Irish Heritage Site to Occupy Five Acres of Irishtown Bend Park

“100-plus” sculptural door frames bearing addresses of families long gone will stand alongside red bud trees at Irishtown Bend Park. Credit: Plural Design Studio

When the 25 acres of the land set to be Ohio City’s Irishtown Bend Park were excavated last summer, an archeological team hit apparent historical gold.

More than 60,000 artifacts from the mid-1800s were recovered, and later preserved accordingly: from drinkware to housing frames, coal cellars to Celtic pipes, and a large cistern. It was unclear, at the time, how these relics would be properly stored, or, if incorporated into the park, exactly how they would mesh with a larger design.

The team behind Irishtown’s new phase confirmed Wednesday that one-fifth, or five acres, of the park will be devoted in some way to honoring the relics uncovered during the archeological dig, as well as the families to which they belonged.

The team “has uncovered so much about this forgotten neighborhood—everything from bricks and stone foundations, to pottery and household items,” Scott Cataffa, an architect at Plural Design Studio, said in a release. “Each piece contributes to the story of Irishtown Bend. We’re excited to share that story both visually and experientially.”

Cataffa’s vision, shown in a slew of renderings released this week, depict an outdoor museum, rust-colored and industrial brown, that seems to mesh nicely into the actual park aspect of the hillside. To acccomplish that, he’s been collaborating with an Irish Heritage Committee, spearheaded by Irish Honorary Consul General Mark Owens and Margaret Lynch, the executive director of the Irish American Archives Society.

In an interview, Lynch said that she’s been abreast of plans to memorialize the hillside’s Irish population, most of it from Famine-ridden Mayo County, since the early nineties, when it was designated on the National Register of Historic Places. In Lynch’s mind, the park’s homage to thousands that lived and died here might surpass, culturally-speaking, Ireland’s spot in the Cultural Gardens or the Johnny Kilbane sculpture in Battery Park.

“This’ll be the largest public place by far that celebrates the Irish in this place and in Cleveland,” Lynch said.

The foundational remains of a coal rig will act, the rendering suggests, as a place maker for parkgoers. Credit: Plural Design Studio

A picnic in Ohio City? Credit: Plural Design Studio

Some 100 “neighborhood door” sculptures, with addresses dating back to 1825, will be dotted along the park’s southernmost side, and could act as fixtures in a museum-like audio tour. (With hundreds of red bud trees surrounding them.) One rendering depicts a gaggle of twenty-somethings picnicking at a table with a 19th-century aesthetic, with a nearby door frame acting as the prop-like entrance.

Along with the actual foundations from a coal dock hoisting rig, used as a kind of place marker along the river’s edge, the park will also include non-abstract historical homages: a rust-colored bird blind etched with a nod to Cleveland’s coal history, and a tabletop street grid that shows how folks might’ve navigated the original Irishtown.

At a slated bill of $45 million, less than half which has been raised thus far, actualizing a 25-acre park on a precarious hillside has not been an easy feat. A legal dispute over a building on its northernmost part between developer Bobby George and Irishtown’s team led to a lengthy excavation delay. The actual stabilization itself, which is “on track” to wrap up next fall, has been beset by inflation.

When completed in 2026 or 2027, the park will be the final connector between the Towpath Trail and the lake, a huge notch in Cleveland’s overall pursuit of a more unified bike and trail network.

The Irishtown team is asking families with knowledge of or connections to the original Irish immigrants to send their stories in, as to influence further iterations of the project.