Gorge Dam Removal

The Gorge Dam has held back the Cuyahoga River in Cuyahoga Falls since 1912, a 60-foot concrete wall that trapped nearly a million cubic yards of contaminated sediment behind it over a century of industrial use. The EPA began dredging that sediment out in 2025 under the Great Lakes Legacy Act, work expected to run through 2027. Once the cleanup is far enough along, the dam comes down too, opening a free-flowing channel through the Gorge for the first time in more than a hundred years.

This chapter is one of two sites in the Cuyahoga Area of Concern project, alongside Euclid Creek at East 185th, documenting what it looks like when a river the EPA designated an Area of Concern in the 1980s starts to recover. Subjects are still being finalized, but the portraits will center on recreation, stewardship, and history: anglers who've worked the spillway for decades, volunteers who log hours on habitat and cleanup work along the river, and people who carry the site's institutional memory, It also means holding two timelines at once. The dam has shaped this stretch of river for just over a century, but the Cuyahoga was a throughway for Indigenous peoples long before that, and that relationship doesn't end when the concrete does.

Portraits and interviews are scheduled through this fall, with the chapter wrapping and publishing by early winter. Paired with East 185th, it will document a river's recovery through the people who use it, protect it, and are already asking what the Cuyahoga becomes once the dam is gone.