Sunday, September 30, 2018

CLEVELAND'S WEST SIDE MARKET

AMERICA'S BEST FOOD LOVERS' MARKET


Cleveland architectural firm Hubbell and Benes was contracted to create the new indoor space and, after nearly a decade of planning and construction, the current West Side Market building was finished in 1912 at a cost of nearly $680,000. 

The Neo-Classical/Byzantine building is a brick construct with a large interior concourse that provides nearly 100 stalls for sellers, and an 85-stall outdoor produce arcade that wraps around the side and rear of the main building. 

In addition, the building has a large clock tower, which was easily visible from most of Ohio City in the building's early days.

Saturday, September 29, 2018

CLEVELAND'S WEST SIDE MARKET

AMERICA'S BEST FOOD LOVERS' MARKET


Thanks to brisk population growth in Cleveland and Ohio City in the latter part of the 19th century, the market outgrew its space yet again.

In 1902, lands were purchased across the street from the Pearl Market site, to allow for market expansion and eventual construction of additional indoor market space.

Friday, September 28, 2018

CLEVELAND'S WEST SIDE MARKET

AMERICA'S BEST FOOD LOVERS' MARKET


The West Side Market began operating in 1840, across the street from its current location.

Josiah Barber and Richard Lord, prominent businessmen and both former mayors of Ohio City before it was incorporated into Cleveland, donated the tract of land to Ohio City's government, stipulating that the land be used for an open-air neighborhood market. 

The market space became a center of the Ohio City community for the following three decades, and other benefactors donated adjacent lands that allowed the marketplace to expand.

In 1868, a one-story, wooden framed building was erected on the site, and the newly christened Pearl Street Market was opened.

Thursday, September 27, 2018

CLEVELAND'S WEST SIDE MARKET

AMERICA'S BEST FOOD LOVERS' MARKET


The West Side Market is the oldest operating indoor/outdoor market space in Cleveland, Ohio.

It is located at the corner of West 25th Street and Lorain Avenue in the Ohio City neighborhood. 

On December 18, 1973, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

ST. THEODOSIUS

RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CATHEDRAL



St. Theodosius Cathedral’s parish is the first Orthodox parish in Cleveland and is currently under the jurisdiction of the Diocese of the Midwest of the Orthodox Church in America.

Tuesday, September 25, 2018

Monday, September 24, 2018

ST. THEODOSIUS

RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CATHEDRAL



The Russian Missionary Fund established by Czar Nicholas II provided financial assistance to the parish organized in 1896 that ultimately built St. Theodosius.

Sunday, September 23, 2018

ST. THEODOSIUS

RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CATHEDRAL


St. Theodosius is best known for its appearance in the 1978 film, The Deer Hunder, with Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep.

Saturday, September 22, 2018

Friday, September 21, 2018

ST. THEODOSIUS

RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CATHEDRAL


St. Theodosius Cathedral is considered one of the best examples of Russian church architecture in the U.S.

Thursday, September 20, 2018

ST. THEODOSIUS

RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CATHEDRAL


St. Theodosius Cathedral is an Orthodox church located on Starkweather Avenue in the Tremont neighborhood, on the near west side of Cleveland, Ohio.


Wednesday, September 19, 2018

TROPICAL TRAILER PARK PARKLET


Miami Urban Design Firm Creates a Portable Parklet for Park(ing) Day 2018



By Sean McCaughan – The Big Bubble Miami


Park(ing) Day, the annual event when urban activists around the world turn parking spaces into public parklets, is almost upon us.

This year, Park(ing) Day is on September 21. 

PlusUrbia, the Miami-based urban design firm headed by Juan Mullerat, is creating a movable parklet for parking day this year, by putting it onto a flatbed trailer.

This way, instead of creating a temporary parklet that will be gone the next day, the project, called the ‘Tropical Trailer Park,’ will move to various sites around Miami as needed.

‘The Tropical Trailer Park’ idea was a Miami Foundation Public Space Challenge 2016 winner.

Currently under construction, the parklet will debut on Park(ing) Day this year at the corner of NE 3rd Avenue and NE 1st Street in Downtown Miami. 

“Miami’s lack of open space has an adverse effect on our health and livability. Our studio decided to build a parklet that provides a mobile solution to enhance our streets – a park on wheels – as a gift to our city.” said Mullerat.

Tuesday, September 18, 2018

THE SMART PLAN AT APA FLORIDA 2018

PROMOTING ECONOMIC GROWTH 
THROUGH RAPID TRANSIT INVESTMENT 


PlusUrbia’s Juan Mullerat, APA, served on an expert panel discussing the Strategic Miami Area Rapid Transit (SMART) Plan — a bold program of projects to significantly improve mobility in Miami-Dade County. 

The SMART Plan presentation took place at the American Planning Association’s Florida statewide conference.

The SMART Plan’s goal is to provide a world-class transit system that promotes regional economic growth. The initiative includes developing and implementing a vision for transit-oriented developments (TOD) along six rapid transit corridors.

Led by the Miami-Dade Transit Planning Organization (TPO), the land use component of the SMART Plan aims to maximize the return on investment (ROI) of the infrastructure program, and expand mixed-use development options throughout the Miami area. 

PlusUrbia is providing urban design and land use services for multiple corridors.


https://plusurbia.com/the-smart-plan-promoting-economic-growth-through-rapid-transit-investment-at-apa-florida-conference/

Monday, September 17, 2018

BALLOTS AND BULLETS: BLACK POWER POLITICS -- part 6

AND URBAN GUERRILLA WARFARE IN 1968 CLEVELAND



James Robenalt's Ballots and Bullets: Black Power Politics and Urban Guerrilla Warfare in 1968 Cleveland.

The most important book of 2018.

It forced me to examine how I was brought up, by somewhat racist parents and rabidly bigoted grandparents.

My family blamed all troubles for African Americans on African Americans.

Not substandard housing, lack of job opportunities, unequal schools, police brutality, etc.



Lakeview Tavern. The nationalist home next door was site of wild shootout, leaving two policemen dead, many severely wounded. 

https://www.ballotsandbullets.com/home/

Sunday, September 16, 2018

BALLOTS AND BULLETS: BLACK POWER POLITICS -- part 5 -- full review

AND URBAN GUERILLA WARFARE IN 1968 CLEVELAND


We were back in our hometown Northeast Ohio in July.

We visited the Cleveland Police Museum.

It has displays and artifacts from the Torso murders/Kingsbury Run deaths and Elliot Ness' over reaction to shanty towns.

The most moving display, by far, is on the deadly Glenville Riots/Uprising in 1968. 

It turned out the exact day we were visiting marked the 50th anniversary of Glenville.

As a child growing up in the Rust Belt, all I heard was how stupid black people were.

Because “the white people gave them money and built them projects to live in and all they do is tear up the projects and burn down the stores in their own neighborhood.”

This rather racist view meant Hough and Glenville were black people doing bad to each other – because they didn’t know any better.

Apparently, off in the white flight-created suburbs and exurbs, picket fence folks preferred not to think of substandard housing, absentee landlords, stores that price gouged, schools that were substandard compared to “white” neighborhoods, lower city spending in black vs. white neighborhoods, lack of jobs and a general closing of opportunities give to whites.

Not only did those conditions not exist, but if they did, it was no way linked to racist policies of those in power.

Though it is a police museum, and multiple Cleveland Police officers died in the streets of Glenville in 1968, and many more were severely wounded and permanently injured – the little museum does a fair job of not demonizing the Black Nationalists involved in the bloody events of July 23, 1978.

Rather than sticking only with the pejorative “riot,” the displays in the free museum I call it riot/uprising.

Through the lens of a racist president of the United States who calls virtual KKK members and white supremacists “fine people,” I’m on the side of calling it an uprising.

Because Cleveland police were so brutal to African Americans, activists began to arm themselves.

Of course shooting down cops is wrong.

But when you look at all of the oppression, it’s not such a shock the frustration boiled over in many American cities in the mid- to late 1960s.

Even the unthinkable act of burning local businesses is understandable, if not justifiable.

Commissions that studied things found that black-owned and black-friendly businesses were spared from looting and worse. Stores well-known for discriminating and worse, did not survive the nights of violence.

I was incredibly young, but I remember my folks, in the exurbs of Medina County, fearing that “race riots” would destroy downtown Akron, where my dad worked.

After Glenville, my folks pretty much stopped going to the great museums, the zoo, West Side Market, lakefront, ethnic villages, playhouse row and other cultural amenities of what once was the prosperous sixth largest city in America.

Infrequent trips to see the Indians or Browns – in a cavernous old stadium cut off from the rest of town by a lakefront freeway – were judged safe because you didn’t have to drive through a (black) East Side neighborhood, nor did you have to walk through downtown.

Still, the journey from freeway to the big surface lot next to the stadium on Lake Erie were met with much fear.

Doors on the family Chevy were locked tight.

My brother and I were give the head's up that dad might drive through a red light -- even in daylight, if he saw a menacing (black) person approaching. 

Of course, my stiff, bigoted parents’ aversion to the “Mistake on the Lake” made me love Cleveland, warts and all.

The second I got my driver license learner permit and my own car, I was off to explore and photograph every crevice of the city in the summer.

I remember my folks viewing Carl Stokes (first African American elected as mayor of a major city in America) and his brother Louis Stokes (a longtime congress person) as incompetent crooks, if not the devil.

George Forbes, a flawed individual who represented Glenville on the Cleveland City Council and spent more than a decade presiding over the Council, was Satan incarnate.

All of these dims views of diversity were was mixed in with a dose of urban legends of teenage white boys on field trips to Cleveland cultural institutions being stabbed in the gut by "black monster hoodlums" who would slash a belly open to steal a good suburban kid’s lunch money.

Long before the internet, it was impossible to do research to disprove these outlandish tales told to make blacks something less than human.

Certainly, events in Watts, Detroit, Chicago and perhaps even Harlem will always take a higher place in the history of the 1960s in racially divided America.

But the Glenville uprising is today, maybe even more than it was exactly a half century ago, a pivotal event in American history.

Robenalt, a Thompson Hine attorney, progressive thinker and author of other historical books, delivers an unflinching, backed by facts, compelling account of what went wrong in Cleveland and why – all things considered – an outbreak of urban guerrilla warfare should have surprised no one.

The engaging book has much about the campaign of Carl Stokes plus pivotal Cleveland visits by Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali.

Beyond the loss of life, both police and black nationalists, the biggest tragedy is the collapse of the Cleveland Now program that promised more than one billion dollars of federal and local money to address issues in Glenville and many other neighborhoods on the city’s predominantly black east side.

Fifty years later, with the GOP controlling the White House, Senate, House and strong majority of governor offices in the U.S., the oppressors continue to pretend that the oppressed will do fine and dandy on their own.

Rather than spending billions -- to not only right wrongs of the past, but to also level the playing field so folks in broken neighborhoods can pursue a bright future – the opposite is happening.

Most of those silver spoon “leaders,” born into immense wealth, act like cutting already thread bare programs will some you kindle, not starve out hope that social equity will ever be a reality in America.

Robenalt explores the racial and funding divide in his brilliant book.

For many reasons, including vivid storytelling, Ballots and Bullets: Black Power Politics and Urban Guerrilla Warfare in 1968 Cleveland, is an essential read -- one of the most important books published this year.

https://www.ballotsandbullets.com/home/

Saturday, September 15, 2018

BALLOTS AND BULLETS: BLACK POWER POLITICS -- part 4

AND URBAN GUERRILLA WARFARE IN 1968 CLEVELAND



James Robenalt's Ballots and Bullets: Black Power Politics and Urban Guerrilla Warfare in 1968 Cleveland.

This book is a clear and compelling story of racial disparity 50 years ago.

Read it then ask yourself have we truly progressed, in terms of social equity and civil rights, as much as we should have a half century later?

My answer is we shamefully have not.



In the spring of 1968, while Mayor Stokes kept peace in Cleveland and Bobby Kennedy came to deliver his "Mindless Menace of Violence" speech

https://www.ballotsandbullets.com/home/

Friday, September 14, 2018

BALLOTS AND BULLETS: BLACK POWER POLITICS -- part 3

AND URBAN GUERRILLA WARFARE IN 1968 CLEVELAND



James Robenalt's Ballots and Bullets: Black Power Politics and Urban Guerrilla Warfare in 1968 Cleveland.

Learn about the Glenville uprising in Cleveland, Ohio.

It was a (tragically) key moment in American history.


With a race baiting #45 & his KKK advisors, it's clear we've learned very little -- even a half century later -- from issues chronicled in this superb book.


Fred "Ahmed" Evans and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. the day before Carl Stokes was elected as the first African American mayor of a major U.S. city.  Dr. King came to Cleveland frequently in 1967 to assist in Stokes' election.

https://www.ballotsandbullets.com/home/

Thursday, September 13, 2018

BALLOTS AND BULLETS: BLACK POWER POLITICS -- part 2

AND URBAN GUERRILLA WARFARE IN 1968 CLEVELAND


James Robenalt's Ballots and Bullets: Black Power Politics and Urban Guerrilla Warfare in 1968 Cleveland.

Unless you are as racist and pig headed as our illegitimate president, it will open your eyes and heart.


In a time when our POTUS praises white supremacists and clearly is a raging racist himself, this book is essential reading for any of us who still believe in equality among all human beings.

Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes with former Browns player Walter Beach in the summer of 1968

https://www.ballotsandbullets.com/home/

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

BALLOTS AND BULLETS: BLACK POWER POLITICS -- part 1

AND URBAN GUERRILLA WARFARE IN 1968 CLEVELAND


James Robenalt's Ballots and Bullets: Black Power Politics and Urban Guerrilla Warfare in 1968 Cleveland.

A must-read book for all who want to improve urban places, attain social equity.

This is an essential book.

With a racist president and GOP willing to look the other way, we are no better with race relations today than Cleveland was in Glenville 50 years ago.

Learn from this story.


Stamp out discrimination based on race, physical disability, gender, orientation & age.


MALCOLM X DELIVERED HIS BALLOT OR BULLET SPEECH AT CORY METHODIST CHURCH IN CLEVELAND ON APRIL 3, 1964


https://www.ballotsandbullets.com/home/

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

HAPPY BIRTHDAY HEIDI

MY SOULMATE FOR ONE THIRD OF A CENTURY AND COUNTING



In June this year, we celebrated 30 years of marriage.

We've been a couple for one third of a century.

We both grew up one county outside of Cleveland Ohio and met at Kent State University.

We went back this year to visit the CLE Steampunk Shop.

It's in the the 5th Street Arcades, at 500 Euclid Avenue.

Grand old shopping arcades, that had fallen into shabby states with vacancies when we were in school, have been restored and joined as one.

Quirky stores and restaurants fill the reborn downtown spaces.

The rejuvenated retail spaces merge the Colonial Arcade, built in 1898, and the Euclid Arcade, constructed in 1911.




Monday, September 10, 2018

FIRSTS: COMING OF AGE STORIES

BY PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES 
Join Heidi Johnson-Wright and take a step back in time with some of the best writers with disabilities as they recount the first time the unexpected treaded into their life. 

Enter to win a copy here:

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/284174-firsts-coming-of-age-stories-by-people-with-disabilities … 

Check out her tweets @GimpGirl64 

Heidi's blog: http://earthboundtomboy.blogspot.com

Sunday, September 9, 2018

FIRSTS: COMING OF AGE STORIES

BY PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES 

Join Heidi Johnson-Wright and take a step back in time with some of the best writers with disabilities as they recount their first adventure.

Enter to win a copy here:


Check out her tweets @GimpGirl64 

Saturday, September 8, 2018

FIRSTS: COMING OF AGE STORIES

BY PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES 
Heidi Johnson-Wright contributed to--

Firsts: Coming of Age Stories by People with Disabilities.

Edited by Belo Miguel Cipriani! 

Win a free copy: 

goodreads.com/giveaway/show/284174-firsts-coming-of-age-stories-by-people-with-disabilities … 

Check out her tweets @GimpGirl64 

Or her blog: http://earthboundtomboy.blogspot.com

Friday, September 7, 2018

FIRSTS: COMING OF AGE STORIES

BY PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES 

Heidi Johnson-Wright contributed to--Firsts: Coming of Age Stories by People with Disabilities, edited by Belo Miguel Cipriani! 

Win a free copy: 


Check out her tweets @GimpGirl64 

Thursday, September 6, 2018

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Monday, September 3, 2018

INDUSTRIAL CLEVELAND, OHIO -- part 23

STEEL MILLS




I have no idea what the function was of this rail car.

It looks like it carried something boiling hot, maybe dangerous.

It's preserved at the edge of the parking lot of the Steelyard Commons shopping center.

From the shopping center's site:

Steelyard Commons, located at the edge of Cleveland's industrial valley just south of downtown, has risen from the ashes of LTV Steel's abandoned No. 2 finishing mill. 

The mixed-use shopping center combines retail outlets, restaurants, a playground, and hiking and biking trails--all in the heart of the city.

Sunday, September 2, 2018

175,000 READERS

TODAY WE CELEBRATE OUR 175,000 VISITOR TO THIS BLOG



Before this month ends, we will have posted more than 2,000 articles - all illustrated with vivid images.

More than 90 percent of the photos -- like these in our hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, were taken by Steve Wright with his various Nikon digital SLRs.

These images show off Cleveland's amazing cultural amenities, such as the Natural History Museum (top) with Heidi Johnson-Wright, Steve's wife of 30 years.

The picture below is Heidi inside the amazing atrium expansion at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where it is free to visit every inch of the collection that is not a special exhibit.

Visit Heidi's blog at http://earthboundtomboy.blogspot.com/


Saturday, September 1, 2018