Built in 1940, the art deco Cleveland Coast Guard Station was designed by renowned Cleveland architect J. Milton Dyer. Located on a pier at the end of Whiskey Island near Wendy Park, it cost $360,000 and contained officer, crew and staff quarters as well as recreation, communication and storage rooms and a mess hall. It also contains a boat house, vehicle garage, and lighthouse. The pier is public property and there are usually people fishing there. They've made it fairly clear that they don't want people in the building but I'm pretty sure a Coast Guard boat saw us and didn't do anything. The city of Cleveland closed the Coast Guard Station in 1976 and it later became either a restaurant or a nightclub for a short time (Sources are conflicted on this). Today the inside is pretty well gutted and the second floor no longer exists so getting into the lighthouse is a bit tricky but we managed it. Today a friend of mine joined me for his first UE experience. Before this, we explored a large factory that I won't post pictures of because I explored it a few months ago and posted a detailed write-up thread. But this was both of our first times at Whiskey Island. They've talked about renovating the building for a while now but haven't done much outside of replacing the roof over the boat house.
1. Looking down the pier which is was fairly busy as it was warm out.
2. That sign on the fence is a faded trespassing warning but there are no signs on the building itself.
3. The lighthouse
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6. The entire first floor looked like this. A maze of cement walls with small, empty rooms an no ceiling overhead. There is nothing to distinguish what each room was.
7. When we stepped down into the basement, we found it flooded.
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9. Suddenly, lots of colors.
10. It appears the city is using one room as storage for signs for some event.
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12. We ascended a stairwell that abruptly ended at the second story where was no floor. The only way to access the lighthouse was to hold on the railing where the stairwell used to continue and walk on the tops of the first floor walls.
13. After an enclosed set of spiral stairs, we came to a graffiti-covered room that had an open spiral staircase that went higher.
14. Some of the graffit.
15. The top of the second spiral staircase. There was once one more staircase that led to the very top of the lighthouse but it was mostly gone and definitely not climbable. So unfortunately, we didn't get any views from the top of the lighthouse.
While we were at the first factory, we did run across an abandoned playground that I missed the first time I was there.
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