Branding Cleveland
This is an interesting piece at Rustwire on Cleveland’s constant attempts to rebrand itself over the past 40 years. As industry left the city, Cleveland suffered an identity crisis as real as its economic crisis and continues to struggle with both today. The city has responded through a series of rebranding efforts, culminating in the theoretically fortuitous popularity of Drew Carey in the 1990s and his identification with the city in his popular show. Even that didn’t lead to any large-scale changes in fortune for the city. In fact, while the popular vision of cities absolutely matters, I do not believe that you can hire advertising agencies to change your brand. It’s way too complicated than that. Here’s my favorite of the rebranding efforts highlighted in the Rustwire article, this from the 1970s:
I spent last year in northeastern Ohio, teaching at a college in a small town about an hour outside in Cleveland. There wasn’t a whole lot to do in this town so we went to Cleveland pretty frequently. I really love the place. It has major problems of course. Whole sections of the city are essentially depopulated. White flight is a major problem. The industrial jobs are almost all gone and, although there is a slight uptick in manufacturing jobs recently, aren’t coming back with any kind of scale.
Moreover, Cleveland faces a crisis of leadership and identity that you can see in these rebranding efforts. It wants to recapture its past glory. Cleveland identifies as a working-class white town and wishes it could be that again. It’s hardly alone here. Cities from Detroit to Butte have had a really hard time letting go of their vision of what their city to rethink was what their city could be.
Last spring, I read an article about Detroit that I wish I could find. It was a letter to the editor of a Detroit business journal by an out-of-town executive who had recently visited the city. He said in no uncertain terms why his company would never move to Detroit. He wrote that white flight continued to destroy Detroit because that city was so dependent on cars and suburban living that it had not developed any of the 21st century infrastructure that is bringing young people back into cities. You can’t walk anywhere. Public transportation is a disaster. His company’s young workers wouldn’t move to Detroit, not because of its history but because of its present. This executive blamed a lack of leadership in Detroit, telling its politicians it needed to think about the future instead of the past.
I read this article in a link off of a Cleveland blog and the commenters there really agreed with this sentiment in regards to Cleveland. Local politicians there want the old industrial jobs back and have a heck of a time thinking beyond that. These commenters really wanted Cleveland to succeed and felt that investments in public transportation especially would make a huge difference.
The thing is though that Cleveland has some amazing neighborhoods developing without a lot of outside assistance. The Great Lakes Brewery and West Side Market anchor a very small but pretty cool walking neighborhood west of downtown that includes several excellent bars and restaurants, including the superb Bier Markt and the new Market Garden Brewery, owned by the former brewmaster at Dogfish Head. Tremont is another awesome neighborhood, combining cool old homes with excellent bars and restaurants and the Christmas Story house (where you can buy a leg lamp).
I haven’t been to Detroit, but I understand there are also little islands of interesting things happening there. In both places, with little to no municipal leadership, young people are beginning to move in and open businesses. Is this going to replace industrial labor and save the city? No, but these businesses do build off each other. Can the city help? Absolutely, but it takes shifting the political emphasis away from the 20th century and into the 21st. Can that be done without essentially lending government support to gentrification? I don’t know. That’s a concern of mine. Cleveland does have image disadvantages that are hard to overcome. It’s very cold and is littered with industrial ruins. Maybe that can be turned into something positive. At least this person is trying to build off the city’s less than ideal past with humor.
One of the funniest bits of ROGER AND ME was when Moore highlighted Flint’s hapless and expensive efforts to try and rebrand itself.
Also, no article about Cleveland is complete without linking to these famous tourism videos.
The best thing about those rebranding efforts is the amusing entries you see in the newspaper contests.
Welcome to Philadelphia: Drive Carefully–Most of Us Aren’t Insured
New Jersey: It’s a Death Trap, It’s a Suicide Rap, We’ve Gotta Get Out While We’re Young
The worst part of any declining city or town is the mindless snowblower of money directed at the rich to ‘keep our jobs’ in .
Hasn’t Pittsburgh done a pretty decent job of weathering this storm? I have never been there, but from what I understand, they focused on biotech and other modern industries, built up a light rail system, etc. I noticed that Pittsburgh wasn’t on the Atlantic’s bottom 10 list.
I live in Pittsburgh now; it’s a really nice city, and has indeed made a remarkably graceful transition. Not so much with the light rail (I think there are one or two lines, but I’ve never ridden one), but the bus system used to be one of the best around. Of course, since the recession a lot of lines have been cut and buses come less frequently, and the plan for the future is to make it worse still, to the point of uselessness. Progress!
Pittsburg used to be an environmental nightmare, but they’ve been working on that since the early 60′s . . .
Akron managed to do this really well in the mid-90s. For whatever reason/through whatever processes, the University of Akron had become the world’s leading school for polymer engineering. As a result, Akron began to clean up the downtown area (removing out adult “book” stores and seedy bars, building a nice little double-A baseball park) and in response, polymer industries began to relocate to Akron, even renovating the decrepit and abandoned Goodrich factories and warehouses. As a result, Akron managed to rebound to the exit of industry (rubber, in this case) than Canton or Youngstown (or Cleveland, though on a much smaller scale). I’m not sure to what extent its experience could really be replicated due to both its size and the timing of things, but it’s at least one model that could be instructive for other rust belt cities.
And a collegiate soccer power, strangely enough.
I’d assume that it was directly linked to the rubber industry. (Ditto for the number of adult stores, phwoar!)
Yeah, well, I now live about equidistant from Cleveland and Akron (actually a little closer to Akron), and I never seem to find a reason to go to Akron. Just sayin’.
He wrote that white flight continued to destroy Detroit because that city was so dependent on cars and suburban living that it had not developed any of the 21st century infrastructure that is bringing young people back into cities. You can’t walk anywhere.
Detroit seemed to me to be ready for an influx of weird artsy cheapskates…right now it’s a catastrophe, one that’s really worth visiting. Recent American travels if anyone cares, a little more Detroit than Cleveland.
The downtown area of Detroit is in fact very walkable – flat with fairly tightly-packed buildings in a few places, a bunch of which would be terrific with some creative repurposing.
Cleveland could flatten or destroy the lakefront megaprojects to great effect. I was only there for an afternoon/evening; coming in past gigantic industrial spaces getting destroyed was depressing.
The influx of artsy cheapskates is well under way:
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20090313/LIFESTYLE/903130306
The thing about Detroit is you can’t underestimate the ongoing damage of white flight. It isn’t just that the white people moved to the suburbs, it’s that they seem determined to punish the (predominantly black) residents who were left behind. They do everything possible to prevent state dollars from being invested in the city, and then blame the city’s residents for the fact that the city hasn’t rebounded.
It’s just ridiculous. Obviously, the state economy would be better if Detroit weren’t a desiccated husk of itself. Just as obviously, many of Detroit’s problems were caused or aggravated when whites began abandoning the city. And yet, the suburbanites insist that all of Detroit’s problems are its own and have only to do with the moral failings of “those people.”
Cleveland: The Mistake on the Lake
Rebranding through PR firms doesn’t work. Bringing back manufacturing won’t work (because its not possible – manufacturing jobs have decreased in the nation every year for about the last sixty years). Some types of government sponsored redevelopment/renewal have worked. Baltimore’s help in building Camden Yards revitalized downtwon Baltimore which led to a resurgence in the entire city, New York’s assistance in gentrifying Times Square led to a resurgence there (just watch Taxi Driver for a glimpse of what Times Square had become in the early 80s) and led to a revitalization of areas near Times Square, tearing down the god awful Embarcadero freeway in downtown SF which had blocked the entire view of the pier revitilized that whole area (only possible because of the 89 earthquake). Similar well intentioned efforts in other cities (the ball park and Rock and Roll Hall Fame Museum in Cleveland, for example) haven’t done the trick. You have to be creative and lucky.
There are great neighborhoods in Cleveland, but the Hall of Fame really didn’t lead to much around it. Part of it is that it is right on the water, much of which is more or less excluded from everyday Clevelanders anyway as a result of it being an industrialized space for more than a century.
Down below that Hall of Fame – a pretty sickening place to be IMO – I saw a pedestrian walkway. Do people use that?
Not sure to what extent. In the end, my time in Cleveland wasn’t as much as I’d like and most of it wasn’t spent downtown except the one time I visited the HOF and a couple of Indians games.
The HoF is cut off by highways and rail. There is no place for development there. Not unless you are starting a new neighborhood from scratch. We’ve got the land!
The HoF is basically on the edge where the land from the flats rises up to meet the lake. The coastal highway is right there, as in, right there. There is the newer spur of the blue line that goes up there, but no housing really. If you go south you will find some minimal amount of housing in either directions, except down around West Ninth where the downtown starts abruptly, but that’s it. Don’t even think about going due east though, there is nothing that direction, all the way to MLK drive and Bratanahl (sp).
As for the walkway, lots of fishermen go around there. Its nice, in places, but yeah there really is nothing in that area.
I don’t disagree with you about Cleveland, Erik. Its just that the HOF and the ballpark were heralded as things that would revive the city but, unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case. They seem to have had little impact.
The dumb ideas are unlikely to have impact, yes. The stadium and the HOF are isolated from everything else by big fields and an expressway. They’re things to drive to and drive away from. On the other hand the “hackey” arena is in the middle of town; the spillover crowd can find a beer pretty easily.
Yes, this. The stadium could be effective given that it is on the south edge of downtown. And there is a little strip of cool stuff, including the superb Greenhouse Tavern, but there’s a also a lot of empty buildings.
I think cities need to spend more time creating the infrastructure for cool shit to happen organically and less time deciding what giant building is going to be the answer.
Yeah, it’s not entirely true that the stadium is cut off from everything — you can take the Rapid in and walk to see a ball game quite easily — but it’s not as tightly connected to the any walkable tourist areas as Camden Yards is to the Inner Harbor. And Erik is right, both about the Quicken Loans Arena having led to a boomlet of restaurants on 4th St. and that the Greenhouse Tavern is great.
The cities in the North East and Midwest that weathered deindustrialization and suburbinization the best were the ones with the best infrastructure. That is the ones with higher, decent to great public transportation, and cultural institutions.
New York City was the best prepared to deal with deindustrializtion because it already had a decent post-industial economy before deindustrialization occured. Chicago and Boston were somewhat similar. Philadelphia was hit harder but did a bit better than say Detroit because it had a somewhat decent transit system and a number of cultural institutions and colleges.
I wonder if other Northeast and Midwest cities like Cleveland and Detroit would have done better if they mad good mass transit systems and colleges.
Cleveland has the colleges (Case and a rapidly improving Cleveland State, and nearby in the region Oberlin and Baldwin-Wallace), but yeah, the transit is a disaster and that hurts a lot. I’m sure inner-ring suburbs like Cleveland Heights and Lakewood would be in better shape if they hadn’t dismantled their trolley lines way back when.
I’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for most of my life. And, until last year, I have never been East of Reno, Nevada. After I took the Bar Exam in late July, I decided to go on a cross country drive.
I stopped in Cleveland for one night. I asked the person at the front desk of the motel what there was to do in Cleveland. Now, I did this in every place I visited, and the person would normally give me a long list of things to do. In this case, the person at the front desk said, “well, there is a big stamp that says ‘LOVE.’” That was it.
I ended up going to a Cleveland Indians game. It was my first non-San Francisco Giants and non-Oakland A’s game I ever went to. It was a lot of fun. The Indians have a nice stadium, and it was a good crowd for a Monday Night – especially because the Indians were playing the Seattle Mariners.
But anyway, I loved Cleveland. I thought it was great. It had a nice downtown area. It also had a lot of old, industrial buildings/factories. I just love industrial buildings and factories, because I never got to see any growing up.
Yeah they are great, when they are being used for something
I’m fortunate to have found a great place to live in Baltimore, a city that faces many of the same problems as Cleveland and Detroit but is lucky enough to have pretty decent public transit and some great neighborhoods. Places like Federal Hill, Fells Point, Hampden and Charles Village (my current ‘hood) offer great dining, entertainment and living in walkable packages.
The desolate areas of the city, however, are just heartbreaking, and while The Wire may have sensationalized crime a bit, it’s a very real concern even in places like Charles Village.
Baltimore hasn’t seen quite the same level of gentrification that DC has, but the city government is working to “revitalize” neighborhoods by fining owners of vacant properties until said properties can be auctioned to “trusted” developers.
There’s a great population of dedicated young people here (Occupy Baltimore was strong and successful) and some village elders (so to speak) are reaching out to really make an impact (the director of the Baltimore Museum of Art is known as a champion of young and emerging artists and independent galleries). But the population decline that appeared to slow at the beginning of the millenium continued with the recession, so like Detroit and Cleveland the city is hoping to attract new residents and investment.
I’m a little skeptical of “rebranding” efforts, but I suppose that depends on what one means by “rebranding”. Detroit (where I grew up) is never going to be a New York or a San Francisco or even a Chicago. But it does have a pretty rich history and local culture in its own right that it can draw upon. That of course will only go so far; people still need places to work, live, and shop.
Cleveland: Home of the Torso Serial Killer
(subtitled We Still Haven’t Caught Him, but He’s Almost Certainly Dead By Now)
Hey, don’t underestimate the positive publicity LA gets from stuff like the Black Dahlia. If you can mold the serial killer stories in just the right way, they can work for you.
From the perspective of the young, maybe this recession has helped clarify what is truly important in life. I was born in Cleveland, and to defend it you always had to get a bit metaphysical. So, okay, maybe California and the south has nice weather, and maybe New York and Chicago are bigger and have more stuff to do, but how important is any of that stuff truly? Aren’t cities just collections of streets and buildings and trees and rivers and people? Can’t you find a little of anything you like virtually anywhere? Is there something wrong with living in a city that’s simply good enough, a place where you can make a life? At which point you’d probably get laughed at, or have your arguments undermined by a fellow Clevelander’s rampant pessimism.
But maybe young people are turning away from that which truly doesn’t matter towards more substantive concerns, like actually being able to afford a house. From that perspective, I think the Great Lakes region in general is a great place to live. And if the ice caps melt and the weather turns screwy, wouldn’t you rather live where the abundant supplies of drinkable water are?
I do have a back-to-Michigan escape plan, should it become necessary.
I always got a kick out of reading about some of the harebrained schemes to transport water from the east over the Rockies to supply the boom towns of the southwest. Nothing more American than fleeing to Arizona to escape the cold weather, only to build housing developments with beautiful green lawns and nearby golf courses
It makes me want to scream at them like Sam Kinison. Move to where the water is, asshole!!!
There were many reasons to not support Bill Richardson’s 2008 presidential bid, but as somebody born-and-raised in Ohio (but who’s also spent several years in New Mexico), his desire to pipeline the Great Lakes into the desert Southwest so they could farm more was at the top of my list.
If someone actually tried to do that, you would very likely see armed resistance from folks in Michigan and probably other Great Lakes states from across the political spectrum.
Oh, right – I never thought it stood a chance (for exactly the reason you mentioned). But just the sheer stupidity and offensiveness of it (“we want to steal your water so you can be as barren as we are!”) shredded any chance at taking Richardson seriously.
Rebranding has its limits, no doubt. But it’s not all that long ago that New York City needed a little rebranding of its own. I vividly remember the “I [heart] New York” campaign — I was in high school in suburban Philly at the time, and I think those ads were very effective in conveying the message of “Don’t be frightened–you’ll have fun!” to us provincial rubes who happened to be close enough for a day trip. Sure, it was strictly about tourism, not bringing back manufacturing jobs or anything that large-scale, but I wouldn’t underestimate its power. (And this was years before anyone even contemplated the scrubbed and sanitized Times Square of today.)
But as I recall, the I Love New York campaign went hand in hand with cleaning up Times Square and other concrete actions, not just a PR campaign. I remember very vividly visiting NYC in 1981, which was just about the nadir of the city’s image. Besides the seediness of Times Square, I remember the phalanx of drug dealers outside the great Public Library building openly hawking their wares and the rush of squeegee guys who would surround your car if you stopped at a stop light. All of that made NYC a very dicey proposition as a tourist spot. Those things were stopped, Times Square was cleaned up and this went hand in hand with the I Love NY campaign.
Looking at the timeline of events, the I Love NY campaign started in 1978 while the cleanup of Times Square started a couple years later and didn’t really achieve a significant breakthrough until the City bought six of the historic Broadway area theaters in 1990 and refurbished them. So the PR campaign seems to have had an impact on reviving tourism even before the city took the steps to make NYC a tourist mecca again. I wonder if tourism actually increased once the campaign started and before the cleanup efforts took effect. If so, it says that certain PR campagns can work.
When I lived in NY, I was walking along one day and saw a store displaying a t-shirt that said “Go ♥ Your Own City.” I vowed I’d buy it the next time I saw it. Sadly, I never saw it again, not even in the storefront where I first spotted it. I still kick myself for not buying it when I had the chance.
There is a store near penn station that has one.
Pere Ubu! Pere Ubu! Pere Ubu!
Greatest American Rock band … evar?
Certainly one of the best.
I lived in Cleveland from 1971 to 1976 doing a residency at the Cleveland Clinic and living near Shaker Square. I never got a sense that there was any leadership or vision for Cleveland. The people who could have played that role seemed focussed on short-term personal gains. They acted alienated from the future of the city. There was a sharp racial divide with the city limits being 50-55% black and the burbs being a lot paler. People with money; people who could get stuff done lived in Pepper Pike, maybe got down to Severance Hall sometimes to see the orchestra but lived out of the city and retired to Florida.
I don’t think one can talk of the problems of the old north-east industrial cities without thinking about the racial divides that turned them into centrally decayed poverty zones.
Sadly, in that respect little has changed in Cleveland since then.
Posting these is, of course, compulsory.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysmLA5TqbIY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZzgAjjuqZM&feature=related
I’m not sure if Erik was eliding the name on purpose, but the neighborhood where Great Lakes Brewery and Bier Markt/Bar Cento are is Ohio City. (And if anyone should happen to stumble across this page while wondering what there is to do while on the east side of Cleveland, there’s a fantastic beer bar, La Cave du Vin, in Coventry just up the hill from Little Italy.)
Ohio City, thank you. My memories of Ohio are already fading. Not sure what this means.
The whole Coventry neighborhood where La Cave du Vin is located has good bars and restaurants: The Winking Lizard has at least as good a beer selection, Tommy’s is THE place to go for vegetarian food, Pacific East is a perennial “best sushi in town” winner, Grumm’s sub shop is terrific . . . love the whole bunch of them. I live just the other side of Taylor Rd. and walk/bike there all the time in good weather.
[...] Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money writes at length about the effort of fellow Great Lakes city Cleveland, trapped in an identity crisis since the end [...]
It also takes patience and persistence, two qualities that were lacking in the 90s when capital was (relatively) abundant, stadiums were being built on public largess, and “quick wins” were being sought. Tellingly, the last few years of lower tax receipts have encouraged municipal and county governments to take the assets that Cleveland has in abundance (vacant land, legacy philanthropy, and people with a DIY attitude) and do things like Reimagining Cleveland.
Granted, cities don’t become world-beaters on community gardens and rain gardens, but these initiatives along with storefront renovation projects, micro-lending, and support of small enterprises all encourage an entrepreneurship culture. I confess not knowing how this gets branded, but I imagine that a rolled-up sleeve should figure prominently in a logo.
I lived in Cleveland for the first 44 years of my life. I lived and worked through several of its ‘comeback’ periods. I could talk about this, explain some of it, but who cares? It’s all behind them now, they are going to open a casino downtown. Happy days are hear again!
Sometimes I think people shouldn’t be allowed into city government until they can win a SimCity game. It’s a bad thing when the game offers you the casino – not quite as bad as the maximum security prison or the toxic waste dump, but still bad.
Years ago people whom I met who were not from the city of Chicago thought of it as the city of Al Capone and gangsters. Then Michael Jordan happened. I don’t know if you would call that rebranding, but the first thing people thought of when they thought of Chicago changed. Not that Chicago doesn’t have a million other things going for it, but that tough Capone image was the primary image for a long time and now it isn’t.
[...] here on cities regulating food trucks out of business, but the overall point is fairly sound. In the comment section for my post on Cleveland the other day, I suggested that cities trying to revitalize themselves need to spend more time creating the [...]
This may be the letter to Detroit that you mentioned. It’s also posted at Rust Wire:
http://rustwire.com/2011/03/11/michigan-business-owner-soul-crushing-sprawl-driving-us-away/