photographs of abandoned places #25

Gordon Aquarium

William Gordon died in 1892. He bequeathed 122 acres with access to Lake Erie to Cleveland for a park.  Memorial Shoreway cut the park in two, and a bath house became a trailway museum in 1943. The museum held fish from Doan Brook, and Lake Erie. In 1954 the museum became the Cleveland Aquarium, and was operated by the Cleveland Natural History Museum. Trips to the Florida Keys brought salt water animals as exhibits, and improved man made sea water was used. In 1967 an octagon expansion tripled the building size, and tank space ten fold. In 1985 the building was in bad shape, and funding and admission money were too small, and talk of East 9th Street development with a new aquarium (that did not come then and there) killed the aquarium. The aquarium closed June 1985, the animals went to the Cleveland Zoo in April 1986. For some years, the police trained dogs in the building. A new Aquarium opened in 2012, in the flats in a former utility company powerhouse.

 top of the octagon

For many years, these three storm drainage pipes and pedestal have been on the slope between I-90 and the building.

This entrance was closed. There was an opening elsewhere, but not for me. From seeing other people's fotos, there were fish outlines on the walls, and a police car door inside. Light should stream through little windows of the octagon.

part of the roof caved in, and part of the roof has become sod