This 28-by-73-inch horizontal panorama documents Perry Beach along Lake Erie’s Ohio shore—a natural landscape that provided recreational escape from Cleveland’s industrial environment while itself bearing marks of the region’s complex environmental history. The six-foot width captures the beach’s expansive horizontal character.

Created in 1988, the work represents Hayashi’s documentation of landscapes shaped by but distinct from heavy industry. Lake Erie’s shore offered Cleveland residents access to natural beauty even as the lake itself suffered from industrial and agricultural pollution that had made it a symbol of environmental crisis by 1970. The beach landscape embodies this tension between natural beauty and environmental damage.

Perry Beach lies in Lake County, northeast of Cleveland proper, where suburban development mixed with remaining agricultural land along the lake shore. The beach represents public access to Lake Erie’s waters—recreational space that industrial workers and their families had enjoyed for generations, natural counterpoint to factory floors and steel mills.

The extreme horizontal format suits documentation of beach and lake, the composition emphasizing the water’s horizon line and the shore’s linear extent. The photo collage technique captures the beach’s textures—sand, water, sky—while fragmenting the scene into the multiple perspectives that reveal Hayashi’s presence moving through the landscape.

Lake Erie’s environmental recovery since its 1970s nadir represents one of America’s ecological success stories. This panorama captures the beach during a transitional period when the lake was improving but industrial decline was transforming the regional economy. The natural landscape persists while the industrial infrastructure documented elsewhere in this series has largely vanished.