Two weeks on the road. Nine days in Paris. Four day in San Francisco. 13,000 miles traveled in 14 days.
Returning to Cleveland was a disappointment.
Cleveland, Ohio
There’s nothing wrong with Cleveland, of course. I’ve lived here for my entire life and I have an “insider’s view” on all the good things that are available here. From museums to restaurants to parks, the city offers plenty of great things to do and I enjoy them regularly.
One important thing: I’m not talking about the suburbs. Once you get past the first ring, it’s all the same smear of big box stores, chain restaurants and so on. There are some interesting things once you get more than 5 miles from the city limits, but realistically those are so few and far between that there is nothing to distinguish Lyndhurst from Garfield Heights from Parma from Strongsville.
The problem with the city is directly related to the suburbs. I live in Cleveland Heights where there are three good concentrations of “interesting places” within walking distance of my house. (Cedar-Lee, Cedar-Fairmount and Coventry, for those who are wondering.) This is a rarity in this area. Tremont has a good cluster of interesting places but once you cross one of the freeways it’s relatively undifferentiated residential city neighborhoods. Let me also include Rocky River and Lakewood in my list, just so folks understand where I’m going with this.
And this is the problem: Urban sprawl and the migration to southern states has reduced the population density in the city to the point where other than a few interesting clusters the entire county is just one big boring smear of sameness.
Paris and San Francisco
The thing about both of the cities I visited this month, as well with New York and Boston which I visited recently, is density. When you get down to it, in most parts of the city it’s possible to walk to what you need. Worst case, it was a reasonable walk to public transportation and then a stop or two to the place you wanted to visit.
In the last year, I’ve stayed in hotels in all of those cities and was able to walk out to a restaurant, drug store, supermarket and dry cleaners. The walks were reasonable and I made it back to my hotel without being worn out from lugging stuff miles and miles. (This latter is true with my Saturday walks which are a two-mile walk from my house to the Shaker Square Farmer’s Market and back.)
That’s why I’m disappointed upon my return. If all the “cool stuff” in Cleveland were lumped together (Tremont, Cleveland Heights, Rocky River, Lakewood, Collinwood, Ohio City…) into a contiguous area, it would be a place that could compete with the best cities in the country.
Things here seem sleepy and slow.
4 Comments
Once they see the lights in the big city it’s hard to bring them back. Looks like someone wants to leave our tiny town.
I don’t know if I want to leave.
One option is to travel more often to places that are distinctly different from Cleveland.
The other option is to look for a job someplace else, but NYC and SFO (examples) are seriously expensive. I’m not sure if such a move would make financial sense. (Thus, pointing back to option one as the more likely scenario.)
9.5 years in Cincinnati, and I still haven’t found anyplace here that is as cool as the area of Cleveland that you live in. I still really miss Arabica and Aladdins, and good Chinese food.
Don’t get me wrong, life here is pretty good– Great friends, amazing church, and I get to ski twice a week all winter long. (Not to mention that the weather isn’t nearly as windy or rainy here.)
But I miss the kind of coffee shops that are nestled into a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood, that are open late at night, and that are cozy and inviting so that you can spend a couple of hours just hanging out with a cuppa something warm and frothy, a decadent dessert, and a group of friends. All we have here is friggin’ Starbucks, which isn’t any of those things. Worse yet, they don’t even aspire to be any of those things. *sigh*
Found your blog and this entry from the Plain Dealer’s “Blog 5″ blog roundup — interesting stuff! I agree to an extent, but having recently moved back to Cleveland after living for seven years in the extremely population-dense Washington, DC metro area — which includes the fastest-growing county in the US, Loudon County, VA — I can attest that density itself isn’t sufficient for introducing the uniqueness your’e looking for. DC itself has lots of interesting, diverse things and places, but both the VA and MD suburbs, along the I-66, I-495 and I-95 corridors, is the same smear of sameness you describe here, with big boxes and strip malls. There are little pockets of uniqueness, but you really have to search for them.
(Maryland is a little better, esp. in the College Park/UMD areas, but not a lot.)
On the other side of things, I spent a while working in living in Frankfurt, Germany in 2002. Frankfurt is similar in size and density to Cleveland, with the metro-area population about 2.25 million and the city population a bit over half a million. There, I was able to do things the way you describe — if things were not in walking distance, they were easily accessible by bus or U-bahn. Europe generally, I think, has a better attitude towards preserving neighborhoods and making them liveable and walkable.
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