A deteriorating footbridge tucked inside North Chagrin Reservation is on track for a rebuild, as Cleveland Metroparks pursues state grant money to replace the aging span and strip away accessibility barriers along a popular trail. The park district wants to swap the current structure for a new 48-foot wooden bridge with steel supports, part of a $44,365 project that would also reroute about 350 feet of trail and remove steps that currently block easy access to a small scenic overlook on a tributary of the Chagrin River.
To pay for it, Cleveland Metroparks has applied for $33,000 from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources' NatureWorks program, according to Cleveland.com. The park district would cover the remaining $11,365 out of its own budget. NatureWorks operates as a reimbursement grant, offering local government subdivisions and park districts up to 75% of eligible costs for outdoor recreation projects, but only after those projects are built and paid for upfront, per the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
Cleveland Metroparks submitted the application specifically for Lake County's NatureWorks allocation, since each of Ohio's 88 counties receives its own slice of the program's funding pool every year. The grant program traces back to a $200 million state bond issue Ohio voters approved in November 1993 and has funded more than 2,300 public park projects statewide since then, according to reporting cited by Ohio state representative Sean Brennan's office.
A Century-Old Forest Gets a Modern Fix
The bridge sits inside North Chagrin Reservation, a nearly 2,000-acre preserve spanning Cuyahoga and Lake counties that ranks among the largest and most ecologically diverse holdings in the Cleveland Metroparks system, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. The reservation stretches across portions of Willoughby Hills, Gates Mills, and Mayfield Village and includes the A.B. Williams Memorial Woods, a 65-acre National Natural Landmark of old-growth beech-maple-hemlock forest with trees estimated at 250 to 400 years old, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.
Cleveland Metroparks acquired that land in 1925, and in 1931 it opened a trailside museum in North Chagrin that is recognized as the first facility of its kind in the United States, established under the park district's first naturalist, Arthur Baldwin Williams, the same encyclopedia entry notes. The park district previously invested in the reservation's waterways in September 2022, completing a 585-linear-foot ecological restoration along Foster's Run to rebuild natural stream shape and wetlands, a project that was funded by the Ohio EPA.
Part of a Broader Push Beyond Cuyahoga County
The North Chagrin bridge is not the only NatureWorks request Cleveland Metroparks has filed this cycle. The park district is also seeking funding for an accessible kayak launch at Hinckley Lake in Medina County, a lake that only reopened to boating, swimming, and fishing in June following a two-year, $12 million project that dredged 15,000 cubic yards of silt and rebuilt its 1927 dam and spillway, per ScripType Publishing. Hinckley Lake had been drained for that work from September 2023 through late 2025.
Trail bridge upgrades have become a recurring theme for Cleveland Metroparks. In July 2025, the district reopened both the Valley Parkway Cedar Point Bridge in Rocky River Reservation and the Hawthorn Bridge in South Chagrin Reservation after replacement work, according to a Cleveland Metroparks Facebook post. And earlier this month, the park district opened the Old Lorain Connector, a $2.7 million paved path in West Park designed to eliminate steep terrain barriers between Kamm's Corners and Rocky River Reservation.
A Regional System Built Over a Century
Cleveland Metroparks, established in 1917 and known locally as the Emerald Necklace, now covers more than 25,000 acres across 18 reservations with over 300 miles of trails, drawing roughly 18.5 million visitors a year, according to Wikipedia. The North Chagrin project reflects a system-wide pattern of removing physical barriers and repairing century-old infrastructure county by county, even as each NatureWorks application competes for its own limited local allocation. Whether the Lake County request receives approval has not yet been reported.
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