Cleveland Going Dark

 In the paper this week there was a headline: Book now for next year's total eclipse! 

It wasn't an advertisement, it was an article about the total eclipse of the sun that will pass in a great diagonal line across much of the United States on April 8, 2024. People are already making plans to be in the path of the totality. Prominently mentioned was how Cleveland would be a prime viewing spot. I've been in the path of many partial eclipses in my time, but never a totality, and given I may not have a lot of other opportunities, I decided to seize the day and go for it. 

During a partial eclipse, small openings
for sunlight show the progress of the eclipse.
The effect through dappled leaves is dazzling!
Each crescent is replicating the eclipse.

It turns out a lot of downtown Cleveland hotels were already sold out, so I checked into AirBnbs. There weren't so many downtown locations available, but there was a cluster on the western border of Cleveland near the lake. As it turns out, that is exactly where I lived, once upon a time. Somehow, I was more comfortable going for the neighborhood I knew a little - even if it was 40 years ago - than picking any other place at random. I ended up booking a whole house - two bedrooms, sleeps five - and it is just a block from my old apartment building. It was also brand new on AirBnB, no reviews yet (though the host is a superhost with other places). Most importantly, I can cancel up to 48 hours before.

Looking at available places kicked me off on a whole nostalgia trip. I spent quite some time on google maps and street view wandering around. I found my old building, still there, and still with a McDonalds in the back yard. Where I lived was in the town of Lakewood, just one block
from the Cleveland border. The street that formed the city border is a commercial strip, with today many more fast food places than the single McDonalds from when I lived there. Online, with my iPad, I browsed restaurants, places to shop, the lakefront, taken up by a wholly unexpected cascade of memories.

The time I spent in Cleveland, starting in 1982, was the most urban period of my life (so far). I had had a hard time finding a job after grad school, and I finally took a job at a steel company, working actually in a steel plant in a small town in the middle of industrial rust belt Ohio, south of Akron. I had steel toed shoes, my own hard hat with the prestigious brown burned spot on the forehead from leaning into the furnace to admire the molten metal, and some incredibly unattractive prescription safety glasses. After two years, I loved the work but I was done living in this small, backwards town, and actively seeking other jobs when I was offered a promotion to headquarters, in downtown Cleveland. I jumped at it!

My apartment was an old apartment building (turn of the twentieth century) with a common layout. A brick building with four apartments, two up and two down, each apartment with the same long, narrow, floorplan. In front, a parlor with a balcony overlooking the street. Then the main bedroom, a dining room, and sharing the back wall, a small bedroom and a smaller kitchen, with a back balcony and outside stairs down to the parking places behind the building. The ceilings were high, there were blocked off fireplaces in the parlor and the dining room, and there were beautiful glass fronted builtin cabinets in the dining room. There was a smoke alarm, newly required and very sensitive. Because the ceilings were so high I couldn't reach it to pull the battery out when it went off, not even when standing on a chair, and so I went to the Radio Shack around the corner, bought a button switch, and wired in a way to cut off the noise from ground level whenever I was broiling something in the kitchen. 

Where I lived was on the border, not only of Cleveland and its closest, oldest suburb, but also the border between the relatively wealthy lakefront and lake-adjacent blocks and the solidly blue collar interior of Lakewood, trying hard not to slide down into poverty. Most of the buildings in my town were two-flats, up and down, in woodframe houses. I lived just part of a block away from the richer side, but my neighbor buildings were the two-flats. The folks I saw every day were a real mix. I don't think even on the lakeshore there was the wealth I later found in a very similar Chicago suburb, Evanston - also the closest suburb to the city and along the lakeshore from a different Great Lake.

The view behind my office building,
downtown Cleveland, 1982

In Cleveland, my office building was connected to the central rapid rail station, and via some other tunnels, to the old time downtown department store. If you have seen the movie "A Christmas Story" you have seen my office building. (It was filmed while I worked there. The filming was a very big deal in Cleveland.)  In the mornings, I would walk from my apartment around the corner to the main street, where I caught a bus that poked along, taking at least half an hour to drive the five or so miles right to my office. In the evenings, I would instead catch the Rapid (metro rail) which was much faster than the bus but dropped me off a half mile up the main street and I'd walk past all the run down businesses home. If I worked late, which was rare, I would take a taxi home as neither transit option felt safe. Often at lunch, I would go by tunnel to browse in the department stores, and more than once was mistaken for a sales person because I had no coat, even in winter. 

Industrial sailing, Cleveland, 1982

I liked the urban vibe, and the rusty vibe, even though it was not a happy time in the industrial midwest. To me, Cleveland felt a bit more "eastern" than midwestern, and it had a Great Lake and thus sailing opportunities. Cleveland's waterfront was almost entirely industrial, not yet experiencing the waterfront revivals other old cities were just starting then. But there was a small marina where I signed up for sailing lessons as soon as the weather permitted. From that contact, I was feeling my way into a sailing scene and thus a non-work social life, when my life was disrupted by the company being bought. I worked in corporate finance for my steel company, and actually worked on the merger / buy analysis, the only time in my life I had genuine "insider knowledge" where I could have made my fortune if only I had had money to invest (and didn't get caught). Our little financial analysis group were the first to realize that we were in exactly the kind of jobs where the masters of the merger would expect to find efficiencies, ie redundancies. So, in those pre-internet days, every Tuesday when the Wall Street Journal published its "help wanted" section, the six of us would go through the ads together. It was my boss who pointed out the airline ad ("Do you have an MBA? We want YOU!") that I applied for and got. That job took me to the suburbs of Chicago and back to a life behind the wheel of a car. (It also took me all over the world but that is a story for another time.)

Reclaimed lakefront, Cleveland, 2010

I never went back to Cleveland after I moved, until 2010 when I took my oldest boy to college in Ohio. He was in Oberlin, about 20 miles away from Cleveland. I stayed a couple of days with him, moving into and setting up the dorm room, attending parents orientation sessions. But there was a point where my boy didn't want me around for a bit, and there was a pause before an important session I needed to attend about maintaining his scholarship. I took a three hour self-guided tour of Cleveland. I went to the downtown, and the waterfront, which had been greatly transformed. There was the grand Rock and Roll Hall of Fame right on the water. There was a place to stroll along the lakefront. There were The Flats, an industrial area along the river (the river that famously caught fire). Notionally, back when I lived there in the early 1980s, they talked of turning The Flats into a new-urban-style place for loft-style apartments, bars and restaurants. Thirty years later, it was a reality, though without the polish seen in the high-end waterfront developments here in DC. There were still freighters using the river and railroads hauling ore and coal, right in the middle of this urban playground. Still the rust belt, but one with some attempts at polish.

Watching a partial eclipse on the National Mall, 2017

So I'm going back to Cleveland again next year. Plenty of time in the next 11 months to invite someone to come along and see the total eclipse- Whole House! Two Bedrooms! Sleeps Five!