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Coastal View & Moor News Issue 19


Hollie Bush Writes A whimsical look at our area


I


’m more and more coming to the opinion that most people around me think East Cleveland is going to hell on a handcart - and the evidence for this? Well, we have arguments for and against wind farms, despite everyone expecting power at a fl ick of a switch. We have complaints about empty high street shops, despite the fact that most locals seem happy to shop at supermarkets sheds elsewhere. We have concerns about abattoirs, bus service changes and beach cleaning. We whine about council service cuts although the thought of paying more council tax to support these is also unthinkable, and we don’t even seem to know where we really live, engaging instead in endless debates about the merits or demerits of North Yorkshire, Teesside or Redcar and Cleveland.


Well, it’s true that for many, East


Cleveland is indeed a hell hole. But not in Brotton or Boosbeck, Saltburn or Skelton or even Lingdale and Loftus for that matter. This hell hole is 4,000 odd miles away. I speak of the offi cial city of East


Cleveland, Ohio. Yes, this does exist. Home to 27,217 people, 11,210 households, and 6,423 families, it is a separate part of the greater city of Cleveland. Many of us in


our East Cleveland argue that all would be well if we only had our ‘own’ council, well our US cousins do. And a fat lot of good it seems to have done them.


The other East Cleveland was once a thriving place, It was home to General Electric’s historic Nesla Park, the world’s fi rst industrial park and one of the world’s biggest electrical engineering factories. It was also the base for the US’s biggest rail marshalling yard and many machine tool companies and the main drag, Euclid Avenue, was once known as “Millionaire’s Row”. The many estates along this stretch of road included the 248-acre home of the late John D Rockefeller, “the world’s fi rst oil billionaire”. But no longer. In US urban myth, East Cleveland is now their own Beirut. Crime, municipal corruption and squalor now epitomises East Cleveland. As one local reporter there put it: “With all due respect to the Bronx and the entire state of New Jersey, it’s hard to beat East Cleveland when it comes to corruption. This suburb is known as a place where cops are routinely busted for drug dealing and allowing prisoners to escape for a bung. It’s so dysfunctional that it doesn’t know where half its water goes, and it forces its fi remen to mow parks in


their down time.” Prior to 1985 East Cleveland had been under the leadership of a Commission and City Manager. In 1985 voters grew frustrated with that form of government after two commissioners were charged with theft in offi ce,


and after a revolving door of city managers resulted in chronic instability and huge reductions in services, Citizens for Sound Government, a group of residents, led a successful petition drive to elect a ‘strong mayor’ and a fi ve-member city council. So problem solved? Well, no. Over the next two decades one mayor has ended up in the state pen after being convicted of what the local paper colourfully called ‘a smorgasbord of bribery charges.’ His successor gained offi ce despite previous convictions for manslaughter after stabbing her boyfriend to death, and her successor in turn, one Eric Brewer, came to grief after what looked to be rogue elements in the local police union releasing across the web a set of photographs showing him wearing fetching frothy girlie lingerie (and they are still there, if you are odd enough to want to look.)


All this seems to be of a piece with the place. In the richest country in the world, it is desperately poor. About 28% of all families and 32% of the entire population are below the poverty line including 45.5% of those under 18 and 22.5% of those aged 65 or over. Crime is rampant, with street drug dealers taking control of several city


blocks, and, for a time, police offi cers only responding to what they felt were ‘high priority’ calls.


Again, cruising the web, and using Google’s amazing ‘street view’ app, you can see with your own eyes just what this means. Lines of those large US traditional wooden suburban detached homes (the staple of so many soaps) are abandoned or burnt out. Instead of the Star and Stripes fl ying above the porches and verandas, trees are sprouting from inside what were once loving family homes, now ruins with no windows or roofs. The truly staggering and awful thing is that there are still people living there - but then, they have nowhere else to go.


The latest is that a new Mayor, a guy called Gary Norton, is now trying to clear up the mess. He seems to be a clean pair of hands, a local Obama for this benighted part of Ohio. But he is still in deep doo-doo. Only last month, he had to threaten locals who wanted speed enforcement cameras removed that, if they get their way, the loss of millions of dollars of revenue from waived fi nes from driving offences would mean he would have no choice but to lay off yet more police, fi re and city hall staff to make up the budget shortfall. A place that’s so bad, it can only subsist on parking and speeding fi nes? Well, good luck to Gary Norton - he needs it. But for us? Well it may be that our own little patch of East Cleveland has much more going for it than we might imagine.


Hollie Bush


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