A New Wave on Lake Erie

Looking out over the water from the new Patrick S. Parker Community Sailing Center, it’s clear that what’s happening at Cleveland’s East 55th Street Marina will ripple across all of Lake Erie.

The 28,000-square-foot campus — which opened in late June — strives to do something unprecedented on Lake Erie: strip away the elite barriers of sailing and hand the water back to the community, no boat ownership required.

“Ninety percent of Cleveland will never get to see our skyline from the water,” notes Brian Zimmerman, chief executive officer of the Cleveland Metroparks, which is spearheading the project. “We are a waterfront city. We want people to see how pretty our city actually is.”

While there are places to learn to sail on Lake Erie — most notably exclusive yacht clubs — this will be the first to offer year-round training to the general public, including STEM-based youth education, summer camps and adaptive sailing equipment for those with disabilities. 

The goal? To expose as many people as possible to the benefits of sailing.

“It’s a team sport,” Zimmerman notes. “You need communication. You need to understand weather patterns and geometry. There are just so many things that sailing teaches you about life.”

In addition to inclusive education and training, the $18.5 million sailing center is filling another gap in Northeast Ohio’s stretch of Lake Erie — waterfront restaurants that are open year-round. 

“There are just so few of them,” Zimmerman says. “It’s allowing us to curate an amazing patio experience on Lake Erie.”

To that end, The Galley will offer 178 indoor and outdoor seats — all with panoramic views of Lake Erie and the downtown skyline — and a Midwest smokehouse menu. Run by the Metroparks, it hopes to build on the success of the system’s signature Merwin’s Wharf, located on the East Bank of the Flats. With most entrees priced under $20, the approachable menu includes shareables like the Merwin’s Big Pretzel, before branching out to salads, smoked meat platters and handhelds. Refreshing craft cocktails and weekend brunch offerings like Nutella pancakes and chicken and waffles round out the experience.  

While the new sailing center is an obvious boon to Cleveland and its surrounding suburbs, Zimmerman doesn’t hesitate when asked if he sees it as a regional draw, gesturing to the 16 transient docks just steps from the sailing center.

It’s easy to imagine lounging on your boat watching the flutter of sails, especially if a regatta is underway, before grabbing a bite at The Galley. For anyone who brings bikes or wants to get their steps in, the Mandel Community Trail unlocks seamless access to the area’s best cultural sites. Scheduled for completion this August, the well-lit, 2.7-mile paved path connects East 55th Street directly to downtown Cleveland and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It also provides a scenic 6-mile route to the museums of University Circle. 

Before breaking ground in 2025, Zimmerman says his team spent time in other sailing centers on the East and the West coasts “looking at what they are, how they interact with the community, how they bring people in.”

But rather than hiring an outside architectural firm, the Metroparks turned to its in-house team to design the project. “We did not want outside influences,” says Zimmerman. “We wanted our people and our expertise put into this building.”

The result is a structure designed to make the most of its waterfront perch, without dominating or disturbing it. The hub of the facility is a two-story light-filled atrium with expansive windows bringing both the lake and the buzz of the city in (Zimmerman notes that some 117,000 cars drive by the south side of the sailing center each day on Interstate 90). 

But it’s not just cars that pass by. Each spring, hundreds of millions of birds migrate through northern Ohio, pausing to refuel and rest on the shores of Lake Erie before continuing north. “It’s great to have so much light coming into the building,” notes Zimmerman, “but the birds are a real issue.”  The solution was to embed windows with a subtle opaque grid of dots to deter bird strikes.

That feeling of light and openness continues throughout the rest of the building thanks to room partitions that slide open, ensuring that anyone sitting in a meeting or class has a view of the water. The two high-tech sailing simulators, meanwhile, are positioned so they face the shoreline. 

The center expands on philanthropists Mike and Gina Trebilcock’s vision to offer Cleveland youth access to the water through rowing and sailing instruction and programming. The couple officially opened The Foundry, in the Flats, to the public in 2017, working with the Cleveland Metroparks to run public lakefront programs. It’s when sailing programs were selling out in less than five minutes that the idea for a dedicated sailing center was born. The Foundry handles programming, while the Metroparks manages the facility. 

In the summer of 2025, approximately 665 Cleveland youth learned to sail at The Foundry, according to the nonprofit’s annual report. With the opening of the new sailing center, Mike Trebilcock expects that number to soar.

“We anticipate all of that growing by 200 or 300 percent,” he says. “We are attacking a community that has been largely neglected by the sport of sailing.” 

The center is named after Cleveland businessman and philanthropist Patrick S. Parker, who was a lifelong avid sailor. Zimmerman, too, enjoys spending afternoons on the water with his family. “This is one of the life sports that can stay with you,” he adds. “It can grow with you.” 

Trebilcock hopes the new facility acts as an invitation to the entire region to do exactly that.

“Sailing has kind of an Ivy League feel to it,” Trebilcock notes. “Typically, you’d have to buy your own sailboat and join a yacht club. None of that exists in our world. This is a great big welcome mat.”

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