STRUTHERS, Ohio – At first, Justine Parise, owner of Barefeet Kayak Rentals, wasn’t sold on creating a park in the area she launches customers in kayaks onto the Mahoning River.
She didn’t think the city needed more parks. She’s changed her mind though after seeing the finished project.
“It’s beautiful,” said the owner of the mobile kayak rental business.
“We’re not walking through the mud and high weeds anymore, bringing the boats down and trying to scramble down the hill,” added Andrea Best, who works at Barefeet Kayak.
Instead, a cement path leads from the park, off of Bob Cene Way, to the Mahoning River. The park includes a pavilion, a children’s play area and restrooms.
After Parise sends customers along their river trips, she snaps photographs and shoots video, posting them online and writing about how beautiful the area is.
It was just woods and weeds before the work, Mayor Catherine Cercone Miller said. She led a ribbon cutting Thursday afternoon at the Struthers Community River Launch.
“To Struthers, it just gives us a place for people to gather and people to go – whether it’s visitors, tourists – something for people for an attraction that we have here,” Miller said. “And we’ve been preaching and harping on opening up the river and making it more accessible. And this is just one of the steps that we’ve started to do, so we’re excited to open the river.”
There are more plans surrounding the river for the city.
“We have a lot of plans just to clear it because if you drive through Struthers, you might not know that there’s a huge river that runs right throughout downtown,” the mayor said. “Hopefully, over the years, we just keep uncovering piece by piece because we want people to be able to access it. We want people to be able to enjoy it and just sit with nature and hang out.”
She also credited former mayors Dan Mamula and Terry Stocker, who were part of the county mayors river association, for their work on the river project, as well as Eastgate Regional Council of Governments, which facilitated the Appalachian Community Grant Program that funded the project.
Justin Mondok, Eastgate planning and development director, said Struthers was one of 10 communities in Mahoning, Trumbull and Ashtabula counties to receive ARC funding.
“It represents investment in the community,” he said. “This was a spot that was a popular kayak put-in and take-out location. It really gained activity after the removal of the Struthers Dam, so we’re excited to see this is kind of a growth of that.”
The Struthers project was identified as part of the Mahoning River Corridor Revitalization Project, which involves the removal of nine dams. Four of them, including the Struthers Dam, have been removed. Work is ongoing or planned for the future on the other five.
“It’s cleaning up the legacy past that we were left with after the steel mill collapse and the infrastructure that was no longer useful that was left in the river and was noted to be a water quality impediment,” Mondok said of the revitalization project.
It cleans the water and energizes people who want to take advantage of amenities along the river, he said.
Kathy Zook, Appalachian Regional Commission program manager for Eastgate, said the investment in the Struthers project through the grant program was $1.18 million.
“It’s finally here, and the transformation has occurred,” she said.
The project is the result of collaboration, and that was the strength of the grant application, Zook added.
“We have our River of Opportunity, where the communities along the river came together as a group to make strategic investments within our communities so that folks want to come and visit our area,” she said.
It’s also a way to improve the quality of life and to attract more people to the area, Zook said.
A team from MS Consultants designed the park, and Katie Phillips, an urban planner at MS, said the design was developed based on what the community and the mayor wanted.
“We took that vision and we turned it into this,” Phillips said. “We also did the site development work behind this as well as overseeing the construction of it. So again, we were really able to be that partner. That means a lot to us.”
Adam Lee, a board member of Friends of the Mahoning River, said the project helps build a relationship between people and the Mahoning River.
“Access is where stewardship begins,” he said. “When folks have a safe, easy way to put a kayak or canoe in the water, the river transforms from something you just drive over on a bridge into a shared backyard. You notice the wildlife; you feel the currents; you naturally want to protect and care for it.”
Pictured at top: Justine Parise, owner of Barefeet Kayak Rentals.