Whiskey Island, the long peninsula under your feet, sits at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River where it meets Lake Erie in Cleveland, Ohio. Right here is ground whose current shape was created in 1827, when the river’s mouth was moved to this very location. You can picture the first solid patch of land Moses Cleaveland saw in 1796, a single spot amid swamps one-quarter mile down the Cuyahoga.
Lorenzo Carter later built his family farm here, and the island took the name Whiskey Island after a distillery appeared in the 1830s. The neighborhood grew with Irish immigrants when the Ohio and Erie Canal was cut in 1825 and the river was rechanneled in 1827. The peninsula you stand on stretches about 1 mile long and 0.3 miles at its widest, bounded by Lake Erie to the north, West 54th Street roughly to the west, and the Cuyahoga River to the south and east.
To your west the Cleveland Bulk Terminal occupies the western half; to the east you’ll find a marina and Wendy Park, part of the Lakefront Reservation of the Cleveland Metroparks. The Cleveland Bulk Terminal holds the west half, while Wendy Park and a marina wait to your east.