Some good news from Cleveland
The best photo of 2008 showed an eviction in Cleveland and the media enjoys stories about the devastation in my home. According to Richard Florida's article in this month's Atlantic, Cleveland does not stand a chance in the years to come, either.So I am compelled to offer some good news from Cleveland.A few months ago I went looking for the former home of Charles Chesnutt. Chesnutt was America's first black professional author-for a short time, he made his living through his writing. He was the first African-American to publish a story in what was then, as now, one of preeminent literary magazines, The Atlantic. The magazine's reputation-making editor, William Dean Howells, compared Chesnutt to Henry James, Guy de Maupassant, and Ivan Turgenev, and launched Chesnutt's literary career. But Chesnutt's novel The Marrow of Tradition, which fictionalizes the 1898 Wilmington race riots, did not sit as well with the literati as did his early work, and Chesnutt had to return to making his living as a legal stenographer. He remained politically active in Cleveland, and in 1928 he was awarded the Springarm Medal by the NAACP for his "pioneer work as a literary artist depicting the life and struggle of Americans of Negro descent, and for his long and useful career as scholar, worker, and freeman of one of America's greatest cities."Chesnutt lived in a well-appointed house in a middle-class Cleveland neighborhood. A few minutes of googling was all it took to find out where that house was, thanks to the Cleveland Public Library's Digital Archives.I assumed the block would look nothing it did when Chesnutt lived there (1899-1906). I knew that section of town had been struggling for some time, and, with the housing downturn, I imagined abandoned houses would outnumber lived-in ones. So I was not surprised when I turned onto 73rd Street and saw a row of boarded up brick duplexes with "No Copper Stay Out" spray painted on the doors.
What I saw next surprised me. Three newly built, vinyl sided houses lined the block past the boarded up ones. They sat primly, chrysanthemums blooming in front. The grass was freshly mowed, and the trees around them bloomed glorious yellow. Across the street was another pretty house with Halloween decorations out front.Further up the block were lots filled with grass and more sparkling-leaved trees. The empty spaces filled with plant-life gave the block an oddly bucolic feel. I found a few more abandoned houses, too, but they had been carefully boarded up.
