Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Cleveland Not Rocking

We spent a night in Cleveland last weekend. I'd been to the city several times in the early 90s but I hadn't been back since 1991. Back then, downtown Cleveland was a deserted wasteland and I was curious to see if things had improved over two decades.

After checking in at our hotel, we walked down Rock and Roll Boulevard to find a bite to eat. We were ready to rock. And here's what we found:

If you look closely, you can actually see a third person in the above photo (behind the car making a left). This photo was taken around 3:30 pm on a Friday ... a waiter in a diner had just told us that they were closed. According to the city's wikipedia entry, there's a local perception that the downtown is a crime zone ... and Cleveland is apparently the US' 11th most dangerous city (we've already done #1). And named the US' poorest major city twice in the past decade.

We'd just arrived and were hungry and, fortunately, we were able to find an open food court in this mall:

I was at this mall twenty years ago on my first trip to Cleveland and it was a dead mall back then. Today, it's an even emptier, dead mall. Which begs the question, who would bother operating and maintaining an abandoned mall? FOR TWENTY YEARS? Maybe that's why Cleveland is so poor.

But the mall management hasn't given up and is rocking the mall with an exciting red umbrella campaign.

After the food, we continued down Rock and Roll Boulevard to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (adult admission $22 ... so most people actually from Cleveland can't afford to go) where, as you can see in the photo, we saw another three pedestrians. You know what those pedestrians were doing? ROCKING. Okay, no ... they weren't.

We'd had enough at that point and were ready for dinner. The Flats was the "hip spot" in the 90s (it's not a "district" as promoted, it really is just a "spot") but it's on the wane. The city's groovy hipster area today is the Warehouse District. So we walked there. Alone.

The Warehouse District is an area of attractive old buildings that surround a supermassive parking lot. It's sort of like Liberty Village, with one glaring omission ...

HUMAN BEINGS.

The quaint streets are packed with a total lack of human beings. This is the restaurant and bar district ... on a Friday night. Maybe everyone was hung over from rocking all week.

We spotted a bar with people on the patio ... including a group of black and white people socializing together, which disputes the tourist mags' claim that multicultural Cleveland is a rich melange of twenty shades of white:

They don't even mention African Americans in the article pictured above, which is funny because we saw black people everywhere. The woman behind the desk at the hotel was black and so was the guy checking in before us. In fact, I checked the stats and 51% of the city's population is ...

Everyone not visiting that part of town is missing out; we had a beer on a patio and a pretty good dinner at a restaurant. Afterwards, we walked back to the Hotel and passed through 'Tower City', a mall and train station that serves tens of people every year.

Then, on our way back to the hotel we stumbled upon something startling ... a single city block of bars and restaurants. There were even people there.

So that's downtown Cleveland. What makes it so eerie is that it looks like a real city. There are lots of big buildings and some of them are really nice and the downtown is walkable, if lonely.

I guess we'll try again in another 20 years. See you in 2029, Cleveland.

Update: Here's the walk route: