DIRTY OLD TOWN (1977-1988)

It’s an archive in book form. With 600 shots the book won’t qualify for a nice coffee table art/documentary book, but, i’m capable. Perhaps, one day i’ll do that. If you want to see a nice book edit, view Twilight Town/Fall Town Mix which refines those two books into an art book.

Dirty Old Town is the first of a trilogy of books that views one city in the context of loss and the Rust Belt. Dirty Old Town is America’s first Rust Belt book, shot on Kodachrome 25, between 1977 and 1988. The city is purposely left anonymous, so that it can represent all of the many towns and cities that went through the same scenario. And not to stereotype it any further.

The author in 1980, where the Jefferson Avenue swing bridge was located. The Rust Belt didn’t take it out. It was a freighter that rammed it because it wasn’t opened, in 1952.

To the left is the B&O #463 jacknife lift bridge, soon to be demolished. To the left of the bridge was a Gulf Oil facility that was demolished. In the background are the remains of U S Steel’s Central furnace that dates back to 1900. That blast furnace to the left was a marvel when built, one of the biggest furnaces of its time, making mostly pig iron. To the right is the powerhouse for John Rockefeller’s Oil Refinery #1, and is the only thing left of the refinery. Off in the distance is the steeple of St. Joseph church, that was demolished in 1990. It was built in 1889, by German immigrants and was one of the most impressive churches in a city of churches. The river, of course, was known for catching fire in 1968, but it had always done that, including burning down bridges.

It’s all here the city lost almost 2/3 of its population and it’s capture includes Republic, steel, J&L Steel, US Steel, the old standard oil, refinery, numerous or boats like the Henry Steinbrenner, the Buffalo, the Calumet, as w=ell as, manufacturing plants like White Motors, Fisher Body, General Electric, Perrless Automobiles, Jordan Car Company, Forstn City Foundry, churches like St. Theodosius, St. Casimir and St. Joseph. Homes, bars, churches and factories are captured, almost all of which is gone.

You can also read the Introduction and text here.

VIEW the slideshow.

Home & Mill, Pershing Ave. _ Built 1880s, Abandoned 1989, Demolished 1995

Elizabeth Kocher's home - sitting on the edge of the bluffs over the Cuyahoga River Valley and Republic Steel Mill. It was second last home before entering the Clark Ave. Bridge, longest in this city, from the East Side. The bridge and home are gone, and Pershing Ave. deadends here, where it used to become Clark Avenue crossing over the Valley into the west sid.
The mill is still entirely operational and profitable albeit without its two coke plants.

Republic Steel, Original C-1 Blast Furnace - Built 1911, Closed 1988, Demolished 1993

The #1 Furnace outlasted, by far, its predecessor furnaces, that lined the Cuyahoga on the west side of the river where this furnace was one of four.
Two furnaces, the C-5 and C-6 are still in operation today and are located on the east side of the river.

Holmden Hill - Homes & Jones & Laughlin Basic Oxygen Plant

Originally, and briefly, a Dutch neighborhood, known as Dutch Hill, Holmden Avenue quickly filled with Polish immigrants around 1910, many working at the nearby steel mills. It was largely Polish when this picture was taken in 1980.

Paul H. Hanranhan, at the Pennsylvania Railroad Huletts - Built 1941, Scrapped 1986.

The ship was built 1941, scrapped 1986. Often mistakenly called the last Hulletts (they were second last), these were built locally in 1912, closed in 1995, mostly scrapped, except for two of the huletts which still lie on the property awaiting resurrection as a memorial.

Republic Steel, Coke Plant, Quenching Tower - Built 1916, Closed 1990, Demolished 1995

A coke plant in the middle of a city is, today, unheard of. Republic Steel, and, before that, Corrigan & McKinney. had built this large coke and coke by-products plant where the East Side ends, at the old demolished Clark Avenue Bridge.
McKinney built furnaces beginning in 1908, and, when sold to Republic in 1936, they continued the mills' expansion.

Coal Tipples - Built 1919, Closed1956, Demolished 1990

fter the Nickel Plate picked up various Cleveland rail lines, and, at the encouraging of the city, since the population increased fourfold between 1880 and 1910, numerous passenger station consolidations, rail, bridge and infrastructure upgrades occurred, particularly building gradings for crossing the numerous streets that the rail lines snaked over.
The towers are gone and half the rail lines have been torn out, but Norfolk & Southern still runs a lot of traffic through here, and into its railyards, just west of here.

Home, East 38th Street - Gone

This section of the city, all its old buildings now gone, had some of the oldest homes and churches on the east side. With the Haymarket, lower Ontario Street and everything along Woodland Avenue taken out with a community college and the meeting of a number of interstate highays, the area north of Scovill Avenue and east of East 30th Street, out to 55th Street, became the last vestige of the earliest and most polyglot neighborhoods of the city.

Payne Tavern, Payne Ave.

The tavern is still in operation today. The place has, of course, been vinyl sided, but it still serves drinks to local working-class folks at good prices.

The moderne front and asbestos shingles have been replaced with vinyl siding.

Church, Rawlins Avenue - Built 1899, Closed 2012, Demolished 2025

Originally a huge Hungarian neighborhood, the church ended up as a branch of the Hagars and closed in 2012

Home, East 36th Street - Gone

An occupied, but doomed home, in the old true inner city west of East 55th Street

Colonial Arcade - Built 1895

Built 1895, The Colonial was probably pretty classy in its day, and always held on to its grandeur. Recently gentrified, the shopping/office lane, for most of its time, had modest shops that sold hats and coins. There were small diners and barber shops with offices upstairs above the shops. At the time, in the early 1980s, it reflected the striong blue-collar majority of the city. The milieu of great, entertaining and healthy architecure for everyone, mostly working-class, was remarkable, particulalry by today's standards.

Sidaway Bridge - Built 1931, Closed 1968

Colloquially, known as the longest bridge in the world, because it connects Poland to Africa.
Translation - At once time the bridge connected two ethnic neighborhoods that was both Polish and Eastern European. The east side of the bridge, mostly Hungarian. By the sixties, all the white ethnics on the east side of the bridge, had left, and housing projects and a black population took their place. The Polish from the Hyacinth neighborhood burned the bridge during the Hough Riots in the 1960s, and it became a monument to that event if you were truly local and from Cleveland.
It was discovered about 15 years ago by the exploration/ruins crowd where it's a symbol of aesthetic masturbation, regurgitaitng the same internet research to honor its history. But none of them ever walked across it.

East Fourth Street, 1978

Lined with wig shops, bars, clothing stores, etc., it was the best street in town, if authenticity is your thing.

Corner of Starkweather Avenue and Thurman Avenue - Gone

Almost every structure is gone today, replaced by some of the highest-priced real estate in the city, but not before Tremont lingered in this condition for twenty-five years. Before that it was a down and dirty working-class paradise.
When I first began shooting the street and it's structures, a wild ass guy which storm out of the house on the right. I called him the Puerto Rican Rasputin, because his hair and beard were so wild and out of control. After explaining to him what I was doing and who I was, we became friendly, and, if I would've told him that this area of Tremont would be prime real estate in the future and your property would be worth into the millions, I think he would've gone wild with anger over saying something that could never happen.

Homes, East 34th Street - Gone

In the true inner city, west of East 55th Street, were some of the city's oldest homes.

Home, Quincy Avenue - Gone

An extremely rare style of duplex homes in 1988.

Damascus Church, East 36th Street - Gone

It was a remnant when i took the shot in 1980, now nothing remains of the oldest of the city's neighborhoods. This could easily have been a school house originall

Home, Central Avenue - Gone

The now familiar shots of old homes in the Rust Belt, overgrown with vegatation is nothing new as evidenced by this shot from 1982. Close to the center of, what was, America's sixth largest city, fifty years ago this scene looks like it could be out in the country, or, takne yesterday in the same city, thus, the length of this project, still ongoing, since 1977.

U S Steel Central Furnace Blast Furnace D - Built 1911, Closed 1978, Demolished 1984

D was an early example of the modern thin-walled furnaces. Its stoves were crowned with an industrial pediment, Alaways Work Safely - most likely since this mill, where iron had been made since the 1850s, was notorious for killing workers. I have never heard of a blast furnace called a widowmaker. They are affectionately named after women, though, but in this

William Mather Ore Boat on Winter Lock-Down, Cuyahoga River

he Mather was converted into a tourist attraction and is permanently docked three miles away on Lake Erie, part of the saviour of the Rust Belt - a leisure and service industry that took forty years to materialize.

America Republic Passing the John Dykstra - Built 1924, Mothballed 1986, Scrapped 1988

The John Dystra was part of the Henry Ford's fleet of ore carriers. The ship lasted from 1924 to 1986.
The American Republic was built in 1980, with a self-unloading mechanism that made older boats obsolete. Built to navigate the tricky, bending Cuyagoga River, it supplies the steel mills that are four miles upriver from the lake.

American Republic Upbound With Ore

To the left is the old Erie #19 Jacknife lift bridge that allowed Erie Railroad trains, loaded with iron ore, to begin the trips south to the steel mills along the Mahoning and Ohio Rivers. The large space in the background was occupied by U S Steel's Central Furnace and mill that was torn down in 1984.

Window, Valley View Porjects, The Flats

The housing projects, like many workinclass and poor homes were built on the bluffs bordering the mills and afforded a view on industry like no other.

The Flats Industrial Valley Looking East

Stacks of the Republic Basic Oxygen Plant

Republic Steel, Basic Oxygen Plant, East Side

The BOP at sunset - it seemingly never stops steaming and bleeding gas from its roof and its twin stacks. Closing in seemingly permanent bankruptcy in 2002, it was brought back on line, with the 2004 steel tariffs, and Cleveland Cliffs now runs it.

St. Theodosius Church, Homes & Smokestacks of the Sohio Refinery Powerhouse

Saint Theodosius is framed by the powerhouse smokestacks of the old Standard Oil Refinery Number One. Built by Rockefeller, it was probably the first truly large scale refinery producing multiple oil products.The old homes at the base of the church are gone today. In fact, the entire bluffs were packed with houses on terraced and steep streets  heading into the industrial Valley. They began to disappear in the 50s.

West Seventh Street, Entrance to Tremont from Flats

There were parts of the city in the eighties that became cut off because so many bridges were closed because of deterioration. The Tremont neighborhood, sitting on a penisula of land, that was only accesible by numeros bridges, was particularly hard hit. Tremont is where the longest bridge in the city, straddling the indstrial valley, was closed in 1978, and many smaller access bridges in the Flats were shut down, while the large Abbey Road Bridge from the north was also shut and demolished