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Showing posts from July, 2018

Cleveland, beyond Rock (Part II)

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Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, Cleveland, Ohio "Everywhere else is Cleveland."  -Tennesee Williams I've spent most of my adult life living either in Baltimore City proper, or in the immediate suburbs.  I still teach there.  Baltimore is a rust belt town, accidentally located on the Chesapeake Bay.  And whether you really like professional football, the NFL's grouping of Baltimore, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh (along with Cincinnati) into the NFC North division was a brilliant stroke of playing on the natural rivalry of cities that are very much alike.  (Never mind that near death-match fight over the Browns two decades ago.) Last summer I spent a week in Cleveland, shuttling back and forth between my downtown hotel and the University Heights district that includes the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University.  To understand what you see is to understand a lot of cultural history of America writ large since the Gilded Age. Driving east past Clevel