Cinderella City
Watching Cleveland transform for the RNC, then back to a humble Midwestern city.
Something about my brain evokes memories especially when it comes to transportation. Along with remembering the hundreds of car rides I’ve had with my friends traveling to whatever worthwhile or worthless destinations we were going to, I remember nearly each ride I’ve taken on the train from the east side of Cleveland to downtown and vice versa. It’s the same train I’ve taken when I was a child, back when visiting the Tower City mall was exciting. It’s the same train I’ve taken five years ago, back when the Occupy movements were happening across America and I was starting to come into my own as a politically-conscious adult. It’s the same train I've taken when I was working downtown.
Despite traveling a route I know like the back of my hand — from the exquisite, Fresh Prince of Bel Air-esque homes in Shaker Heights, to the poorly-maintained area between E. 79th St and E. 55th St, littered with old tires, scrap metal and miscellaneous trash—I can remember at least one little different thing about every one of those trips: The person I was around, the inexplicable delay that happened, what music I was listening to, what I was frustrated about at the time, etc. One time, a girl asked me about my wife (I am not married), which was perhaps the strangest — albeit pleasantly strange — thing I’ve experienced out of all those trips.
Last week was the strangest I’ve felt taking a train so familiar, though — in a way that nearly made me feel unwelcome in my hometown. My regular train was more crowded than usual for the early afternoon, many of those people wearing laminated badges around their necks — an accessory far from stylish to go with their businesswear. They glanced nervously when stopping at E. 116th St, and the locals that hopped on board looked equally as uncomfortable. That discomfort hit a peak at the stop before Tower City, when three officers from the Department of Homeland Security boarded the train for a small security sweep before letting it proceed. Staring eye-to-eye with them, their weapons strapped to the front of their bodies like infants in baby bjorns, was chilling.
Last week was the 2016 Republican National Convention, and from the general sense of properly handling the responsibility of hosting such a big event, to the more specific case of properly handling this event — a circus of political insanity that was a shoe-in for being one of the most shameful moments in modern American history— without melting down completely, Cleveland shaped itself the best it could to be the city fit to handle it all. For a place that has been the butt of a joke for decades, and has been building its national credibility up brick by brick this year — with the Cavs winning this year’s NBA championship, Cleveland resident Stipe Miocic winning the UFC Heavyweight Championship, and the Lake Erie Monsters winning whatever the hell it is that the AHL has — this was seen as the next brick of proving how much potential the city has; perhaps even a cornerstone of getting the country to acknowledge that Cleveland is Actually Good.
With millions of dollars going to renovating as much as they could, the city made every effort it could to transform itself from its shabby normal self into Cinderella, aiming to be as exquisite as the ball it was hosting. One might let their smile fall crooked acknowledging that these efforts were inspired by wanting to please the arriving visitors rather than their own residents, but nevertheless, the city and its locals were hopeful for a prettier image to be broadcast to the country. The act of contorting oneself in the best way possible to better one’s reputation with strangers may be one of the most common things done in the modern world, but it’s still an odd practice when you spell it out. Regardless, after the festivities of this political shitshow were done and over with, Cleveland would still get to enjoy the changes it made, and possibly send off the droves of visitors with good memories of a city they likely had unflattering predispositions about.
For the most part, it worked, and many visiting delegates, politicians, and ample amount of media people enjoyed their experience in the city, though there’s no denying that their experience was far abstracted from a normal day in Cleveland — it was prepared for them in pockets of exclusivity. They attended private shows at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Jacobs Pavilion just across the river, and drank on rooftops instead of the plethora of bars downtown — a symbolism much too evocative. Delegates and politicians dined at sponsored events with catering, and plenty of media companies rented out restaurants to serve as their bases of operation for the week, leaving many local businesses with lukewarm results after expecting a surge in business. Barrio, right across the way from the Quicken Loans Arena — the hub of the RNC — extended its hours to entice visitors for an easygoing lunch of tacos and margaritas, but never experienced that surge. A bartender at Wonder Bar, located on the alley walk of E. 4th St, told me that many people who stopped in were just trying to use the bathroom. They had stocked up on fancy whiskey intended for the deep pockets of RNC attendants — much of it remained untouched.
It was even worse further out from the immediate perimeter of The Q. Bars on W. 9th St., a walk less than ten minutes away from Public Square, remarked that this was one of their worst weeks of the year, both because visitors from the RNC weren’t coming around, and locals were staying away from downtown to avoid the congested hoopla altogether. Even still, Johnny’s Little Bar maintained its regulars when I stopped by Wednesday night. The bartender told me he had no expectations of increased business this week, exclaiming to me and the others sitting nearby, “It’s always the locals that keep this bar going. That’s how it’ll always be.”
***
I spent last Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in downtown Cleveland to experience the RNC for myself, or at least as best as I could for an event that had no intention of including me — or most other locals, for that matter. And yet in this week where Cleveland was taken over by the out-of-towners — where the pro-Trump and anti-Clinton apparel outnumbered that of Cleveland sports apparel — the locals who did feel compelled to check out the scene downtown gravitated towards one another. I ran into people I hadn’t seen in years, from high school classmates to friends from the old Occupy rally, occasionally having to shout to hear ourselves over the megaphones of the same handful of fundamentalist Christians demonstrating in Public Square. I met new locals whose faces lit up learning that I was a local as well, as if it immediately made us trusted allies in a crowd of strangers from all over the country. Seldom do I relish in hometown camaraderie, but it did spur a warm feeling inside (beyond the humid Cleveland summer air we were standing in all day.)
Only a few were there to demonstrate, while the rest just wanted to see what all the hubbub was about. They weren’t so much engaged with the politics of the gathering as they were interested in seeing how this nationwide gathering would manifest in their city, and surprisingly, most were not enthused. Compared to the city-wide celebration of the Cavs winning the NBA Championship a month ago, they mostly weren’t invested in the reason why Cleveland was brimming with activity this time around. Of course, the Cavs parade was way more satisfying compared to the RNC, primarily because the former was a gathering of unequivocal happiness, and the latter was the reality show finale of nominating a serial con-man whose complexion resembles that of instant mac-n-cheese powder and whose mindfulness of running a country is analogous to a teenager joyriding his father’s Sebring convertible after drinking a fifth of Malibu rum, to be attended by a gathering of the Republican status quo who have faithfully maintained its despicable and regressive ways in their political stances. But deep down, it was because they knew this gathering wasn’t about Cleveland. Cleveland was the background, not the subject, of nationwide attention — the place in America that just happened to be the place of temporary occupation for the flocks of media and the conservative political elite.
The strongest sentiment with the locals, however, was the concern that the RNC in Cleveland would be the time and place for the eventual eruption of dissent in response to the deplorable man who was being nominated. They didn’t want to see something bad transpire in their city, but in contrast, much of the media predicted— some of whom hoped, even — that Cleveland would blow like a powder keg that week, all for the sake of great news. It wasn’t a far-fetched thing to think, but it was one that sardonically smiled at the prospect of Cleveland breaking down into a battlefield. Perhaps one shouldn’t take it personally, since the simmering anger towards Donald Trump erupting anywhere in the country would make for captivating news (it already has before), but one knows how much the narrative writes itself were it to happen in Cleveland. The Cinderella City, which had tried so hard to prepare itself for the event, would only end up having its dress burn and its glass slippers shatter — a historic event to bolster the notion that Cleveland is the Bad Luck Brian of American cities.
Thankfully, it didn’t go that way, and for the most part, everything there was quite copacetic. For the few transgressions that did occur, though, they were covered and attempted to be made as mountains out of molehills. Most eventful of these was a flag-burning demonstration on the corner of E. 4th St, which had been warned of well in advance, and when the flag-burner accidentally caught himself on fire, cops rushed in to contain the situation while a siege of reporters followed closely to capture what they later tried to deem as chaos in the streets. Alex Jones, who strutted around downtown like a rock star, eating up the RNC’s scene of establishment Republicans having to swallow their pride while watching Donald Trump become the official Republican presidential candidate as if he were solely responsible for it, was hit with a meager sucker punch in the midst of speaking in Public Square last Tuesday. The conflict was quickly quelled by the omnipresent law enforcement, but shortly after, he gloated about enduring the incident as if he were Theodore Roosevelt surviving a gunshot mid-speech.
The biggest embellishment in the face of the calm scene in Cleveland, as we all should’ve expected, came from Trump at the apex of the RNC last Thursday night. Among his speech constructed of boilerplate fear-mongering and paint-by-numbers demagoguery, his strongest recurring bit was articulating how unsafe the entire country was today than it had ever been before — from foreign powers, illegal immigrants, and its own angry citizens. These claims are statistically untrue, and more specifically than that, it stood in stark contrast to the reality of the city the speech was being given in. Much like the reporters hoping for a sensational scene of Cleveland being a battlefield, one could expect that Trump was also hoping for the city to spiral into chaos, just for the sake of proving a point.
He also complimented Cleveland in his speech, in the same autopilot fashion as any touring band does in between songs, saying how many more times he would be coming back. It spurred an almost unanimous cheer from the bar I was watching the speech at. I stayed silent. It was an empty statement.
***
A couple days ago, I took my usual train to downtown. It was sparsely occupied. The E.34th St stop wasn’t a makeshift hub for the DHS anymore — it was just another stop. A group of kids were carrying boxes of candy to sell to benefit whatever summer camp program they were involved in. A guy with a beard and gauges sitting in front of me represents local metalhead pride with a Chimaira shirt.
Stepping out onto Public Square wasn’t filled with a bustling mass of posters, cops and cameras anymore. The newly-built fountains in the ground flowed on undisturbed, with few people lounging on the benches to watch them. The streets circling the square weren’t being impeded by InfoWars-fronted billboard trucks touting “Hillary For Prison” signs, or advertisements for Dinesh D’Souza’s next conservative cash-grab flick, ‘Hillary’s America’. Instead of seeing a sea of political attire and credentials dangling from lanyards, Cavs shirts and Indians hats were the common pattern of fashion for the people on the sidewalks.
E. 4th St was absent of congested foot traffic, and it was a relief to take a breath and stroll leisurely down the brick road. All the restaurants on the strip were open to the public once more. I stopped into Erie Island Coffee Co., passing a chalk sign that read “We survived!” Their WiFi password still remained as the password a week ago when MSNBC had occupied it — an unlikely souvenir for the coffeeshop to remind them of a week ago when they were the base of operations for one of the biggest media groups in the country.
The ball is over, and Cleveland is no longer Cinderella. By its own premise, it was never meant to last forever, and exaggerated expectations of how Cleveland would be afterwards weren’t met on either side — the city wasn’t showered with gold, nor was it bathed in blood. All that attention that Cleveland was a part of last week has now shifted to Philadelphia, though plenty of reporters currently enduring the surprisingly more contentious convention and even ickier hot weather in Philly are remarking how pleasant their times were in Cleveland — a glass slipper of a memory to hold on to should they ever think about returning. But beyond it all, Cleveland still remains, and whether last week was a fleeting few days of extravagant attention that has come and gone, or an integral step in Cleveland climbing up to be the next epicenter of Midwest America, it’s rightfully beloved by its own people, whether as Cinderella or its simple self.
