Good Kids, Bad City - Kyle Swenson Page 0,2

and race. Much of your life in this city is rooted in where your days play out in relation to this zigzagging waterway garlanded overhead with elegant steel bridges and navigated by barges and container ships off the Great Lakes. They say even your accent—whether you murder your vowels with the sharp end of that characteristic midwestern nasal or not—depends on whether you’re an East or West Sider.

Public Square is the middle ground, the original municipal center plotted by the town founders in 1796. Stand here and you see all the downtown architectural touchstones: the Old Stone Church; the Civil War Memorial; and, shadowing the green space, the city’s most iconic building, Terminal Tower, fifty-two stories of Jazz Age elegance that until 1964 held the bragging rights as the tallest building in North America outside New York City. Turn west, toward the river, and you’re facing white working-class neighborhoods—Tremont, Ohio City, West Park, the Detroit Shoreway, Old Brooklyn. Swing east, and you’re looking at a long run of African American areas—Central, Hough, Fairfax, or “down the way,” in the local-speak. These black neighborhoods run more than a hundred blocks to the eastern edge of the city line, where the terrain itself climbs up to a shelf of land holding some of the most exclusive and wealthy—and white—suburbs in the country: Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights, University Heights.

The town I knew growing up was hard edged but bighearted. No one would argue it was an easy place to live, and this seemed to stamp resilience onto the natives. The winters were endlessly Siberian. The sports franchises were heartbreaking laughingstocks, bereft of championship trophies since 1964. The river was so choked with toxins, it had burst into flames numerous times. But the circumstances also fed a fierce sense of hometown pride. It might be a mess, but it was ours. Philip Wiley Porter, a longtime Cleveland newspaperman, put it well in 1976: “A comfortable place to live and work, but a great place to complain about,” he wrote. “Volatile, emotional, gung-ho for winners, merciless toward losers, torn by the two-bit view point and a suicidal yen toward disunity.… Unhappy about the status quo, but sensitive to criticism, and quarrelsome about how to change.”4 Around the same time those words went to press, a T-shirt was popular around town: CLEVELAND: YOU’VE GOT TO BE TOUGH.

But by 2011, Cleveland’s civic struggles seemed to be in overdrive. The Cleveland stories were all ugly. We were poster-child postindustrial. The numbers were all bad.

In 2010, Cleveland’s population was sitting near 390,000 residents, a significant downgrade from the 478,000 people counted in the city a decade earlier.5 The poverty rate was the second highest in the country, with 35 percent of Clevelanders below the poverty line—a figure that had increased significantly in just two years.6 Around half of Cleveland’s children were living in poverty.7 A rising murder count regularly slotted the town in rankings of America’s most dangerous cities.8 In 2010, Forbes crowned Cleveland “America’s Most Miserable City”; the French government even issued a travel advisory warning citizens to stay clear.9 And in one final kill shot to our collective pride and ego, LeBron James—NBA supernova and beloved son of Northeast Ohio—exited the Cleveland Cavaliers’ organization to splash around the waves in South Beach.

Cleveland wasn’t the only city sinking. The 2008 Great Recession seemed to kick off a parade of grim forecasts for similar heartland metros, places that had apparently spent all their capitalistic mojo in the first giddy-up decades of the last century and now were struggling to segue to the next. Milwaukee, Flint, Toledo, Youngstown, Erie, Buffalo—the familiar steel, iron, and auto hubs that hang from the Great Lakes like a necklace. But you could argue that Cleveland’s case was worse because we’d lost the most. In 1950, Cleveland was the seventh-largest city in the country, widely known for its booster motto as “the best location in the nation.” The only city that had suffered a comparable fall was Detroit, regularly put in the spotlight by the national media as the main crash site of American industry. But behind the doomsday headlines on Motor City, Detroit was celebrated as a test lab for any and all long-shot ideas about the future of American urban spaces. No such optimism framed Cleveland’s deepening woe.

As 2010 rolled into 2011, in Cleveland we weren’t really sure whether we’d hit the bottom or were still in free fall. It could get worse. The only fact we had was that the basic mechanics