A lake, a beach park and a highway
Summit Lake is a natural glacial lake on the old portage route that Native peoples used between the Cuyahoga and Tuscarawas rivers, and later used to help manage water levels on the Ohio & Erie Canal. The neighborhood around it once stretched north to Bartges Street and the B.F. Goodrich plant.
For four decades it was home to Summit Beach Amusement Park, open from 1917 to 1958. The neighborhood and the park were segregated; one woman who grew up in Akron remembered “whites only days” at the beach. In 1965 the Akron Metropolitan Housing Authority built Summit Lake Apartments on the lake’s eastern edge.
Then came three blows. Redlining cut off investment. In the 1960s, Interstate 76 split the neighborhood in half from north to south. And pollution from the rubber plants made the lake unsafe for swimming or eating fish for years.
The houses: Akron Vernacular and family legacies
Summit Lake’s most common house is a two-story single-family home of a type the city’s planning department calls “Akron Vernacular II.” The Brown Family Home at 242 Lake Street, built in 1913, is an example. James and Johnnie Elaine Brown bought it in 1966 and raised six children there, and in 2024 the city’s preservation commission conditionally approved it as the neighborhood’s first historic landmark.
Families like the Browns built wealth here. A woman who has lived in the neighborhood since 1963 said she and her relatives own several houses on Princeton Street. She also named the hardest part of staying: aging homeowners need help with repairs, from overgrown trees to bigger work, and that help has been slow to come.
A comeback around the water
The City of Akron, Akron Civic Commons and other partners have put millions into the area. The Summit Lake Nature Center opened in 2021 in a former pump house on Ira Avenue, with a pier where people fish. The $7.5 million Summit Lake NorthShore Park adds picnic areas, a boardwalk, a kayak launch and a pavilion along the Towpath Trail. Neighbors say traffic on Ira Avenue and Lakeshore Boulevard has picked up with the visitors.
Selling a Summit Lake house that needs work
Residents describe the situation plainly: older owners with century-old houses and more repairs than they can manage. You don’t have to make repairs first, and you don’t have to clear out decades of belongings either; see selling a house full of stuff.
If the house came to you from a parent, read selling an inherited house. If the city has cited it, our Akron housing code enforcement guide explains the process. Bob can walk the house with you and your family and write up what he’d pay and why.