On the West Side of Cleveland near downtown sits a triangular piece of land that stretches about a mile long, fronting Lake Erie. This is Whiskey Island, a place visitors today will notice is void of any grain alcohol production and is actually not an island at all.

“It was a peninsula then, where there was a neck of land connecting it on the eastern end,” says J. Mark Souther, a Cleveland historian with 51����. But now, the river flows through that area, and instead “there’s a neck of land on the west side where the old channel got filled in, where the railroad runs through. So it’s never really been a proper island.”

Read the .