Requiem For A Slaw Dog
A few days ago, I watched as Steve’s Lunch smoldered and crumbled while firemen hosed out a blaze that had completely destroyed the place.
The Legacy of Redlining in Rust Belt Cities
In the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) set out to evaluate mortgage lending risk in American cities. The resulting maps codified and legitimized the racism of the day ...
Being Ernie Krivda
“Play me something” says the tenor master during our first lesson together. I squirm uncomfortably in my socks, having left my shoes at the door of the immaculate if modest music studio.
There’s Always Next Year
My father was born in 1949. If you’re a lifelong Indians fan, his birth year is significant. Chances are, you’re shaking your head in sympathy or smiling ruefully right about now. My long-suffering father has never seen his beloved team win the World Series.
Long Lines at the Pantry: Hunger and Need on the Rise in Ohio
For the past five years, I’ve been a reliably imperfect member of a plucky church that serves a lot of poor people on Cleveland’s West Side. I’m consistently un-punctual at board meetings and have volunteered at the church’s ...
SGS Presents: Behind The Sign, Episode #2
At first glance, West 65th Street, between Clark and Denison, tells a story of neglect. There were once kill plants and cattle yards, then came a box store and strip retail that supplied landfills with furry plastic and leisurewear;
How To Make A Building Fall
One Saturday morning when I was eight, my dad took my brother and me downtown to watch a building get blown up. Thousands of people came out to celebrate the event, as strange as that sounds.
Numbers Now Say Burke Is Really No Longer Needed
There are times when Mark Twain was right, that numbers are lies and damn lies and all that, but there are others times when the numbers line up so pointedly that they connect the dots in a way that no verbal argument ever could.
Visualizing Roads, Rivers and Rail in Pittsburgh and Cleveland
Transportation cartography focuses on making complex systems easy to understand by exaggerating certain elements while suppressing others. This is great for helping us figure out how to get from point A to point B but ...
Out of the Kokoon: Cleveland’s Festival of Art and Dance, 1911-1938
Cleveland vies with Seattle for the title of the grayest, most overcast American city, and in the first three decades of the 20th century it was even grayer than it is now.
It’s Murder
The extended video of the Tamir Rice shooting is jumpy, grainy, and 30 minutes long. That doesn't matter. I've watched it twice. I couldn't let it run uninterrupted. I stopped and scrolled, leaning into my computer to get a close-up view.
Gull City: Cleveland’s Vagrants, Freeloaders, And Rarities
They’re out there, floating on the wind. Hundreds of thousands of gulls stop over in the Great Lakes each winter on migrations from the Canadian Arctic to the Gulf or Atlantic Coasts.