By Erik Piepenburg
I thought I knew Cleveland. Then I stayed downtown for a week. Without a car.
Let me back up. I left Cleveland in 1989 for school and life elsewhere. But I return often. I visit my mom, always making sure to pick up a bag of Becker’s maple-glazed, cream-filled donuts before I leave. I take a week off work every year to watch movies at the film festival. I’ve never missed a Cleveland Christmas.
There are Cleveland cheerleaders, and then there’s me. When I’m not posting about the downtown housing boom or how good Mitchell’s vegan chocolate ice cream is, I spend my social media life defending Cleveland from the lazy reporters and coastal snobs who have never been to Cleveland but know it’s a terrible city because Mistake by the Lake and Wikipedia.
Every time I come home I stay in my childhood bedroom, with its dusty library of Smiths and Duran Duran vinyl. I drive everywhere, in either my mom’s car or a rental. I’ve never had to stay anywhere else, and the idea of using public transportation is — as for many Clevelanders able to afford a car and gas — as absurd as a Cleveland Brown spit shining his Super Bowl ring.
But last month I saw Cleveland differently. My partner and I brought a group of friends from New York, where I live, to Cleveland for the Gay Games. We stayed at downtown hotels, where we watched the city turn a shade of gay my closeted teenage New Wave self never would have imagined. Men holding hands on Euclid Avenue? An impromptu conversation between strangers on the Detroit Avenue bus about how well San Francisco’s teams were doing in the competitions? The mayor taking photos with drag queens and guys in wet Speedos? It happened. Nobody blinked. Mind blown.
More than an epiphany of Cleveland as a modern, gay-friendly city, my car-less Gay Games week allowed me to experience a city richer in character than I knew. Seeing it by foot and RTA made that happen. As a Cleveland teenager in the 1980s, I was lucky to have parents who owned two vehicles that I could drive with my friends to see shows at the Phantasy or movies at the Cinematheque. I had enough privilege — we’re talking middle-class North Olmsted privilege, not gilded Pepper Pike privilege, mind you — that I didn’t need to take public transportation. Worried about riff raff, my parents warned me never to take a bus, anywhere. I listened.
But then I moved away, to bigger cities: New York, Chicago, Washington. I learned to love public transportation, with its breathtakingly eccentric mix of humanity force-fed down riders’ throats. I’ve seen subway cars turned into dance parties (Chicago) and vomitoriums (New York, twice). I’ve been flirted with (Chicago) and flashed (Washington). Despite that one night at a red light in Lakewood, I didn’t get any of that at the wheel of my Geo Metro doing 70 on 90 in ’88.
For the Games, my partner and I got a week-long RTA pass and used the Healthline and the Rapid. We’re used to meeting people on the subway in New York. But in car-culture Cleveland? On the Rapid we met Gay Games competitors who told us with a smile how surprised they were at Cleveland’s architecture and vibrant food scene. If we’d had a car we never would have meet a young woman and her young son taking the Healthline on their way to volunteering at a Gay Games swimming event.
The real discovery was on foot. Walking through the city, seeing surprise after surprise from Midtown to Ohio City, I fell in love with Cleveland anew, and hard. The gorgeous townhomes along the winding roads where the hulking bridges of the Flats kiss the neighborly streets of Ohio City, near Hoopples bar at Columbus and Franklin, were a revelation of industrial chic. On placards I learned about Ohio City’s many Arms, the brick-and-mortar-kind. A trek from Cleveland State to Asiatown was rewarded with incredible salt-and-pepper tofu at Szechuan Gourmet on East 36th Street.
Could we have taken a cab or Uber to these places? Sure, and sometimes we did. (I wouldn’t suggest walking through Westlake, let alone the outskirts of downtown Cleveland, alone at 3 am.) I bristled when I heard an Australian visitor complain that Cleveland was a “ghost town” on Sunday afternoon. But he was right. There were times during the day when we or other lanyard-wearing Gay Games attendees were the only people in sight on some streets. The outskirts were even more deserted. I don’t think we saw a single person during our 15-minute walk from a swimming competition at Cleveland State University to Szechuan Gourmet. But I’m glad we walked. Looking back, not seeing Cleveland up close would have been a mistake.
Cleveland’s Public Square
Not everything I saw made me swoon. The makeover of Public Square can’t happen fast enough. I kept thinking about the “If you build it, they will come” line from Field of Dreams each time I walked past the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. If your main central square is sad, cracked, dilapidated and cold, you will attract sad, cracked, dilapidated and cold people. Just as lipstick won’t pretty a pig, a farmer’s market — even with some first-rate vegan soup and almond milk — just isn’t enough to spruce up a square that looks like a Soviet Union playground. It made me sad to see the square so lifeless during the otherwise buoyant Gay Games week. This has to change. Don’t wait for the 2016 RNC.
Blame my gay gene when I say that there was a lot of design I saw that made me cringe. In too many places it looked like the worst of the 80s were back and the 90s never left.
And don’t get me started on restaurants with theme park aspirations. I so want to give a makeunder to Cibreo, the Italian restaurant in Playhouse Square that looks like an Epcot Olive Garden. Cleveland is not Tuscany (or, as other restaurants seem to think, New Orleans, Nashville or Berlin). But it is a post-industrial city, and that’s what’s on the design vanguard these days. Restaurants, coffee shops, hotels, apartment developers and retailers should consider that in their design. Think exposed brick, concrete floors, muscular artwork and furnishings made of recycled materials. Designers like A Piece of Cleveland, Reclaimed Cleveland, Play-Haus, and Rust Belt Reclamation know how to maintain the integrity of an industrial space with bold design that’s fresh and modern, not tacky or dowdy.
The Arcade
The pervasiveness of blaring TVs screaming about the Indians is absurd. ESPN on a TV at Crop Bistro diminished the specialness of one of the most stunning interiors in town and turned it into a quasi-sports bar. The shops at The Arcade are well-meaning but gloomy stands that had almost no customers, or even passersby, during the week we stayed at the Hyatt. I’d rather see The Arcade turned into an urban food court like New York’s Gotham West Market or DC’s Union Market.
Who gets it right? Here’s a short list:
Pour Cleveland
- Pour, a coffee shop that combines mid-century modern with clean lines and with beautifully contrasted colors and textures. (And locally made pastries, not the panini/smoothie/sushi/pizza busy-ness at other downtown cafes.)
- The Transformer Station, a gorgeously renovated artspace that would look at home among the galleries in Chelsea.
- Trentina, Jonathan Sawyer’s new upscale restaurant of shimmering accents and bold artwork that perfectly match its zany-brainy menu.
- The Westin Hotel, a stylish hotel that pleases the eye not with douchebag flash but with dashing swagger
- Urban Farmer, where an airy, shabby-chic interior is in conversation with a farm-to-table menu
- Chinato (or any Zach Bruell restaurant), a sophisticated space where dark woods and subtle yellow and creams have a muted dazzle
- Jack Flaps and Coquette, two eateries where good, fun art is as important as great food at reasonable prices.
The dreaded “hipster” has a negative connotation in New York, with its suggestion of entitlement, twee living and self-absorption. But Cleveland needs to be more hipster. Think Portland and Minneapolis, not Vegas or Dallas. If any Cleveland businesses need help figuring out how to design their space in a modern, fresh way, I suggest getting in touch with the organizers of the Weapons of Mass Creation festival. They know from good design.
I also hope the city’s tourism decision-makers capitalize on the success of the Gay Games by doing even more outreach to the LGBT community. The huge welcome the city gave to gay people (and their straight allies) should be year-round. Use the games as a selling point in crafting vacation packages that encourage gay people to come to Cleveland for its abundant architectural beauty, buzzy restaurants, dynamic art scene and cheap airfare and lodging. I was at a movie screening in New York last month that was hosted by All Access Baltimore, an LGBT tourism web site that offered audience members a chance to win one of several vacation packages in Baltimore. The prizes are tailored to the gay community, but include mostly non-gay events like tickets to an Orioles game and museum passes. When the promotion was announced to the audience, the word “Baltimore” got lots of laughs, but that’s just New York hauteur. Did I enter? You bet. There’s no reason Cleveland can’t promote itself the same way.
My experience as a tourist in my own hometown probably sounds silly to Clevelanders who walk or ride the RTA every day to get to work. But as downtown becomes more and more a place that people call home, I think it’s important for locals and lovers from afar to experience their new city the way cities are meant to be discovered: with the car keys back home.
Erik Piepenburg is a senior editor at NYTimes.com. The opinions expressed here are his own.
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Nice perceptions, Erik. I’ve always thought that the sociological importance of mass transit in places like Cleveland has been lost through the years. Being forced into a closed space with people you don’t know has an upside to it that allows us to get outside our personal bubble. My dad was a lawyer in Cleveland, and took the bus every day for 40 years from whitebread, suburban Euclid. His friend on the bus for some of those years was a transvestite who sold cosmetics at the downtown Halle’s department store.. One day my dad came home from work and explained to us kids how exasperating it is for a guy to wear a see-through blouse in public without shaving his chest. How’s that for multi-dimensional, sociological interplay?
Boy, did you get all this right! I was fortunate to see Cleveland via RTA even as a high school kid in the mid-80s because I lived in Parma and went to high school in Lakewood. Not only was I changing buses downtown for school, I would meet up with friends from across the West Side on the Square to buy records and bum around town. Erik, Simon Le Bon said at a recent show that he enjoyed shopping for records on Public Square in the 80’s. You missed out!
I left NEO for NYC, DC and Geneva for many years, but I came back four years ago and love being here.
Yes, Clevelanders miss out by being in their cars all the time — and by thinking it’s too far to walk more than a few blocks downtown. We also need to fight for state-level transit funding to make it easier to use RTA. Service cutbacks have been awful.
Add to the TV and cheesetastic restaurant decor problem: music selection. Please, please turn off the ’70s classic rock or ’80s hits unless you are a bar catering to those audiences. I’ve sat in restaurants that bend over backwards on menu and even decor who then play Blue Oyster Cult or Hall and Oates. That’s just wrong. Cleveland is stuck in a weird time warp in some ways.
Yes, Cleveland needs to keep working to attract gay visitors. As a former DC neighbor told me during the Games, we have great food at lower prices than on the East Coast, little traffic (what we think is bad just isn’t), and lots to do in a compact area. And the architecture is indeed lovely in ways natives often don’t realize.
Great review of the city, Erik. I lived eighteen years in Rocky River, attended K-12 there, returned many times to visit friends, and recently completed a young adult novel called Canoedling in Cleveland set in the city in 1960. I too am excited by the planned makeover of Public Square. The Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Monument is the architectural centerpiece of the city—not only the statue of the Goddess of Freedom on top holding the shield of Liberty and the four bronze sculptures outside—a cavalry grouping showing close-range fighting with pistols and sabers and a foundering horse; an infantry color guard with soldiers getting wounded; an artillery unit with a cannon and mortally wounded soldiers; and a Navy mortar group with an African American sailor helping load the mortar—but the bas relief sculptures inside the monument. These depict “The Beginning of the War in Ohio,” “The Soldiers Aid Society” (women of the Sanitary Commission, Soldiers’ Aid society and hospital service), “The End of the War” (Lincoln meeting with the Union generals at City Point), and most important to me, “Emancipation of the Slave,” in which Lincoln is standing, breaking the chains of a kneeling slave, and handing him a rifle. The outside walls of the room are covered with names—the nine thousand residents of Cuyahoga County who fought to defend the Union and end slavery, seventeen hundred of whom died in the war. What could possibly be a more deserving source of pride to Clevelanders than this. The monument is also special to me as a setting for a scene in my novel.
Erik, I generally agree with your observations. I’m an almost 10-year downtown CLE resident and my husband and I are seriously considering ditching one of our cars because, frankly, we just don’t need two vehicles when we can walk or bike to so much. I’d challenge your assertion that “all things Bruell” are amazing, and I’d point out that, while surely some venues could use a design makeover, being the not-quite-perfect city has always been part of our city’s charm. So we wouldn’t everything to become *too* pretty, would we? Thanks for the positive press, and I hope you continue to spread the good word about our city far and wide!
It was as uplifting a read and with more detail, than the comments I saw from Gay Game participants who got on a bus in Downtown Cleveland and said everyone clapped. Just the kind of activity we need to duplicate on as many levels as possible. I also like is critique of what could be done better. Crop should be on a different level than the regular sports bars, it’s a different dining experience. I also agree with the ‘industrial’ look that should be replicated whenever possible.
I was on a Knoxville forum today and saw people with ‘meh’ responses to a new urban outfitter/supply store opening because it didn’t utilize the warehouses when it decided on a location but instead opted for what they called a boring strip shopping center look. To that end, I feel the same about some of the newer construction projects (residential) that, while being well-built, copy the suburban look too often. I also look at a few town home developments that seem to utilize exterior design that would be more appropriate on a Delaware beach.
Belt Magazine is, I’m sure, something city planners and architects and developers are looking at intently. The more they hear about what people appreciate in design will hopefully make an impression and even influence their design plans. Kudos!
Erik,
Thanks for your perceptions about public transit in Cleveland. At the current time I am a transportation and public transit planner, possibly because I grew up as a CTS (old name for RTA) rider in Lakewood in the 50s and early 60s. Since we lived on Clifton Blvd., the convenience was outstanding, although I did not appreciate it because it was the only environment I knew well. And apparently things were safe way back then; I started taking the bus alone when I was in elementary school, and going downtown to the orthodontist and then to my father’s printing business on St. Clair (where the Justice Center is now) by the age of 12. Looking back, it’s amazing how independent we were able to be at an early age because of public transit.
Although I haven’t lived in Cleveland since I was 18, articles like yours in Belt are making me feel hopeful about the city. I’m willing to bet that public transit will play as important a part in its redevelopment as it did from the early days of the Shaker Rapid Transit.
A sad statement, but the writer seems to have never known Cleveland, but then a city without good transit doesn’t invite an intimate relationship.
Always interesting to hear a visitor’s impressions of a city! Clearly Cleveland has made some progress. It would be great if the piecemeal progress solidifies into a city-wide improvement.