Cleveland Water Crib, Ohio Live Cam

The webcam sits on a water intake crib in Lake Erie and looks back at the Cleveland skyline five kilometres away. The city water department runs the feed from the structure.

Cribs are how Cleveland takes its drinking water: the intakes stand well offshore where the lake is cleaner, and tunnels bored under the lakebed carry it back to the treatment plants on land. The first of them was dug by hand in the 1860s and cost lives to build.

Terminal Tower, the pointed block among the towers, went up in 1930 and stayed the tallest building outside New York until 1964. Erie is the shallowest of the Great Lakes, so it warms quickly, freezes over in hard winters and throws lake-effect snow at the shore east of the city.