Ohio - Day 8 - Cleveland and polkas

Geneva State Park
Wednesday, 8 May 2019

today's route

Actually, this is just yesterday's map because it doesn't show the detail of Cleveland I'd need to show where I went - so basically, I left Geneva, went to Cleveland, stopped off in Euclid, then went back to Geneva.

Before I left the campground, though, I had a visit from a Cardinal and this photo is mine.

It's a little fuzzy because he was hopping and I was afraid I'd lose him before I got the shot, and I was standing, or crouching rather, in front of the passenger seat balancing myself with one hand while I took the photo with the other.  But I got him.  The Cardinal is Ohio's state bird.

Where the campground's side road hits the interstate is the town of Harpersfield, that claims to be the oldest continuous settlement in Ashtabula County.  For what that's worth.

Spring green is just now coming on the trees and the flowering trees are still going strong - tulip magnolias and weeping cherries and japonica and all making things pretty.

For most of the time I've been in Ohio I've been in country where lots of bulrushes grow, so of course I've been seeing lots of Red-winged Blackbirds.  The last campground was packed with both.

Cleveland sits right on Lake Erie.  I passed a pleasure boat harbor coming into town. 

Cleveland's also built on the Cuyahoga River, the one that famously caught on fire in 1969 and sparked the environmental movement.  In reality, it had caught on fire several times before - some of them much more serious than the '69 fire - and the '69 fire was such old hat and put out so quickly that no photos were taken.

This one that Time magazine made famous was actually taken in 1952 and caused $1 million in damages.  The 1969 fire was the last.  The river is now quite clean and very pretty for a very urban river.

West Side Market

side of market

front of market & clock tower

Owned by the City of Cleveland, the market has been operating since the 1800s.  The building was built and opened in 1912 and is now in the National Register of Historic Places.

There's a side arcade that's mostly fruits and vegetables, and a building was put up to close it in a few years ago - although "close in" is a relative term - I was there and it was pretty cool and drafty.  I don't imagine that many of the vegies were locally grown, though some of them may well have been.  But I also saw dragon fruit and blood oranges and many kinds of berries - not what I think of as standard for northern Ohio in early May.

The main building had mostly meats and baked goods, a vast variety of both.

Fernengels

Ohio City Pasta

The meats in this photo are from a store called Dohar, and the sign said "Magyar Kolbász" and "Fokhagymás - Garlic."  Is that Hungarian?  The labels in front of these meats say they're varieties of smoked sausage.

the salsa and "Miami Donut" I bought

I ended up buying something labeled "Mexican salsa" to go with the tacos I planned to have for supper - this little tub cost me $4 but the salsa's not bad.  The pastry is from a shop called Euro Sweets and was labeled a "Miami donut."  When I asked the clerk, she said it was a cronut, a cross between a croissant and a doughnut which I've heard of but not tried, so I thought I'd try it.  I don't know what they usually taste like, but this one was more like a cinnamon roll.  But good.

I went earlyish - got there by 9:00 - and was glad I did because parking was a problem.  There's a very handy and pretty empty parking lot right there that's free for 90 minutes, but the guards refused to let me park there and insisted I park on the street instead.  They were nice about it and found a good parking spot for me, which is why I was glad I was early because there actually was a convenient spot available at that hour.

Ohio City Farm

The dogs and I walked around the neighborhood a bit and found nearby a place called Ohio City Farm, where I could see people actually working in a very big garden and where I saw rows of covered plants growing.  I looked it up and learned it's one of the largest contiguous urban farms in the country - about 6 acres.  One of the acres is the responsibility of Great Lakes Brewing, Ohio's first microbrewery, opened in 1988 and situated nearby.  They use the land for growing hops and depend on the labor of nearby residents and refugees, who are trying to get resettled in a new country and who also work in the garden.  On Saturdays from June to November the farm opens a farmstand where the public is encouraged to come buy the vegies grown there.  I didn't take this photo, and the view is greener than when I was there, and I saw people working in the fields, but this is about what I saw.

Tremont Neighborhood

Before I came here I'd read that this neighborhood is one of Ohio's oldest and has the largest concentration of historic churches of any neighborhood in the US, so I thought I'd drive around a bit. 

Pilgrim Congregational Church - 1859

I saw this church but couldn't get the photo - this is off the internet.  I also saw St. John Cantius Church: Polish (it says on their sign), built in 1898, and the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, built in 1919, but there weren't any internet photos that didn't have copyright problems.  That last one has a gold dome on each of its 2 towers.

a house in Tremont

The Tremont neighborhood was first established by German immigrants at least as far back as 1836.  In the early 1900s a flood of Ukrainian immigrants moved in, but left in the '70s and '80s when the steel mills and other industries started closing up.  In the 2000s the neighborhood was rediscovered by retirees and hipsters who noticed there were some nice historic buildings for not a lot of money located very close to downtown, and the neighborhood was reborn.  They're probably pushing out all the long-time residents who aren't able to afford it any more, as happened to us in Austin, but their internet page didn't mention that.  Still it does have character and looks like a nice area to live in.

I picked out my own route using an online map of the city and was astounded to find that I actually didn't get lost and didn't have any problems.  Except that one street called Thurman Ave. was actually an alley - and yes, it had houses fronting on the alley and was very pleasant - but it was still a one-lane one-way alley.  I got lucky there was no other traffic.

Of course, I then got lost trying to get out of town and ended up in what was obviously a public housing project, but I stopped to ask for help from one of the workers and he actually got in his truck and led me to the entrance to the highway.  Very nice of him.

Cleveland Oddities

Cleveland is the home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which I might have enjoyed visiting except they wanted to charge me $24 for senior admission.  I decided I'd wait until I got to Motown to spend my r&r money.

FirstEnergy stadium

I passed the Home of the Cleveland Browns.  And I guess I don't understand why anyone would build an open air football stadium in northern Ohio on the shore of Lake Erie.  Aside from that it looked very nice.

I found a Bob Hope Lane on the map and learned that his family immigrated here when he was 7 years old, and this is where he grew up.  He was known to have said, "We'd have been called juvenile delinquents only our neighborhood couldn't afford a sociologist."

On the interstate in a suburb of Cleveland called Bratenahl the ACLU of Ohio has put up a big billboard that reads: "Bratenahl Mayor's Court collected over $500K in 2017."  Turns out the ACLU has done a report about mayor's courts in Ohio and their findings aren't good.  

Mayor's courts are local courts that hear traffic cases and local ordinance violations, and some of them are in the business of making money, and the ACLU can prove it.  These courts combine both the executive (police) and the court functions so there are no checks and balances, and they allow no recordings or transcripts of any kind of the court proceedings, so if you're not there, you don't know what happened.  The ACLU says these "mayors" acting as judges are very nearly coercing people to plead guilty and insist all fines be paid in full before the person leaves the courtroom; if not, they're put in jail until the fine is paid.  

The ACLU says some of these courts operate in a reasonable manner, but some of them are targeting out-of-towners and minorities with the goal of raising revenue for city operations.  They've got 5 fairly simple suggestions for the Ohio Legislature that they say will help fix these problems.  Good for the ACLU for noticing and documenting all this.  

Cleveland-Style Polka Hall of Fame and Museum

I know it's not considered reasonable to like polkas, but I never was considered very reasonable and I do like them.  So I had to find out what this place in Euclid was about.

The first thing I learned is that "Cleveland-style" polkas are smoother, a little less bouncy with less oom-pah-pah than other styles.  Cleveland-style includes a banjo playing with the accordion, and it was based on Americanized Slovenian folk songs.  Actually, this music also includes the musical styles of immigrants from Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Croatia and Italy, each of whom absorbed the music from other countries into their own styles.  We've always claimed the US is a melting pot, and I guess this is an example.

Slovenian immigrants moved in around the Great Lakes and western PA beginning in the 1880s to work in factories, mines and the railroads.  By 1900, Cleveland had more Slovenians than any town outside Slovenia (a country about half the size of Switzerland between Austria, Italy and Croatia).  A recent immigrant from Slovenia is Melania Trump.

Polkas have been around for decades but their popularity really took off after WWII - the public was ready to have some fun and surely everybody can agree that polka is good-time music.  Then in 1948 local resident Frank Yankovic became "America's Polka King" with his million-seller, "Just Because," followed a year later with a second million-seller, "Blue Skirt Waltz."  And Cleveland-style polka became a national craze all during the '50s.  Yankovic's success is especially noteworthy because he almost had his fingers amputated during WWII, a result of gangrene after frostbite in the Battle of the Bulge.  He got lucky.  In elementary school I learned to square dance to "Just Because" and remember it because I liked the song so much, so I guess I got lucky too.

At any rate, the truly remarkable thing about all this is that in the late '40s and early '50s immigrant music became a part of mainstream America.  It was replaced by rock&roll in the late '50s but has never really gone away.  Older folks, like the lady who showed me around, have been concerned that it'd eventually get lost in history but are reassured because young people seem to enjoy it now too.

"button boxes" or diatonic accordions

piano accordions

For many years the button box style was the preferred accordion style for the Slovenian-Americans, likely because it's much more common in Europe than in the US and because they were made in Cleveland.

These are two of the really fancy accordions the museum has.  Real works of art.

This place is first and foremost a hall of fame and most of the space is devoted to those inducted into the hall of fame.  I'd never heard of any of these folks and wasn't really interested.  But I got to hear some good toe-tapping music and learn a little more about my country.

Geneva-on-the-Lake

I took a detour on the way back to the campground and went on to the shore of Lake Erie to see this little town.  Which turned out to be a disappointment because there's nothing scenic about it, it's just a little seaside community with resort businesses and small motels and cottages.  It definitely doesn't show signs of having hit the big time yet (no national franchises) but may likely be a pleasant place to have a vacation.

The state park where I've been staying has a pretty nice beach but I didn't even want to get out of the RV because the wind was really blowing strong and cold.

You can see the waves breaking - and this is Lake Erie, not the ocean.