Signs of life in Tremont:

Human invention is a “sign” of hope and optimism, or at least that people do not totally regret life.

-Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Happiness Myth

On Saturday afternoon I had the pleasure of kayaking (with boyfriend and his canoeing co-workers) the Upper Cuyahoga River. The seven miles downstream on the river to the Camp Hi Livery was placid, and I was reminded how good green smells and how sonorous springtime should be; we were accompanied by bird song, dragonfly buzz and bull-frog blats as we paddled/floated along.

Today, I was in Cleveland walking between Ohio City and Tremont, lamenting the cement-shored-up Cuyahoga of my neighborhood; disbelieving it is even connected to the river I kayaked just a couple of days ago. Walking over the Abbey Avenue Bridge, I stopped to smell the tree blossoms along the hillside leading to the tracks along Train Avenue. I jumped when I saw a pair of eyes looking back at me. At first, I assumed it was just someone hanging out in the trees (for a variety of reasons, none of which I cared to analyze), but I soon realized that they were not human eyes. It was a large doe.

My first reaction was sadness. I was sad for the deer, and her kin, who are eking out an existence along the narrow strip of post-industrial green between the river and the train tracks. My second, and longer-lasting reaction, was hopefulness. The reason I stopped to smell, was the same reason the deer was there. Nature abhors a vacuum. Could the space left by departed industry be slowly filling with good growing things?

I looked into this peaceful animal’s eyes. Despite the drone of traffic, I was transported to the past and potential of our Cuyahoga—the verdant growth, the bird song, the hillside sloping down to the river. She stared at me for about 30 seconds before she turned and went in the other direction.

I went to the Twilight Hike in the Natural Flats and the Shrinking Cities exhibit at SPACES Gallery, but today was the first time I viscerally understood the potential for a “shrinking city” to embrace compactness and to truly become something different. A deer on Abbey Avenue, I had no idea.

I took this picture at the University Circle Rapid Station. The fine print at the bottom reads: "GRAFFITI IS A PUNISHABLE OFFENSE A PUBLIC NUISANCE AND MUST BE ABATED PER PUBLIC CODE 3101"

The weird thing about the sign is that I couldn't read the print until I took a picture of it with my camera and then zoomed in on it. I wasn't sure if the sign (tacked to a bulletin board) was a joke put up by graffiti artists or part of a guerilla campaign cooked up by the city to deter graffiti artists.

The graffiti is one of the few aesthetically pleasing sights on the red line from Tower City to University Circle. Personally, I'd like the city to focus on cleaning up the piles of tires, refrigerators, and blue toxic waste barrels and leave the aerosol artists alone for now.

I took a walk around Tremont yesterday and wandered into a new gallery on Professor Avenue. The gallery space was, until recently, some sort of drapery or upholstery store.

The Paul Duda Gallery opened for the first time during Friday's Art Walk. Paul is not new to the gallery scene and has had a gallery in Brecksville for almost twenty years. The gallery on Professor is a wide-open, uncluttered space and Paul said that he'd be willing to share the space with groups who need a reception or meeting space.

I talked with Paul about his photography; his photos look almost like paintings, they are printed on canvas and mounted like paintings. Many of his photographs are of Cleveland's cityscapes and landscapes.


My favorite (on the right) is a photograph Paul took on this year's snowy Valentine's Day at Edgewater Park. I can't afford the original, but Paul sells nice looking prints for $35.

Paul is no stranger to the neighborhood; he has lived in Tremont for six years. He has some ideas for how the gallery owners could work together, including having unified business hours. Paul's idea is that people will travel from afar to the neighborhood to visit the galleries, if they were all open for business--making it worth the trip.

I went to two community meetings tonight; both had to do with my involvement in a new middle-school, after-school arts program that will begin this fall at Mound Elementary School in Slavic Village. The program, The Slavic Village Players, is simple: an after-school arts program, one afternoon a week for 12 weeks each semester. Each semester culminates in a performance for family, friends and the community.

The first meeting was at the Carnegie West Library in Ohio City for Neighborhood Connections, a program of the Cleveland Foundation. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the nuts and bolts of collecting the grant money awarded to us by the program, but the most interesting part of the meeting happened during the introductions. Each organization present introduced the name of their program, the neighborhood it will serve and the goals of the program. This meeting is one of many that Neighborhood Connections is having around Cleveland, yet I was amazed at the number and the creativity of the grassroots community programming represented.

There were many, many organizations who received funding for urban community gardens; I counted about ten groups at this meeting alone. I also learned about the Ben Franklin Community Garden in Old Brooklyn, which is a five acre garden that provides food for area hunger centers.

Community groups were also awarded funding to plant trees, to create walking groups and to provide arts and youth programs. Neighborhood Connections also funded a program that provides strollers to mothers who cannot afford them, a program to provide school supplies and book bags to indigent children and a program to fund a new African Dance group at Tri-C Metro. I left the meeting feeling fortunate to have shared a room with such a committed and motivated group of community-minded individuals.

The second meeting was at Slavic Village Development. The meeting was with Cleveland Public Art and ParkWorks to talk about the public art project pending for Cleveland's first rails-to-trails project on the Morgana Run Trail.

The Morgana Run Trail runs from East 49^th and I-77 to the Mill Creek Falls off of Fleet Avenue. This trail connects Slavic Village to both the Garfield Reservation as well as the Ohio and Erie Canal Towpath Trail.

Architect Christopher Diehl, the new director of the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, part of the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Kent State, unveiled his visions for public art projects along the trail, an appropriate combination of urban-space and green-space. He spoke about not wanting to “add something, but to find something already there (along the trail) and charge it with more meaning and emphasis”.

Diehl's ideas include creating a pixelated mural on a long industrial building; converting a house adjacent to the trail head into a work of public art to be seen from I-77; and painting convenience stores and an abandoned building to mark the route when the trail converges with city streets for a couple of blocks.

His preliminary images were thought-provoking and left plenty of space for community involvement—that’s where The Slavic Village Players come in. We are looking for community arts projects in which the students could participate. The Morgana Run Trail is near Mound Elementary and being involved in this project could be an ideal fit for our program.

I received this poem in the mail on Friday from my best friend from college. I love getting real mail from a real friend.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

-Mary Oliver

I planted broccoli, tomato, basil, brussels sprouts and cayenne peppers in the middle of March. I knocked over a couple of the tomato pots pre-sprout and my cat knocked over some of the basil. Despite being knocked around a bit, some of the seeds have achieved sprout status.

This morning I pried apart wooden pallets and this afternoon, with help, reassembled them into a raised vegetable garden bed.

Last week I checked out the Girl Culture photography exhibit at the Gallery in Trinity Commons. I recommend the exhibit to anyone who has the time to check it out, but I confess that I left Trinity feeling a little disturbed.

The photographs were selected from some of Lauren Greenfield's books and are photo-journalistic in style. Greenfield collected images of females at fat camps, at inpatient eating disorder clinics, at charm schools, playing dress-up, backstage at strip clubs and other uncomfortable and disordered female situations.

Had I looked at just one or two of the photographs, my reaction would have been, "well, it is too bad for those poor women and boy don't they have problems." However, the pervasiveness of society's unreasonable expectations for women is undeniable when the photos are viewed as a group and I admit my place on that neurotic continuum even though I try to rise above it.

Girl Culture is at the Gallery at Trinity Commons until April 28, 2007.
Exhibit Hours:
Tuesday: 10-6 Friday: 10-6
Wednesday: 1-8 Saturday: 10-3
Thursday: 10-6 Sunday: 10-3
Closed Monday