Photo Credit: Illustration by SmithGroupJJR
Six miles upstream from Lake Erie, Toledo’s “Middlegrounds” once buzzed as a hub of 19^(th)-century Ohio commerce. Wharves and warehouses crowded onto a wedge of low-lying land between a creek and the Maumee River, which was busy with canal boats, rail cars, and Great Lakes vessels.
Yet, for much of the 20^(th) century, the Middlegrounds hardly seemed in the middle of anything. A destructive 1880s flood and transportation changes put an end to its role as a commercial crossroads. Its aging rail lines and increasingly abandoned warehouses isolated the area from the nearby downtown. The Middlegrounds fell into disuse and misuse, a scrubby dumping ground littered with industrial debris.
“The only thing this site had going for it was the river,” suggests Jon Zvanovec, project manager for Toledo Metroparks, which acquired the Middlegrounds site in 2006. The 28-acre parcel was “a bit of a stretch” for Metroparks, far smaller and far more degraded than the regional park district’s other properties. “But 28 acres on the Maumee River is hard to come by,” he adds. “We saw this as an opportunity to get people down to the river, give them a place to recreate, and maybe get them thinking about why Toledo grew up here.”