The Morgantowner: Cuyahoga County

This was my eighty-ninth county, the last of the forty-two counties that start with "C." It's also, according to the latest U.S. Census estimates, the largest county I've visited on these trips since we moved East in July 2012. Cleveland is the main city in Cuyahoga County, and only the second (after Athens County, home of Ohio University) of nineteen I've visited in Ohio, that didn't vote for the current President in 2016.

I allotted four days, Friday to Tuesday over Veteran's Day weekend, to do justice to the county. Between Council meetings, my last class at OLLI, and our planned trip to Memphis, I couldn't find other times to go. I thought I would stay downtown, but The Usual Chain charged twice as much as a suburban branch, plus an extra fee for parking. I had figured I could drive the 200 miles to Cleveland from Morgantown before lunch. I left late, as usual, so stopped for lunch on the Ohio Turnpike at Panera at a rest stop. I don't know if the kids who work there don't listen, but this was probably the third time, at different locations, that my order was taken wrong. This time, I caught it before they made up the order and got it straightened out.

I pulled into Cleveland's Public Square about two, found a parking garage, and started looking for a bathroom. I walked into a fancy branch of a big chain hotel looking for one. This is a time when I use the privilege of being white and unscruffy, looking like I might being staying at the hotel, to find a bathroom off the lobby. No luck! It was locked and one needed a guest key to get in. There was a coffee place next door. I thought I would order tea, and use their facility, but a sign on the door said there was no public restroom. I ducked into the iconic Terminal Building, figuring it might still be a railroad terminal and thus have a restroom. The lobby area and several floors of the building are now an indoor mall, with some upscale stores and many vacancies. I found the food court in the back, with an adjacent restroom, open to the public. It was crowded with the locals, mainly African-American men, looking for a bathroom and a warm space to hang out. This seemed to be the only spot on the Square to do that.

I did check out the Civil War monument, the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, much fancier than the obelisks honoring Confederate soldiers in every county in Virginia. It's quite elegant, with a museum inside with brass bas reliefs of scenes from the war. From there, I went back to the car, and drove out of town to the hotel, eight miles south in Independence. Wikipedia says the Rockside Road corridor, where my hotel was located, is the "Silicon Valley" of Metropolitan Cleveland. After a nap, I walked to a fast-casual Middle Eastern restaurant. It was cold out and it wasn't a great place to walk, with only intermittent sidewalks.

I picked twenty historic places in Cleveland to visit, out of several hundred on the National Register, and planned to visit the most eastern ten Saturday and the western ten Sunday, leaving most of the suburbs for Monday. I planned on seeing the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Beachwood on Saturday. Sunday I figured to go to Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

Saturday, the temperature ranged from 29 F. to 37, overcast and windy. I started at Cleveland State University just east of downtown, saw some old buildings along the "green necklace" park system along Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive. I stopped at Case-Western Reserve University, then passed the museums (some of which Joe and I visited with my sister Robin in 2018), then out to the far eastern end of the city, to find a historic theater on East 185th St. I ate at Gus's Diner on the same street, an old-fashioned kind of place, like the diner in the movie that we used to visit in Baltimore. From there, I checked out Wildwood Park along Lake Erie. This was my third trip to the lake, after Ashtabula County, Ohio in February 2014, and Chautauqua County, New York in March, 2018. On both of those trips, the lake was frozen over. Not this time. There is a strip of small shops on Waterloo Road, parallel to I-90, out that way, and I stopped at a record store. I bought a 1969 Warner Brothers teaser, a two-record set of up-and-coming artists from 1969, like Sweetwater, and The Fugs.

I visited the Maltz Museum in suburban Beachwood, the current fashionable Jewish suburb, after close-in Cleveland Heights, where there is still an Orthodox community in that walkable inner suburb, and past Shaker Heights, Cleveland's answer to Baltimore's Pikesville, where Jews lived fifty years ago. Beachwood is past there, and the houses are larger than Shaker Heights and on bigger lots. The museum is next to a sprawling synagogue complex.

The museum featured a traveling show from Philadelphia's Jewish Museum about Leonard Bernstein. There was a lot about his family history, an explanation about the music, and his life as alternatively an openly gay man, and a husband and father of three children. What moved me, was his political advocacy for humanistic causes, and his abiding love for Israel. Politics today are so much coarser, and Israel has made itself much harder to love since those days.

I stopped in the gift shop and bought a new kippa for Joe, and a copy of Roz Chast's 2013 graphic memoir, both funny and sad, about her parents in their old age, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?" I noted to the woman working there that they had a hardcover version of Parts One and Two of Art Spiegelman's Maus. She had never heard of it, and I told her she had to read it. That may have been my one good deed on this trip. I asked her why the trees were bare in Beachwood and there was snow on the ground, when that didn't seem to be the case in most of Cleveland, where there were plenty of colorful leaves out and no snow. She told me that this was the beginning of the "snow belt" more west than south of Lake Erie, extending up to Buffalo, and that it was colder and snowier than central Cleveland. Who knew?

I got back to the hotel, not close, around sunset, napped for a time, and found, online, a diner to the west of where I was staying in another suburb. I thought about finding a movie or something, but crashed back in the room.

Sunday was warmer, but more difficult. I thought I was cool, missing a home football game in Morgantown. I didn't note that the Cleveland Browns were playing Sunday afternoon. I explored some of the old industrial areas west of downtown, saw some little coffee places popping up, and nearer downtown, a neighborhood of new apartment buildings and some factories renovated into loft-type apartments. I saw young people walking their little dogs, electric scooters for rent littering the sidewalks and other signs of young up-and-coming inhabitants. Thee was even an LGBT Center. I snapped a few shots, but as I crossed the Cuyahoga River into the city center, it became difficult to navigate and impossible to park, because of the impending football game. I gave up and headed back to the'burbs.

I couldn't find anyplace to eat that interested me, and finally lunched in a Subway in an old treeless shopping center. I stopped into a grocery store for fresh fruit. Cuyahoga Valley National Park, as the name implies, follows the river, but there is also a canal from the days before the railroad came, with a few old inns and remnants of the canal. Although the area is flat, the river is in fact in a valley, and although just over the hills there are factories, warehouses, and houses, the valley itself is remarkably preserved. I walked the trail along the canal about 1.5 miles each way. I came back to the hotel and slept, then went to dinner at the Ohio-based chain restaurant near the hotel. It was better than that chain usually is.

The weather forecast for Monday was dire, although it was relatively warm (40 F.) and sunny in the morning. It was supposed to hit 50, then start raining, and, by 3 P.M., snowing, a lot, with possibly a foot of accumulation and temperatures falling to 15 F. overnight. The hotel let me check out a day early. I went looking for a few historic houses in Independence and Parma, where I also found Sheetz, where I got gas for the trip home. There was a historic house listed at an address on a lake in the far southwest corner of Cleveland, so I went there and found two late nineteenth century mansions ( I never did see the lake). It was starting to rain by then, and I headed to Westlake, a suburb on Lake Erie almost in the next county. I went there because there was a Nordstrom Rack, and I am a sucker for bargains on clothes. It was in a development like The Grove in Los Angeles, kind of Disney-looking, only with three and four-stories of apartments upstairs, parking on the streets and much larger. The layout was confusing, as was parking in the garages, but I made my way to Nordstrom and bought a shirt, pants, underwear, socks and a belt. There were some fancier brands than other stores, but I think T.J. Maxx is as good, and cheaper. I went looking for a place to eat. I picked a noodle place (closed) and then a Chinese place (also closed). There was a chicken place, but it was all spicy, which I didn't' want, and a pizza place, where I said to the greeter that I couldn't eat a whole pizza and she snapped back "Well, we don't sell it by the slice," and walked away. By now it was getting colder and raining, and I wondered why this outdoor shopping area was built in a cold, snowy place. It would make sense in Southern California, but not here. I stepped into that ubiquitous coffee chain and had a bagel and hot tea. Next door was Graeter's ice cream from Cincinnati, deserted. I stopped in for a scoop. The proprietor told me there were now two branches in Cleveland, the other in a development like this one in Beachwood, and that, while it was mobbed in summer, it was slow November to March. I asked him if he thought all the apartments were rented and he said that in this part of the development, more expensive than some of the others, he didn't think so.

By now, it was approaching 2 P.M. and the snow was to start at 3. I was at the northwest end of Cuyahoga County, heading south and east to get home. It was pouring down rain. I got through town, and soon the weather cleared and, by the time I got to Morgantown, it was 60 F. and sunny. I was home for dinner. It snowed a bit overnight Morgantown, and the temperature dropped suddenly down to 30, but unlike in Cleveland, there was no accumulation. I enjoyed being in a large metropolis with a diverse population, and I would like to go back and see more.