Avon Lake Saves Power Plant Artifacts as Redevelopment Planning Begins

Don’t worry. The company’s master clock and several pink marble slabs from the lobby (where customers once paid their electric bills through a counter window) have been saved.

The demolition and major clean-up of the former Avon Lake Power Plant was completed by fall 2025. Although the building is gone, memories remain. 

Built for $30 million in 1926 by the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, it was once the largest power plant of its kind in the world. At its apex, the plant produced enough power to supply a million homes. The last of its turbines powered down in 2022, and a chapter of Avon Lake’s history came to a close. 

A new chapter for the 43-acre lakefront site will begin, but Ted Esborn, community development director for the City of Avon Lake, says plans and negotiations with the current property owner, Avon Lake Environmental Redevelopment Group (ALERG), and others, are ongoing. ALERG worked with contractors to shut down and demolish the plant, conduct environmental cleanups and consider redevelopment ideas. Esborn says part of the Avon Lake Economic Recovery and Resiliency Plan recommends determining “what has been done and what needs to be done on the site.” 

Possible plans by future site owners and developers may include mixed-use development. The city wants to buy 23 acres of the property for a public park along the lakefront with access to Lake Erie. That would include a section earmarked for a power plant commemoration site. There, some of the artifacts recovered by the city and the Avon Lake Historical Society could be incorporated.

“We had a list of items we wanted to save, some of which we could, and some of which we couldn’t,” says Tony Tomanek, president of the historical society. “We were trying to save the entire front entryway with granite steps, the carved lintel over the door and all that beautiful sandstone that was quarried in Amherst in the 1920s. But the building accidentally came down on all that.”

Fortunately, the lintel was saved, in addition to the following items: nine of the streetlights in front of the building; seven brass wall sconces; a flashing strobe light from one of the plant’s iconic towers; brass railings; pink marble architectural slabs and trim used in the design of the building’s art deco lobby; a decorative clock from the lobby and a master clock that the “whole building ran on,” according to Esborn. 

Architectural blueprints, historic photos and other documents were also preserved. Some items are temporarily on display or in storage at the Avon Lake Public Library. (Archival information includes accounts of a situation in 1953 when “great masses of gizzard shad” died from a sudden drop in temperature in Lake Erie near the plant’s intake channel. The dead, floating fish interfered with the intake screens, and the plant’s seven generators shut down, leaving a good portion of Greater Cleveland in the dark.)     

Two thousand original bricks from the coal-powered power plant, which employed 300 workers at its height, are also being sold to benefit the historical society.

“In the park’s commemorative area, if it becomes a reality, we’d like to put up some of the marble, light the walkway and install a bronze plaque,” says Esborn, noting additional members of the preservation committee include Dave Kos, Chuck Fye, Bobbe Rudge, Dan Rogatto and Matt Sarver. “We haven’t designed any of it yet, but that’s the goal. We want the public to be able to visit that park and remember the power plant whenever they want.”