36 Hours with a Native
Apart from the four years I spent living in Montana, New Jersey, and then New York, I've lived all of my life in Cleveland.
While I was living elsewhere, I always had a certain routine when I came home to visit. There were things I had to see, feel, touch, pay homage to as the icons of my own personal memory.
(Now, I'm no dummy. I know that you have to be suspect of other people's nostalgia. For example, Lead Paint Cookbook probably doesn't realize that when I finally drag her to New York, she's going to spend much less time at Bloomie's or in Central Park than she is riding the F-train to Jamaica and gawping at the empty space where the Manhattan Mall Arby's used to be.)
But I feel it's equally important to get a handle on what the people who have been with a place through thick and thin really treasure. What they would miss if they found themselves far, far from home. These are the things that bind us, our common ground, how we would recognize each other out in the lonely, unfamiliar world.
So, in the spirit of the recent New York Times 36 Hours Cleveland article, I've asked a few of my favorite native-Cleveland friends to imagine they were living someplace else, and bringing a friend home to visit Cleveland for a 3-day weekend. What would they do? Where would they go first? How would they convey the essence of their Cleveland?
I'll be posting these over the next few weeks. And if you're a native Clevelander living here or elsewhere and want to tell me about your Cleveland -- please do email me at christine [at] christineborne [dot] net.
While I was living elsewhere, I always had a certain routine when I came home to visit. There were things I had to see, feel, touch, pay homage to as the icons of my own personal memory.
(Now, I'm no dummy. I know that you have to be suspect of other people's nostalgia. For example, Lead Paint Cookbook probably doesn't realize that when I finally drag her to New York, she's going to spend much less time at Bloomie's or in Central Park than she is riding the F-train to Jamaica and gawping at the empty space where the Manhattan Mall Arby's used to be.)
But I feel it's equally important to get a handle on what the people who have been with a place through thick and thin really treasure. What they would miss if they found themselves far, far from home. These are the things that bind us, our common ground, how we would recognize each other out in the lonely, unfamiliar world.
So, in the spirit of the recent New York Times 36 Hours Cleveland article, I've asked a few of my favorite native-Cleveland friends to imagine they were living someplace else, and bringing a friend home to visit Cleveland for a 3-day weekend. What would they do? Where would they go first? How would they convey the essence of their Cleveland?
I'll be posting these over the next few weeks. And if you're a native Clevelander living here or elsewhere and want to tell me about your Cleveland -- please do email me at christine [at] christineborne [dot] net.
Labels: 36 Hours with a Native
posted by Christine Borne at 9:48 AM
6 Comments:
Um. I have no desire to go to Bloomingdale's or Central Park, really. I just want to find those Puerto Rican street gangs I saw in West Side Story. And I want to buy bootleg things.
Also I can't wait for your 36 hours with a non-native series, hint, hint.
You'll have to wait until Cleveland Relocator Appreciation Month, which is in Cramtober (the imaginary month between October and November).
Actually, I'm interested to see what people from other parts of Ohio gravitate towards. In contrast to natives and people from outside Ohio. I remember talking to someone from Queens who moved here and went all crazy and slavering over the Metroparks because "they're so GREEN!" And then I moved to Queens and understood what he meant.
Also, Cookbook, I really only planned to take you to the Disney Store at Times Square, ride around on the Staten Island Ferry, and maybe go see if there's an Arby's left in the Bronx somewhere.
I can't wait. I really miss the Disney Store since it moved out of Tower City and I would love to someday achieve my goal of visiting an Arby's in every state before I die.
Also if you do not let me write a 36 hours I will do it on my own blog and it will consist of 2 hours of things you hate and 34 hours of sitting on your hot tub, staring.
If I had a tourist with me from out of town, I'd be sure to take them down by the steel mills at night - you can actually see the molten steel from your car - though, alas, not quite as much as you could a few years ago, before some of the roads down there were closed off.
I'm also a big fan of the Cleveland Musueum of Art. The CMA is better than someplace like the Art Institute of Chicago in that the CMA tends to be very good at selection. Rather than have one good and five average paintings by a given artist, they just have the one good painting. As a librarian, I appreciate the effort of selection.
Of course, I still wish that they had a decent Jackson Pollock.
I'd also consider including a driving tour of the Euclid Golf Allotment and Ambler Heights district.
Actually Christopher you would be a good person to interview for one of these because you had to sell Audrey on Cleveland, didn't you? I would like to hear that perspective: the native who must entice their out-of-state spouse.
Jim isn't from Cleveland, but he is from the netherparts of Ohio, so he was, I think, willing to move to any part of it - Jim feels about Ohio like a softhearted old lady might feel about an outdoor cat who likes to get in fights but always loses.
Now what I really liked about the Art Institute of Chicago was the part where they had the bits of old buildings that got torn down. Chicago is a city that cares about its buildings!
Christine,
Our decision to move to northeast Ohio was a simple issue of cost of living.
We looked at houses in Maryland, both in the city and the country. Everything was way outside our budget. On my salary, we could afford a small rowhouse in average to poor condition. We loved (and still do love) the rural Maryland landscape, especially around Hagerstown, Maryland, where A's family is.
After searching for a while, we finally found what we thought we wanted: a c. 1800 stone farmhouse with a barn, on 12 acres, near Hagerstown. It would have been an hour and a half commute into Baltimore or D.C. When we got to the house, we found that the "barn" had collapsed. The house didn't have especially good lines, and it looked like the doors and windows had been sitting open for some time. Further, it overlooked a somewhat decrepit trailer park. It sold a week later at asking price, $250,000.
In Northeast Ohio, we were able to find several good potential farm candidates, all with 10-20 acres, a nice historic farmhouse, and a barn, for 3/5 of what the farm in Maryland sold for. All of these farms were about an hour from downtown Cleveland.
On a whim, I started looking at houses in Shaker Heights - I hadn't bothered before because I had assumed that they were far outside our budget. I came to realize that there were plenty of good houses at reasonable prices for people willing to do the work. The house that we purchased would have cost at least five times as much in the Baltimore metro area, the schools wouldn't have been as good, and the commute would have been 50% longer.
It's a cost of living issue. We were spending $2000 a year on liability insurance for our cars in Baltimore, now we pay a fifth of that. We came to the conclusion that we couldn't afford the lifestyle that we wanted in that area. It seemed logical that we should be someplace where we would be close to one of our families.
I can't ignore one other important factor - salary. Cleveland Public Library pays very well. As a result, it's hard to get a job there and they get the best people, usually. I'm making 50% more than I was making in Baltimore (and working a lot harder for it, too). If it wasn't for that, I'm not sure that we would have come back to Cleveland - perhaps we would have ended up in upstate New York or western Pennsylvania.
The thing that I think is great about Cleveland is that anyone who is willing to throw a bunch of labor at a house can have a really great place to live. Many other cities have cultural institutions of the same caliber as Cleveland, but few have the great housing stock at reasonable prices.
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