Goodbye to Cleveland

I never said farewell to Cleveland, at least the farewell that that city deserved. One day, I was there; the next, I was not. We left on sour terms.

Having spent evenings in Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland… the abandoned cities of Lake Erie, I recognize now that they hold in common a familiar sense of having been left behind, of lonesomeness even when you are there with someone. It is a unique American mournfulness, to have been the center of so much greatness… some other recent day.

I never intended to live in Cleveland, albeit for different reasons than those for which I never intended on living in San Francisco. I chose it because of its proximity, at least by air, to other cities. Its affordability due to its economic decline was also a draw; and being myself as I was at the time, I thought that I would prefer the vacant, art deco plazas to the lively, pedestrian-filled places of California and the East Coast. It was an old period.

I remember my first night in my apartment, making up my bed in the odd sort of loneliness that comes from having a place to yourself for the first time. Hanging up the familiar posters as Pete Drake’s “Forever” played over my laptop speakers. The smell of carpeting, drywall, appliances that had known no one but me. Of falling asleep, and rewaking, to strange new city sounds.

I remember the smell of Jack Flap’s in the Euclid Arcade, a breakfast dive damned to close that winter. It was an unusual sight, a place that full of smiling faces in Cleveland; and you could sit down and have weighty pancakes piled with brown sugar, roasted pecans alongside coffee and bacon for some ungodly price. It was a price too low to type in San Francisco now without pain. The cook worked with a peculiar energy, turning hash and pancakes and eggs and bacon against the grill with cheery artfulness as the morning waxed on and the permanent Lake Erie wind rustled up Euclid Avenue towards the suburbs.

I remember the rarefied air of the Ritz-Carlton, a strange diamond of worldly elegance set amidst the rusty crown of the Tower City mall. I later learned this was to accommodate wealthy Arabs when they visited the town for its medical facilities (they certainly did not visit for the Polish sausages). One could sit and sip a cocktail or coffee, neck-and-neck with the sandstone eagles of the old post office outside the windows, overlooking the Cuyahoga River as a freighter was tugged along its snaky curves.  You could believe industry in America might come back and we would again fill the world with our steel, our coal. But like most of Cleveland, it was a beautiful illusion.

For those who like such things, there was an odd loneliness in Cleveland, truly unique to the area. It faded immediately upon leaving Cuyahoga County and entering the comfortable farmlands that butt up against Wooster and its university. You could savor it best in the Grand Arcade, a beautiful place that had no business being as deserted as it often was. This three-story temple to commerce, gilded and wrought, was forever empty; jazz would waft from hidden speakers and echo off the tiling, the empty tables, the occasional homeless warming themselves and bothering no one. Downstairs, a sorry BBQ joint would always draw lunch crowds, but other than that and the odd special event, this place was solitude itself, or a reprieve from the biting cold when coming home from Heinen’s.

Ah, Heinen’s. To go grocery shopping in the glories of an old bank is the sort of thing one finds in Cleveland; it is the only way to save these enchanted old ruins, by reducing them to some other commercial purpose. You rustle among the bread loaves or pick out a Thanksgiving turkey beneath the murals depicting the Great Lakes’ discovery by Europeans. And this is not so bad. But like the rest of the city there is a sense, or an impending sense, of paradise lost.

I have chills from recalling Cleveland. It is a place I have not revisited in the two months I’ve lived in Frisco; the startups and the cable cars and the vitality are too much for its memory. Candidly, I am glad I am no longer there; more candidly still, I am glad I am in San Francisco. But here in an evening of fog which wraps thick around the towers, I shall let myself say: goodbye, Cleveland.