Almost. Two months later Time magazine published an article about the nation’s industrial pollution and its impact on waterways. It included a photo with a huge smoke cloud billowing from a ribbon of fire on the water. The picture was from another Cuyahoga River fire, 17 years earlier. In fact, the river had ignited many times over the years. Regardless, the story ensured that the 1969 fire, a blaze that few saw, would be seared into the memory and lore of this Great Lakes city, and would become a persistent theme in the city’s narrative. Even today, national media dutifully reference the burning river whenever Cleveland is the subject.

The fire serves as a convenient shorthand, but like its smoke, it obscures more than it reveals about Cleveland, its symbolic place in “Rust Belt” history, and a pioneering African-American mayor—the first elected to lead a major U.S. city—who understood his opportunity to do more than be a handmaiden for a city in decline.

As Mayor Stokes stood above the river on that summer day he carried a heavy burden that extended well beyond a flammable river. Even before 1969, Clevelanders were painfully aware that their city’s waterways were severely compromised. Those who were paying attention also knew that Cleveland was in the throes of what scholars have called “the urban crisis”—a mix of racial discrimination in housing and jobs, neighborhood decay, capital flight, and deindustrialization—long before the river burned. The previous summer, a protracted gun battle between police and black nationalists on the city’s East Side had shattered hopes for rolling back the urban crisis. The so-called Glenville Shootout, which unfolded just a mile from the epicenter of the destructive Hough rebellion of 1966, and practically within earshot of the venerable stone edifices of the acclaimed Cleveland Museum of Art and Severance Hall (home of the Cleveland Orchestra), cast a much darker cloud over the mayor’s office than anything the murky Cuyahoga River could churn up. In his memoir years later, Stokes recalled that Glenville spelled “the end of Carl Stokes as hero.”

Why was Stokes a hero in the first place? It had been no small feat becoming the first elected black mayor of a major U.S. city—and it was a particularly unlikely achievement for Stokes, considered in light of his early life. As detailed by Stokes biographer Leonard N. Moore, the mayor’s mother, born Louise Stone to a sharecropper-turned-preacher and a plantation cook in Wrens, Georgia in 1895, had fled the South in the Great Migration and found work cleaning in Cleveland’s staid Union Club. In Cleveland she met and married Charles Stokes, a laundryman from Cordele, Georgia.

In 1929, Charles Stokes died, leaving his young widow to raise two-year-old Carl and a four-year-old brother in a cold, drafty rental house in Cedar-Central, Cleveland’s version of the Chicago Black Belt or New York’s Harlem. Stokes later wrote that, as a child, he admired his uncle, who ran an after-hours joint next door: “He was a very rough man and I was proud of him. In a community where people live in despair and denial, the man who defies the rules and is able to make a living becomes a hero.” After 10 years, the Stokes family managed to secure a unit in the brand-new Outhwaite Homes, one of the nation’s first public housing projects. Freed for a time from the harshest of existences, the young Stokes flourished, developing a reputation as an exemplary student and a championship ping pong player, but he lost focus in his teenage years as gambling, playing pool, and fighting competed with his studies. Stokes dropped out of high school, worked in local factories, and served a stint in the U.S. Army before finally finishing his diploma. He enrolled in college on the G.I. Bill, went on to earn a law degree, and eventually won election to three terms in the Ohio House of Representatives in the 1960s.

Following an unsuccessful mayoral run in 1965, Carl Stokes, the great-grandson of slaves, narrowly edged out his Republican opponent Seth Taft, the grandson of U.S. President William Howard Taft. In doing so, Stokes shared one thing with his uncle in 1930s Cleveland—he was a man who defied the rules of the political game. Stokes’ victory owed to his charisma; his ability to convince one-fifth of white voters, including influential business elites, that he might bring stability to a city recently wracked by racial unrest and violence; and his work to mobilize a grassroots political movement that delivered nine-tenths of the city’s black vote. This combination of a nimble ground campaign and a willingness to forge strong ties to the business community offered, if not a blueprint, a guide for a generation of black politicians who sought the mayoralty of other cities in the 1970s and 1980s—among them Tom Bradley in Los Angeles, Coleman Young in Detroit, and Harold Washington in Chicago.

Stokes was a “messiah mayor” before the term was coined. From the moment he threw his hat in the ring in the mayoral race of 1967, he made clear that he could read the pulse of Clevelanders. With his campaign slogan, “I believe in Cleveland,” he prescribed a new mentality in a city that was deeply mired in urban crisis. He became an embodiment of civic hope. One of the mayor’s aides noted of his travels around the country, “People were saying nice things about Cleveland again.” At least for a few months of Stokes’ time in office, the national media narrative highlighted an urban renaissance led by an unlikely black celebrity.

A hand fan depicts Cleveland’s Carl Stokes and other mayors who represented a generation of “New Black Leaders” in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Image courtesy of The National Museum of American History.

After Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, Stokes, hoping to head off the reactive violence that had hit other cities, launched a massive campaign called Cleveland: NOW!. It was a $1.5 billion blueprint for change that would, if fully implemented, speak to dire needs in employment, housing, and health and human services. It promised to address many of the reasons that the Civil Rights movement had struggled to gain traction in northern cities with direct-action tactics designed to counter Jim Crow in the South.

But Stokes was both a realist and a showman, and he understood that he needed to generate a sense of progress and excitement on the ground to buy time for the hard work ahead. Dispensing hope became more critical after the Glenville Shootout destroyed the myth that a black mayor was an insurance policy against racial unrest. Stokes and his brain trust of youthful, energetic cabinet members undertook symbolic initiatives to mold perceptions of Cleveland, especially as some of the city’s most cherished places closed over the next year—the ornate theaters of Playhouse Square, the Euclid Beach amusement park, and Sterling-Lindner, a department store known for its towering Christmas tree.

With the city’s Lake Erie beaches too polluted for swimmers and environmental remediation still on the horizon, City Hall installed chlorinated “swimming pools in the lake” at two popular beachfront parks. Surrounded by gleeful children, Mayor Stokes rolled up his pants and waded into one of these enclosures at its dedication in the summer of 1968, a year before the river fire. With affordable housing in short supply following years of slum-clearance campaigns, the administration worked out a deal whereby dozens of houses that stood in the way of building a new municipal service center in Shaker Heights were moved from the model suburb into Cleveland neighborhoods in 1969. Stokes personally presented the keys to the first home, a Dutch colonial moved to East 114th Street, to Helen Willis and her three children, beneficiaries of a new federal mortgage assistance bill designed to mitigate displacement by urban renewal programs.

Taking cues from the “Fun City” programming launched by Mayor John Lindsay in New York City, Stokes also worked to re-enliven downtown. His administration sponsored an outdoor café, music and arts festivals, and lighting and signage to support the fledgling Flats entertainment district along the Cuyahoga. It also partnered with business leaders and the city’s General Electric (GE) Lighting Division to install streetlights touted as the brightest in the nation on the downtown stretch of Euclid Avenue. Stokes flipped the ceremonial switch at a festive event in a Playhouse Square district only recently darkened by shuttered theaters. All were calculated as highly visible and easily attainable facets of the Cleveland: NOW! campaign.

Stokes won re-election in 1969, but political adversaries in the city council worked tirelessly to undermine the mayor’s vision for a more equitable city. Political constraints, not to mention a city budget gutted by mounting debt, significantly limited what Stokes could accomplish, leading him to bow out of the 1971 mayoral race. It would be a mistake to conclude that Stokes accomplished little, for he did more to address the plight of the city’s poor than any of his predecessors. Nevertheless, he was powerless to stop the broader social and economic forces that were siphoning away jobs from the Great Lakes region and emptying older cities like Cleveland.

The four-year tenure of Carl Stokes was one of several periods of intentional civic renaissance in Cleveland. It has again become fashionable to tell stories about the revival of Rust Belt cities. We latch on to narratives in which a hero—such as Dan Gilbert in Detroit, or LeBron James in Cleveland—comes to the rescue of a once-great city. If heroes don’t necessarily produce lasting transformations, they do help people cope with unsettling metropolitan change. Throughout the long downward tilt of older American cities, people with big dreams propelled wishful counter-narratives. 50 years ago, the nation’s first big-city black mayor had the audacity to hope that 1969 might be the year that future Americans would remember as the moment when Cleveland began to throw off the shackles of a longstanding urban crisis—rather than one when a burning river sounded the alarm that an American city was on its deathbed.

The post The ‘Messiah’ Mayor Who Believed in Cleveland When No One Else Did appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Since 2000, Cleveland has always made the list of the top five big cities with high poverty. While the national poverty rate stood at 15.5 percent in 2015, the rate in Cleveland was 39.2 percent, ranking second only behind Detroit among cities with populations of 300,000 or more. Cleveland also ranks high in child poverty (54 percent), in the top 10 cities with populations living in concentrated poverty (28 percent), and number five in rankings of racial segregation.

These statistics raise questions you may not hear discussed this week during the Republican National Convention. Why is Cleveland so poor? What are the effects of these conditions on the city and its residents? And what is being done about it?

The answer to that first question is not terribly different from the experience of other “legacy” cities, the term for older, industrial areas that have experienced population loss, job loss, and loss of steel or other manufacturing employers.

Cleveland was the U.S.’s sixth largest city in 1940, but since 1970, when it was still in the top 10, the city has lost 48 percent of its resident population. In the 2010 census, Cleveland barely remained among the top 50 largest U.S. cities, at number 48. Only Detroit had a larger population loss during this period (55 percent), yet Detroit still remained among the 20 largest cities in 2010 (as number 18).

Cleveland’s population loss has an important backstory: the population of Cuyahoga County, in which Cleveland is located, has remained largely flat since about 1950. It is the city’s metropolitan core that has lost people, while the smaller cities and suburbs outside Cleveland have gained. The city lost its tax base, saw disinvestment in properties and neighborhoods, and a loss in property values (and resulting revenues for public schools). So, many Cleveland families left the city for more opportunity and better neighborhoods in the city suburbs.

Today, Cleveland neighborhoods are beset by poverty. Among Cleveland’s 34 neighborhoods, 15 have poverty rates in excess of 40 percent—the standard for concentrated poverty—and another eight have poverty rates between 30 and 40 percent. Only two neighborhoods have poverty rates below 20 percent. Among Cleveland’s 58 suburbs, the picture is different; 53 have poverty rates below 20 percent.

Despite these circumstances, greater Cleveland identifies itself with its city center. Downtown Cleveland, with its sports venues for the Cavs, Browns, and Indians, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Public Square, are sources of great civic pride. There is a broad agreement that for the region to thrive, the city of Cleveland must be strong and vibrant. Yet, the challenge remains about how to accomplish this when many of the families that make the city their home remain in poverty.

Social researchers who study poverty, like me, often find that poverty is related to nearly everything we measure. It’s both an effect and a cause. For example, poverty is highly correlated with educational status, single-headed family structures, and neighborhood of residence. Individuals who are poor feel a variety of direct effects—lack of food, health concerns, poor housing, toxic stress, and for children, exposure to lead, maltreatment, and infant mortality. Additionally, poor families who live in areas of concentrated poverty lack access to good education, work opportunities, many social supports, and healthy food options. These families are also exposed to more crime. We see all of this in Cleveland.

Concentrated neighborhood poverty further restricts the ability of individuals to overcome their own poverty. In a recent study of Cleveland kindergarteners, our research team found that children who continuously resided in such neighborhoods from birth to kindergarten were nearly twice as likely to have elevated blood lead levels as compared to their peers. In fact, 40 percent of these kindergarteners had a confirmed elevated blood lead level prior to entering kindergarten, and these children experience significant literacy delays and are far less likely to be proficient in reading by third grade.

In a city where poverty remains a persistent problem, it’s easy to conclude that current efforts are ineffective, but the reality is much more complicated. In Cleveland, you can find many efforts to reduce the underlying causes of poverty and address the needs of families living with its consequences. And the response here has been as multi-faceted as poverty itself, including partnerships between city and county governments, the philanthropic community, a diverse nonprofit sector, and representatives of the business community.

Cleveland and Cuyahoga County have built a strong safety net, with food assistance, subsidized childcare, health care coverage, and housing supports. We also invest in high-quality early learning (through Cuyahoga County’s Office of Early Childhood/Invest in Children and the Pre4CLE initiative in the city) as an avenue to improve outcomes for young children as they grow. And the Cleveland schools have a major initiative underway—The Cleveland Plan—to improve the way public education prepares our children for later success. These efforts are showing good progress in reaching and assisting families in need. For example, children served with high-quality preschool show 33 percent greater odds of passing reading proficiency tests in third grade.

One promising strategy involves economic development that connects the city’s core and periphery. The Fund for Our Economic Future is a philanthropy-driven collaboration started in 2004 that has put more than $100 million into preparing people for jobs, creating jobs, and providing access to jobs around Cleveland. For example, the Fund is making sure that the Opportunity Corridor Project, which will connect a major east-west freeway to the University Circle region of the city, will do much more than shorten drive times for suburban commuters. Residents of the neighborhoods adjacent to the corridor will have economic opportunities as a result of the project.

As a resident of this community, I see the legacy of Cleveland’s once-remarkable population and economic vitality on a daily basis—the grand architecture, the public parks and spaces, the world-class cultural and health care institutions. The decades of population out-migration and other economic challenges have taken their toll. Despite this, recent years have seen tremendous progress in the right direction, such as coordinated public and private investment and a marked growth in the population of young professionals living in the city. Such developments contribute to a civic spirit that has endured decades of decline.

 
In “Beyond the Circus,” writers take us off the 2016 campaign trail and give us glimpses of this election season’s politically important places.

The post There’s No Magic Bullet for Cleveland’s Poverty appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But there are stories of renewal here, too. In 1992, the bakery chain that defined Northeastern Ohio became the latest business to close its doors. As it turned out, that wasn’t the end of the story, but the beginning of mine.

At its height, Hough (pronounced “Huff’s”) Bakery was a $25 million business with 1,000 employees and some 81,000 square feet in operating space spread over 30 locations across our region. Hough’s bakeries were beloved for their cakes, butter cookies, coconut chocolate bars, and “daffodil” cakes, all of them made from scratch and with top-quality ingredients, not mixes.

The business began with Lionel Archibald “Archie” Pile, who was born on August 29, 1879 in Barbados and immigrated to New York City, where his brothers lived, at age 21.

In 1902, Archie Pile moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he also had relatives living. He worked at a local grocery store on Hough Avenue, earning $8 per week. After saving $57, Pile made a down payment on what would soon become the first location of Hough Bakery.

On May 25, 1903, Pile opened his doors for business on Hough Avenue. Shortly after, he fell in love with and married Kate Welker. Together, they raised their six children during World War I. As their family grew, Hough Bakery also prospered, despite the ensuing Great Depression. The Piles’ four sons eventually joined the family business, and by the 1950s they led the operation with their father’s wisdom.

Archie Pile and I share a first name, and a devotion to quality baking. I was born in 1948 in Wildwood, Tennessee and grew up under the care of my grandmother. There were very few black families in the small rural area. As a young child without many other children to play with, I would watch my grandmother as she baked and helped out whenever she allowed me to. Seeing her make breads, biscuits, and pies fascinated me, and planted a seed that would eventually grow.

I visited relatives in Cleveland every summer and decided to move there in 1966, after I graduated high school. Once I arrived, I knew several people who worked at Hough Bakery, and they were able to help me get a job.

Customers form a line outside of a Hough Bakery in 1945.

My first position was in the sanitation department. As a black person, it was difficult to rise in rank and join the bakery’s production team. I was denied advancement and told I needed more experience—the very experience they were denying me. After I filed a grievance with the union, the Pile family became aware of my situation and immediately promoted me up to production. This was where my passion for baking reignited, and from that point on, I was unstoppable.

The bakers were very temperamental, and wouldn’t teach everything they knew right away. I had to gain the confidence of the two head bakers. So while one baker was off, I would tell the other one working how much more talented he was. Doing that with both bakers led to them teaching me secrets they wouldn’t ordinarily teach anyone.

After working in various departments, I finally landed my dream job as one of the head bakers in the Specialty Bakery department, a.k.a. the Swedish department. It had gotten its name from an old Swedish baker who worked there and who wrote most of his recipes in Swedish. When he left, it was a nightmare trying to translate his work, which helped the name stick around. The department handled all large-scale catering orders as well as any special requests that customers might have.

This was the department that handled the millionaires; we catered all of Bob Hope’s birthday parties back in the ’70s and ’80s. The largest dessert I created was a brownie cheesecake topped with fruit for an event at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, which served approximately 3,000 guests.

Shortly after the Canton party, Hough Bakery closed. The chain had become so large that when the economy took a turn for the worse, it couldn’t maintain. The original owners sold the brand to a Wisconsin company that promised to retain all our employees, but was ultimately unable to do so. They began to consolidate locations, and eventually the whole operation went bankrupt.

It came as a shock that August day, as we discovered our loss of employment on the six o’clock news. The labor union called a meeting for the remaining 400 employees. They wanted to assist us, but the local baking industry could not absorb that many jobs.

I had the idea to reopen Hough Bakery as an employee-owned company, which led to many meetings and the formation of committees. But, unfortunately, we couldn’t raise the capital needed to move forward. The assets of Hough Bakery were then sold in bankruptcy court. Kraft Foods bought the bakery division just so they could lock up the recipes. People had tried to mass-produce imitations of our most renowned desserts, such as our seasonal daffodil cake, but even at twice the price our original recipes kept customers loyal. Getting ahold of those recipes let Kraft remove some of their biggest competition from the market.

Our lack of success left me disappointed, but not distraught. I had always wanted to own my own bakery, so I went around to auctions buying used baking equipment, which I stored in my basement. To pay the bills, I worked part-time in various catering departments as well as doing odd jobs like planting flowers and washing walls. A few people I worked for took a liking to me, and one catering company even went so far as to give me a three-compartment sink for washing dishes, free of charge.

Things seemed darkest as I looked in vain for a place to open up shop. Finally, I stumbled upon an old, unused bakery that still had a working oven, located in the neighborhood of Collinwood on the east side of Cleveland. The area wasn’t that well off, but at the time was a haven for people of Irish, Italian, and Hungarian descent as well as many black families. As soon as I signed the lease, I became paralyzed with fear. Would anyone show up?

The day that I opened Archie’s Lakeshore Bakery in 1994, I knew things were going to be OK. Almost instantly, people flooded the place, many of them from the surrounding neighborhoods. They had feared they were never going to eat their favorite treats again and were grateful to me for keeping the tradition going. We still make everything from scratch and refuse to alter the quality of our ingredients.

Because Hough Bakery had been a much larger operation than mine, my recipes were cut down in size, making them just different enough from the ones that Kraft had purchased to allow me to legally use them. A few years later, Kraft lost the national rights to the Hough brand, at which point I stepped in and acquired the name for myself.

To date, our most popular dessert is undoubtedly our white cake, which blends the taste of almond with other flavors in a way that is only possible to achieve when you make it from scratch. We’re also known for our “Hungarian Delight,” made by sandwiching raspberry and fudge filling between two butter cookies. We can only make them in the colder months of the year, as the fudge will melt in the summer.

The bakery has been open at the same location for 22 years now. People come from all over to visit us, but the majority of our customer base is still from greater Cleveland. Customers often come to share memories about growing up eating Hough baked goods. (The town of Davidson, North Carolina, which is home to many ex-Clevelanders, has asked us to open an outpost there).

One time, a woman walked into our store and demanded that we allow her to cut into one of our white cakes, as she didn’t believe they were really Hough’s. I was working in the back when I heard a noise coming from the counter.

When I investigated, I found the woman in tears. I asked her what was wrong, and she explained that this cake was a part of her childhood, and that she never thought she’d get to taste it again.

But she had. At Archie’s Lakeshore Bakery, we’ve created a bit of magic of our own.

 
In “Beyond the Circus,” writers take us off the 2016 campaign trail and give us glimpses of this election season’s politically important places.

The post The Double Rise of an Iconic Cleveland Bakery appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Most inquiries ask what makes Cleveland special. Too often, the responses that are given to the media are civic booster-speak. Once the fifth-largest city in the nation, John D. Rockefeller did create Standard Oil while in Cleveland. But one must be be wary about firsts, subjective rankings of contributions, or people that have “changed the way we live.”

Calling the city “special” can be problematic. Cleveland fits the pattern of many other midwestern industrial cities, particularly those situated on the Great Lakes. As a historian, I long for more studies that contextualize not only our industry but also social life, class, and benevolence in Cleveland with other cities, particularly during the years just before and including the turn of the 20th century known as the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

The Gilded Age intrigues me because it is the era in which landscape, philanthropy, and migration coalesced to make Cleveland an important player in the nation’s economy and political life as well as in culture and education. Landscape, diversity and philanthropy gave Cleveland a significant history and primed the city for future growth—including some of the gains of today’s post-industrial era.

Cleveland’s location, on a lake (Erie) at the mouth of a river (the Cuyahoga), is not special. Classically, many cities were perched on waterways for transit and trade. That’s why Moses Cleaveland, the leader of the first survey party in 1796 and the city’s namesake, decided to establish the town at the site. He expected the community to develop as the mercantile center for a surrounding agricultural hinterland. But, it would become far more than an agricultural entrepot. The discovery of iron ore, coal, limestone, petroleum, and other natural resources in the regions around the lakes in Ohio and Pennsylvania some 50 years later, would transform a community of merchants into a community of industrialists, inventors, and workers. Efficient transport networks, canals, railroads, and lake shipping provided links to markets and resources and by the late antebellum era, created the foundation for a period of immense growth.

A 1917 poster from the Cleveland Board of Education’s Americanization Committee.

Today, landscape and place still play significant roles for the city and the surrounding region, but the impact extends beyond commerce. Like other industrial cities that had a “lock” on business and industry because of their water and rail networks, Cleveland’s jobs and factories begin to exit the area via the new postwar highway networks, and later through channels of global industrialization. But, the lake remains, as does a now relatively clean Cuyahoga River. Both now are seen as lifestyle amenities and while both still carry commerce, they have also anchored waterfront entertainment venues and other recreational attractions. The waterfronts are also an important part of the sales pitch for businesses seeking new workers in the competitive high-tech and medical labor markets. But the lake’s most significant quality is its looming future importance beyond lifestyle given the realities of climate change. There is no shortage of water in Northeast Ohio.

While acknowledging the importance of the lake and river, many citizens still lament the loss of industry and the extravagant lifestyle they link to the industrial barons who lived in the region, with a palpable nostalgia for old Euclid Avenue, once known as Millionaires Row. The area once hosted dozens of spectacular homes that were ostentatious showcases of Gilded Age wealth. Several remain, but the splendor is gone. Yet, the legacy of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era wealth of the city is embedded in many of Cleveland’s cultural, medical, educational, and social service institutions.

One can argue that the barons of the Gilded Age should have paid their workers more and spent less on dividends, charity, and culture. That’s an interesting question for me, given that my immigrant grandfathers worked in the steel mills, and that today, I work for two institutions, Case Western Reserve University and the Western Reserve Historical Society, whose growth was supported in large part with Gilded Age money. The futures of those institutions depend on a continuity of a local philanthropic tradition.

This legacy money—which also created Severance Hall, the home of the Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and University Hospitals—is now being joined by funds provided by a more diverse set of donors. A drive or bus ride down Euclid Avenue today shows not mansions, but an always-evolving medical, educational and cultural complex. The names (such as Ahuja, Seidman, Mandel and Wolstein) on the newer buildings on the avenue and in University Circle indicate the manner in which the New England tradition of community stewardship has been augmented by communities that arrived in the years since the 1830s. Call it what you will: stewardship, tzedakah, or charity, these traditions of altruism have been central to the city’s history and have created institutions that seem to be anchoring its future.

The diversity of names on the buildings on Euclid Avenue and in University Circle is the result of a process that the founders never expected. They envisioned Cleveland as an outpost of New England. That’s why they laid out a town square at its center. But the growth of commerce and industry attracted a global population. The immigrant and migrant flow provided not only cheap, replaceable labor in the factories, but also skill sets and ideas critical to innovation. In 1920, two-thirds of the population of nearly 800,000 was of foreign birth or foreign parentage. Another 35,000 residents were African-Americans, the majority having come in the years since 1900. As was the case in Chicago, Buffalo, Detroit, and other cities, they created a web of neighborhoods anchored around their workplaces and a network of culturally attuned stores and businesses.

Today, some of the “Ellis Island” neighborhoods endure, their identities marked not so much by the ancestry of their current residents, but by structures, stores, and restaurants. They are home to the city’s evolving “foodie” culture, to many young professionals, and to the beginnings of gentrification. That diversity also colors memory—in positive and negative ways—among Clevelanders with deep roots in the city. There is still, despite recent demographic changes, a local passion for remembering roots and ancestry. The question often asked of a newcomer in Cleveland is not “What do you do for a living?” but “What are you?” in terms of one’s ethnic identity.

All of this is happening in a city and region in which the percentage of foreign-born is now well below the national average, whereas between 1860 and 1950, the city was well above average. Yet, the number of national/ethnic identities is now larger than ever before. Some estimates put it at over 110. So, on one scale the city is not as “ethnic” as it was in terms of numbers, but on another, the region is more globally representative than ever.

Here too, some see the future in the past, arguing that immigrants can bring new skills and viewpoints to the city and to the workplace, and that a more globalized Cleveland would better reflect the broader world in which it exists. Some local groups focus on attracting skilled immigrants, while others see the city as a home for refugees who could acquire skills and settle in the city. Indeed, there are many open spaces in Cleveland, a city that once housed over 900,000 people and now has fewer than 400,000. Perhaps those spaces could provide refuge. However, the matter of diversity is encumbered by political rhetoric. There is also the question of who would be displaced in the job market if there were an influx of new job-seekers competing for the non-technical, less skilled jobs in the region.

Yet the city has “been there” before in this regard. In some instances—industrial strikes and urban unrest—the consequences have been brutal. Yet, what was to be a bit of old New England did transform itself and survive. Cleveland’s future will need to echo a past in which it transcended the location that gives it an identity and came to embrace ideas, skills, and concepts of altruism from around the globe. Does that make it different or special? Perhaps. But even if not, it is a city with a history that begs for further exploration.

 
In “Beyond the Circus,” writers take us off the 2016 campaign trail and give us glimpses of this election season’s politically important places.

The post Cleveland’s “Millionaire’s Row” Still Glitters With the Gilded Age’s Unanticipated Legacy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Tens of thousands of people flock to Brite Winter, an annual festival featuring six stages of music, DJs, artists, ice carving, and food trucks. The event takes place outside—snow, sleet, or sunshine—in a different Cleveland neighborhood each year, often near some signature piece of Cleveland’s infrastructure. In 2016, Brite Winter popped up underneath the city’s majestic steel bridges on the Flats adjacent to the Cuyahoga River, a once-decaying entertainment destination that’s been revitalized by restaurants, bars, and concert venues.

Brite Winter embodies Clevelanders’ resiliency—a good trait to have when you’re wrangling with four months (or more!) of our winter. It’s also a demonstration of how this city, despite challenges ranging from the climatic to the economic, never stops playing. The city is now small enough that when you go see a show, you’re likely to see someone you know. Music is so unavoidable here, 12 months out of the year, that it’s easy to forget that not every place is like this.

Cleveland’s been a cutting-edge music city for decades. In 1952, local radio DJ Alan Freed threw a concert known as the Moondog Coronation Ball at the Cleveland Arena. This event, which featured then-popular acts such as The Dominoes, Paul Williams and the Hucklebuckers, and Tiny Grimes and His Rocking Highlanders, is considered to be the first rock ‘n’ roll concert.

In the late ’60s, The Velvet Underground played so many gigs in Cleveland they called it their “home away from home.” David Bowie’s first U.S. concert was September 22, 1972, in Cleveland at Music Hall. And both Rush and Bruce Springsteen received career breaks (and boosts) thanks to the support of local rock radio station WMMS.

Brite Winter Festival, 2013.

Many influential underground acts have flourished here too. The Outsiders and power-pop aficionados The Raspberries became beloved rock bands in the late ’60s and early ’70s (respectively). Later in the ’70s, proto-punk acts such as Mirrors, Rocket From The Tombs, and The Electric Eels gave way to the mighty noise-rock troupe Pere Ubu and punk band Dead Boys. In the ’80s, evocative post-punks Death Of Samantha and the pop-leaning band The Mice made waves. In the ’90s and beyond, Cleveland’s hardcore scene and hip-hop community spawned various factions and movements that made waves well outside of the city.

Why has so much important music emerged from Cleveland? Residents are unpretentious and can smell insincerity from a mile away—no matter what the genre, if the music’s not genuine, it won’t fly here. Plus, the city’s status as an off-the-beaten-path metropolis, coupled with a low cost of living, lets musicians experiment with impunity. Creativity is both encouraged and applauded.

Accordingly, ingenuity is a hallmark of Cleveland’s music venues, many of which are in historic buildings representative of the city’s grit, heritage, and traditions. The popular Beachland Ballroom was once a social and political gathering place called the Croatian Liberty Home. Today, the two-room venue includes an intimate tavern where the audience can get nose-to-nose with the stage, and a larger ballroom where a disco ball casts a festive glow over shows. The creative space is utilized by national touring acts of all genres as well as local bands. In fact, the tiny tavern hosted early shows from The White Stripes and The Black Keys.

To the west in the funky enclave Lakewood, the old-school bowling alley Mahall’s 20 Lanes has become a mecca for up-and-coming punk, emo, hip-hop, rock and comedy acts. In the venue’s basement, it’s common to see throngs of people thrashing to a rock show right across the hallway from serious bowlers.

Meanwhile, an unpretentious shot-and-a-beer joint called The Happy Dog pairs legendary hot dogs with an eclectic variety of music, like soul and polka DJs and hip, national touring bands. Then there’s the proudly dive club Now That’s Class, which rounds out the West Side music scene with a vegan-friendly menu and shows featuring noise bands, up-and-coming punk and hardcore bands, and renowned legends.

On the east side of town, venerable venues such as The Grog Shop—which has hosted the hippest rock, hip-hop, and punk acts for over two decades—and the sophisticated, jazz-oriented supper club Nighttown add diversity. In and around Downtown, venues such as the House of Blues and waterfront Music Box Supper Club, as well as the legendary rock venue the Cleveland Agora and outdoor riverfront amphitheater Jacobs Pavilion at Nautica, bring out-of-town acts to the city.

Larchmere PorchFest, 2013.

These venues draw different clientele: For example, the seated venues Nighttown and the Music Box Supper Club book music geared toward an older crowd, while the Agora’s metal-heavy slate draws passionate fans of all ages. But the scenery is unparalleled—for example, gigantic freighters often pass directly behind the Jacobs Pavilion during shows, causing artists to stop and wave at workers on the ship.

Cleveland’s homegrown artists such as Cloud Nothings, The Lighthouse and The Whaler, FreshProduce, and Wesley Bright and The Hi-Lites don’t always limit themselves to gigs at traditional concert venues. Consider the annual Larchmere PorchFest, when local bands perform on the stoops of houses in a quaint, artistic East Side neighborhood every June. Throughout the day, patrons stroll around the neighborhood with lawn chairs, stopping every so often in strangers’ front yards to take a seat and hear everything from folk and hip-hop to bluegrass to rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a gigantic, multi-street block party that draws fans from all over the city—and artists from all corners of the music scene. Unofficially, it’s the kickoff to summer in Cleveland.

During these warmer summer months, all of Cleveland’s nooks and crannies come alive. Edgewater Park and Euclid Beach Park host weekly concerts showcasing local talent amidst their lakes and greenery. Everything from cover bands to blues acts to the city’s legendary soul-funk troupe Kinsman Dazz Band make appearances. Locals enjoy from the patios of favorite restaurants, like Gordon Square’s cozy Luxe Kitchen and Lounge, and beloved barrooms, like the 1930s Tremont institution Prosperity Social Club. The venues in the downtown theater district, Playhouse Square, host the annual Tri-C JazzFest, which in 2016 threw the spotlight on legends such as Maceo Parker, Chick Corea, and David Sanborn.

Thanks to the attitude towards the arts in Cleveland, music isn’t something people have to carve out time to appreciate. Instead, tunes and sounds are an integral part of cultural institutions or events. Transformer Station, a contemporary art-driven annex of the Cleveland Museum of Art, hosts weekly summer concerts on the front lawn. This year’s slate includes everyone from Ethiopian pop act Debo Band, to the Sahara-based blues band Tamikrest, and the tropical-leaning Ondatrópica.

And (perhaps unsurprisingly) live music is a staple of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Locals play on the outdoor plaza, while the venue’s popular monthly Sonic Sessions showcase up-and-coming touring acts from around the globe. The Rock Hall and its sister institution, the Library and Archives, host frequent talks, performances, and book readings. These events are often free, too, which is perhaps the biggest advantage for locals. History comes to us and camps out in our backyard.

 
In “Beyond the Circus,” writers take us off the 2016 campaign trail and give us glimpses of this election season’s politically important places.

The post Cleveland Rocks, Even in the Dead of Winter appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Today the valley is a 51-square-mile nature preserve stretching from the Akron suburbs in the south to the Cleveland suburbs in the north. Waterfalls, rolling hills, caves, narrow ravines, boulder-strewn cliffs, rolling floodplains, and lush farmland create a stark contrast with the densely populated metropolitan area around it.

As a bicyclist I try to visit the valley at least twice a week to find inspiration in its solitude and to enjoy some sessions of sweet silent thought. Along the towpath I regularly spot bald eagles, peregrine falcons, and great blue herons with Jurassic wingspans. Typically, I have to share the path with queen snakes, spotted turtles, and industrious beavers building their dams in a nearby marsh that was once a junkyard with a small stream flowing through it. On one of the many hiking trails through the steep woodlands, the sharp-eyed can spot the occasional black bear or bobcat, or a pack of coyotes hunting for rodents and rabbits and unfortunate toy poodles. Visitors are urged to keep their dogs on leashes at all times.

The park is an idyllic setting that seems a world away from the dark, satanic steel mills and the sulfur-spewing smokestacks that crowd the riverbanks in Cleveland’s industrial flats.

For 10 years, on and off, I worked in those mills as a union boilermaker, earning my way through college and graduate school. At 7 a.m., with an acetylene torch in hand, I would climb into the black asbestos pit of a dust collector and begin cutting through enormous pieces of warped and rusted metal, all the while thinking of my unsmiling professors and how they remained unimpressed by the latest draft of my master’s thesis, an unwieldy tome by a 27-year-old pseudointellectual who’d fallen under the sway of Joseph Campbell.

While my blowtorch melted the inch-thick sheets of steel, I tried to remember Campbell’s words: “Life is a wonderful, wonderful opera. Except that it hurts.”

Yes, the fiery embers hurt, the falling pieces of jagged scrap metal hurt, the deep cuts from power grinders hurt, but always above the roar of the blast furnace I heard the opera. Below me toiled the enslaved Nibelungs harassed by invisible foremen while I sang the part of Siegfried, hammering a sturdy sword of scholarly pretension.

I couldn’t decide which was more absurd—the neuroses of academic life or the physical dangers of blue collar work. Both seemed hellish and bizarre, equal parts vaudeville and Wagner, completely untethered from anything most people would recognize as reality. On those rare days of bright sunshine and yellow smog, I stood on a platform at the top of the refinery where I could see, to the north, the skyscrapers of downtown Cleveland and, to the south, the thin white line where the towpath followed the river and eventually disappeared, five miles away, into the lush treetops of the national park.

It seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that Cleveland was a city of scarcely believable contrasts—heavy industry and bucolic nature; blue-collar trades and intellectual ambition; an international hub of cutting-edge medical research and an epicenter of the foreclosure crisis where entire neighborhoods were devastated by the government’s lax oversight of predatory lending. How many boilermakers and steelworkers and pipefitters, I wondered, who made their homes in some of these neighborhoods, would take their final breath at the Cleveland Clinic’s state-of-the art “Cancer Pavilion?”

After work, the men poured from the gates of the mills and then went straight to one of the dank dive bars at the corner where they cashed their checks and in stoic silence drank shots of whiskey and mugs of cheap draft beer. I rarely joined them. Instead, I had to fight rush-hour traffic and race to night classes at Cleveland State University. If time permitted, I would stand under an icy spray of water in the athletic center’s locker room, washing away the sparkling graphite dust and scrubbing the stubborn black soot that ringed my eyes and mouth. Later, sitting in the classroom and fighting the temptation to sleep, I would patiently take notes on Mailer and Roth and Updike, how each boasted of his sexual conquests, and sometimes, if the Indians were playing and Manny Ramirez had hit another home run, I would hear the celebratory explosion of fireworks from the ballpark 25 blocks away.

Driving home from school, I would pass through Playhouse Square, the largest performing arts district in the United States outside New York City. Near I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I would turn onto the West Shoreway overlooking the guano-splattered break wall and the tumultuous lake.

Measured by surface area, Lake Erie is the 13th largest lake in the world, but it’s the shallowest of the five Great Lakes with an average depth of just over seven meters. As a result, it’s the roughest of the lakes and can kill an exhausted or inexperienced swimmer quickly. Invasive species like the zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha) are beginning to thrive here, but the lake is still healthy enough to sustain a fishing industry that supports 10,000 jobs. In recent years a toxic algae bloom, fed by nitrogen and phosphorus-rich runoff from Ohio farmlands, spread east from the lake’s western basin, depriving the walleye of oxygen and turning the rolling waves into the color of cold hard cash.

This latest environmental catastrophe makes me think again of Cleveland’s notorious burning river. Polluted from decades of sewage and industrial chemicals and fueled by a thick oily sludge, the Cuyahoga River caught fire on a Sunday morning in June 1969 near the Republic Steel mill, not far from where I would eventually work. A piece of molten steel fell into the water and set the surface ablaze, causing $100,000 worth of damage to two railroad bridges. (The arresting photograph that appeared in Time magazine, showing flames leaping up from the water and completely engulfing a ship, was actually from a much more serious fire in November 1952.)

While it was a public relations catastrophe for what was at one time the fifth-largest city in the United States, the fire did help spark the modern environmental movement and the passage of the Clean Water Act. In 1970, to celebrate the inaugural Earth Day, a number of Cleveland State University students marched from campus to the river. In the decades that followed, the Cuyahoga’s water quality has improved dramatically, and business investors have converted parts of the Flats’ abandoned industrial cityscape into an entertainment district featuring restaurants, nightclubs, and music venues.

What’s true for the Flats is true for much of downtown Cleveland. As a result of winning the bid for the 2016 Republican National Convention, the city has undergone a massive capital improvement project, with the fixing of roads and bridges and public buildings.

The arriving delegates will see some of this: 275 new trees will spring up in the city; 250 planters filled with flowers and greenery will decorate the streets; murals and art installations will pop up all over town; 1,000 banners will hang from street poles; 1.5 million individual twinkle lights will gleam around the perimeter of Public Square and the lakefront and the arena where the convention is being held; bars and restaurants will stay open until 4 a.m. And a grant from the United States Bureau of Justice Assistance will pay $50 million to keep 5,000 police officers on duty during what is sure to be a violent political carnival.

As a novelist and unapologetic introvert, I’ll avoid the mayhem—the trendy bistros and crowded microbreweries and open-air amphitheaters and designated protest zones. I prefer to ride through the national park 10 miles due south. Yes, the thousands who will soon descend on the city may find the vibrant boardwalk along the downtown riverfront a refreshing glimpse of nature. But it cannot compete with the sense of grandeur one experiences while hiking through the national park.

As I bike through the tranquility of the park, I’ll think again of that young man forging his sword of prose and poetry in the demonic foundries along the Cuyahoga. But, instead of the deafening bombast of Wagner I’ll hear the plaintive melody of a miniature masterpiece by Randy Newman who sadly sings, “Burn on, big river, burn on.”

 
In “Beyond the Circus,” writers take us off the 2016 campaign trail and give us glimpses of this election season’s politically important places.

The post The Wonderful, Painful Opera of Cleveland appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

An outsider might think I live in exactly the wrong place to satisfy this love: Perry, Ohio has just 1,500 people and sits in the farmland along Lake Erie, about 35 miles east of Cleveland. But, like so many of the misconceptions about my oft-maligned state, the notion of rural Ohio as a backwater a world away from the tasting rooms of Napa is dead wrong. In fact, Northeast Ohio has an aquifer similar to that of the wine-growing regions of France, so we have bottles at least as good as that $150 Burgundy, at probably a tenth of the price. And entrepreneurs have caught on: today, there are probably 30 wineries within 30 miles of my home.

But living in the best wine region for thousands of miles isn’t all good. Even reasonably priced wines cost something, so a couple of years ago I noticed I was becoming wine poor. Markups on wine by the glass make it much more economical to buy whole bottles, which penalizes a writer who spends much of her time alone. And until recently, it was illegal in Ohio to recork a bottle and bring it home. Drinking less wine wasn’t much of an option, so I was on the lookout for a cheaper way to indulge.

Then I stumbled on my first micro-winery, a small wine producer that doesn’t have its own vineyard and doesn’t make everything by the bottle, keeping costs low. The one I visited had no ambience and the wine was truly awful, making me skeptical of the whole concept. Then I found the one that would quite literally change my life.

I was driving down Main Street in Painesville, just five minutes from home, and saw that a new micro-winery called Your Vine or Mine? was almost ready to open. Burned by the first one, I nearly didn’t bother, but I found myself keeping an eye on the place as the opening date neared. That first day, I walked in and sat at the bar. The décor and feel of the little shop were warm and welcoming.  There was nothing that felt commercial about the place, with its beautifully accented walls and ceilings, original hardwood floors, antique chairs and wood tables resting on bases made from antique cast iron sewing machines.

With some trepidation, I ordered a glass of blueberry Pinot Noir. A flavored wine probably wouldn’t appeal to a wine snob no matter how good it tastes, but take my word for it: this one was excellent. The berries and grapes danced on my palate. One sip in, and I realized I’d found my spot.

Since then, Your Vine or Mine? has become my home away from home, or perhaps I have become one of the fixtures. I stop almost every afternoon, sipping a glass of Riesling, Amarone or that blueberry Pinot to smooth the transition from my day job to the responsibilities waiting at home. It’s one of the rare places that feels welcoming to people coming in alone; I’m never treated as an incomplete party and I don’t glance enviously at couples, wishing my husband was there. On Thursdays, I bring my laptop along, setting myself up in a corner to work on my latest book or article and enjoying the solitude of my work.

But paradoxically, while the shop has led me to embrace solitude, it’s also given me community. The owners who created this warm atmosphere, Penny and Alex Schebal, have become two of my closest friends. And I don’t get much work done on Thursday evenings anymore because a constant stream of other friends comes through the door. I stash my laptop in favor of catching up on town news and the gossip du jour. We all raise a glass and pass around some appetizers. As a writer, it’s not in my nature to make friends easily or be a social butterfly, but “The Vine,” as we call it, has transformed me. It’s made me a friendlier, more outgoing version of myself. I find myself participating in social events that are miles outside my old comfort zone: donning a Halloween costume, singing bad karaoke, participating in cooking competitions, dressing up for a murder mystery night on New Year’s Eve.

I also make my own wine at The Vine at least twice a year–300 bottles total. I started with the blueberry Pinot Noir, of course, moving on to the peach-apricot Chardonnay, white cranberry Pinot Grigio, pomegranate Zinfandel and, most recently, blackberry Cabernet and Amarone. People are always very impressed to receive a bottle with my custom label displayed, and I’m always proud to present it as a gift. But it’s funny: although every batch has been excellent, I rarely open a bottle at home. Somehow the grapes just taste better when shared with friends.

Betsy McMillan is a professional pharmaceutical/biomedical writer and editor by day, a freelance copywriter and published author of four non-fiction books by night, and a frustrated singer in between.

*Photo by Betsy McMillan.

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