Beaver Heights, like many of the places RealStill captures, was done fully, which means, over many years, until there was, basically, nothing left, except the pictures of the people, places and things from another lost neighborhood.
East 65th Street & Beaver Avenue, (1996-2000). East 65th ended at the railroad cut, one block north. By this time most of the homes had disappeared in Beaver Heights, but the abandonment was unrelenting and wouldn’t let up until its slowing by around 2015.
The Triangle was an area of the city formed from five separate neighborhoods marked by the huge triangular configurations of the main drags of Woodland and Kinsman Avenues, that eventually formed the outer triangle’s point that is called Beaver Heights. Eventually the entire Triangle area became known as the Forgotten Triangle, so bad was its unmitigated decay and abandonment, which was the worst in the city that was already known for large-scale deterioration. Nevertheless people, especially those that couldn’t afford it, stayed. But it became home to those on the edge as well – the low end of the scrappers, the drugged ones, strawberries, hookers and low-lifes, during a time when folks in such places would refer to time as – before crack, and after crack.
Housing in the Triangle runs the gamut from home-made to original unrehabbed homes going far back into the city’s history. Every neighborhood on the east side has, at least, some new homes built since the 1990s, but the Triangle never had one, until 2021. It was in the center of the city taking up a huge swath of land, yet was ignored, so much so, its endemic qualities grew in proportion to its forgotten nature, and was a wild and outlaw area on many of its streets and various sub-neighborhoods.
(above) (2009) Ernest built this and a number of other shelters in the Triangle where he lived for many years – 1990s until 2019. (below) (2021) Homes – occupied and abandoned – still dot the area, but practically all is gone and fallen by organic unmediated descent.
Beaver Heights, the small enclave of homes that formed the point of the triangle, was a cut-off hood, more than the city itself had become, and it’s rate of nativity was 100%. Surrounded by two cemeteries, housing projects, factories and railyards, that made up its borders. Anyone who stayed does so, long-term, usually to death, a few make it to assisted living, but that’s the ticket out, and the Rust Belt lesson for abandonment. The sons and daughters don’t want to live in the dangerous, polluted part of the city, and the homes aren’t worth anything. Often taxes go unpaid for years, as folks get closer to the end of their lives and when the widower finally passes, the city gets the property, which has been falling apart for years.
Today the new parkway, the Opportunity Corridor, will slice through the very center of the triangle, over the rail lines to the south in an equally devastated section of the Triangle, but Beaver Heights will remain untouched by it, because it is that isolated. When eminent domain was declared for the Opportunity Corridor, considering the amount of land they got, it was a bargain, since there were so few homes left in the entire path of the parkway, which is quite long, to purchase to knock down.
To be honest they should name it, the Old Folks Highway, instead of the Opportunity Corridor. The opportunity was taking cheap land and that happened because no one, including family members, wanted to live there, selling a property wasn’t worth it, and along with the taxes unpaid, the place went into disrepair, and when the final inhabitant finally passed away, it went into the possession of the city, and much of the land for the new highway occurred that way, freshly delivered as an empty space. Beaver Heights went out that way too, but without any purpose, just empty fields, for now, since the Corridor is south over the railyards.
Beaver Avenue is the name of the street that was at the center of the little enclave, basically 1 – 2 blocks wide and 8 blocks long, whose border were defined by the projects and Woodland cemetery, to the north, St. John’s cemetery on the east, the railroad to the south and the point of the Forgotten Triangle – the intersection of Kinsman and Woodland Avenues to the west. The Heights moniker is a typical sarcastic/affectionate tag that locals put on their neighborhoods, because they are city’s poorest, and sit on the flatlands of the east side, that is buffered to to east by the the Heights, or, Portage Escarpment, where the suburban inner ring suburbs are, including Shaker Heights, that was always the richest city in America right up until the eighties, and, although less haughty, Cleveland Heights, more diverse economically, but also a nice place to live with a couple of huge mansion districts and upper class homes near to Shaker Heights, just on the other side of the city line, where the Appalachian Plateau ends and the midwest forested plains begin, to the Cuyahoga River, where, in the firelands, the rolling forests and prairies begin, to flatten, out into the west. Nice flip, christening the worst after the best.
Many city neighborhoods have sub-neighborhoods within the larger neighborhoods, where, usually due to geography, zoning and commercial buildings, a residential section becomes a bit isolated and can exist in its own world. Beaver Heights. one of these typical hyper-endemic zones, is, if represented like rings on a tree, would be the second ring out from the core. In Cleveland the oldest and first residential zones – the Haymarket, Longwood and Lower Woodland – the core residential sections next to downtown, were wiped out by the 1960s and Beaver Heights came next, disappearing from 1980 – today.
Like most of the city, deeply affected by the demise of industry and manufacturing, along with social and demographic changes, the place became a slum, that went into full organic descent without mitigation until around 2015, with a couple of homes that were left from a local holocuast. The mitigation being mass demolitions and the end being nothing left to demolish.
What was very dramatic about this long term decline was simply the level to which the city and many others had fallen. The long fall was ceaseless and simply became the way it is. Knowing this place by heart, and over a long period of time, RealStill witnessed close up, places that simply, on both an architectural and people level, completely burned itself and themselves out. Very good people were trapped by this abandonment, and the reality of this sort of abandonment, is the children of all the long-haulers no longer want to live in the trashed and dangerous place, that has become so bad.
The writing has always been on the wall for these kinds of places. There is no future. These are some of the last and oldest homes from neighborhoods built on the back of industry, where the last thing to go is always all the houses, leaving streets, sidewalks and utilities ready for the next boom because this one, the last one, is done. The absolute oldest and main immigrant portal to the city, Longwood and the old Haymarket had been obliterated with freeways, housing projects and a college in urban renewal projects that went back to the 1950s, and Beaver Heights is part of the next old ring of slum dwellings to be removed, highlighted by the construction of the Opportunity Corridor, although, it’s off to the south over all the rail lines and will never effect Beaver Heights, it’s so cut-off.
Of course, it was bad enough, really bad, before crack, but when it arrived, it’s fueled everything negative that has been happening already, and places such as Beaver Heights became very hot in the bonfire of carnality. The crack circus just took what was left after the the first 15 years of the Rust Belt and lit it up in little hits providing a lot of pleasure for a little while, especially in the lost places of the city, the ones they call forgotten, but, relative to its beginnings and much of its history, a tougher horror show was on display here every day and night, outside the warm homes of the old-timers. It was there if you sought it. And if you stayed inside, your might live much longer, even getting out of your once grand, now crumbling home, and settling into a fresh, new and clean assisted care facility not too far away. All by having to thread your way through the bull shit going on outside your property.
Life in a brownfield-zombie zone ain’t pretty, you don’t even make the news for one night, even if the most dramatic and evil circumstances come to your door and even if you are a really good person who was simply the victim of someone evil. On a larger level, not day to day, it’s over nothing. Territories never last and the smaller ones – neighborhood enclaves – last the least amount of time, but a home is a home and not a house that can be abused, even if its one of the last. I know about this after insisting, in Brooklyn that under no circumstances would i be forced out of my slum railroad flat that, of course, was loved as a home, but in retrospect, was entirely futile, even with the law on my side.
In the early 1980s, a Marianist brother, and social activist, who was well-known in the pese projects, was video-taping the conditions around the King-Kennedy Housing projects just north of Beaver Heights, across Woodland Avenue, and was attacked by two men, they flipped him upside down and smashed his head repeatedly on the sidewalk. They named the building where he was killed after him, but within ten years that was changed with new a new client – drug rehabilitation. I’m closer than any of you might think. I know a guy who grew up with the perps and saw them that day and how nervous they were. They did time, I even crossed paths with one in 2019. He had been released from a long prison term…I had to include one horror story, ignoring the sheer volume, until it was all gone.
Long-time residents, who could remember the good old peaceful days going to back to the 1960s and before, were given a run for their money, especially if they piped up about the always temporary folks screwing the place up, so much that it became a very screwed up place, relatively speaking.
These old-timers went back to the time around the end of the second World War and southern blacks had moved north to work in Cleveland’s factories. These places were completely mixed as were the projects and people of many ethnicities lived together in the 1940s and the 1950s. The blacks would eventually take over from the aging white ethnics looking to move out, typical of the usual racial flip of these times before the sixties. The European immigrants moved on, but the people who were from Beaver Heights talked affectionately of those days when your neighbors might be German, Irish or Black, and that was a good thing.
To be a front porch witness to a neighborhood packed with homes and apartments, built well before the penchant for developments with all the same style of homes that were built in the 1920s. Before that in the 1880s, neighborhoods out to 105th Street had only blocks of unique homes and apartments, that, beginning in the 1950s, began to deteriorate heavily, particularly the oldest neighborhoods on the east side, west of East 55th Street – Longwood, Lower Woodland and the Haymarket, next to downtown, all fell to freeways and urban renewal by the sixties. Beaver Heights, on the other side of East 55th is next on the complete disappearance list – out to East 79th Street. It takes a while, but it vanishes before your eyes. Beaver Heights had streets of individual unique homes and apartments, the oldest on the east side. Shotgun shacks with additions added to the back and in-law homes in the backyard, were scattered amongst the large old duplexes, worker cottages and large single family homes.
Mrs. Reddick’s home, East 68th Street, 2010. She would finally move in 2011, and all is now gone.
With the in-law in the back, Beaver Heights had many, it’s another sign that this is one of the oldest and, certainly, untouched and unrehabbed, places in the city, built when it was actually densely populated and all available land was used.
(below) Thelma’s Lil’ Blue, as i liked to call it, was next door to her main home on Bushnell Court. None of these homes exist today and nothing has replaced them.
It’s a bit disheartening, but filled with actual knowledge about the city, and it’s not something that many folks go through or witness, and no one experiences it, above a certain income in a good neighborhood. Bringing home the physical truth of the city over time with a camera, I get in a small way to live the city’s history.
By the 1980s the women of the neighborhood started to lose their husbands in high numbers, so that, by the 90s there were only widowed women. Can you imagine waking up in the middle of the night to find a scrapper in your basement stealing your hot water heater? Or to come home after going shopping for one hour and find that your home is destroyed because scrappers took out the plumbing without turning off the water and from the top floor down the place is completely flooded? There’s a much longer list as well, including your rental property going up in an arson fire, across the street. But can you imagine?
There were three people who lived on Bushnell Court in 2010 – Thelma and Wilma who lived in a side by side duplex and Miss Burke who lived across the street from the above houses. Thelma owned the home and rented it to an old-timer she knew, but he passed, and she just boarded the door, which was safer than renting to a young who-knows-what. Thelma also owned the two houses in the background, which also had been boarded up.
While hanging out at her place, I smell smoke. We got out there before the fire department showed up, and Thelma watched one of her properties go up in flames at 11 am on a Saturday morning, while we were hanging out.
With rents that only go down, and not the best sort of people show up, so the natives will only rent to a person with some age that they know and can trust, usually old guys on pensions, and by 2005, there was no one to rent to. In blue-collar households, men go first, many upon retirement, after working their whole lives.
Today there might be a dozen homes left in all of the neighborhood, that, in cities with normal or good growth, there may well have been only a dozen homes left, as well, but every empty space would be a new, efficient, bigger, better buildings. You see this in the Bronx because it boomed in the 1920s, and large apartments building replaced most of the older wooden homes, when the Bronx looked like Cleveland, from 1880 to 1920. Rust belt cities have such old housing because development and redevelopment never went beyond 1930, until around 2010, and that’s 80 years. The population loss numbers back it all up, population being the single biggest influence on a city’s growth or decline. That really steepened significantly in the 1970s and 1980s and in the 1990s slowing slowly until 2009, when the population loss numbers were less significant, but still ongoing.
Like rings on a tree.
That’s what I mean about territories, American urban neighborhoods are always changing, much quicker than other countries, because this is the home of capitalism, it must redevelop after everything has been developed already, or wither and die.
The neighborhood was tight and every August they still have Beaver Heights Days in the neighborhood, every year, disappearance or not, the place gets honored, and folks get a bit tighter. Thus, as much as the city burns itself out and down, it can make those who remain tighter, more endemic and native.
Every August the neighborhood has a party/reunion of folks that grew up together and went to Woodbridge Elementary, that was a large very old school at the corner of Kinsman and Grand, that closed in thew 1980s, stood abandoned until, 1998, and eventually became a large indoor tomato growing operation in 2005.
That’s the infamous MaMa Lily on the right and her home in the background, with her son and friend, all from Beaver Heights. Obviously, city sub-hoods are going to be endemic, but with the challenges of deterioration and disappearing completely, it’s curious how people always return, in some cases, to mostly empty fields. Home is home.
I don’t play ethics police. I understand that people have to work very hard, and come home very tired, with families and everything else, so we can’t expect complete 24 hour empathy, we live local, especially the working-class, and family is the focus. Nor, does RealStill harass hard-working people from not being sensitive to all the nuances to all the other cultures, religions, races and ethnicities. All you can do is try. Speaking personally, I do not take my ancestral ethnicity that seriously. I’m American. I take other cultures seriously to the point of spending lots of money honoring and documenting their cultures. My family immigrated here then, i was born here, thus, i am American.
Taking these pictures RealStill takes the time, to share the realization of things, like, could you imagine, the worry of raising a daughter in the Triangle? Where there are no young girls at all, just old widows. Most folks never have to think of even the smaller, daily routine things that a Triangle kid does – the abandoned homes and factories on the way to school, drugs, prostitution, scrappers, a few evil. When they walk in from school, many adults openly pursue sex, drugs and street money, and, at least ignoring them, except for the occasional molestor, or worse.
Beaver Heights had the oldest homes in town. Woodland Cemetery opened in 1853, when it was more rural, but the city was about to burst with new arrivals and immigration. Already, by the 1950s, the urban renewal and housing projects would jump East 55th Street, just north of the neighborhood, sealing itself off from other places in the city like them – the residential and poor and working-class neighborhoods, not government assisted, but private homes.
The old-timers – union retirees from the good old days who hang in their vacant lots and makeshift huts are friendly and good to have around. Other fires are there for scrapping, burning the insulation off copper, but the fires ya gotta watch out for are the ones set by the drug ad alcohol crowd, attracted by all the freedom they’re afforded out here. The Triangle is a unique world, much more so than just a regular Cleveland poor neighborhood which, by itself, is pretty damn unique too.
It’s always interesting running into the phenomena of always returning to the rooted, even if the tree has been gone for twenty years or more.
The Four Seasons Social Club in 1989. These types of clubs were common in the Triangle, usually set up in a vacant lot and staffed by retirees, many of which were from the steel mills and auto companies that brought so many to this town.
Of all the street activity in the Triangle, there wasn’t any thing to worry about with these crews who drank and had a good time and went home at dark. It’s ironic that they would meet on the same ground they grew up and lived, and, even if they wanted to stay here, they couldn’t since there was no housing left.
It’s not a socialist country by far, pretty much the opposite, and if we look at it coldly, the reason why we have talk of socialsim rising, it’s because the rich are rising and absurdly so. Coldly, the present unmistakable reality and message is – don’t like it, get out. Saying that, while, of course, knowing by heart the impossibility of that, while in it, particularly in a very unusual place, like the Forgotten Triangle, which, given its position on the social status scale, is as bad as it gets. Given reality it’s a risk, they, you thread. Leaving the wild and ransom to watch for.
If you can’t get out, don’t want to, or any human reason, for that matter, there’s a way to live amongst the chaos and survive it. That’s what it is, the big difference in poor places, and what dominates it, is just that – chaos and the level of it is beyond belief in neighborhoods like Beaver Heights. It’s not something that any class, from working to affluent could survive. The basic organization and trusts, built in, and, simply taken for granted, and permits routine work, don’t exist here in anything-can-happenland.
It’s January, 2021, and the freaks still arrive. While shooting along East 65th St. she insisted that I take her picture, to the point that she was preventing me from doing my work, which was documenting the disappearance of homes along E. 65th St.
The many remaining homes, occupied by long-time residents, have something to measure that chaos against – history, or, simply, the past when it was better. All of them widowed women, who, like their husbands, labored in nearby factories and raised children, and witnessed the huge long decline to nothingness that is so extremely expressed in the most forgotten sections of the city.
Thelma in her front yard in June, 2009, when the catalpa trees bloom. She owned the duplex behind her and her cousin, Wilma had the unit on the right. An extremely rare duplex style, the side-by-side had the typical over run flora of the mature Forest City.
In September 2010, she went to an assisted living facility with Wilma, about three miles away. The scrappers immediately went to work, pulling pipes. Squatters had moved into Wilma’s place. I would go in and find her bedroom had been lived in, and a candle was lit on the dresser, the interloper hiding out somewhere in the house. Both Thelma and Wilma simply left behind all the furnishings, some of which were antique, like Thelma’s old black walnut desk featuring carved penguins.
In October the house was destroyed in a fire. She was the the second last resident of her street, after having lived there for sixty years, and her home burned down within six weeks, after being scrapped out of eberything including the bath tub.
The day i met Ernest he had single-handedly gotten Thelm’a bathtub out from the second floor and on to his pick-up.
Was it better? Fuckin right. Compared to the social horror stories, the only movie in town for forty years round here.
There was a home that dead-ended where E. 65th St. hit the railroad property and where Bushnell Court also dead-ended at East 65th, and I would often see the lady who lived there, with her daughter, when I visited friends, Wilma, Thelma and Big MaMa, on Bushnell Court who owned the last homes on that street, the others having been slowly abandoned and demolished over the years.
In the 1990s things only would deteriorate more, to the point, one person got fed up with being bothered about drugs so much that she made signs and posted them.
East 65th St. and other Beaver Heights streets dead end here because of the railroad, and its main lines running east to west, and into a large switching yard. The city’s rapid transit line runs through, as well as, the freight traffic. Behind her house, before the railroad property, an old dilapidated industrial area become a dumping ground and the person who ran the sprawling junkyard below had collected all sorts of things, including a horse that he kept permanently on the property. Finally in 2011 he got kicked out and fined for all his dumping and pollution, and the place was turned into a park that no one uses, since the area, the tip of the Forgotten Triangle, is so depopulated, and, essentially, industrial. But this was 2020, a long way from 1997 in the Triangle, where things go down quickly and never come back.
When i went to go visit Thelma, i would talk with her, and one day i took her picture in 1997.
The No Drugs lady, obviously spoke up about it. She had a home and a daughter, and, if you’re good, so is your home, no matter where it is located. Still, the majority know not to speak about… Things pass, at least that’s the lesson here at the tip of the Forgotten Triangle.
In 1997 the No Drugs Lady had put up the signs that became her moniker, warning that she had no drugs on her property and was against it on all levels. Crack and more drugs had been burning out these places for ten years and it had gotten very nasty. The crack problem was mostly generational, highlighting the demographic in these sorts of situations – the long term older residents try to ignore the ultra-poor and street folks who found it easy to set up shop in the poorest sections of the city.
She did what she could. I’m sure many of you live in a different part of your city than East 65th Street, off Beaver Avenue, but there is no difference in anybody’s feelings about their homes. We love them.
It was arson, and murder.