I was thirty minutes away from entirely forgetting to post today. I have in the past not been able to post before midnight of a given day, but it was never from me not thinking about writing, but from me not being able to get access to the site. Today was almost different and would have killed my whole Blog 365 project. If I had forgotten, I would have probably just quit blogging entirely in protest of my lack of habit-forming ability.
Today was an entirely uninspired day, which may have been part of why I almost forgot to post. We didn't really do anything at all and I took a nap for most of the afternoon. Exciting, I know. So instead of talking about that, I'll write a post I've been tossing around for the past few days.
I really like Cleveland. Most of the cities of the South are more or less modern-day boom towns and there's little local character in the appearances of the city. Most parts of Atlanta look like most parts of any city in the country that were built in the past twenty years. There's very little of the indigenous design and architecture left until you get far enough away from the city that you're out in the boonies. There are those rare cities, often cities whose local flair drive their economy like Asheville and the center of Savannah, where this isn't the case, but by and large every city in the Southeast looks like every other city.
Not so in Cleveland. The city's glory days are gone and while the population may not be dropping (I've heard that the claim that Cleveland is shrinking only applies to the city limits and not the metro area) it sure isn't growing like Atlanta or Charlotte, NC. Cleveland is a place where even the suburbs are old, at least by American standards, anyway. You drive through neighborhoods on uneven, potholed roads and the homes you pass hunch against the cold and snow that they know will come soon despite the 88 degree summer days. Instead of the xeroxed horizon of chain restaurants and stores, you see old neighborhood bars and local Italian bakers that just haven't made room for Applebee's and Krispy Kreme quite yet.
That's not to say that Cleveland doesn't have it's share of chains. It does, it just seems to have managed to keep it's local spirit a little better having had most of its maturation before the age of chains. Even the suburbs were full and as the chains spread out from their sources, they had to squeeze into whatever open space they could find in the business mesh that had already formed here. In the Southern boom towns they had an open slate to move into and with their advantage in capital and pre-existing name recognition took over the landscape like smallpox in a previously unexposed population.
I also like the ethnic flare that Cleveland has. Atlanta has its share of influence from recent Asian, Hispanic, and African immigrants, but you're not going to find the Eastern European communities that Cleveland is just full of. Just driving down the major highways here you see a plethora of gold domes and turrets from a variety of Orthodox, Coptic, and ethnic Catholic churches. Take to the surface streets and you'll see even more. That's not to say that Southern cities don't have these. If they're big enough, they do, but not in the number, size, or age of the churches you'll find here.
I also like the fact that if I really dig a beer at a brewpub here, I can just bring it home. Breweries are allowed to distribute their own product in Ohio. The fascists that make alcohol laws in Georgia require breweries to sell through a distributor, don't allow brewpubs to sell for off-premise consumption, and even go so far as to prevent breweries from telling potential customers where to go to find their beer. Seriously, the Georgia alcohol board sent cease and desist letters to breweries who listed on their web sites the bars and stores that carried their beer with threats of major fines. That's fucked up.
I still wouldn't want to live here, though. The roads are totally crap and I like my car and it's a much too long of a drive to the mountains for my taste, but I do enjoy my visits.
5 comments:
That's exactly why I don't want to live in Atlanta again. It has zero character. I've really enjoyed our trips north where you find cities with a mix of old and new. Atlanta is just full of new, unencumbered growth.
Our nanny laws are fucked up.
I like the smallpox analogy.
I repeatedly comment, on our visits north, about the amazing proliferation of locally-owned restaurants and bars there versus our familiar corporate landscape. In North Cape May, the Papa John's closed because they couldn't attract any business. There are so many incredible and unique Italian restaurants in the northeast that people already get a far superior pie from someone local and, in many cases, have for generations. In fact, I don't recall ever eating chain pizza north of the Mason-Dixon.
Come to think of it, the only chains in the city of Cape May are one Dairy Queen and one Ben and Jerry's. Against a hundred family-owned ice cream shops.
Aw hell, I'll keep going. You would.
I also constantly remark on how people up north actually live in their town centers in the older homes. In southern cities and towns(but less so as gentrification takes hold) sections of town with smaller, older homes are called the ghetto. It has a lot to do with real estate costs, I guess, with people of means in the north content in their 75-year-old, 1500-square-foot, $300,000 home- a house that would cost maybe 85k in Knoxville and be in a bad neighborhood.
In other words, I agree.
I think part of that is because in the northern cities you have large numbers of locally born and raised. There are probably easily a million people in the boroughs of New York who are about as well versed in life outside of the city as the rednecks who live where I live are about life outside of a couple of counties in the swampy south.
Southern cities seem to have more outsiders than locals. Of the people I met in college who were from metro Atlanta, I don't think any of them were born there and their parents definitely weren't.
Those people didn't grow up with the local restaurants and stores and were more likely to go to places they recognized from elsewhere or from TV. Kind of kills the local places.
On the one hand I love "urban renewal" because it springs up that local flair. You go to Decatur and there are a ton of great local bars, coffee shops, restaurants and stores and the few chains tend to be the ones that don't suck so bad. There's a lot of stuff like that in the Virginia Highlands, too, and I think that's a cheaper neighborhood.
On the bad side, Decatur's revival (and similar transitions) also required poor locals to lose their homes and have to move out because they were renters and couldn't afford to stay and didn't own anything to benefit from the sudden hike in property values.
Maybe we would have more character if the North hadn't burned it to the ground.
And hi. I'm Julie. Your friend that you met in college. I was born in Cobb County and still live in Cobb County 28 years later.
Julie: I did forget that you were a local, but you're one out of like 10. You're just that exception that proved the rule.
And really I think we would have had it if our farm land hadn't been so rich that we'd have turned to industry over agriculture in the 1800s. Agrarian culture is going to get overrun with a sudden urban boom.
And Sherman only burned most of Georgia. The North Carolina and Florida cities are hardly anymore unique except for Miami in a tacky, promiscuous sort of way.
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