A City of Absurdities Offers Fresh Material
By Roldo Bartimole

It’s hard to believe that Cleveland hasn’t produced a novelist of the absurd. There’s so much material floating around here for that variety of talent.

In the past week two long-time champions of self-interest have presented to someone enough material for several writers of the absurd.

First, we had Sam Miller in an entertaining interview with WKYC-TV’s Tom Beres. You can hear it in full here.

Sam wants action - as long as it benefits him. Watch a charlatan in action.

Then we had more fodder from my old buddy George Forbes, former Cleveland Council President. He’s working through the Call & Post where he’s the legal representative of owner Don King. What a combination.

Forbes’ C&P has been lambasting black council members for not speaking out on the poor state of police relations in the black community. The same Forbes represented police unions in the past and protected them as Council boss for years. He also came under fire for his activities with the NAACP involving more than one case of police brutality, including that of Michael Pipkins, killed while in police custody.

George has spent too many years in the wilderness, I guess. First, his old friend turned nemesis, Mike White, shut him out of City Hall action (that means money) for 12 years after defeating him for mayor in 1989. Forbes had to resort to Republicans in Columbus to keep the business flowing. Forbes made taped endorsements for Republican Jim Petro in the 1990s.

Then he had a brief respite with Jane Campbell for two years. Now, he has to contend with an unfriendly Mayor Frank Jackson after having backed Campbell.

He’s out again and wants back in.

Miller, as we wrote last week, has his self-interested reasons for speaking out loudly now. He wants a convention center built on his property, paid for naturally by you and me.

So he’s telling us how laggard we are and he’s willing to pay for a prearranged study by his Cleveland State University urban study puppets.

Sam wants, instead of regionalism, something he calls “county-ism.” He coined word to fit his present needs. The need is a political will to present him with a convention center connected to his Tower City.

Miller was full of trite-isms in the Beres interview. “We’re tired. We’ve given up. We’ve lost faith in ourselves,” says the 85-year old Miller, a long-time buyer of politicians. We don’t need a “band aid” solution, he says forcefully.

If there were two people who have held Cleveland back for their own selfish purposes it would be hard to find two guys that are more deserving.

“I care about this town,” Sam tells Beres with feeling.

“We don’t have the fire in the belly. It’s been extinguished,” declares Sam.

Boy, doesn’t that raise a lump in your throat. “No, no, Sam, we care!”

Before the interview is over, Beres gets to the kernel of the discussion: the medical mart, a first step to a new convention center and a multi, multi million public investment for Sam and Forest City Enterprises.

It’s a first step, admits Sam. Yes, he concludes, we’ll get a convention center.

And we probably will, as long as guys like Tim Hagan the Hypocrite are around to scratch Sam’s back.

What will they promise us to sell this boondoggle? Just about anything. Again.

• How about “28,000 good-paying jobs for the jobless.
• “Neighborhood housing development for the homeless.
• $15 million a year for schools for our children.
• Revenues for City and County clinics and hospitals for the sick.
• Energy assistance programs for the elderly.
• Development to generate $33.7 million in public revenues every year to provide those goodies.

Oh, my error. Those were the promises of Gateway. We can’t promise the same again. Can we?

In a city of absurdities, anything is possible.

A Back Of The Hand To Its Architecture Critic

Art and architecture critic Steve Litt has been on occasion more outspoken in his analysis of our community than the PD in general.

Indeed, Litt, though not a political writer, was the first PD writer to be critical of former Mayor Michael White until the newspaper very belatedly soured on him.

So it was surprising to me that Litt got shabbily cuffed by the PD after he strongly lobbied for Cuyahoga County’s stubborn commissioners (two at least, Tim Hagan and Jimmy Dimora) to think more about the decision to destroy the 29-story Marcel Breuer building behind the historic old Cleveland Trust domed building at E. 9th and Euclid.

On March 29, just before the final vote by the Commissioners, Litt wrote a final plea. “The deal – with a cost of $218 million and counting – has looked bad from the beginning. It still does. Hagan and Dimora ought to heed the views of Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones, who favors the cheaper – and more environmentally an architecturally sensitive – option of renovated the tower,” Litt wrote.

Then Hagan and Dimora quietly voted to go ahead with the razing of the 1971 building. (Anything more than 30 years old is dispensable in our society.)

Taxpayers will pay for a new expensive headquarters for the Commission and its 1,700 employees. I’ll bet that not two years will pass before the County will rent more office space elsewhere.

Okay, it is the commissioners right to vote wrong. They are so accomplished in doing so, one guesses it comes easily to them.

Litt tried over a long period to call attention to what was being done. Apparently, he wasn’t even heard in the PD newsroom.

The PD barely covered the Commission vote. A single paragraph notice of the vote ran in the next day’s daily column of briefs entitled “Communities – from staff reports.”

In other words, it was hardly worth the PD’s attention.

The editorial page voice its opinion on the same day with an inept cartoon by Jeff Darcy depicting a “duck” as the Breuer building with three commissioners in hunting attire in the bushes. It quotes Jones, “If it looks like an ugly duck, walks like an ugly duck, talks like an ugly duck, it’s a swan.”

So much for its architecture critic. It was dissing one of its own accomplished critics. (I guess this is part of the strategy to keep young, talented people in town.)

The editorial department followed with an editorial headlined, “Let the tower fall.” It said the vote “makes sense economically, practically and aesthetically.”

You can be sure that the PD hasn’t studied one aspect of the project. The editorial writer also suggests that it polled the public. The editorial cited – one wonders from what data – that “…99 percent of those who look at the building find it extremely unattractive…”

One guesses that the 1 percent meant the PD’s own architecture critic.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Roldo Bartimole roldoATadelphia.net

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