From Fertilizer Plant to Bird Sanctuary: Cleveland’s Puritas Wetland and Green Infrastructure

On the west side of Cleveland, tucked between residential streets and Interstate 480, there is an 80-acre wetland that most people who live nearby have never visited; and, under current rules, cannot enter. Birders know it well. They park along West 145th Street facing north and scan the area from behind a chain-link fence. They walk Industrial Parkway from 150th Street, peering into willow stands where warblers shelter during migration.

This is the Puritas Stormwater Detention Basin. It was not designed to be a nature preserve. It was designed to keep basements from flooding.

What Combined Sewers Have to Do With Lake Erie

Cleveland’s oldest neighborhoods were built with combined sewer systems — single pipes carrying both sewage and stormwater to treatment plants. The design made sense when it was built, but has a fundamental weakness: during heavy rain, the volume overwhelms the pipes, and the combined overflow discharges untreated directly into local waterways and ultimately Lake Erie. (NEORSD, “Combined Sewers and CSO Control”; US EPA, “Combined Sewer Overflow Frequent Questions”)

In the 1970s, more than 9 billion gallons of combined sewage reached Lake Erie every year from Cleveland’s system alone. (NEORSD)

A stormwater detention basin captures that runoff, holds it temporarily, and releases it slowly at a rate the system can handle. The Puritas basin was built for exactly this purpose — fed by a channel engineered to direct stormwater away from adjacent properties and I-480. (Birding Hotspots, Puritas Wetland) What nobody planned for was what would grow there.

A Marshy Place, an Industrial Plant, and a Return to What Was There Before

Before becoming a fertilizer plant, the area around what is now the basin was historically naturally marshy and the site of a pond fed by the Big Creek watershed. (West Park History, “Dryer’s Pond”)

The American Agricultural Chemical Company, locally known as Agrico, opened on the site in 1874 and operated until around 1970. (West Park History)

When the plant closed, the land passed to the City of Cleveland and was repurposed for stormwater management.

And with that shift, a gradual ecological transformation grew from the basin’s hydrology, creating conditions where native plants could establish and in turn fostering habitat for birds and other wildlife.

Its detention basin, it was in some sense returning to its natural character: a low, wet place in the Big Creek watershed.

And surveys conducted by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History beginning in 2005 have documented more than 138 avian species on the site, including several listed as endangered in Ohio, and more than 66 native plant species. (Cleveland Water Pollution Control, 2017)

Cleveland’s Ambitious Green Infrastructure Effort

The Puritas basin was one early piece of what became a much larger environmental effort in Cleveland.

In 2010, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District entered a federal consent decree mandating a 98% reduction in combined sewer overflows into Lake Erie by 2036 — from 4.5 billion gallons annually to 500 million. (NEORSD, “About Project Clean Lake”) The resulting $3 billion program, Project Clean Lake, combines large underground tunnels with green infrastructure: bioretention basins, rain gardens, bioswales planted with native species, and permeable pavement spread across Cleveland neighborhoods.

The sewer district has also worked with the Cuyahoga Land Bank to turn vacant parcels, the empty lots left behind by Cleveland’s decades of population loss fueled in large part by deindustrialization, into functioning stormwater features.

Bioswales are shallow planted channels along a street or in a vacant lot that slow and filter runoff before it reaches the sewer. Cleveland’s 2010 consent decree was the first in the country to formally incorporate green infrastructure as part of a mandated pollution control plan. (NEORSD)

Cleveland’s Environmental Reinvention, One Lot at a Time

The Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, an image that defined Cleveland’s environmental reputation for a generation and helped drive the passage of the Clean Water Act.

But in the decades since, there has been a sustained effort to reverse a century of industrial damage, neighborhood by neighborhood, lot by lot.

The birders on West 145th Street, scanning the cattails through a chain-link fence at a wetland that used to be a fertilizer plant, are watching one small piece of that effort. But one that carries a truly significant impact.

Sources:

• Cleveland Water Pollution Control, “Stormwater Detention Basins Are Green Spaces Too,” 2017 — https://www.clevelandwpc.com/sites/default/files/2020-09/Stormwater%20Detention%20Basins%20in%20Cle.pdf
• NEORSD, “About Project Clean Lake” — https://www.neorsd.org/community/about-the-project-clean-lake-program/
• US EPA, “Combined Sewer Overflow Frequent Questions” — https://www.epa.gov/npdes/combined-sewer-overflow-frequent-questions
• West Park History, “Dryer’s Pond” — http://www.westparkhistory.com/spotlight/DryersPond.htm
• Birding in Ohio, “Puritas Wetland” — https://birding-in-ohio.com/cuyahoga-county/puritas-wetland/
• Birding Hotspots, “Puritas Wetland” — https://birdinghotspots.org/hotspot/L857737