car has no air-conditioning. My open window lets in the heavy, hot fumes of summer, melting tar and truck diesel. All I want to do is get to Case, do a quick interview, and then head to my neighborhood pool for an evening swim before it closes. I’m thinking more about the pool than the interview, which I’m doing only because the guy who runs the little summer theater on the Case campus bugged me so much about it. I’ve agreed to watch a rehearsal of their next show, and then talk to the playwright, someone I’ve never heard of, who’s in from Peru. I’ve been so busy I haven’t read the play or anything about the playwright. I’ll wing it.
At this point, I’ve lived in Cleveland only ten months. I still get lost, still don’t know all the shortcuts. I keep up the yelling at myself and other drivers as I head into the rush-hour snarl of University Circle, a hub of culture, education, and verdant parks at the eastern edge of the city. The Circle is the rose on the lapel of Cleveland’s threadbare jacket, financed by the likes of John D. Rockefeller and the city’s other titans of the Gilded Age as the home to the Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Museum of Art, two history museums, a botanical garden, art and music schools, and Case Western Reserve University.
On the many occasions when our civic dignity is wounded, Clevelanders always invoke University Circle to restore our pride. It’s no easy task. Magazines continually put us on soul-crushing lists, naming us the fattest city in America, or the poorest, or the least sexy, or—the latest—the most miserable city in America. I like to imagine teams of statisticians with clipboards going door to door, measuring the misery of an entire city, offering tissues and hugs as they listen.
I forget how this one determined misery. The choices are many, topped by dreary winter weather, high unemployment, and the sorry history of our teams. Cleveland still has three major-league teams, but they all lose so often, and so spectacularly, that my newspaper calls it a “streak” if any of them win two games in a row. The nickname for the stadium where the Cleveland Browns play is “The Factory of Sadness.” After LeBron James took his talents to South Beach, ESPN found few reasons to even mention Cleveland, and resumed paying attention only when he came back in 2014. Before the first home game after LeBron returned, Clevelanders filled the streets downtown, the mass celebration reaching a level of joy and mayhem that other cities might reserve for a World Series or Super Bowl win.
The Cavaliers lost the game.
After delivering that familiar disappointment, the team then astonished everyone in Cleveland by starting to win, making it to the playoffs, winning again, and continuing to the NBA Championship Finals. Which they lost.
Clevelanders, their hopes crushed yet again, immediately started talking about next year.
On one border of University Circle you have the massive Cleveland Clinic, a Legoland where new buildings appear almost overnight, usually followed by squat bodyguards outfitted with Secret Service–style earpieces, there to protect the Middle Eastern shahs and princesses who jet into Cleveland for luxe treatment on private hospital floors. A few years back, a rumor circulated that one shah arrived with his own “volunteer” kidney donor in tow. Some said it was because he did not want to wait on an official donor list; others said it was simply a matter of not trusting the quality of our kidneys.
A couple of blocks from the clinic is Hough, the poor, predominantly black neighborhood where a six-day riot, sparked by racial tensions between black residents and the police and white business owners, broke out in 1966, the middle of the decade of urban riots in America. Four people died. Two years later, in Glenville, another neighborhood that borders University Circle, a shoot-out between black nationalists and Cleveland police sparked a three-day riot that left seven people dead.
When we moved to Cleveland from Minneapolis in the summer of 1983, we knew little of this. Most of what my husband and I knew of the city fit on the invitation to our going-away party, which featured a picture of that burning Cuyahoga River and a woman from a ‘50s horror movie running away in terror. “Cleveland, City of Light, City of Magic,” it said, adopting Randy Newman’s ironic ode to our new home.
None of our friends could imagine why we would move to a city that was a punch line for late-night comedians: First prize: A week in Cleveland! Second prize: Two weeks in Cleveland! Ba-da-bum. The city offered so much material for mockery. The burning river. The stinky steel mills. The mayor who set his hair on fire with a blowtorch when he cut a ceremonial metal ribbon to open a convention. The wife of that same mayor, who declined an invitation to the Nixon White House because it was her bowling night. (It was, in her defense, the league championship.)
Our reason was simple and embarrassing: We moved to Cleveland because we had quit our jobs at the Minneapolis Star on impulse, in a buyout, and The Plain Dealer was the first paper to offer us both employment. We were twenty-nine. We decided we would stay five years, then move on.
That summer of 1983 was the summer of Return of the Jedi, which supposedly completed the Star Wars trilogy but did not. Madonna released her first album. Michael Jackson introduced the Moonwalk. WMMS was the hot radio station in Cleveland, playing “Every Breath You Take” and “Beat It” in constant rotation. That summer, Scientific American reported that crack cocaine, which in 1983 was just beginning to creep onto the streets of big cities like Cleveland, was “as addictive as potato chips.”
In Cleveland, it was also the summer of the smash-and-grab. That was the first thing everyone warned me about when they discovered I was new to town. “Don’t leave your windows open or your purse on the passenger seat,” they said, over and over again, those first months. “At stoplights, they smash the window and grab it before you even know what’s happening.”
“They,” while never overtly identified, implied the black men and boys in the designated danger zones of the city—Hough, Central, Fairfax, Glenville: neighborhoods that still showed the scars of the riots in 1966 and 1968. Block after block was pocked with weedy vacant lots and houses with windows covered in plywood and graffiti, where people slipped in and out of the back doors like shadows. Many of them came from the suburbs. In 1990, the celebrated, and winning, and white, coach of the Cleveland State University basketball team was one of those shadows, caught leaving a crack house with a prostitute on his arm.
Hough, once a fashionable neighborhood of three-story houses with wide front porches, changed in the space of a single decade, going from 95 percent white in 1950 to 74 percent black in 1960. Urban renewal and the last gasp of the great migration from the South pushed black people out of the central city and into Hough. Realtors lit the flame of panic selling and white flight to the suburbs up the hill, Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights.
By the summer of 1983, Hough was a place I was told you did not go if you were white. Of course, black people had danger zones, too. They were warned not to go to Little Italy, where the aging vestiges of the Cleveland Mafia passed the day drinking espresso at sidewalk cafés and young white men attacked black people who dared cross into their territory.
You drove through Hough, along Chester or Superior Avenue, to get from the suburbs to downtown. But you didn’t turn onto the side streets. Or so I was told. My husband, working the police beat that first year, told me not to stop at red lights if I ever came home late at night.
Sometimes that first year I felt like a child listening to fairy tales about the dangers lurking in the woods. Go straight to work, Little Red Riding Hood, and don’t stop or the wolf might get you.
What did I know? I had lived in Minneapolis–St. Paul for a decade, where the black population appeared to consist of Prince and about a dozen other people. A black reporter who had recently arrived from Texas came into the newsroom one day and said she’d spotted some black people on the street and followed them in her car, hoping to find out where all the black folks lived. She left after a year. “This place is just too white,” she said as she departed.
In Cleveland, smash-and-grabs turned out to be the least of the dire warnings. When I went to look at an apartment in Cleveland Heights, the landlord warned me of an epidemic of carjackings. As we stood in the living room, the sun slanting on the polished wood floors, he told me that one of the women in the building had just bought a BMW, and I should think about it, too.
“She