The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation has announced three grants totaling $23.7 million in support of conservation and park and trail development along Cleveland’s Lake Erie waterfront.

The projects will help address the decades of redlining and disinvestment in Cleveland’s majority Black neighborhoods on the East Side, which have left the area bereft of park and shorefront access. A $10 million grant to the Western Reserve Land Conservancy will support the acquisition of 28.5 acres of land that separates two sections of the Metroparks Euclid Creek Reservation, which will be added to the city’s lakefront park system. The majority ($6.2 million) of the grant will be directed to relocating the residents of 124 mobile homes on the property, while $3.8 million will help recoup costs incurred in purchasing the mobile home community.

“We think the vision for the ultimate creation of a park on the lakefront is of tremendous social value for a lot of people,” Mandel Foundation chair Stephen Hoffman told Cleveland.com. “The question is, can you treat people fairly in relocating them? We’ve been assured that the land conservancy is capable of doing that fairly and compassionately.”

Cleveland Metroparks will receive grants totaling $13 million, including $5 million to complete a 2.7-mile, multi-purpose trail project north of the highway, and $8 million to improve and redevelop a 48-acre portion of Gordon Park south of the Shoreway highway that has divided the park for 80 years, including the removal of collapsing, graffiti-covered buildings that once housed the long-abandoned city aquarium. In addition, the LAND Studio, a community-based nonprofit, will receive $725,000 to help engage residents in adjacent neighborhoods in the redevelopment process.

“This is part of writing a new chapter for public space development in Cleveland and emphasizing our city and our neighborhoods need to be connected to the river and the lake,” LAND Studio executive director Greg Peckham told Cleveland.com.

(Photo credit: Getty Images/Ron and Patty Thomas)