Last month, I was at the US Go Congress in Kent, Ohio. I can tell you more about what happened at Congress if you send me a message/comment/etc., but for now I’ll say 2 things:
I confirmed that I’m stronger than AGA 1-dan even with almost no serious games since early 2022, i.e. since my son was born.
My go activities were scaled back after I fractured a collarbone playing soccer. I didn’t need surgery but I’m still recovering.
Here, I want to talk about my impressions of Cleveland, where I’d never been before1. Kent is a little less than an hour south of Cleveland, and closer to Akron which is arguably a separate entity2. I spent one full day in Cleveland proper, and the rest of the week in Kent.
Am I really writing 2 posts about spending 1 day in Cleveland?
I guess I am. So here’s a caveat that I’ve only seen and experienced a tiny sliver of Cleveland. But a lot of what I wrote is about the context that I used to make sense of what I was seeing. Having said that, if you just want to know what I did there, you could probably skip the next 2 sections.
Here’s a map for the 2 posts on Cleveland.
Why is Cleveland there?
Every big city has reasons for being located at that particular location. For Cleveland, the first obvious reason is that it’s on Lake Erie. And the second reason is that it’s where the Cuyahoga River flows into Lake Erie.
But why is the river important? Early on in the visit, I learned that Kent is in Portage County, so that was a giveaway for what happened there. This is where the Cuyahoga River gets close to the Tuscarawas River, which flows into the Ohio and then the Mississippi River. This was a portage, where people would carry stuff over land from one river to the other, so that you could send it by ship to a totally different place. These were important places for transportation because ships were much, much cheaper than land transport before we had trains and trucks.
So Cleveland was a good place to collect goods coming from ships on Lake Erie or from Ohio River, and people could trade these goods or use them as raw materials to make something else.
This is similar to how Chicago is where it is because of the Desplaines River, which flows into the Mississippi and yet gets so close to Lake Michigan. Chicago and Cleveland became big cities only after colonization and then industrialization, but portages were there before Europeans got there.
And just like how Chicago built canals to connect the 2 water systems to make it even more efficient to transport goods, the Cleveland area built the Ohio and Erie Canal.3
A brief history of every city in the Rust Belt
History explains so much of why big cities look the way they do in much of the Midwest and the Great Lakes region.
The city starts out as a transport hub, as mentioned above.
The city grows quickly from the late 19th century to the mid 20th century, because it’s an obvious place to put a bunch of factories. People flow in for the manufacturing jobs at these factories. Many of these people are foreign immigrants and then African Americans from the South. Technically, the city doesn’t have Jim Crow laws, but it achieves segregation by other means.
After WWII, urban highways get built, going right through downtown and minority neighborhoods4. These highways make it easier for affluent white residents to move out to the suburbs and commute by car.
When manufacturing jobs start to decline in the 70s and 80s, unemployment and crime rise. People who can move, do move out to the suburbs. Even as the city faces these problems, the city government is in financial trouble as it’s losing tax revenue.
From the 90s to now (or until very recently), crime rates fall. This lets affluent people move back near downtown again.
Details change depending on which specific city we’re talking about, but the outline is the same, from Detroit to Buffalo to St. Louis to even Chicago.5
I think we underestimate how big and rich some of these cities were. Around 1950, Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis were among the 10 largest cities in the US, and Detroit and Cleveland had higher median household incomes than New York and San Francisco.
Downtown(-ish)
In the morning of my visit to Cleveland proper, I got dropped off at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by the lake, and got on a shared scooter to go to the West Side Market, just west of downtown.
One thing that was obvious from being driven through the area and then scootering downtown is that Cleveland is fairly hilly. I’d forgotten to not assume everything in the Midwest is flat like Chicago. Also, there was more nature and industrial stuff near downtown than I expected.
West Side Market was recommended to me by a local, and it was worth the detour. Marketplaces like this one are something American cities don’t tend to have much of, and it makes sense that the ones we do have are treasured.
Under different circumstances, I would’ve liked to buy some meats and veggies, but I also realized that, being relatively close to home at a similar latitude, local produce looks very similar to what I would find in Chicago.
After a light snack, I scootered back downtown. Here, it helped that I had just seen some tweets about Cleveland from Michelle Stenzel, a Chicago tweeter with a walking/cycling focus. First, I headed to the car-free East 4th Street.
Even before lunchtime on Wednesday, there was a fair amount of foot traffic. But I wasn’t hungry yet, so I walked over to the Arcade.
The building is gorgeous. It was restored about 20 years ago, when it might have been demolished, and it now houses a Hyatt Regency. But when the tenants include a chiropractor, a post office, and an insurance agent, I have to say it’s not really a thriving downtown shopping center.
I was able to grab a good espresso here at Rising Star Coffee Roaster and sit down to read a chapter of The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. More on that chapter in Part 2.
I then headed back to East 4th for lunch. Mabel’s BBQ was another recommendation from a local. I’ve spent years in Memphis and Columbia, South Carolina (and Chicago), so getting BBQ where there isn’t a BBQ tradition is a bit risky. I thought I was going the non-traditional route with Big Pig (a pulled pork sandwich on potato bun), but I realized after taking a bite that this is still too much like South Carolina BBQ (pulled pork with mustard sauce). But it was good enough that I would try something else next time.
Then I took a stroll on Euclid Avenue, the main thoroughfare through downtown.
After getting to Playhouse Square, I walked back to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to catch my ride to University Circle (which I’ll talk about next time).
How can downtown Cleveland be better?
I thought East 4th Street and parts of Euclid Avenue are nice foundations to build on, but I also saw problems (that are related to each other) that need to be addressed if it wants to be a more attractive place.
There aren’t enough residential buildings. It’s clear that downtown Cleveland is one of those downtowns that became almost exclusively a business district in the mid-to-late 20th century. Even at the best of times, this makes it likely that downtown goes dead at certain times of the day, and then COVID reduced the number of people coming into the office. Having more residents nearby would help maintain some level of activity at most times.
If you stray from Euclid Avenue, you will find a sea of parking. This makes interesting things further away from each other, defeating the purpose of having a downtown—we’re supposed to get lots of things concentrated in a small space so you can get multiple things done without having to drive around.
This is the result of making it more convenient to drive in and out of downtown by car. Better public transit and more residential development near downtown should reduce the need for so much parking.
Speaking of downtown being convenient to drive in and out, you can also see in the map that there’s freeways right through downtown. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the football stadium, and a few other tourist attractions are on the lakefront, and they are separated by a freeway from the rest of downtown. This obviously makes it not so pleasant to walk from downtown to the lakefront, limiting any potential for commercial development in between.
What I’m listening to now
I haven’t highlighted a Japanese artist in this section before, so I’m going with the 2007 album 空洞です (Hollow Me) by Yura Yura Teikoku, a now-defunct psychedelic band6.
They’ve got a good groove, and my 1-year-old son dances to a good fraction of their songs. What makes them stand out, though, is the lyrics. They flit between fantasy/sci-fi scenarios and the mundane, and it sometimes seems like the vocalist Shintaro Sakamoto is telling deadpan jokes. A lot of the readers here don’t speak Japanese, so I guess you have to trust me…or you can Google some lyrics and get them machine translated. Just as an example, the last track is the title song, and it’s about the narrator literally becoming a cave, which children run through, after someone breaks his heart.
Shintaro Sakamoto is active as a solo artist and making more of this kind of music, so you should check him out if you like this.
Part 2 is here
This was my third time in Ohio.
First was when we stopped by Cincinnati during a family road trip when I was in high school. We watched the San Francisco Giants play the Reds and saw Barry Bonds get booed, hard, every time he stepped up to the plate. This is before people thought he was cheating.
Second was when I joined my wife and her grad school friends to go to Cedar Point.
According to the US Census Bureau, Kent is part of the Akron Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is part of the Cleveland-Akron-Canton Combined Statistical Area.
By the way, if you like reading about this kind of thing, you’ll probably enjoy
by . Here’s him talking about how Chicago got big.IMO, residential segregation and urban highways explain so much of what makes American cities dysfunctional.
I guess Columbus and Indianapolis are the exceptions that prove the rule here. They are big more because they are state capitals than because they are good places for water transport. They didn’t become as dependent on manufacturing, and they didn’t have the same kind of decline that other cities in the region experienced.
Even more surprising to me is that I haven’t talked about West African or Brazilian music. They take up a bigger chunk of my listening time than Japanese music.