Before beginning with the worst street in America, we’ll start on a positive note and look at the best Street in America, historically and ornamentally speaking that is. This would be Euclid Avenue, the main drag of Cleveland Ohio. As the city exploded into an industrial powerhouse, the Masters of industry within the city coagulated along Euclid Avenue in the outskirts of what would become downtown, which soon would explode and absorb the finest Street in America during this time. Mark Twain, upon seeing the street, called it the most magnificent Street in America and comparable to the Champs-Elysess, but the weird thing about it is that it only lasted, at best, fifty years, betraying the permanence built into each home.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoNQn6KOXvA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm3XrYgUSlc
Eyewitness and resdient of Millionaire’s Row
https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu/my-recollections-of-old-cleveland/chapter/millionaires-row-mischief/
Residing in Manhattan, Mr. Rockefeller could afford even more than this, including the biggest best most ornamneted home in America, but, compared to his peers, had a modest Manahattn mansion, although he still clung to his love for dark and exotic wood for all six sides of his rooms often carved, and ornamental as hell, making the interior the very opposite of the world outside speeding into modernism.
https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu/my-recollections-of-old-cleveland/chapter/millionaires-row-mansions/
You wanna make it, no matter who you are? Mr. Rockefeller laid it all out, just go apply and do it.
\https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hpOv5rbmbI
Ironically, for the last thirty 25 years, further east, in the “suburb” that John D., founed, and lived while in Cleveland, is home to the worst street in America, now and in the near future. Chapman Avenie is two blocks long, ome block is south of Euclid Avenue, the other, more wasted, lies to the south of the main drag in Cleveland. Wasted is something that this block personifies. No one has lived there for over twenty years. In 2018 the city simply blocked it off and let it descend in organic descent, and being swallowed by the nature it thwarted with its developmnet 100 years ago.
Even though I stay there while in town, I never wanted to shoot the streets of east Cleveland, because I know them so well. If you want to trouble just go out in the streets around 2004 and you’ll definitely find it in this town. Nevertheless, beginning in 2006, and continuing today, East Cleveland is the place I hit with the camera all the time, living there while in town makes it convenient, and convenient to injury. Of course, I had my close calls, then, back in 2006, the sheriffs department came in for for so long with East Cleveland police to mitigate the drugs, violence, and general air of complete danger. Today the streets are far more mellow than back then, although still the opportunity for anything to happen and the overall negativity still remain.
The open air street markets for sex and drugs are no longer out in public like they had been for twenty years, and Chapman was a big locale and hot spot for quite a while, until there was nothing left and the street got blocked off from any traffic.
See what i mean. Even though EC finally got funds, for the first time, in 2010, to start demolishing structures, Chapman is at the bottom of the list, because the sections and sub-neighborhoods of the city, where folks actually live is the priority. Understand that the two blocks of land east of Chapman is entirtely abanodoned small factories, and to the west is Norrthfield Road with 3 homes left that are habitable, and then the next five blocks west was probably the most densely populated section of East Cleveland with lines of brick tenement apartments which became ghetto, but entirely rehabbed in 2006, only to be shut down a few years later, and then obliterarated in 2017.
This is 2 blocks west of Chapman, where, in 2017 three square blocks of large brick apartments were demolished. On the east side you will find these pockets of open land that have been converted to urban “reservoirs” that will filter out a lot of impuirties before sending the water to the sewers.
Honestly, the morning of this shot, it was one of the most tranquil and verdant spots i have visited. The pond was loaded with ducks, the entire perimeter’s vegrtation had sprouted summer flowers, yet i was in an urban zone of danger and decay, where great open spaces have found a purpose. When i swung over to the other side i ran into two early-rising or up-all-night frolicking prostitutes, cutting throught the accidentsl park.
Although desolate and uninhabitable, Chapman Avenue is still a great shortcut to the convenient store on Euclid Avenue, and, like all ghettoes it’s the typical unhealthy food mecca, and a good place for cigs, beer and wine, along with char-boy, bic lighters, condoms and everything you need to cope with life.
An apartment building, mid-block, in the good old bad days in 2010, when you could still drive down the abandoned street. It was empty, except for one man who resided in an empty large apartment building, where Chapman dead-ends at Elderwood Avene.
This was an entirely working-class neighborhood. There were numerous factories until the 1980s, within walking dsitance, in Cleveland, and the public transit was right there, on Euclid Avenue, and in walking distance tof the “rapid transit” running west to downtown and then out to the airport on the far west side. Like everything in East Cleveland the housing was quality with fine architecture of brick and stone, large lobbies and apartments, with small units, by today’s standards, but had glorious exotic woods, a stained glass window and rooms that were laid out as one, two, or three bedrooms.
Without any record of prior suburbs, this one made the “mistake” for its future 100 years later, by constructing a small cith as a suburb, meaning housing was priced and offered to the workin-class, all the way to the rich, John D., bering the superstar of capitalists both founded and libed here, until he go thoroughtly disrespected by tha tax people, and, thereafter, pretty much avoided his home town.
Satellite dishes began to proliferate just as the apartments along Chapman Avenue began to shut down. This is a view of the back of the western side of the street. Vine activity has peaked and all that is left is the eventual covering and complete collapse of the apartment buildings in an unchecked organic desent back into the local vegatation.
It’s 2011 and the single use for Chapman Avenue is as a shortcut to the local convenience store and the road that was still accessible before its closure in 2017.
A few weeks after this shot of an EC resident talking on his phone while walking back to where he came from, across the street, i would meet my fate.
In June, 2011, I was climbing the stairs of this apartment building. I was a few steps from the third floor landing when the entire staircase collapsed all the way to the first floor. I was lucky in the sense that I did not die, but I was put out of commission for quite a while while recuperating from surgery after breaking bones in my feet. Before entering the building a crackhead came up to me, crackheads and whores were numerous back then, and said to me, “I wouldn’t go in there.” A little bit cocky I said that I can deal with it. I should’ve listened.
In 2017 i was shooting the entrance to the building where the stairs collapsed, when a new Cadillac Escalade with tinted windows rolled up and parked. I kept turning my head checking them out. Finally a window rolled down and i walked over. They asked what i was doing, and i asked who they were, which they wouldn’t answer. As we were bantering two scappers walked by, and one said, “Hey, mayor.” Turned out that the two guys that looked like thugs in the luxury SUV were the Mayor and his driver.
I asked, “Why didn’t you tell me who you were?” That might be enough to get roughed up and arrested in the city known for that, but, no doubt, my license plates, New York, and my demeanor threw them off, perhaps, thinking i was a journalist, definitely not an urban explorer type, as i’ve been too much at home with my work and a participant, and do not the fit that bill whatsover with my age.
Another hiker, who has ventured to the unhealthy comforts of the urban oasis, at the local convenience store.
Coming back home from Euclid Avenue.
Indecision at the corner of Elderwood Avenue and Chapman Avenue. Which road does a hustler take, or, “where did i leave that money, do i really want to go back home?” Who know what happens in the mind of the city wanderer…
Although I survived the peaking of the East Cleveland mayhem and violence, i understand that sometimes it was actually myself who is my worst enemy. Another injury on Chapman Avenue when i got a nice cut in 2022, 11 years after a stairway collapse up the street. Here, it was off to an urgent care facility, get sewn up, and go back to get the shot. Stupid, shoulda gone to an ER since tendons were cut through, still hurts.
Being East Cleveland it fits.
For twenty years I’ve seen the growth of Chapman Avenue and it isn’t real estate development that I’m talking about, but flora.
You may have noticed i see things, and always will, from ther bottom up. If you think that perspective is worth it, you might like this essay, which is the epitome of bottom up thinking, EC Holes.
Update – The first homes to be demolished in EC finally occurred in 2010, and it eventually migrated east out to this section of the city, so that, by 2024, this entire street had been torn down. Today it’s cleared flat land
The mayor survived a recall, but got indicted in 2024. Most of the police department had been indicted over the previous five years, including the chief, and became convicted felons, with most of them going to prison.