A Fruitful Endeavor
With the help of Hemisphere Development, vineyard thrives in old industrial site being redeveloped along Lake Erie ... read more
Originally published at OurOhio.org
Walking along rows of freshly hedged grapevines on a warm fall day, Imed Dami stops to pluck some of the smaller Riesling grapes from the vine. He pops one of the grapes into his mouth, demonstrating that the sweet white grapes are good to eat even though they are used for making wine. He drops the cluster of grapes into a yellow bin while explaining that the smaller, or secondary, grapes need to be removed from the vine so the larger grapes can get more energy during their final weeks of growing.
With harvest rapidly approaching (usually early- to mid-October), the grapes growing near Lake Erie this year are smaller than normal. An unusually cold winter and frost in May damaged the crop of grapes growing in Lake and Ashtabula counties. But Dami, assistant professor of horticulture and crop science at Ohio State University, doesn’t mind. He’s happy the grapes are not only growing but thriving in an area that was once considered a polluted wasteland. Dami chuckles as he talks about how people react when he tells him that the grapes are growing in the middle of a massive brownfield, an old industrial site, that is being cleaned up.
“They are surprised, interested and excited to hear about the vineyard. It’s not every day that you hear about a vineyard growing in a brownfield,” he said.
The idea of putting in a vineyard came during discussions about what to do with a 300-acre man-made lake that Diamond Shamrock Painesville Works used for making soda ash, a chemical needed for glass manufacturing. The lake is in the middle of 1,100 acres that were used for 64 years by Diamond until the company closed in 1976. In the 1980s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency put a 120-acre clay cap over a contaminated area of the site, and the land sat idle for more than two decades. During that time, plants started to grow on the dried-up lake. As they did, they formed a layer of topsoil.
Recognizing that the land located along the Lake Erie shore was prime real estate, a Cleveland-based development company, Hemisphere Development LLC, became interested in the site. Funds from the Clean Ohio Fund, a statewide bond initiative approved by voters in 2000, helped kick-start redevelopment of the property. The bond initiative, renewed by voters last year, has provided more than $400 million for farmland preservation, green space conservation, brownfield revitalization and recreational trails. Hemisphere came up with an elaborate multiuse plan for the old Diamond property – residential housing, a hotel, golf course, nature trails and sports center – and called it Lakeview Bluffs. The developers and scientists weren’t sure, however, what to do with the lake, which was too unstable for housing.
That’s when Bill Rish, a risk-assessment expert with Hull & Associates Inc., came up with an unusual, if not crazy sounding, idea. During the process of making soda ash, millions of gallons of Lake Erie water were used, and the water and remnants of crushed calcium and limestone were pumped out to the man-made lake, known by locals as the “soup pond” for its white consistency. When the lake dried up, it contained several feet deep of Solvay material, which is essentially pure baking soda.
Story by Amy Beth Graves. Photos courtesy of Bryan Rinnert
