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I read an older post on the blog “Adventures in Capitalism”. The post explains why the blog author hates San Francisco.
His list of reasons isn’t complicated. It’s an issue of taste, of preference, not logic. He doesn’t like to drive there (left turns, parking, etc), he doesn’t like the “attitude” of people (protests, hip bars, etc), he doesn’t like the “nutball politicians” and the homeless…so his complaint is that he doesn’t like big cities like San Francisco.
Consider it this way: If I took his list of complaints and substituted New York or Chicago for San Francisco, the list would essentially still apply. After all, what big city doesn’t have annoying traffic problems, homeless people or nutty politicians?
It’s a stated preference for one kind of place over another.
A Cleveland Preference
I like Cleveland. Yet, I’m wondering how much longer I will stay here. I’ve lived here my entire life but have worked in other cities and traveled to more for work or vacation. My parents are here, but I have other family in places like Boston. I work in a field and in a role that allows me to move if I want to move. I have options. What about Cleveland, the city, keeps me here?
I like Cleveland. I’ve been to Paris, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Amsterdam, London, and a many other cities. I’d visit each of them again. I’d live there, given a job and place to live. However, I’m not driven to be there. What about Cleveland, the city, keeps me here?
What keeps me here and what drives me to this line of thought is something I’ll call the “Cleveland Dichotomy”. For me, the Cleveland Dichotomy is the divide between the city’s legacy of creativity and its suburbanized population. It’s the problem caused when there are many unique and interesting events/places but not enough interested people.
(How many people thought I meant “East-Side vs West-Side” when I said Cleveland Dichotomy?)
The Cleveland Dichotomy
Cleveland is a ‘decent’ area to live and bring up a family. Other cities are, for now, enjoying growth and business is moving there. Cleveland is shrinking but has a legacy stretching back into the 1800’s of established organizations – educational and artistic – that make Cleveland ‘decent’ when a city without this legacy might be dreary or depressing. This is a unique legacy.
For example, if you like art, there are tons of art galleries, the Cleveland Museum of Art, MOCA in the city. There are several live performance theaters that put on great shows season after season. There are multiple “destination” areas within the city, each with good-to-great restaurants, bars and shops.
Of course, none of these are of the size, scope or number as in New York or Paris…but this is Cleveland, not New York or Paris. If you want big then you go to big places.
I’m willing to endure something frustrating in exchange for what I enjoy. The population of Cleveland is smeared out across dozens of suburbs. This situation, lowering density due to people leaving or people moving farther out, gets a little worse every year. And thus: The frustration for me is that the critical mass to support interesting events might be more and more difficult to obtain.
Take, for instance, the Cleveland Public Theater. A few days ago, I went to see their closing performance of “Two Plays by Gao Xingjian”. It was amazing. I’m not being hyperbolic. I was shocked at the amazing quality of the performance. I expected that the plays, written by Nobel Prize winning author Xingjian, would be excellent. I thought the performance would be solid (as always) but I didn’t anticipate the performance I witnessed. I’ve been thinking about it for days.
Yet there were a few empty seats! By the last day of a show, word of mouth should have recruited more people to the show. (It was how I wound up there, in fact.) There should have been sold out shows…
Even more, it was an amazing value. For $18, I saw two plays written by a Nobel Prize winner, performed by a very talented cast, in the new “destination” district of Gordon Park (Luxe is a few doors down).
What would a movie cost me? Around $10. The $8 difference is honestly nothing.
Best of all, there are events like this in Cleveland all the time. Great bargains, good locations, one-of-a-kind experiences…and there are almost always empty seats in the house.
It’s nice to always get a seat, know that there probably aren’t any lines, and so on. But these organizations need attendance to get grants, pay the bills with ticket revenue, and so on. Thus, it seems clear that reaching critical mass is the problem. People in Cleveland are too far apart from each other to make this kind of stuff, the same quality as in larger cities, from tipping from “successful” into “renowned.”
I don’t think Cleveland needs to be renowned or that such success is even necessary. But when dumb-ass writers in Newsweek (see the second paragraph) make a direct reference to Cleveland as a “C-List” city, it’s frustrating…and not because I realized I wasted my time on a Newsweak article, either. It’s frustrating because I know that I live in a place that has far more interesting, cultural, artistic, aesthetically pleasing places and events than most places in this country.
I’d be happy if people who live here realized how much they miss by going to Olive Garden instead of La Dolce Vita. The kind of experience they pass up when they see The Hulk instead of something at Cleveland Public Theater. What they don’t see when they go to shop at Legacy Village instead of…well, you get the point. (No slight intended towards the west-side. I’m just using examples I know best.)
So the dichotomy: so much potential; so much apathy. I suspect the apathy isn’t because people here suck. It’s more likely because of the kinds of things discussed in Bowling Alone
This is starting to turn into a rant. But you probably see where I am going with this. When it’s hard to find people (casual friends, dates, etc) who are interested in these kinds of events, when the events have anemic attendance, what can you do? You can cheerlead. You can give up. You can move to a city where there are more people like you: Chicago, New York, Paris…
So, Cleveland: love it or what?
(Reiterating for clarity and in case my boss is reading: I have no plans to move but I’m thinking about where I’d like to be in ten years. Is it here?)
6 Comments
I’ve been thinking about your post all afternoon, and I wonder about the perception of apathy. When I think suburbs, I think about people with children who HAVE to go to Olive Garden, since as a smug urban singleton, I’d prolly give the stink eye to a couple of tykes in Sarava – and their parents know that, so Olive Garden it is. (And Northeast Ohio is def. a region that loves marriage and children.)
I also work in the arts, and there are quite a few small suburban arts organizations. They may not be producing Chinese one-acts, but they do provide artistic opportunities that are accessible to those who choose the suburbs: choruses, orchestras, performing arts groups, community center arts programs…
Because our artistic infrastructure is built for a city that once competed with Chicago, we are trying to maintain a centralized arts district (Cleveland proper) with a population and audience base that has chosen to leave. If the tables were turned and I had to go into the suburbs to get something – would I? I have to go to Rocky River for a proper woods walk – which means I do it less than I want. Does that make me apathetic to nature? Or have I learned to need it less – or find it in smaller quantities in unexpected places. Maybe you don’t SEE what they are attending and you assume they’re staying in – just as someone could accuse me of not utilizing our wonderful green spaces as much as I should.
It is sad that the show wasn’t sold out, but how many of them who would have attended were elsewhere enjoying some other wonderful creative thing. 60k turned out for Parade (that’s 15% of the urban population) maybe 25% would have been better, but 15% ain’t bad.
I think that Cleveland is a city of artists and creative people – and I think it’s manifest in ways you don’t always see. So maybe, by your word of mouth, you can talk more people into coming to the things you love so there won’t be as many empty seats!
Excellent post. Unfortunately I believe that you may have been a little too quick to discount the possibility that ‘people here suck’. Our population dropped from close to a million people in the 50’s and 60’s to less than 500,000 today. In the 70’s and 80’s, amenities for the open minded sophisticate were not nearly as plentiful in the city of Cleveland as they are today so naturally not only did we lose alot of people, we lost alot of a certain type of people. Those who stuck around tended to be a little more blue collar, a little less artistically intriqued, a little less forward thinking. Trivisano is still the number one radio show in Cleveland and that speaks volumes. However, we are moving in the right direction. All of the wonderful points that you make about Cleveland are valid and true. I see more and more people moving to Cleveland from other cities and living in places like Tremont or Ohio City or even downtown. Every major city has its suburbanite population that chooses not to really be a part of the city center community. The problem here in Cleveland is that 1.Our suburbanites make up far too much of our population and 2. Not only do they choose not to be a part of the city-center, but they actively disparage it. Fixing number 1 will automatically fix number 2. When more and more suburbanites meet more and more people that really enjoy living, working, and playing inside the city of Cleveland, they will be forced to see it as a viable option. Maybe not for themselves, but viable none the less. Some of them may even decide to see what it’s all about, maybe even check out a show at CPT every once in a while. (If they can get tickets)
Thanks for the thoughtful comments.
Sarah: Given your role, working with an arts organization, I’d love to hear what you encounter when your group goes looking for donors, tries to engage people, sell tickets and so on. Do people resist or are they just apathetic?
Keith: I think you’ve got a good point. It’s one of those “tipping point” situations, where once you have the right number of people engaged in things the word just spreads and people jump on the wagon (as opposed to getting involved of their own accord).
For me: I’m still wrestling with the fact that it’s hard to be consistently enthusiastic when you see the same people at every event (and I love you all, I promise!) and great events (like the Gao Xingjian plays) aren’t packed to capacity every night…
Matt,
I understand what you mean.
Sarah offers a good point of why events appear empty: although that it appears there’s few people at events, it’s because all of these people are scattered across the area at events, instead of a central location(s). The population isn’t high enough so that it appears full at each location (Keith touched on this point).
Another reason (Not many people go), because, (and I think this is a very broad stereotype here), that (this is a general quality of people, but in my short life, I think it’s stronger in Cleveland) people are afraid of the unfamiliar and will only do established things.
This hypothesis is supported by people with children, who will stick with the familiar. This is because kids are more fickle (another stereotype here, and I don’t have any kids). For example, when you go out to eat with your kids, you want something that they’ll probably like, so you’ll go to the same couple places (corporate chain or not), because if you go somewhere else, you’re taking a risk they won’t like it, and the parent will hear the dissatisfaction from the kids the rest of the time.
For me, Cleveland can be a place for me in 10 years (especially because it’s so cheap compared to other places). It does have the events, but they’re sometimes harder to find out about than it has been for me in other cities (I’m looking at kalamazoo, although it is not much better).
To respond to your question: We did have a shrinking subscriber base, but we are working to change that by developing new audiences – which takes time and effort.
I work with opera, an art form that had seen a substantial “greying” in the late 90s. However, due to its interdisciplinary nature and complexity, we’ve been seeing younger faces, which falls in line with the national trend. We also have to fight the perception of opera as “stuffy” – something which we have been actively addressing in marketing to the 25-40 set – and at the last production we saw 20% of our Sat’y night audience were new, single tix buyers, meaning our efforts paid off.
I think people would be open to trying new things if arts administrators (and funders) would realize that it is up to the arts organizations to make it accessible – either through lower tix prices or free valet parking or traveling productions/exhibits in the ‘burbs. You have to make it EASY and COMFORTABLE for someone to try it – and I’ve found that if we can butts in seats once, 25% of those butts will come back on their own.
There is an Ohio Arts Council grant called Arts Accessibility that’s all about funding initiatives that bring art to the people instead of waiting for people to come to the art. Because in a post-industrial era, in a rustbelt city, the people are not where the art infrastructure is. So, where does that leave art? In schools, churches, or groups that charter a bus to come downtown for a matinee – they’re finding their own art because we are no longer meeting their needs.
Generally, I don’t find apathy at all, people want to know more when they find out where I work. But I do find that when we invite a 34 year old tech guy to come see La boheme, he’s skeptical – but at the end of act III, he’s bawling his eyes out – and then helping us connect to other tech folks – which will help us develop audiences… focused word of mouth, I guess.
People need to make a connection to the art first, then they form a commitment – and only after the commitment is formed (through multiple positive experiences) do they think about subscribing or donating.
So I think it lies heavily on the arts administrators to know their audiences – meet their needs while taking them a little beyond their comfort zone artistically to keep growing – but be willing to meet them halfway.
Dichotomy is also a delicious popcorn at the West Side Market!
Urban density is key. I think people are starting to realize this more and more as can be seen my mixed use developments in downtown Cleveland. Density is what makes a city a city. I’m fortunate that I live downtown, my girlfriend lives downtown, my sister lives downtown, my girlfriend’s sister lives downtown and my brother… well, he lives in Tremont, but that’s at least he’s in Cleveland! It’s so great to be able to walk and visit all off them or just on a whim all grab a drink at the wine bar (like we did last night).
I think Cleveland is great for people of all ages, but single people that live in the suburbs… That really confuses me.
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