Go Fish

You may be surprised to learn Cleveland once had an aquarium. It was small, certainly, but from 1954 to 1986 an expanded former bathhouse in Gordon Park was home to otters, alligators and sea turtles. When the aquarium was shuttered due to a lack of funding, it didn’t cause any uproar — not with SeaWorld just a short drive away in Aurora.

But now that Shamu has long since moved, it’s clear to many Clevelanders that a city on a lake needs a major attraction exploring life under the sea. City Council seconded that notion in September when it gave Marinescape NZ Limited and Jacobs Investment a 10-year, $2 million loan to build an aquarium in the Flats. Plans call for it to occupy 55,000 square feet of space in the historic Powerhouse.

“[Marinescape] fell in love with the building because it really sets off what they do — the family, interactive component,” explains Paul Ertel, general manager of the Nautica Entertainment Complex, which includes the Powerhouse property. Plans call for the new aquarium to have space for classrooms, a restaurant with an underwater theme and the United States’ longest SeaTube — a roughly 200-foot-long tunnel through which visitors can walk and watch stingrays and sharks swimming overhead.

In all, it offers the promise of another family-friendly attraction in a downtown that needs them to reach critical mass as a place people choose to visit and spend money.

“It’s very important that folks taking a look at tourism understand that it’s not single-faceted, that a destination has to offer a variety of attractions, and an aquarium certainly would put us in the position of being even more attractive than we are now,” says Dennis Roche, the president of Positively Cleveland.

Sources: Aquarium public relations departments and Web sites; charitynavigator.org