By Larry Durstin
From the second story back porch of my 1950s childhood home on Hope Avenue, I could see the outline of the Terminal Tower faintly in the distance. All I knew was that it was a very big building in a place called Downtown. A place where I occasionally went, hand-held on the trolley, to shop with my mother on Saturdays, or anxiously perch on Santa’s lap each Christmas, or breathlessly sit atop my father’s shoulders to watch flag-waving parades on the Fourth. I also fondly recall going to the old Cleveland Arena with my dad for Knights of Columbus track meets, Barons’ games and city championship basketball showdowns.
I believed Downtown was the greatest, most exciting, most mysterious place in the world. However, since I actually lived just off W. 65th St. and Clark, a stone’s throw from the Pilsener Brewery and the Stockyards, whatever magic conjured by the sight of the majestic Terminal was countered daily by the gritty reality of my cobblestone neighborhood. Still, I knew Downtown was always out there and was really something special. Somehow, I sensed that wasn’t ever going to change.
In due time, I was able to go downtown by myself or with friends. Trekking to the Stadium in the fall to watch the real Superman, Jim Brown, and in the summer to watch Rocky rifle throws in from right field. I recall the Allen and the Palace theaters with their elegant audiences and velvety seats, going home over the High Level Bridge and always turning around to ritually honor the Terminal, the sirens’ song of my youth.
I vividly recollect seeing President Kennedy standing on a Public Square platform and electrifying a huge crowd, feeling for the first time that I really was a part of something big and important. I also can’t forget the numbness that accompanied me less than two years later as I somehow found my way to the Palace for an afternoon screening of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, World, the last movie JFK had seen before he was assassinated two weeks earlier.
Soon it was time to leave home and I parted ways with Cleveland and my family, heading off to college at the other end of the state and getting lost in the Revolution of the late ’60s, never looking back at my old neighborhood or turning my head for one more peek at the Terminal Tower.
Instead, I immersed myself in the socio-political and the psycho-sexual aspects of the time. Rhapsodizing about the passion-filled nobility and mythic nature of patchouli-scented romantic fusion. As Tennessee Williams wrote, “I didn’t go to the moon, I went much further.” Through it all, though, I remained beyond Zen, never stepping into the same river once. Concurrently, back home, the Cuyahoga had burned and downtown was starting down the road of an urban non-renewal that slowly but surely was turning Cleveland, unjustifiably, into the butt of national jokes.
Over the next decade or so, I found myself frenetically going through the motions of trying to forge a meaningful career, like the one I was certain I would have when I lived on Hope Avenue, out of a series of expedient, dead-end jobs that were leading me nowhere fast. Trying to develop a meaningful relationship, like the kind I Technicolor-dreamed about in the ’50s, out of a lifestyle of open-mouthed passion that overflowed with the absence of everything.
Sometime in the mid-’80s, I began getting drawn back home. Both of my parents became quite ill so I started returning to Cleveland more often than the hasty holiday drive-throughs that marked the 20-year reality of my virtual estrangement. During these longer, now more reflective stay-overs, I started spending more time Downtown and noticed how everyone seemed to be saying things were on the “upswing.”
People said the Flats had come back. I responded that I had always loved them. They talked about the revitalization of Playhouse Square. I couldn’t help but share my theater district memories as if they had happened yesterday. They said the Browns were near the top again. I said they would always be synonymous with Dynasty to me. Although Cleveland still wasn’t New York, despite multiple additions to the skyline, I told them to thank heaven for small favors and you couldn’t beat the Terminal Tower anyway. So when they concluded by saying downtown’s future looked bright, I always left them with a what-else-is-new shrug.
By the time I permanently moved back to Cleveland in the early ‘90s, Jacobs Field and the Rock Hall were in the works, as was my own mid-40s life re-evaluation. I began a career in journalism and co-founded an alternative publication called, appropriately enough, the Downtown Tab. Our offices were on the third floor of the spectacular Old Arcade, overlooking “the Street of Dreams,” Euclid Avenue where, not so long ago really, electricity shot through each and every square foot of its pavement and populace.
I’ve been back in Cleveland for two decades now and Downtown is again in the midst of another revival of sorts: A new convention center, medical mart, casino, CSU expansion, another Flats East Bank resurrection, more hotels and retail and lots of people living right there in the city’s center. None of this surprises me. I’ve always looked at Downtown as a grand, mysterious mosaic with infinitely more going on than you could possibly imagine and innumerable good, bad and indifferent reasons why it never stops coming back.
There may be no way to fully capture the elusive, forever magic of Downtown, but we all know that certain feeling that happens every once in a while when you go there and, out of nowhere, feel a twinge in your heart that’s far more powerful than memory alone. It’s all the big things, of course, like the sporting events, parades, fireworks and historic touchstones. It’s also a thousand nooks and crannies and fleeting images that, woven together, form the fabric and foundation of life in Northeast Ohio.
But to me, Downtown is, above all, the Terminal Tower. Yeah, the very same one that, once upon a time, I was able to catch a glimpse of from my childhood back porch on Hope Avenue.
Larry Durstin is an independent journalist who has covered politics and sports for a variety of publications and websites over the past 20 years. He was the founding editor of the Cleveland Tab and an associate editor at the Cleveland Free Times. Durstin has won 12 Ohio Excellence in Journalism awards, including six first places in six different writing categories. LarryDurstinATyahoo.com
3 Responses to “A Love Affair with Downtown Begins on Hope Avenue”
calvin
Thanks Larry, from someone who wandered the streets of 62nd and St. Clair about the same time.
Ray O'Loughlin
Great piece about a great city! My memories are of Playhouse Square, Publix Books, Boukair’s Ice Cream, Sterling Lindner’s and not the Tower but the busy Rapid station beneath it off a bustling Public Square. Thanks.
Bill K.
This reminds me of childhood shopping trips with my mother to downtown Toledo. She always wanted to dress up her little man. We lived in Bowling Green, Ohio. My mother was never happy with our little burg and taught me to appreciate “the big city” and resent our existence in a place with nether the advantages of city life nor the countryside. I have nightmares in which I believe I’ve somehow returned to Ohio. I often awake reassured to be far removed from Bowling Green. Starting in 1985 my career excelled in the Dallas Metroplex until the digital revolution and a series of deeper and longer recessions reduced the wide scope of opportunity.