The City of Cleveland was extending its water and sewer
lines, and this was a strong enticement for townships and other
villages to agree to be annexed. Shaker Heights elected to pay
to join the Cleveland system rather than be annexed.
As lots were created along the new streets, the water and
sewer infrastructure was also installed. However, these were the
early days of sewer engineering and not all sewers were designed
in the same way. Many of the early sewers combined the storm
and sanitary flows, or had cross-connections to handle sudden
inflows from storms. CSOs – or combined sewer overflows – and
SSOs (sanitary sewer overflows) discharge the entire flow into a
river or lake if they are overwhelmed. This was a common early
sewer design, and is how the East View Village sewers were
originally constructed.
As Cleveland grew during the 1800s, water was being
extracted from Lake Erie while at the same time untreated
sewage was being dumped into it, often in close proximity. The
predictable consequences led to changes that separated intakes
and outflows.
One of the first major projects to improve the sewers was
the Easterly Interceptor in 1905. This collected wastewater along
a stretch of Cleveland’s East Side before it made it to the lake’s
shoreline and diverted it to a central discharge point. This point
would become the Easterly Wastewater Treatment Plant. Today
the majority of wastewater generated in Shaker is processed at
the Easterly Treatment Plant.
In the early 1900s, sewer construction generally meant that
trenches were dug, sometimes by hand, and large clay pipes were
connected together. Small diameter pipes were then branched
off to connect houses and buildings to these larger pipes.
One common original design in Shaker and other
communities was the “over-under,” which was efficient to install
because it only required one trench for both the sanitary and
storm sewers. But problems can arise when the sanitary sewer
gets overwhelmed because of infiltration and cross connections,
and spills into the storm mains. The result is an “SSO event,”
where untreated sewage ends up in bodies of water.
Furthermore, over time the connections can be compromised
by tree roots or crushed by heavy loads on the surface. These
factors, along with additional housing development and leaks
from one set of pipes to the other, led to sewers that were not
able to handle the peak flows of storms. The result is like a dam –
the water has to go somewhere, and sometimes that somewhere
is into basements.
WWW.SHAKER.LIFE | SUMMER 2022 61
Opposite page: As it
meanders through the
neighborhoods, Lomond
Boulevard roughly follows the
path of a stream bed that ran
through the area when it was
farmland (map circa 1921).
/WWW.SHAKER.LIFE