Comments on: Return to Cleveland

By: Phil

Phil — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 13:56:48 +0000

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.

By: knwd

knwd — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 02:53:59 +0000

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*

By: matt

matt — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:08:03 +0000

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.)

By: Trent

Trent — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 12:26:32 +0000

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.