The first attempt to secure the former Oakwood Country Club for park land has failed. The 90-day purchase option held by the Trust for Public Land expired recently, before the San Francisco-based group could raise enough to buy the 150-acre privately owned site, which spans Cleveland Heights and South Euclid.

Fran Mentch, of the Severance Neighborhood Organization, is disappointed but continues to hope that mostly undeveloped land can be preserved as a public park. As a Facebook page for supporters of this plan notes, " It is a landscape of open rolling hills with tree-lined paved paths and, most notably, a section of Nine-Mile Creek."

"It comes down to, what kind of community do we want to live in?" she explains. And the inner-ring cities of Cuyahoga County need green space, not more commercial or residential development. "If someone had wanted to develop it," she adds, "it would have been a done deal by now."

Mentch says that SNO would like to partner with other groups to raise enough money to buy the land -- the asking price is $5.9 million -- and give it to the Cleveland Metroparks. SNO recently started pushing a letter-writing campaign to Metroparks, and Mentch plans to attend the December 16 board meeting.

"If they would work with us," Mentch says, "the whole thing could move forward. … I'm very optimistic. This is our generation's Cain Park."

Source: Fran Mentch
Writer: Frank W. Lewis