The Slavic Village neighborhood recently converted an old freight rail line into a 2-mile bike & multi-purpose trail that links Mill Creek Falls to the new Boys & Girls Club and the First Tee golf course at Washington Park.

Marlane Weslian, who worked on Morgana Run for Slavic Village Development, relays the story of how a decaying rail line became a community asset again.

Almost half of the residents in Slavic Village don’t own a car, yet, the legacy of the steel mills—with its rail lines spider webbing through the area—make it challenging to walk and bike. Weslian pegged a two-mile section of the Wheeling & Lake Erie line, which touches four schools and Morgana Park as it doglegs from Stella Walsh Rec Center at E. 78th and Broadway past a MetroHealth neighborhood center, as a place for radical transformation.

In many rural parts of the country, old rail lines are being converted to recreational bike trails. So, Weslian figured, why not do the same—a rails-to-trails for an urban area where 27 percent live at the federally defined poverty rate.

“The rail line used to deliver coal to steel mills, and it had 13 at-grade crossings,” Weslian says. “That was giving the community fits.”

Then, a fire consumed one of the last mills located on the line. It was the only one still running trains, albeit one a day. Soon after, the area started attracting the wrong kind of attention: tires and trash piles started to appear and abandoned mills were broken into for scrap. A greenway struck Weslian as a way to address the mounting crime and reserve a place for more activity.

She found that, beside the rail company, two businesses owned rights-of-way. One was Third Federal Bank, which had its start in Slavic Village (and has since built a new corporate headquarters in the neighborhood). McDonalds owned another and was interested in being close to the trail. But, momentum stalled when the rail company made their offer for the line: $800,000.

“But, over the course of a year (in 2003) and negotiating with the Ohio Rail Development Commission, they saw the wisdom of donating it.”

Today, the Morgana Run Trail has an annual 5K walk/run, the Boys and Girls Club bicycling club uses it, a Friends of the Trail volunteer group sprang up and local businesses that line the route, like Cleveland Wire Cloth, are donating paint for murals and mending fences to halt thieves. Even McDonalds put in new landscaping by the trailhead.

For their part, Weslian and Slavic Village Development are working on plans for Morgana Run East, a 135-unit housing project connected to the trail (funding for infrastructure and brownfield clean-up is in place) and they secured a Transportation for Livable Communities grant from NOACA to study extending the trail and greenway to connect a new Mound K-8 school which will be LEED-silver certified. Future plans also include connecting Morgana Run Trail to a Towpath Trail connector (heading southwest) proposed by Cleveland Metroparks.

In a neighborhood where vacant properties have ballooned to 855 structures (as of May ’07)—comprising 11% of all residential buildings in the neighborhood—Morgana Run is a ray of sunshine. It's the anchor for redevelopment plans (pdf 4.8 MB) on both ends and spread throughout the corridor.

Resources
Clevelanders in Motion
Slavic Village's Active Living by Design program
Rails to Trails Conservancy