Be a Clevelander; Take a Look at Cleveland
By David Budin

I call myself a Clevelander. I was born in Cleveland, at Mt. Sinai Hospital, which was located in the University Circle area of the city until a few years ago. After those first few days of my life, I lived in Cleveland Heights and, expect for a few years when I lived in New York City and then Columbus, and a few months in Los Angeles, I have always lived in Cleveland Heights. But I still call myself a Clevelander.

It’s not that I have always felt overwhelmingly proud of Cleveland. In fact, there were many years when I really wanted to move away from the area, but one thing or another kept me here. And then a lot of things got better here, which lessened my desire to flee. It still feels as if the city is going continue moving forward. I think it will start any day now. Really.

My father was born in what we now call Cleveland’s inner city. His family moved to Cleveland Heights when he was a kid. When I was a kid, in the late-1950s and early ‘60s, I used to go with my father to various spots all around the inner city – sometimes visiting old relatives who still lived there; sometimes eating in restaurants and shopping stores owned by old friends of his family; sometimes just driving around to see the city. Once, when I was around 10, he even took me and my older brother to a Sunday morning service at a storefront Baptist church, where I learned more about the roots of rock and roll than I did from most of the 200 books I’ve read on the topic since then.

These days, I find myself driving around Cleveland’s inner city a lot. I guess those early excursions could be part of the reason. Or it could just be my natural curiosity. Or it could be just be that it’s really cool – much of it. Some of it is really terrible, too. But it’s all really interesting and it stirs up a variety of emotions and ideas.

I don’t need to drive around much of Cleveland to get where I need to go. When I need to go somewhere in the city, it’s almost always downtown, between the Cuyahoga River and Cleveland State University. I could live my life never seeing any Cleveland east-west streets besides Carnegie, Euclid, Chester and Superior, or north-south ones from West 9th to East 21st.

But I like driving around the city, so I often take alternate routes home. If I start out downtown on, say, Superior, I’ll often stay on Superior all the way to East Boulevard and take that into University Circle. That part of East Boulevard as nice a street as any in the county. You’d be surprised.

One of the highlights of last September’s Jazz at the Rockefeller Greenhouse event was a Lolly the Trolly ride through the Cultural Gardens, along Doan Brook and on part of that stretch of East Boulevard. I haven’t heard if they’re doing it again this year, but look for it, and go there and do that.

Several years ago, when I worked at Northern Ohio Live, I was invited to serve as a judge for a street beautification contest sponsored by the gas company. I was sent to places in the inner city that I’d never seen or even heard of. I learned then that the city of Cleveland is many times larger than I had imagined (and that’s just the East Side). I also learned that while there are sections of Cleveland that look as if you could be in rural Georgia or Alabama in the 1950s, which is not good, there are many others that look as if you could be in Shaker Heights, Beachwood, Lakewood or Rocky River. Check it out.

My wife and I recently attended at benefit for St. Martin de Porres High School at East 61st Street near St. Clair Avenue. We drove north on East 65th from Chester Avenue and were amazed at the pockets of brand new construction along the way.

And I recently went to observe a program being conducted by the Roots of American Music organization in an elementary school in the lower East 90s, near Wade Park Avenue. While I was driving around (lost, for a while) looking for the school, I was amazed to see pockets of new construction in the area. Drive around in many Cleveland neighborhoods and you’ll see new construction and lots of rehabbed houses. How come I never hear about these projects? Maybe they’re too insignificant, in the big picture. But some people are doing things – investing something in these communities. That’s good, right? Or am I missing something?

I decided to go look at the Heritage Lane Historical Homes project – the restoration of 13 homes and 12 newly built townhomes on East 105th Street, between Wade Park and Ashbury Avenues. It’s a cool project. But it’s just a fraction of East 105th Street, so I kept going and took 105th all the way to where Cleveland becomes Bratenahl, a few blocks from Lake Erie. I found that driving along East 105th Street gave me a strange and unexpected sense of peace and tranquility. I turned around and drove back to where I’d started. Then I turned around again drove back and forth again, trying to figure it out.

A couple of days later, I took my wife on that same drive. Those feelings, I determined, were created by a combination of things, one of which was nostalgia. Driving along East 105th Street is like stepping back in time and driving along, well, East 105th Street. Not much has changed since I was a kid. Is that good? I’m not sure. But it was oddly comforting – even though I generally like change. And, of course, I hope that the people who live there find it as comforting as I do, though I can’t help wondering if that could be the case. Anyway, it’s still alive, and that part is good.

I often drop off a more-often-than-not homeless man, Willy, who helps us out with yard work. I take him to various spots in the city – places he has found stay for a while, or places he hopes to stay for the night. Sometimes he helps out with work that we don’t really need done; work that we create for him. But most of the time he does the work that my kids should be doing. But they don’t have to now, because he does it. They would do it for free, but I pay him to do it because he needs the money. So do thousands of others like him who live in the city, but he’s the one who showed up at my door, so I pay him, not them. My kids should be paying him for doing their work. But they’d just get the money from me. Anyway, I believe that they’re learning from this. I’m fairly certain that when they’re my age, if they’re doing okay and they’re not semi-homeless like this guy, then they’ll help someone out, too. Hopefully, they’ll help out more than just one guy – maybe a lot of people (maybe including me).

Willy’s about my age. He grew up in the city of Cleveland. I wonder sometimes if he was one of the kids I saw at that Baptist service my father took me to. Maybe he was one of the skinny little kids in nice blue suits and frilly dresses, singing and jumping to the Hammond organ, drums, and electric guitar and bass that accompanied the choir in that tiny church that could have been in Georgia or Alabama, for all I knew, on that cool, sunny June 1960 Sunday morning in Cleveland. I wanted to hang out with those kids. I wanted to play in that band.

In some ways I do play in bands like that now – but for another religion’s services. And every once in a while I hang out with Willy – who may have been one of those kids. But it’s not quite what I imagined when I was 11. I didn’t envision those children as sad, beaten-down, old-before-their-time adults, who can’t seem to figure out how to get along in life; people to whom only bad things happen, but who still manage to maintain a surprising amount of dignity and pride and hope.

I drive Willy to these places – almost always different places – and we talk. I know a lot about his life now. I also know that he’s a smart guy with a good vocabulary who knows about a lot of things. I know he worked for many years at good job for which he used certain skills and knowledge. But I don’t know what happened to him that put him in the position he’s in now. I don’t even know if he knows. And I haven’t asked him – yet, anyway. I guess it’s because I may not really want to know that part.

I dropped him off one hot, humid night last August at some place I’d never been before in the middle of the city. He got out of the car and disappeared into the night. As I pulled away slowly, I was startled by a sound. Not a loud sound, a soft one. It was a cricket. I always connect the sound of crickets with rural settings, or even my yard in Cleveland Heights, not with the inner city. But I looked toward the sound and there was a tiny patch of grass there, which is what a cricket needs. It needs a pace to stay and something to eat. The cricket doesn’t know whether it’s in the country or the city; it’s just trying to survive. It’s like Willy in that way. It’s unlike Willy in that it doesn’t have memories of better times in the past or hopes for better times for the future.

A cricket doesn’t know whether its patch of grass is tiny or not because the cricket is tiny. And we’re tiny. And most of us live in a tiny world, compared to what’s available. Picture yourself where you are right now. Now picture an aerial view of the building you’re in or near. Now move out farther to encompass the street, then the neighborhood, the city, the state, the country, the planet, the universe …

From out there, there’s not much difference between me and you and Willy. And when you think about it, right here in Cleveland there’s still not much difference between us. So I drive around and look at Cleveland. It makes my world bigger. Sometimes it makes me feel good. Sometimes it makes me feel bad. But I get something out of it, either way. Try it. If you call yourself a Clevelander. (:divend:)