Great Lakes Adventure

Today we fell in love with Cleveland. When I heard we were coming here, I expected to find the same urban sickness that afflicts other parts of the rust belt.

My mother often spoke of Cleveland. She was a lifelong employee of Union Carbide, which had its headquarters here. Mom worked on an assembly line making Ever-ready batteries. At one time my parents even considered moving our family here. In December, 1984 a major disaster occurred at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. Litigation forced the company to dissolve. I asked my guide if there was anything left of the headquarters of Union Carbide here, expecting to find an old ghost of a factory.

“Union Carbide?” she puzzled. “Uh, you mean the old Ever-ready battery plant. Oh, yes,” she said. “The old battery plant is still here. I’ll show you in just a few minutes.” Our bus turned a corner.

I expected an empty, derelict factory. Boy! Was I surprised!

“This is our new ‘Battery Park’,” she said. “The old Ever-ready battery plant has been restored and contains several excellent restaurants and boutiques. It is the anchor for a new neighborhood of gorgeous minimalist apartments.”

She showed us an art gallery, a community theater and a venue for a dance company all within walking distance. A wealthy benefactor bought an old warehouse and turned it into an art museum. Then, in the name of the museum, he funded the purchase of several hotels. Now the profits from the hotels fund the art museum, a non-profit organization. The art museum will never run out of money. It is this sort of forward thinking that has allowed Cleveland to escape the blight of so many other cities in the rust belt.

This surprise was just the beginning. We saw half a dozen new neighborhoods with stories similar to that of Battery Park. The Cleveland Clinic, a world-renowned center for heart care, has become an exemplary corporate neighbor, providing a model for a dozen other large corporations who have their home offices in Cleveland. Its origins are remarkable. A small group of physicians saw duty overseas in World War I. They were impressed with the kind of medical service offered in Europe and decided to create such a facility here. Unsure about the success of their endeavors, they designed their new hospital to resemble a hotel, inside and out. Thus, if their medical mission failed, they could at least sell their building as a hotel. Their ideas were a roaring success, however, and ever since, the Cleveland Clinic has been a world leader in providing medical care. Some of its profits are donated to the Cleveland Foundation, a philanthropic organization with assets totaling over $3 billion. Every year they donate around $1.5 million to the community.

Architect Daniel Burnham designed his “group plan” for downtown in 1903 with broad avenues and neo-classical buildings. They are still standing, and they are still beautiful. In the mid-1950s city planners expected population growth of millions. They designed city streets and highways to accommodate a population the size of New York. The population boom never occurred, though, so now Cleveland does not have major traffic problems.

The first stop we made was in The Arcade, now being restored as part of a new Hyatt-Regency Hotel. It is a reproduction of a piazza in Milan, and it is stunning. Playhouse Square gets first-run Broadway performances and contains the Lumen, an upscale apartment of modern (Scandinavian) design. The current mayor lives there. A short drive to the east took us to University Circle, an area that houses several institutions of higher learning including Case Western Reserve University, as well as several museums. What I really wanted to see in this neighborhood was Severance Hall, home of the Cleveland Orchestra. In the mid-twentieth century Cleveland was a middle-sized city with a decent symphony orchestra. Conductor Lorin Maazel turned this orchestra into one of the three best orchestras in the world, ranked on a par with those in Berlin and Vienna. It remains so today. Virtually across the street stands the Cleveland Institute of Music, the launching pad for almost every aspiring concert pianist in the world.

We looked down on an industrial area from the Bob Hope Bridge. The entertainer’s father, an Immigrant from England, was a stonemason on this bridge during its construction. On each entrance to this span are four powerful art-deco statues of the mythical “Guardians of the City.” Once I saw them, my resistance to the renaming of the baseball team to the “Cleveland Guardians” evaporated.

We drove through Cleveland’s Cultural Park. The land was donated by John D. Rockefeller, who wanted to give the city a drive like that in New York‘s Central Park. Nowadays any of the many ethnic groups in the city can petition for a permit to establish a garden in the park. We saw a Hungarian park, a Hebrew park, one for the Russian immigrants, another for the Irish community. Their groups must create and maintain their area, and each one is idyllically beautiful. Some boast architectural gateways, pavilions, or simply breathtaking flowers.

This blog barely skims the surface of all we saw today, but I can say without doubt that Cleveland is a wonderful place to live. The late Tony Bennett may have left his heart in San Francisco, but today I will leave mine in Cleveland.Leggi altro