As a kid, Mike Johnson was warned not to go into the Cuyahoga River.
It’s impossible to ignore the river in Cuyahoga Falls, a city of about 50,000 just north of Akron. The city takes its name from the waterway, which runs through the area, and the waterfalls that dot its southern boundary. By the 1840s, several decades after Cuyahoga Falls’ founding, the river was a source of power and revenue as the city’s manufacturing prowess grew.
But by the time Johnson was growing up in the 1970s, people had a very different view of the river. “It was not a place you wanted to go,” he says. “I remember a lot of visual pollution. I remember people telling stories of serious illnesses associated with being in the water.”
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