ELIZABETH KOCHER’S NEIGHBORHOOD

“The Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp. (Cleveland Works) began in 1873 when CHAS. A. OTIS with 2 associates formed the Otis Iron & Steel Co. It was the first firm in America formed exclusively to make acid, open-hearth steel. Under Samuel T. Wellman’s guidance, the new Otis mill on the lakeshore at E. 33rd St. produced its first basic open-hearth steel in 1880. Although British interests purchased the firm in 1889, management remained in local hands. In 1912 it was incorporated as the Otis Steel Co. and built a new plant along the CUYAHOGA RIVER near Jennings Rd. By 1919 the Riverside plant acquired the facilities of the adjacent Cleveland Furnace Co., organized in 1902 by David T. Croxton to produce pig iron…”

And on it went, with the Kocher home having almost a bird’s eye or drone’s eye view on the growth of the third largest steel district in America. The closest mill was the Corrigan-McKinney that became Republic, then LTV, followed by ISG, and, then Arcelor Mittal and today is owned and operated by local Cleveland Cliffs. Today it still appears as the Grand Canyon of heavy industry, and folks like Elizabeth Kocher and her family lived amidst it, and witnessed its growth.

The mills further to the west across the river and visible from the family’s front yard was J & L Steel. Today Cleveland Cliffs owns it all, both sides of the river, and it’s a rare case of an active integrated steel mill lying with an American city, in this case, its very center.

Elizabeth Kocher’s home was 320 degrees of  integrated steel mills – Jones & Laughlin and Republic Steel, now Cleveland Cliffs, today the second largest steelmaker in the country, and still located in the city of Cleveland.

The industrial era unfolded beneath homes, built on the bluffs, that were built in the 1880s on the brink of the the quickly developing industrial revolution in America, that was filling the Cuyahoga River Valley with nothing but industry. Corrigan-Mckinney was bought by The Otis Steel Company that appeared in 1912 with a huge steel-making plant using the open hearth process, and, by 1930, Republic Steel, took it over from Otis and would continue to expand its steel-making operations, eventually building its huge basic oxygen plant next to the now obsolete open hearth plant, and expanding the Coke Works, across the street from the Kocher home. By 1980 Republic had become LTV Steel, which, in turn, would become ISG steel in 2002, then Arcelor Mittal and finally Cleveland Cliffs who owns it all today, and its the only integrated old school steel mill in America that is within a large city’s borders, let alone in its heart, like here in the city of Cleveland, albeit without its two coke plants.

In Cleveland there was a bridge, the city’s longest, called the Clark Avenue Bridge. It connected the east and west side of the city 4 miles south of downtown and Lake Erie. It traversed the Industrial Valley including the Cuyahoga River which determines the east and west sides. Historically, both were rivals or just plain not interested in each other, but, particularly closer to downtown, that rivalry is disappearing. The difference between the east and west side exists in the city in the Industrial Valley neighborhood, that had, at one time, only one link, a 6,687 foot long bridge, and that’s quite a difference – disconnecting the classic working-class neighborhoods of the southeast and Southwest sides, where the city’s greatest concentration of heavy industry lies, and where the commercial shopping districts of Broadway and West 25th were directly linked, at one time, by the bridge.

Only one neighborhood in the city lies in both the east and west sides. The Clark Avenue Bridge was its center and link. The Industrial Valley has more land and the least residents of all city neighborhoods. In the 2010 the Industrial Valley had a total of 503 residents. These were residents that were  left, because, by the fifties, many of the streets and homes that ran down the bluffs of the Valley had been demolished – left as hillside or absorbed by mill expansion or the building of freeways, which took out multiple sections of streets on top of the bluffs on the east side.    On the west side, directly across the Valley from the Kocher home, the same erosion of little sub-neighborhoods and streets that lined the bluffs, had been taking place since the fifties. Some streets disappeared entirely – Clarence Court and St. Tikhon Street below St. Theodosius Church.

Mr. Kocher’s home was built in 1883 which was twenty years prior to the the massive steel-making infrastructure that replaced the iron industry in the Flats. The Grasselli Chemical Works and the Standard Oil Refinery #1 were about two miles north, and, in 1883 the home sitting on the bluffs had a broad beautiful view of all this emerging industry. Cleveland would become the third largest district of steel output, Standard Oil would be considered the first oil company, becoming the monster monopoly and Grasselli Chemicals was the pre-cursor to Dow.

After years of population loss, mirroring the city, the Industrial Valley has almost doubled in population since 2010, due largely to the gentrification of Tremont that has made living next to an operational integrated steel mill normal for even the really well-off, and that’s big change.

The mills would expand into these former residential blocks, like on the east side where Republic Steel’s Coke Plant took out a large hillside packed with homes. But even today there are still a few streets, snaggletoothed with homes and spaces, that are close to the one large remaining steel mill. Over the years some seemed like they were inside it.

Expansion today on the bluffs of the Industrial Valley is not always industry and transportation anymore, but housing. Ironically, it’s the luxury housing on the gentrified west side of the valley that is making the location desirable to a new class of people.

On the east side of the Industrial Valley, Elizabeth Kocher’s home was on north side of Pershing Avenue and was the second home on the right before hitting the bridge. Across the street, old buildings like hers, dating back to the 1880s, still existed and lined the streets, four years after the bridge’s closure, but were abandoned, as was the home that was next door to hers on Pershing, which was the last home before leaving this peninsula of land before the bridge took you over the river and the mills to the west side and more sub-hoods of the Industrial Valley.

Phillip Yarrish grew up doors away from Ms. Kocher and never forgot his remarkable neighborhood.

East 49th Place, is a two block long street that began, and dead ended Pershing Avenue to the north and the large Republic Steel coke plant to the south. There was one occupied home and one that was abandoned in 1980 on East 49th Place. The occupied home was demolished in 2009, but a family lived there until 2006. This home had no front yard and sat right on the dirt street. If you walked out the door, took five steps and stood, you would have a photographer’s eye-view of a giant coke plant in operation from 1912 until it was demolished in 1996. The folks that lived here, could, in 1996, for the first time, breathe fairly clean air and see all the way over to the West Side.

To the southeast, the neighborhood extended further out into the valley, and there were many homes, like Ms. Kocher’s, on its terraced streets, in another long gone sub-neighborhood that the mill devoured, including gouging back the hillside bluffs until, they ended at the Willow Freeway, Interstate 77, that also was a place where many more homes and streets were taken out of the Industrial Valley, this time, for freeway expansion.

After the Clark Bridge closed, the neighborhood became more isolated, and there might have been cheat spots and illegal bars around, including a notorious Cleveland Police hangout, the Owl Club, but even that disappeared.

In Ms. Kocher’s backyard, in a huge space partially dug out of the bluffs, was the East Side basic oxygen plant that is still in full operation today, as well as, the abandoned open hearth stacks – fourteen of them, that were operational for over seventy years, before sitting abandoned for another 35 years before their demolition in 2014.

The Kocher residence was out on a spit of land and surrounded in almost 360 degrees of heavy industry, including some of industry’s blackest arts and over one hundred years of changing steel technology that saw no mitigation in its pollution until the seventies. If that wasn’t enough, to the east, just blocks north, Interstate 77 took out a huge swath of the neighborhood, creating a north south barrier to the east along with the dead bridge and raging industrial valley.

By the 1980s there was no traffic at all and few people, just the mills, in the once bustling section of Pershing Avenue.

In Cleveland, in the Industrial Valley neighborhood, which in the 2010 census, had 603 residents, on a spit of land on top of the bluffs over a valley and river, Pershing Avenue ends, at what use to be the Clark Avenue Bridge. Cleveland’s longest bridge is the one connecting Clark Avenue across the Cuyahoga Valley. It was built by the city of Cleveland in 1917, at a cost of $1,398,000, and had two street car tracks. It is largely of steel construction, 11,173 tons having been used. The total length of the bridge is 6,687 feet, the steel work alone being 5,992 feet in length.” And bys such the commercial hibs of Broadway and West 25th Street were directly linked.Not to mention the fact that if you wanted to shoot over to either the west side or the east side to drink in the taverns and bars then the Clark Avenue bridge was for you. When the bridge closed in 1978 liquor, cigarettes, gasoline and bars were cheap and plentiful, whose taxes would go on to help build stadiums for the local sports franchises, in the nineties, when the working-class had already suffered so much loss it wasn’t funny.

Here, on the east side of the city, and on to the west side of town, where the bridge heads, the old original immigrant neighborhoods still hang on, although snaggletoothed, and more Appalachian and generic poor white, they survive. If you’re into distinctions, there also might be blacks, whites or Spanish folks living in and around steel mills, and the biggest thing, defining their lives, one thing they all share is they are kinda poor. And in Cleveland, the last city to have an entire integrated steel mill in their borders, poor whites live around the mills, like in Detroit where the famous Great Lakes Mill, now owned by U S Steel closed in 2020, or Mingo, Weirton, Middletown, Bethlehem, if you’re counting, realizing a generality and stereotype is ideology not reality. I know, genrally, poorer folks live close to the mills. I don’t care what color they happen to be.

I’ve worked around and shot all the steel mills of the Rust Belt. Within the towns and cities of the Rust Belt, the neighborhoods closest to the mills all share one thing in common, they are poor, and at best, on the economic level, working class. Nothing fancy, no people that are well-off, and, in fact, usually dirty, gritty and, of course, polluted. The racial and religious make-up of these places doesn’t interest me too much, Braddock and Gary are predominately black, but formerly white, while in Mingo Junction and Weirton, those closest to the mill happen to be mostly white, and, of course, blacks. AK Steel in Middletown Ohio had mostly white folks living nearby, especially close to the now closed and often criticized coke plant, and their mill in Ashland Kentucky, shut down in 2017, is cut off to any residential neighborhoods by a highway and large commercial strip. Likewise in East Chicago and Gary with the greatest concentrations of blast furnaces in America, highways seal in the vast industrial lands. Not much housing, although there is the famous Marktown neighborhood.

Slag Valley in the old Chicago steel district was a poor black slum, but, in the same South Deering neighborhood had Jews originally living in Jeffrey Manor, that became such a flashpoint for race. Eastern Europeans were closest to the Wisconsin Steel mill, and one of the most powerful men in Chicago history, Eddie Vrdolak, had South Deering as his turf and home.  Across the Calumet River where the more ideal residential neighborhoods were located, were the same mix of Croatians, Slovenians, Romanians, et al. While East Chicago, home to many steel mills is a black city. It’s hard to pin down the social make-up, in any general way, of these mill towns, cities and neighborhoods beyond being poor and working-class, and, besides these few paragraphs preceding, it’s what I tend to see first. I do know that people leave these places. Some leave and always return, sometimes with a camera.

Weirton, the city and the mill, are completely intertwined geographically, including its main streets and downtown business district, and, like Mingo’s the whole environment is set into the mill itself. It reeks of steel and class, one kind. But with their many cultures, foods, music, languages and religions that came with them.

What I have seen that historically, and today, in some mill towns, the closer to the mill, the worse off you were. But it wasn’t always as bad in other mill towns. It wasn’t great, but it was ok, cheap, and folks stayed there, surrounded by old Rust Belt towns with cheap rents and houses. Some, like Elizabeth Kocher and her multi-generational family, lived, as though, they were in the confines of the mill, between a huge coke pant and a huge basic oxygen plant. About the nastiest places for a neighborhood of residencies to exist, but they were there for probably 65 years or more. Remember that the Kocher family had lived there in a multi-generational home for over sixty ears and longer.

Many Slovaks and other Eastern European immigrants that worked the mills, didn’t come from urban areas, but farms, where hard times had necessitated a job shift in another country. But it was still basic labor, so it was a good fit. It’s always hard to figure exact numbers of Slovenian, Croatian, Polish, Hungarian, Slovak, etc., since many men simply worked in America, sending money back home, until they could return home. How many did this is unknown, as well as, how many didn’t officially land here. But when you have cities where enclaves of Hungarians and Slovenians were the largest outside of Europe, where they formed neighborhoods based on location to the mills and factories and, most importantly,  their church that the wages paid for, and that they they worshiped at.

Yet in every neighborhood, including the ones that went into the history books as one ethnic places, there were mixtures and exceptions. In this case, we have Austrian immigrants, but, let’s face, it when it came to the Austria-Hungarian empire or pre-Checklosovakia and Yugoslavia there were similar mixtures, and boundaries back then, are nothing like boundaries today.

There is the basic social climbing of any class, and, generally, and historically, as the family improved by working at the mill, and saving money by living cheaply and closer to the plant, they could move to a better part of town. Yet, even close proximity to the steel mill’s hot ends, the most polluting, there were places, like Mingo, where people stayed. Only the blast furnace neighborhoods in Weirton could be called mill slums, while the south side of the city bordering the rest of the mill, including the Basic Oxygen Plant and strip mills, had many long-term folks.

Back in 1981 to 1984, in the Industrial Valley of Cleveland, I knew the remaining Eastern Europeans, mostly Polish, by shooting in the area so much, and hanging out locally. Of course, there were mostly widows left on the bluffs of the valley, their husbands having worked in the mills and died earlier.

By the time I shot her home, anyone who worked at the mill definitely would live further out in the city in a quiet, cheap place close to all that is needed, and many live in their suburbs The freeways gets you to central Cleveland’s mills quickly anyways, but everyone I know who works there lives in Cleveland, only a couple of miles away. By the seventies you’re not going to find a lot of folks living in the Industrial Valley and walking to work at the big mill. And today you’re just lucky, to have an actual union mill job.

It’s the steel mills that makes the Kocher place like no other, because these small neighborhoods were as close to the mills as you could get, and, considering the industry itself was the largest and unhidden major polluter, and was unabated for years, its presence was sensed constantly by smell, taste, sight and sound. When given the opportunity, the steel companies would buy homes and streets of homes to expand their operations, some of which,  might as well have been in the mill. After one hundred years of running free, the mills have slowly decreased their pollution, and it is polluting today, but far less. Both coke plants were demolished in the nineties. But just the fact that there is a 765 acre integrated steel mill in the very middle of the city today is phenomenal.

Forty years ago, when these shots were taken, the place was a classic, smelly, smokey industrial black arts site, which had many more polluting sections, such as those two coke plants and triple the number of blast furnaces, that have, over the years closed and been torn down. 

Steel mill sounds are loud and varied, and to live by the mills is to hear, around the clock, trains, foghorns, hissing, clanking, clanging, scraping, humming and explosions to accompany the notorious stench, and the multi-aromatic emissions of the coke plants and blast furnaces.

If that wasn’t enough, one of the city’s major bridges dumped traffic right outside your door in a bankrupt city, until it just fell apart with no funds to fix it.

In a city of bridges, the Clark Avenue Bridge was the city’s longest. Built in 1911, and traversing the Cuyahoga River Valley, literally vaulting over and threading through the heart of the steel mills themselves, making it the most dramatic of locations in industrial terms, and for driving, since the bridge, depending on the weather, could be shrouded in steam and smoke from making steel below, dangerous for drivers.

Most bridges that cross the Cuyahoga are pretty far north, close to the downtown section. The Clark Bridge, in the south, joined the great working-class immigrant neighborhoods of the east and west sides, and was smokey and busy.

The bridge, needing costly repairs because the chemicals from the mills ate it up with corrosion, had to be sacrificed in a broke city. Workers below complained of falling debris, the deck had holes you could easily fall into. It was shutdown in 1976 and left in organic descent until demolition began in 1984. I did the shots of Kocher’s place during the time it was closed around 1980.

By then no one was left on Pershing Avenue where it begins at the old bridge, except for Ms. Kocher. The houses and stores were there but no one lived or worked in an area that, four years ago, was a major crossing for the city. 

East 49th Street, that dead ends at Pershing to the north, and Jewett Street has about ten homes left and even today they are occupied, but after the closing of the bridge, Ms. Kocher was the last left along Pershing Avenue. To the south of Pershing was the coke plant and a dead-end street that has been obliterated over the years, East 44th Place. Where it dead-ended at the bluffs over the coke plant, there was a home that remained occupied until around 2007. Even in 1980 it was the last occupied home on the block which had one other house and it was boarded up.

I’ve been to all the neighborhoods, enclaves and streets that lie closest to all the mills in America – Weirton, Braddock, Cleveland, Detroit, Youngstown, Johnstown – both working and shooting and hanging out there, with people I know, and I never saw anything like this street, which felt and looked like it was in the mill, and coke plant itself, the most polluting section of any mill.

Many streets that lined the walls of the bluffs over the valley have been wiped out. Famous streets of homes close to heavy industry include St. Tikhon Street, St. Olga Street, Dille Avenue and Clarence Court, depicted in Cora Oltman’s painting of the scene behind St. Theodosius Church, on the west side bluffs of the Industrial Valley. And over on the east side bluffs, swaths of terraced streets filled with homes, and a bigger swath of neighborhood strrets to the north and east that the interstate took. 

Clarance Court was recently “honored” by this. Today high-end housing, some of the city’s most expensive have taken over the area.

The human side of dwelling in an heavy industrialized neighborhood, is captured by the photographs of Elizabeth Kocher, here, where it’s simply a life, like most others, with the exception of the presence of a rather large steel mill or two. Two movies, a Christmas Story and the Deer Hunter were both filmed in Cleveland’s Industrial Valley. Holmden Hill is featured in scenes, of a drunken DeNiro stumbling down the incline, and, of course, Saint Theodosius church. The home of Ralphie in Christmas Story was a west side industrial valley neighborhood, where homes sit on the bluffs overlooking the steel mills, and, ironically, today, Ralphie’s home is a renovated tourst attraction.

An existing mill-and-homes street is Holmden Avenue aka, Holmden Hill, aka, Dutch Hill, on the west side that, that rolls down and ends at the west side basic oxygen plant and caster.

The East Side Basic Oxygen Plant of Republic Steel which is still in operation today, as is the west side BOP, and is owned by Cleveland Cliffs. Over on Pershing Avenue, the open hearth furnaces that shut down in the seventies and remained until Arcelor Mittal bought the plant in 2005 were finally demolished. Mrs. Kocher had the old open hearth furnaces and basic oxygen plant in her backyard, while directly across the street was Republic Steel’s huge coke and by-products plant, and, when the Clark Bridge was open, adding the congestion of a one of the city’s major roads and longest crossings, it was truly an industrial-age city neighborhood, extremely so, and one of the “baddest” I’ve seen and I’ve seen and shot them all.

The drone or birds eye view is a worthwhile perspective. To see ourselves and all we have built from above is loaded with data. We look like ants or herd animals from above. Aerials over Mrs. Kocher’s neighborhood are devoid of people, and there is only infrastructure There are some good ideas that can come out of that, but I can’t dwell there, besides i prefer the perspective of time-lapse which is packed with more info.

Of course, it all changes when you are on the ground and close, with people, places and things.

She came to this place from a farm in Ohio where her family had settled after coming here from Europe, or did she? She ended up on Pershing Avenue soon after. Perhaps, the closing of the bridge, and Pershing Avenue becoming a dead-end, along with the birth of the Rust Belt itself, made things quiet down a bit, but as far as gardening is concerned, it was still way too toxic, but go just blocks outside the valley rim streets, and the European immigrants, many who were from farms in Europe, took care of a lot of their own food needs, in what is called urban farming today. And the immigrants grew food on the slopes as well. A well-known painting depicts this – Russian and European immigrant women harvesting and working below the domes of Theodosius. Today’s urban farming done in wasted Rust Belt cities is reinvention of what was always here.

We talked many times about the air quality around this area, and folks here don’t have to be enlightened about it or its ill effects on health. Ms. Kocher was cognizant of her situation, not obsessed by it. It was her every day experience for a very long time. She spoke of how Case Western Reserve University had done extensive testing and investigation into the area’s health effects, and found that this neighborhood was tops in respiratory negatives and sheer amount of pollution. She showed me growths and sores of unknown origin. Even today with the city sliding from the sixth largest to the fifty-fourth largest city and pollution controls enacted, the city is always amongst the top ten ozone polluters.

Still, Ms. Kocher lived long enough to see the closure of the bridge, coke plant and open hearth furnaces, as well as, their demolition, except for the hearths plant. But not long enough to see the entire complex of mills go silent and dark, when for the first time it all shutdown. LTV filed for bankruptcy protection on December 31, 2000, and was sold in 2002 for 325 million, and all its steel plants went to a temporary buyer of distressed companies, called ISG. Which gave the opportunity to slide int the complex and grab shots. These mills had the most advanced equipment and work force in the world making the most sophisticated types of specialty steel, and went silent, because it could not compete globally. However, by weathering the storm, until the next uptick in prices, a gold mine in profits might happen.

Ms. Kocher missed all that, when the mills went dark and silent and, also, when they roared back. By 2006, American steel manufacturers were the darlings of Wall Street. Steel companies had their highest percentage gain on value in their history and the biggest gainer of that year, by far, on the NASDAQ was Allegheny Technologies, ranking only 455th on the Fortune 500. US Steel reached its highest share price ever, by far. And all because, the steel recession after 9/11 was so severe that the American metals industry, also a strategic national asset, might finally be disappearing for good, and that convinced Bush to enact tariffs.

But, ya know, those who have been there don’t need to be informed. It’s clear that it’s nowhere near an ideal place to live, unless it’s your home, you work close by, just got here, been there forever or just got stuck there. That’s up to you, because whether its good or bad, there is no choice in its overcoming – either stay or work hard to get out. On that level these folks never bitched, but dealt with things and if they wanted to move out, they could, but had to work harder to get out, And then there were folks, born there, from there, and just wanted to stay on tha level.

The 1920 census reports, Margaret Kocher, age 38, was living in Cleveland’s Industrial Valley. She is Elizabeth’s mother-in-law, and Elizabeth married Margaret’s son, Steve. Twenty years later, Elizabeth Kocher, according to the 1940 census, had two sons living with her in a multi-generational home, and her mother-in-law, Margaret, the head of the household, as Steve Kocher Sr. died in 1942. Ms. Kocher did mention to me in 1980 that her husband had died, Margaret Kocher’s son, Steve, had married Elizabeth and had passed in 1967. Also Elizabeth told me that she didn’t move to Pershing Avenue directly from Austria, but from a farm in rural Ohio before moving to Cleveland. She was a native of Ohio, and, like the Kocher family, ended up on a bluff in Cleveland’s Industrial Valley where some of this family lived out their entire lives.

When she told me her husband had died, Steve Jr., I assumed, he worked in the mill, and his father had died at the same age, as well, and that could have had something to do with his job or environment. I never knew that for sure, since we were friends getting to know one another, and I wasn’t doing a documentary, expose or research on the effects of the pollutants on one’s health. But I was hanging out with Elizabeth of 4305 Pershing Avenue. She was the last inhabitant there, and had been there most of her life, fifty years or more. Elizabeth Kocher, a really nice person, always friendly and optimistic as well as completely aware and real about her home, age, health and neighborhood, the Industrial Valley, and like any friend, eventually she tells her story, although she would pass on January First, 1995, meaning she left Pershing Avenue not long after i shot her there in the early 1980s, so we never got to know each other much more.

Elizabeth never told me the circumstances by which she came here. When we hung out she always looked like any other immigrant woman with house dress and babushka, in the center of the American steel industry, in 1980, but, it seems, she was from Ohio, and had arrived in Cleveland from there, not Europe.

In 1940, the census records five people living in the home, that was built in 1880. Elizabeth was listed as daughter-in-law to the head of the household. Margaret Kocher, married to Steve, Margaret’s son has two children living with them on Pershing. The head of the household, Margaret, was 57 years old in 1940, and, she, the matriarch of the household, was born in Austria in 1883, three years after her future American home was built.

When Steve Kocher was born about 1906, his mother, Margaret, was 23. In 1940, he was 34 years old and lived in Cleveland, Ohio, with his wife, Elizabeth, 2 sons, mother, and brother.

It’s possible that there were only two families that had ever lived here, and the Kochers could have gotten here any time after 1905. It’s ok to not know. Can you imagine living here so long through the war years then into the prosperous fifties and sixties when the American steel industry was the dominant producer and the mills that surrounded the families living in the industrial valley were belching out pollutants unabated, which they had done from 1880s through the 1960s?

And outside her front door was the entrance to the main east/west artery. If you worked at the mill and lived on the east side of the valley there was a the staircase on the bridge for access the floor of the valley. but that access and avenue to the west side would close in 1978. It seems the roads and bridges they built after the fifties, didn’t consider the neighborhood too much. It was strictly flyover territory by then, on the way to new suburbs and neighborhoods.

In the fifties Interstate 77 took out a huge swath of the neighborhood running north and south and just two blocks to the east of the Kocher home. But when the Clark Bridge closed in 1976, the Pershing Avenue neighborhood became isolated in the sense that, instead of Pershing becoming Clark Avenue and the west side, it would dead-end where the longest bridge in the city once stood, the major linkage over the industrial flats that was between downtown and the lake and the city’s southern border. All the businesses shut down, the homes abandoned, but for three, and everything going into a slow organic descent until no trace of the structures remain, replaced by commercial and industrial businesses next to a major interstate that took out most of the neighborhood.

Just south is another interstate – 490, that was supposed to traverse the valley back in the seventies, via a huge bridge,  just north of the old Clark Bridge, but 490 dead ended at the valley, and was like that, until the nineties, which made it very difficult to go on either side of the Industrial Valley until the 490 bridge was built. This was when the already  isolated sub-neighborhoods of the Valley hit their peak isolation, a far cry from the seventies and before when they were not isolated at all, in fact, folks wanted in.

Getting back to the ethnic identity of the Kocher family, they have been listed in the 1920s and the 1940 census as coming from Austria, but also Slovakia. This makes complete sense given the history of the times. Slovakia sat on top of Hungary, which became part of the Astro Hungarian Empire, but was broken up in World War I, then it would get mixed up in Nazi politics and borders and ethnic designations changed once more, only to change again after World War II, becoming an independent state in 1993, after communist occupation from 1945 -1993. 

The instability of wars and conflicts skewered ethnic identities, on the level of borders and social unrest, but not identity with the given nationality. But that’s all right, as long as we got America, a home  like no other, for many different types of folks, some of whom found a new life forged in America, on a bluff that had a view on the growth of American industry and cities, that, entwined, grew exponentially, and became, at one time, great cities.

Judging by their parishes and funeral homes, the family was solidly Slovak.

The Kochers, their name meaning cooks, in German, got out of the Slovak region before much of this historic instability, but, of course, not all of it

This generation didn’t see, so much, the dangers of pollution, but an opportunity. But if they ever wanted to do something about it, that would take some unity, wouldn’t it? 

On August 24, 1995 the Kocher house was sold for 5,000 dollars. It, too, was demolished. Mrs. Elizabeth Kocher died on January 1, 1996.

Perhaps because I have documented steel mill neighborhoods in all the steel towns and cities, lived in some of them and living for more than half my life in the most polluted section of New York’s industrial heartland, i just see them as the ultimate working-class enclaves in the sense of proximity to the heavy industry.

In Cleveland the neighborhoods and their sub-neighborhoods, originally forming along ethnic lines were part of the mills, geographically and physically, and formed by what was always the reason to live in this part of town – poverty and proximity to the steel mills in a city that doesn’t attract poor immigrants from overseas, and in a country that never thinks about the steel industry anymore. For instance, in Cleveland’s Industrial Valley neighborhood, on the east side, located on the heights and bluffs, some terraced with homes, the mills could gouge into the existing streets, if given the chance, to expand their operations, leaving homes, where, your front door, leads out into a vista of heavy, dirty industry, operating every day around the clock. Of course, today it’s hard to imagine the hillside crowded with homes and people wanting to live there. Almost as hard as it is to imagine million dollar town houses that exist on the same bluffs on the west side, today in Tremont. 

They come and go. On the west side of the valley on Holmden Hill, a vertical version of Ms. Kocher’s neighborhood, I used to talk with an old Polish woman whose home I shot and would continue to do so today, but it’s no longer there. Now i shoot the house next door, abandoned since 2000. I’ve taken pictures out the windows of the old home next door which, with all the houses to the east demolished, provides a nice view, that I share with the young homeless guy who sleeps there, close to the west side BOP and Caster, very close.

It’s sort of still the same, yet a far cry from what it was back in the 1980s when I was shooting Mrs. Kocher. Today people who live close to the mill wish they could work there, but they see it, hear it and smell it every day. It’s normal for them.

The heavy ethnic scene is long gone, still alive, perhaps in some movies filmed here, but it was really something in its day. It seemed that every woman had the same story of a husband dying and she living many years after. In the case of Mrs. Kosher it was 28 years.

They come and they go. It’s a place where some people get their start, some get pushed out and some people stay. One thing common to them all, is their class in the life of this city, and that’s what i see. I don’t break up the world into groups, according to indentity politcs.

Republic Steel – Basic Oxygen Pant Stacks – still operational today as Cleveland Cliffs, outlving, by far, the generations that worked and lived there.

It’s a rare scene in a city today, but it’s still here and is working always. Folks come and go, neighborhoods fade to nothing, but the mills keep going, at least, in this town.