Bob Clarke doesn’t want to say he told them so, but he did. Over the past few weeks stiff east winds have sent the lake crashing hard into and over the multimillion-dollar steel and concrete wall the city recently built to protect the shoreline just south of Belmont Harbor. The waves have smashed into the corrugated steel face of the wall, shot up and over the concrete, and washed out the gravel running path and dirt behind the wall. That’s pretty much what Clarke and other lakefront activists predicted would happen. “The new revetment doesn’t look good, and it doesn’t work,” says Clarke, a member of the South East Lake View Neighbors. “They managed to get the worst of both worlds.”
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“They put a roadway on the lake,” says Karen Kennedy, a community activist who lives in Lakeview. “It’s a bad design. You can’t see the park from the bottom of the walkway, and you can’t see the lake from the top. Thanks, guys.”
City officials said no, they had to have a solid wall of steel at the edge of the concrete runways to prevent the sort of erosion that had undercut the limestone boulders.
The residents couldn’t understand why the city was being so stubborn. No votes would be gained by sticking to the original plan, which hardly anyone had stepped forward to praise. The residents eventually concluded that the city sees compromise as weakness–if it bends in one place it will only encourage people to demand that it bend somewhere else.
