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| - Zuh-LAYS. Szalay's.
What was once a sleepy little roadside stand has become a zoo. City folk eager for that real farm country experience wander around, fondling produce, pre-zipping corn, swinging on the giant porch swing, burning daylight. On a nice weekend day, there will be so many people crammed into the market barn that breathing becomes difficult, LifeFlight choppers buzz overhead and mere anarchy is loosed upon the valley.
One of the last surviving working farms in the Cuyahoga National Park, Szalay's managed to survive the steamroller government eviction of most of the people living in this verdant valley. (Now the Park is touting the re-introduction of working farms; why, then, toss them out in the first place?) Great produce, reasonably priced, and a lot of other stuff, too: maple syrup, candy, knick-knacks, gee-gaws, trinkets, baubles, even some stuff you can use.
Here's where the place could really use some work: traffic and crowd control. Szalay's is on the corner of Riverview and Bolanz Roads; Bolanz is one of the few "connectors" that allow you to cross the river from Riverview to Akron-Peninsula Roads and as such is a heavily-traveled piece of asphalt. They have parking on BOTH sides of the road, and the glassy-eyes customers wander across the road, oblivious. Combine that with the adjacent hike/bike trail, a couple hundred bikers, leaf-peepers and others with nature-induced rapture and you have a classic cluster-fudge of epic proportions..
Fix that! (I kid, but one day some poor corn-head is gonna die. You've been warned.)
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