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Park service to reorganize Happy Days building Jan. 1, closing front desk but keeping special events
By Bob Downing
Beacon Journal staff writer
Published on Friday, Oct 19, 2007
The Cuyahoga Valley National Park's Happy Days Visitor Center will shut down on Jan. 1 as a meet-and-greet facility after 33 years.
But the historic building off state Route 303 in northern Summit County will remain a key venue for park-sponsored concerts, lectures and other programs.
It will also be available for public rental for weddings and parties.
The change will mean that the front desk staffed by volunteers and rangers will be closed, a small bookstore will be shut down and ranger offices in the building will be relocated, said John Debo, superintendent of the park.
''I think it's a good decision,'' he said. ''Nothing is forever. Happy Days has served us well, especially in the early years of the park.''
The reason for the change is that few visitors come to Happy Days in Boston Heights in search of park information, he said.
Visitor use has been ''quite light'' for years, ''seldom over 100 people'' on the busiest days, he said.
Today's visitors to the Cuyahoga Valley are more apt to visit the park's other visitor centers that lie along the popular Ohio & Erie Canal Towpath Trail, Debo said.
Those facilities include the Canal Visitor Center in Valley View, the Boston Store in Boston Township, the Peninsula Depot in Peninsula and the Hunt Farm Visitor Information Center in Cuyahoga Falls.
On busy park weekends, Happy Days gets few visitors and the other manned facilities are often ''just inundated,'' he said.
In 2005, park officials said the number of monthly visitors to Happy Days had dropped from nearly 2,800 in 1997 to just over 2,200. The other visitor centers also showed drops.
Today's visitors are more inclined to get information from the park's Web sites, park officials said.
Said Debo, ''The bottom line is that it was a question of redeploying our limited resources.''
He indicated that the use of Happy Days for park events will likely grow with the change.
As an experiment, the federal park last year started renting out Happy Days when it was not needed for park events, and that use is likely to continue to grow, he said.
The change has been under serious discussion by park staffers for a couple of years, although the closing has been considered since the early 1990s, Debo said.
Happy Days was the park's first visitor center and played a key role in the Cuyahoga Valley for a long time.
The building, constructed in 1938 by the Civilian Conservation Corps, was turned over to the National Park Service after the Cuyahoga Valley park was created in 1976.
The building, part of Virginia Kendall Park, had been owned by the state of Ohio and managed by Metro Parks, Serving Summit County.
It provided an immediate base for the new park that was invaluable, Debo said.
Bob Downing can be reached at 330-996-3745 or bdowning@thebeaconjournal.com.
The Cuyahoga Valley National Park's Happy Days Visitor Center will shut down on Jan. 1 as a meet-and-greet facility after 33 years.
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