[6] In March 1880, the Atlantic & Great Western emerged from bankruptcy as a new company, the New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio Railroad (NYP&O).

[10] The NYP&O's rail yards extended for nearly 2 miles (3.2 km)[11] along the southwest bank of the Old Ship Channel, around Irishtown Bend, and through Tremont.

[12] Traffic along the Cuyahoga River in this area was so extensive, the C&M had a rail yard eight tracks wide along Irishtown Bend to accommodate it.

[13] In 1982, Conrail (the successor to the C&M) removed 3.3 miles (5.3 km) of track in Cleveland, from the terminus on Whiskey Island to the Von Willer Yard (at E. 93rd Street and Harvard Avenue).

[18] The track bed from the south bank of the Old Ship Channel to the Cuyahoga River opposite Kingsbury Run was sold to Westbank Development Corp., a for-profit company founded by local real estate investor Earl Walker.

[19][b] In 1987,[20] Dr. Alfred M. Lee, an archeologist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, began a three-year-long series of archeological digs at Irishtown Bend.

After two years of work by six governmental planning agencies, the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission released a report in April 1992 that recommended an 18-mile (29 km) series of parks, protected areas, trails, and other new infrastructure to connect Lake Erie with the Cuyahoga Valley National Park to the south of Cleveland.

[22] Although businesses located further south on the west bank of the Cuyahoga River wanted a new, four-lane "West Bank connector" road through Irishtown Bend that would give them faster access to local highways, Cleveland planners (updating the city's Civic Vision master plan) instead began planning to turn Riverbed Street into a biking-hiking path and converting the area into a public park.

[24] The Corps began studying the hillside more extensively in 2007 and 2008, and issued a report in January 2009 which concluded that a very real danger existed of the Irishtown Bend hill collapsing suddenly into the Cuyahoga River.

ParkWorks, a Cleveland nonprofit,[c] wrote one part of the plan, which advocated turning the abandoned track bed between Kingsbury Run and Whiskey Island into a biking-hiking trail.

The plan also included the construction of a new pedestrian bridge over the Old Ship Channel of the Cuyahoga River to reconnect the tracks with the old C&M rail yard (now part of Wendy Park).

The Trust for Public Land (TPL), a national nonprofit which coordinates and facilities the creation of parkland, negotiated on behalf of the group with Westbank Development Corp.[19] On December 28, 2009, TPL purchased for $3.2 million ($4,500,000 in 2023 dollars) title and an easement covering 1.3 miles (2.1 km) of former C&M trackbed between the Old Ship Channel and the Cuyahoga River near Kingsbury Run.

ParkWorks provided the rest of the purchase price after receiving a $1.2 million ($1,700,000 in 2023 dollars) grant from the Clean Ohio Conservation Fund.

[29][e] Initial design work for what was then called the Lake Link Trail was funded by a $215,000 ($300,000 in 2023 dollars) grant from The George Gund Foundation.

Barr and Prevost recommended that Metroparks delay building the Cleveland Foundation Centennial Lake Link Trail along Irishtown Bend until the hillside stabilization issues had been identified and a permanent solution implemented.

[35] In June 2016, the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA) made an $80,000 ($100,000 in 2023 dollars) grant to Cleveland Metroparks to enable it to begin planning for hillside stabilization and the creation of the park and middle section of the trail.

[42] The park, and the middle leg of the Cleveland Foundation Centennial Lake Link Trail, remain on hold pending approval of the design and the securing of funds for hillside stabilization.

Cleveland Metroparks officials said in February 2016 that work on the bridge had been delayed after the agency decided to make "compromises in the design".

In August 2016, Cleveland Metroparks won a $7.95 million ($10,100,000 in 2023 dollars) Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant from the federal government to pay for the bridge's construction costs.

[50] The 0.5-mile (0.80 km), $2.5 million ($3,100,000 in 2023 dollars) northern leg of the Cleveland Foundation Centennial Lake Link Trail starts in the north near the intersection of River Road and Mulberry Avenue.

[38] The 0.25-mile (0.40 km) southern leg of the Cleveland Foundation Centennial Lake Link Trail[35] starts at Columbus Road.