Let's Explore Cleveland Together!
I moved to Cleveland from Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2005. A common (obnoxious) reaction when I told people I was moving here was, "I'm sorry." Looking back, Cleveland's bad rap just meant more Cleveland for me.
When I first moved here, it was scary. The city is older, darker and grungier than Salt Lake City, and was completely unfamiliar. I didn't have a car and didn't know a soul. I was just 18. I would walk around campus, looking for people who looked sort of like someone I knew back in Utah. There was a guy whose voice sounded a lot like my dad's and I would walk near him sometimes on the way to class. (I never spoke to him, because that would have ruined the illusion for me, and now that I'm writing that, I realize I may be a little odd.)
I'll be honest--my first year in the Cleve, I hated it. Case's campus was surrounded by dangerous neighborhoods and it seemed like at least once a week, we'd get a security alert about some student or another getting mugged. The bus drivers were mean--one slapped my hand when I was too slow putting money in the till! Because the city was sort of down on it's heels, it was hard to distinguish between neighborhoods that were safe but looked like hell and neighborhoods that looked like hell and were filled with people who would try to send you to hell (i.e. kill you--not every phrase I write is as good on screen as it is in my head).
I longed to go back to Salt Lake, where it's sunny a lot. Not the Cleveland sun that peeks through cloud cover that happens to be slightly thinner that day, but full-bodied, bone-warming, sunscreen-year-round UV exposure.
I missed Utah winters, where it's cold, but dry, and still sunny. In Cleveland, the icy, somehow-wet-and-frozen-at-the-same-time chill makes you doubt the existence of a higher power when you step outside. You can pretty much kiss the sun goodbye between November and March in Cleveland. If you can find it before then.
I missed Utah summers, where it's hot and sunny and you play outside in the sprinklers during the day and snuggle under blankets in the cool, crisp desert air at night. Cleveland summers are hot and gloomy, with cloying humidity that holds the heat in the air night or day. People are always asking why your face is so wet (some of us aren't built to tolerate a hot yoga lifestyle without a constant sheen of sweat), and inviting you to picnics near the lake where everyone is supposed to ignore that there are humongous clouds of midges that coat the pavilion walls, the tables, the food on the tables and the people who are attempting to eat the midge-covered food on the midge-covered tables.
I couldn't wait to get home to Utah and never venture outside my sunny little corner again. Then something changed. I began to get to know the people of the Cle. It started at Thanksgiving. The dining hall was closed, so my grandma had sent me a care package for Thanksgiving, that included a turkey-flavored pack of ramen for a sad and solitary feast. When one of my floor-mates found out about it, she invited me to her house for Thanksgiving. We stayed the whole weekend, playing apples to apples, eating an egg-bread-and-cheese strata (deeply exotic for me at that point), and hanging out.
I made friends at church, including an amazing angel who stayed with me in the emergency room when I got pneumonia my first spring in Cleveland (did I mention Cleveland didn't have a Clean Air Act when I first moved there, and for the first time in my life, I was exposed to smoking sections in restaurants?? I firmly believe that my 2-pack a day secondhand smoke habit was a precipitating factor in my pneumonia).
I started working downtown and enjoyed hearing the guy on the corner of the Huntington Building evangelize each morning about how the Channel 2 news was owned by the Osama bin Laden family. I woo-ed a handsome, deep-voiced ginger from church and we spent countless hours exploring Case's campus. For one of our first dates, he treated me to a private showing of 'Murder by Death' in one of the engineering building lecture halls. I was so impressed by someone who had the kind of connections to access the engineering buildings at all hours of the day or night!
And as I came to love the people (even though my ginger only said, "okay" when I told him I loved him for the first time), I came to love Cleveland, too. And I've watched it over the years as it's grown up and out of the funk it was in when we first met.*
Flash-forward to 2018. I married the ginger, got a law degree, and we bought a house in the Cleve-Land that we love. We have a little kid that we love and a little dog that we love but sometimes don't like, and seven hens in the backyard.
And...Cleveland is awesome. It's got world-class theatre, dining, music and learning opportunities, with a cost of living that puts Salt Lake to shame. It has a history that's sometimes dark (like the horrifying torso murders or the tragic fire in the early years of the Cleveland Clinic), sometimes environmentally insane (I'm looking at you, giant United Way balloon release), and oftentimes uniquely awesome (like the time the entire population of the city attended the Cavs' victory parade).
It's currently 13 degrees, with a windchill of negative 6. Let's put on our heavy-duty boots, layer on some coats, hats and scarves, and start exploring!
*I first visited Cleveland during one of its freak bonus snowstorms in April. The night we arrived, there was a huge 5-alarm fire that leveled an abandoned multi-story building. The fire burned so hot that the rubble continued smoking under 2 feet of snow the entire weekend we were there. We'd pass it in the bus going to and from our hotel room.
When I first moved here, it was scary. The city is older, darker and grungier than Salt Lake City, and was completely unfamiliar. I didn't have a car and didn't know a soul. I was just 18. I would walk around campus, looking for people who looked sort of like someone I knew back in Utah. There was a guy whose voice sounded a lot like my dad's and I would walk near him sometimes on the way to class. (I never spoke to him, because that would have ruined the illusion for me, and now that I'm writing that, I realize I may be a little odd.)
I'll be honest--my first year in the Cleve, I hated it. Case's campus was surrounded by dangerous neighborhoods and it seemed like at least once a week, we'd get a security alert about some student or another getting mugged. The bus drivers were mean--one slapped my hand when I was too slow putting money in the till! Because the city was sort of down on it's heels, it was hard to distinguish between neighborhoods that were safe but looked like hell and neighborhoods that looked like hell and were filled with people who would try to send you to hell (i.e. kill you--not every phrase I write is as good on screen as it is in my head).
I longed to go back to Salt Lake, where it's sunny a lot. Not the Cleveland sun that peeks through cloud cover that happens to be slightly thinner that day, but full-bodied, bone-warming, sunscreen-year-round UV exposure.
I missed Utah winters, where it's cold, but dry, and still sunny. In Cleveland, the icy, somehow-wet-and-frozen-at-the-same-time chill makes you doubt the existence of a higher power when you step outside. You can pretty much kiss the sun goodbye between November and March in Cleveland. If you can find it before then.
I missed Utah summers, where it's hot and sunny and you play outside in the sprinklers during the day and snuggle under blankets in the cool, crisp desert air at night. Cleveland summers are hot and gloomy, with cloying humidity that holds the heat in the air night or day. People are always asking why your face is so wet (some of us aren't built to tolerate a hot yoga lifestyle without a constant sheen of sweat), and inviting you to picnics near the lake where everyone is supposed to ignore that there are humongous clouds of midges that coat the pavilion walls, the tables, the food on the tables and the people who are attempting to eat the midge-covered food on the midge-covered tables.
I couldn't wait to get home to Utah and never venture outside my sunny little corner again. Then something changed. I began to get to know the people of the Cle. It started at Thanksgiving. The dining hall was closed, so my grandma had sent me a care package for Thanksgiving, that included a turkey-flavored pack of ramen for a sad and solitary feast. When one of my floor-mates found out about it, she invited me to her house for Thanksgiving. We stayed the whole weekend, playing apples to apples, eating an egg-bread-and-cheese strata (deeply exotic for me at that point), and hanging out.
I made friends at church, including an amazing angel who stayed with me in the emergency room when I got pneumonia my first spring in Cleveland (did I mention Cleveland didn't have a Clean Air Act when I first moved there, and for the first time in my life, I was exposed to smoking sections in restaurants?? I firmly believe that my 2-pack a day secondhand smoke habit was a precipitating factor in my pneumonia).
I started working downtown and enjoyed hearing the guy on the corner of the Huntington Building evangelize each morning about how the Channel 2 news was owned by the Osama bin Laden family. I woo-ed a handsome, deep-voiced ginger from church and we spent countless hours exploring Case's campus. For one of our first dates, he treated me to a private showing of 'Murder by Death' in one of the engineering building lecture halls. I was so impressed by someone who had the kind of connections to access the engineering buildings at all hours of the day or night!
And as I came to love the people (even though my ginger only said, "okay" when I told him I loved him for the first time), I came to love Cleveland, too. And I've watched it over the years as it's grown up and out of the funk it was in when we first met.*
Flash-forward to 2018. I married the ginger, got a law degree, and we bought a house in the Cleve-Land that we love. We have a little kid that we love and a little dog that we love but sometimes don't like, and seven hens in the backyard.
And...Cleveland is awesome. It's got world-class theatre, dining, music and learning opportunities, with a cost of living that puts Salt Lake to shame. It has a history that's sometimes dark (like the horrifying torso murders or the tragic fire in the early years of the Cleveland Clinic), sometimes environmentally insane (I'm looking at you, giant United Way balloon release), and oftentimes uniquely awesome (like the time the entire population of the city attended the Cavs' victory parade).
It's currently 13 degrees, with a windchill of negative 6. Let's put on our heavy-duty boots, layer on some coats, hats and scarves, and start exploring!
*I first visited Cleveland during one of its freak bonus snowstorms in April. The night we arrived, there was a huge 5-alarm fire that leveled an abandoned multi-story building. The fire burned so hot that the rubble continued smoking under 2 feet of snow the entire weekend we were there. We'd pass it in the bus going to and from our hotel room.
Thank you for sharing this, Anne. So much of what you wrote here resonated with me! Cleveland is definitely not a fall-in-love-at-first-sight kind of beauty, but she grows on you, especially like you said, if you are brave and curious enough to venture out of your comfort zone and visit places. There's so much that Cleveland offers! I'm falling for her every minute. Let's explore together!
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