A team of archaeologists hired by the Port Authority have recovered more than 60,000 historical artifacts from the Irishtown Bend site, the firm hired to carry out the dig told Cleveland Scene.
In a 20-person dig orchestrated throughout June and July, a team led by Maumee, Ohio-based archaeologist Robert Chidester uncovered a trove of items pertinent to Irishtown’s original settlement: cultural miscellany that archaeologists involved in the project say date back to the late-1800s.
“Everything was where we thought it would be,” Chris Owens, the environmental project manager at Mannik & Smith, the firm that spearheaded the summer-long dig, said. “Home foundations, privies [outhouses], cisterns, some bricks, broken pieces of pottery, dinnerware, glass. An Irish Home Rule pipe even.”
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Such a site dig of that scale is required due to Irishtown Bend’s status, since 1990, on the National Register of Historic Places. The artifact recovery had to be swift and far-reaching enough, Owens said, as to wrap up before the Port’s stabilization of the hillside, which began officially on Monday.
Though this summer’s dig was most likely the largest of its kind along the Cuyahoga River, it wasn’t the first. From 1987 to 1989, archaeological teams led by David Brose and Robert Wheeler, researchers at Cleveland State, excavated artifacts in six plots, and were able to piece together the people—the “policemen, dock workers, widows”—that once used them.
Owens told Scene that, following a comprehensive report cataloguing every item dug up by Chidester’s team, a bulk of the 60,000 artifacts will make their way over to Phillip Wanyerka at Cleveland State, where they’ll be archived along with the rest of the department’s 1.2 million historic and prehistoric stuff.
Irishtown Bend
The demolition of two buildings on W. 25th Street to clear the way for the Irishtown Bend project in February of this year signaled the first big step toward the project getting underway. As we reported in 2020, the demolitions will be the “first major visible step” in the project to create a premiere public park in Cleveland. It aims to stabilize and reimagine the Cuyahoga River hillside along the bend just North of W. 25th Street and transform it into a 23-acre park. Greg Peckham, LAND Studio’s Executive Director, confirmed to Scene by email that LAND had obtained roughly $1.4 million from the Clean Ohio Fund for a number of costs associated with the Irishtown Bend Project, including land acquisition, engineering, demolition and “cleaning and greening” the sites after demolition. The majority of those funds have already gone to HUD and CMHA for the land itself. The project is a partnership with the Metroparks as well. Credit: LAND Studio
Plans for Irishtown Bend Park depict a sort of homage to the Irish shantytown past, before the area was entirely abandoned in the mid-1950s. (It was leveled in 1958 in a second attempt to straighten the Cuyahoga River.) It’s unclear how exactly some of the artifacts recovered in June and July will be used, but Owens suggested LAND Studio, the designers of the park, will decide on curation later in the year.
“Overall these items will give us an indication of these people, their life on the hillside, what their lives were actually like,” Owens said.
Irishtown Bend Park is slated to be completed, and opened to the public, in 2025. Riverbed Road, which snakes down from West 25th St. to the Flats, will be closed until Irishtown’s reopening starting in September.
Mark Oprea is a staff writer at Scene. He's covered Cleveland for the past decade, and has contributed to TIME, NPR, Narratively, the Pacific Standard and the Cleveland Magazine. He's the winner of two Press Club awards.
