THIS LAST FALL

For these folks there is no better day than Halloween.

During the week of Halloween this man and his wife mount a large Halloween display on a side yard and all round their home, one of four left on the once densley populated three block long street, that included huge row houses with four story units, and an enormous apartment building where Roxford, dead-ends at Euclid.

There is no better time to be in this town then the last three weeks of October with color often peaking on Halloween, a holiday that is really about seasons and atmospheres, changing, and, yet, about to happen, as things “die” off for winter.

Cleveland, a place where every day is Halloween.

She’s responsible for the all the “creatures in the field.” It’s a form of neighborhood art as well, as she even utilizes recordings.

The life cycles of trees remind us that to be living is also to eventually die.

A friend ended up buying a huge defunct manufacturing facility, Cleveland Hardware, for a good price, considering the hardware products and machinery brought in the purchase price at the scrap yard, and, he and his partner will be running a scrap yard out of the complex. Speaking of metals, a steel coffin was found, and utilized, here, in this shot.

After the worst year for shooting, in 2021, due to ceaseless sunshine, including the worst shooting conditions for a Fall Exravaganza in my home, NYC, that i have ever encountered in close to fifty years, i needed new tactics for warming falls, and Cleveland, with its Lake Effect would possibly be more reliable since the lake effect cloud machine off Lake Erie often provides tons of clouds and the right atmosphere for digital shooting, preventing abundant sunshine from ruining the ruins in the jungle of asphalt, brick, wood, stone and flora.

In January, 2022, as i plunged into winter work, while shooting the mill towns in the Ohio River Valley, cancer was found inside my bile ducts, and liver, with no real cure. Removing a third of the liver, gall bladder and bile ducts, might give me a bit more time. Once more, i couldn’t go whole hog on shooting due to the disruption – treatments and their side effcts, fueling the importance of the 2022 fall shoot since it coincided with end of chemo, and the ability to shoot without the distractions. Not to mention that, although time signifiers, like the moon and the seasons, seem endless, life ain’t. My intuition was right, this past 2022 Fall, if not the best of all time, while i been on earth, it was the best in eleven years, and it started and faded right on the normal times, that has eluded us since 2011, when warming conditions and drought began to spoil the Falls.

I could still get back to the Bronx and Yonkers where i’m shooting their books, and it would be peak season there, slightly later than Cleveland.  I went back home, got a few good days in, until, right at the peak, there was nothing but sun for five days straight.

The gut does its own thinking, and if your guts are utilized almost every day of your life, it’s worthwhile to listen there for your fate. If you don’t challenge yourself, technically, physically and intellectually, and you are in the typical American bubble, “living” symbolically, in your little world, as if you know what’s goin on outside, stay at home with your devices and virtual social existence, because you will only hurt yourself out here or possibly worse.

In the neighborhood i lived the longest, until i was displaced, every male resident died of cancer, begining in their late sixties and early seventies, the ghosts of the Union Avenue neighborhood of Williamsburg that died around the time of art-fueled gentrification.

How? With everything i got. Where? The east side of Cleveland during its Fall. What is it i want to see? What would happen if a city allowed nature to over run it.

The drab and smashed industrial/ghetto landscapes lights up absurdly in the fall in a ridiculous display of nature in the city. It’s called the Forest City for a a reason, and fall color’s peak occurs on the right day, as long as it’s the thirty-first of October.

I find your questions pretenstious

The tree has been growing here since 2003, at least. It’s a barometer of early fall color and is always, the first to peak early, this is October 13, 2022, and, NOW is the time, don’t hesitate.or you’ll miss the mission.

Along East 55th Street, many of these huge Jewish temples still exist as Christian churches.

The church’s roots go back to well before 1843 when they built their first church close to what is now downtown. The Presbyterians came out to East Cleveland and built this place, made of Berea sandstone and South Euclid Bluestone, a bit later. It closed due to dwindling membership in 1995.

And, by the way, don’t throw stones at stained glass windows, it’s not nice, or, for that matter, to pour your grafitti, over the true works of art in the city – its infrastructure and outer structures.

A man lived here for many years, over fifty, and hung on to his home until he died around 2014.

The one block long street has three homes that are occupied, three that are dillapidated (i’m standing on the porch of one of them), and the rest, gone. Blocks of homes have been demoilshed steadily since 2010, when the big push for complete clearance began, as Clevelanders learned to let go (LeBron James-style) of their once sacred historic landsacpes, and, scenes like this, which were completely common, are now becmoing rare.

Both apartments on either side, abandoned for many years, and many other homes are also gone from the block. With the latest funding another big push on demolition of these structures  begins in 2023.

I got a good vantatge point from the home across the street, sitting up on a hill. The home dwellers had seen me a couple of times, shooting, and we’re good witth me being on their property. When this location appears later on in this book, i’ll explain a an interesting event that occured there, that will give you and idea about reality, where no one controls what’s gonna happen, and random incidents occur as a result. You’ll also learn what’s striking and interesting, but, over time, you’ll know it. 

The abandoned apartment to the right has also been here for many years in this shape. Both buildings have been standing so damaged and for so long, the back of the structures have collapsed.

In front of the building, a reservoir was created where similar apartments once stood, many of them.

These new reservoirs, where urban run-off is filtered by nature before going into the sewer system.The open land was once filled with similar apartments, torn down in 2017, and replaced with one of these new reservoirs that filter urban run-off before entering the sewers.

Homes like these are typically occupied by the owner until death, and, by that time, with taxes unpaid and the home a wreck, it becomes property of a governmeny land bank, storing the empty buildings and spaces until development occurs.

Typical of the hundreds of homes that have disappeared from a stretch of the city called the Forgotten Triangle, which is made up at five different neighborhoods and it’s quite big. Running through the middle of the forgotten triangle is the Opportunity Corridor, a new 400 million Dollar parkway that was built through the largely abandoned lands to reach University Circle and the Cleveland Clinic from the southside freeways.

Thus, with the Corridor already spurring large construction projects, in, what was, the most desolate secions of the city, these sites will soon be more than gone.

The Oppurtunity Corridor project and it’s parkway has spurred a new funded purpose to these old blasted-out neighborhoods, whose residential sections were dwarfed by the dozens of large facories that were once here, and that, RealStill has documented since 1978, along with every house and home in the Triangle.

The Triangle, that became known as the Forgotten Triangle by the 1990s, got its name because of the extreme abandonment, that began on a hot summer night in 1975, when 28 homes went up in a windy fire storm. From that day on the triangle began its long slow descent into nothingness, and, what a wild place it was. One that I experienced fully and one that I shot with the camera over and over again.

Origianlly a largwe Hungarian neighborhood, part of the biggest group of Hungarians outside of Europe, in the 1970s the ethic mix began to change as more Blacks moved in, and the immigrant Europeans, actually poor hard-working folks themselves, departed to move up the hill into a different section of the large Hungarian neighborhood that stretched out to the border of Shaker Heights.

The elderly lady had just moved out and next door a day prior to this shot.

Its twin next door was saved.

Notice the truck filled with scrap. It’s owned by the hard-working man who lives next door, who, like many East Clevelanders, don’t let a thing go to waste, particularly, brick and metal.

Another example of the oddchitecture, abundant around the city. What were they thinking?

Another oddchitecture example, that, particularly in East Cleveland, is quite the thing. In fact, I can no longer delineate qualities Cleveland between structures that I deem odd and those that I deem not odd. Ever since I took this particular shot, I came to the realization that in fact just about everything is odd here.

With the last of the giant rowhouses and ancient classic apartment buidings gone, there’s little demand for electricity.

Originally, the Willson Avenue Temple, it became the Pilgrim Baptist Church, but has been abandoned for many years.

Originally, the Willson Avenue Temple, it became the Pilgrim Baptist Church, but has been abandoned for many years.

Catalpas were planted over 100 years ago as ornamental trees. They are really native to river bottom land, on the Ohio river and Mississippi, but were brought into industrial cities and used on the grounds of many homes, as ornamnetal plants. Only they look that way for half the year.

With beautiful white blossoms in June and some decent color in October, it’s deceptive, because during the winter months when there are no leaves on the trees, the Catalpa looks downright creepy, with huge cigar shaped pods and branches gnarled similar to Japanese maples. Like so many structures in this city,  it’s  a gothic-looking thing, and is eerie.

Last occupied by a squatter/scrapper/handyman, he left a couple of months prior to the shot.

What we all call ivy, technically, is not that, but a creeping vine. You can understand how the term Ivy League school became identified with Boston, but the plant is more rampant in these old industrial cities, that were clearly in their own league of indutry and homes.

Abandoned since 2008, and untouched since then.

In the background along the tracks are many abandoned factories that utilized the railroad including the site i have shot from – The McDowel-Wellman Company, the original builder of the famed Hulett Unloader.

Shot from the roof of the old Wellman-McDowel plant, where the Hulett unloaders were fabricated to be assembled on site around the world.

The dozens of closed factories that line the high line were, at one time, big customers of the rail line.

Originally a Catholic Hungarian church.

Berea Sandstone and South Euclid bluestone, particularly. Berea, was used extensively here. It ages, in cities, from buff golden to black and soot-like. Many of the citiy’s gothic masterpieces are made with this local stone, and often draped in the creeper vines whose leaves turn the brightest reds.

Many places in organic descent lose entire back walls, leaving, sometimes, only the brick facade out front.

Peaking early on October 12, 2022, the vines drape the north wall of one of the plant buildings.

Skyscrapers and industrial neighborhoods set in the Forest City.

From the 1870s, this old factory still stands, where all kinds of safes and locjs were built, definitely heavy industry.

Cleveland cooperative stove company had a very long in early history in Cleveland, and it has been left in a state of organic descent ever since it closed in the 1982.

The location that provided these views – the roof of the Wellman-Seaver Company, a famed and long-running firm that made the Huletts and many other industrial loading and unloading infrastructure projects consisting of docks and machinery.

Passing numerous factories, like the Cleveland Cooperative Stove company, the National Lock and Safe company, Westinghouse Inc., the Cleveland Automatic Machine company and more, including the structures that I am taking all these pictures from, which is the McDowel-Wellman-plant which is the original manufacturing facility for the famed and loved Hulett unloaders.

McDowel-Wellman was sold off a few times, and, by 1988, there was no presence in the city of this company, that also built coal and ore docks, and all types of bulk loading and unloading machinery. Nevertheless the plant was in operation until 2013, utilized by a Russioan producer of rail lines and switches. It was a union shop as well.

All this in a small section of a neighborhood, in a city, once filled to the brim with this industry.

In Cleveland, often people will often stay in their individual rowhouse even as all the other homes go up in smoke, as was the case here until 2020, when the tenant left. 

The place was actually burned up bad on nthe side and back. There, the bukding has completely collapsed.

Street signs are a rarity in East Cleveland. Some sections are entirely devoid of them, that, combined with dark streets at night, and huge potholes, makes driving hazardous.

While shooting this spot, the home-made ghoul behind me would warn me about the “creatures in the field.” which, now included a photographer.

There might be creatures in the field, but there’s still residents on Roxford Road.

The founder of the steel industry in Cleveland, that actusally began as Newbirgh and Newburgh Heights, died suddenly at the height of his industrrisl powers. He was so beloved by the workers that the entire plants of worjers showed up for his funeral, 8,000 strong, and the workers built this monument, which is the very first thing you see from the main entrnace, in a cemetery that houses all the dead industrialists from the famed Millionaire’s Row, including John  Rockefeller, himself, who lived on his huge eastate that bordered this Lakeviw Cemetery where he, and his family are buried.

He was a New Yorker and spent many more years there, disliked Cleveland for some things, but returned in death to the place he made, at one time, the oil capital of America, that made him the richest American as well, like Mr. Cisolm, who came from Scotland and built the local steel industry.

The Victoriasn Era garden cemetery is well represented in Lakeview Cemetery on the east side of the city, that extends its hours in the fall to whenever sunset occurs.

The object was recently auctioned by Sotheby’s in its big outsider, of outside art autumn sale fetching 3.2 million snicker bars.

I was shooting from a family’s porch across the street, when this guy was walking by. He recognize me as the picture man, and saw me this very day in the morning shooting the apartment building he was walking in front of.

Curiously, when I was shooting in the morning I ran into the family who were leaving in their car, and we struck up a long conversation, particularly about East Cleveland and its condition, here, on Charles Street. Their view was part of that scenario. She was fairly depondent about and would always lower her head and speak to the ground, while talking about a life, with children, on the block.

I came back around near sunset to reshoot and when i pulled up, smelled smoke, and thought, another one of these abanodoned places was torched. But to my surprise and sorrow it was the family’s home that i had spoken to seven hours previous. Despair can be quick in these places.

When they cruised off after talking, little did they know that they would retun to a scene similar to what they are surrounded by.

I shot this house enough to get to know people who lived across the street and on either side of it. Everybody was a long hauler and I lived there their entire lives, and remembered 14 years ago when there was a family in this house.

Warner and Swayze, a tool and die manufacturing company, also Bill telescopes, and they built this to domed observatory at the top of Taylor Road hill in East Cleveland. God knows why, an observatory should be out at least in the country if not on a mountaintop in Hawaii.

In 2006 I spoke with a couple of people who had been rehabbing the entire observatory into a home. The family had money. Unfortunately he was a major coke dealer and ended up in prison, and the property went to hell. The scrappers had taken off all the copper from the domes over the years and much, including a beautiful bronze astronomical plaque set into the main floor, were taken.

The headquarters, home and main bakery for Hough, which had a chain of bakeries all over the city and county.

It may have been a chain of stores, but it always felt like a mom-and-pop joint and was well loved.

The plant that never dies in its abandonment.

I know everyone on the block, with half the homes gone, quite well. Their time has come, because the enormous Cleveland Clinic has finally spurred growth in this forgotten section of the Fairfax ghetto. Market value for an occupied home on the block might be 25,000, but recently has incresed at 15 times that price.

Shot from an old factory across the street where many more barrels of toxins were dumped. One could get cancer out here doing this.

The classic ghetto street is a reminder of how huge swaths, at one time, looke across the city.

Here, peak autumn occurs on All Hallow’s Eve, where what’s dead is remebered, and reminds some of us of the idea of universal mortality in all things that live. Today we pump up the day with our love of entertainment, partying and fun. Aside from the billions spent, and the day becoming another reason for adult partie., it’s still OK to have fun and humor, on All Saints Day, or Dia de los Muertos.

Shooting a bombed out Roxford Road, while high up on my ladder shooting the red leaves and vines crawling over a ruined building, in blocks that have seen so much drug dealing, gangs and violence it ain’t funny, suddenly i heard a ghoul adressing me.

Creatures in the field? That’s great. And i’m one of them.

For these folks there is no better day than Halloween.

During the week of Halloween this man and his wife mount a large Halloween display on a side yard and all round their home, one of four left on the once densley populated three block long street, that included huge row houses with four story units, and an enormous apartment building where Roxford, dead-ends at Euclid.

There is no better time to be in this town then the last three weeks of October with color often peaking on Halloween, a holiday that is really about seasons and atmospheres, changing, and, yet, about to happen, as things “die” off for winter.

Cleveland, a place where every day is Halloween.

She’s responsible for the all the “creatures in the field.” It’s a form of neighborhood art as well, as she even utilizes recordings.

The life cycles of trees remind us that to be living is also to eventually die.

A friend ended up buying a huge defunct manufacturing facility, Cleveland Hardware, for a good price, considering the hardware products and machinery brought in the purchase price at the scrap yard, and, he and his partner will be running a scrap yard out of the complex. Speaking of metals, a steel coffin was found, and utilized, here, in this shot.

After the worst year for shooting, in 2021, due to ceaseless sunshine, including the worst shooting conditions for a Fall Exravaganza in my home, NYC, that i have ever encountered in close to fifty years, i needed new tactics for warming falls, and Cleveland, with its Lake Effect would possibly be more reliable since the lake effect cloud machine off Lake Erie often provides tons of clouds and the right atmosphere for digital shooting, preventing abundant sunshine from ruining the ruins in the jungle of asphalt, brick, wood, stone and flora.

In January, 2022, as i plunged into winter work, while shooting the mill towns in the Ohio River Valley, cancer was found inside my bile ducts, and liver, with no real cure. Removing a third of the liver, gall bladder and bile ducts, might give me a bit more time. Once more, i couldn’t go whole hog on shooting due to the disruption – treatments and their side effcts, fueling the importance of the 2022 fall shoot since it coincided with end of chemo, and the ability to shoot without the distractions. Not to mention that, although time signifiers, like the moon and the seasons, seem endless, life ain’t. My intuition was right, this past 2022 Fall, if not the best of all time, while i been on earth, it was the best in eleven years, and it started and faded right on the normal times, that has eluded us since 2011, when warming conditions and drought began to spoil the Falls.

I could still get back to the Bronx and Yonkers where i’m shooting their books, and it would be peak season there, slightly later than Cleveland.  I went back home, got a few good days in, until, right at the peak, there was nothing but sun for five days straight.

The gut does its own thinking, and if your guts are utilized almost every day of your life, it’s worthwhile to listen there for your fate. If you don’t challenge yourself, technically, physically and intellectually, and you are in the typical American bubble, “living” symbolically, in your little world, as if you know what’s goin on outside, stay at home with your devices and virtual social existence, because you will only hurt yourself out here or possibly worse.

In the neighborhood i lived the longest, until i was displaced, every male resident died of cancer, begining in their late sixties and early seventies, the ghosts of the Union Avenue neighborhood of Williamsburg that died around the time of art-fueled gentrification.

How? With everything i got. Where? The east side of Cleveland during its Fall. What is it i want to see? What would happen if a city allowed nature to over run it.

The drab and smashed industrial/ghetto landscapes lights up absurdly in the fall in a ridiculous display of nature in the city. It’s called the Forest City for a a reason, and fall color’s peak occurs on the right day, as long as it’s the thirty-first of October.

I find your questions pretenstious

The tree has been growing here since 2003, at least. It’s a barometer of early fall color and is always, the first to peak early, this is October 13, 2022, and, NOW is the time, don’t hesitate.or you’ll miss the mission.

Along East 55th Street, many of these huge Jewish temples still exist as Christian churches.

The church’s roots go back to well before 1843 when they built their first church close to what is now downtown. The Presbyterians came out to East Cleveland and built this place, made of Berea sandstone and South Euclid Bluestone, a bit later. It closed due to dwindling membership in 1995.

And, by the way, don’t throw stones at stained glass windows, it’s not nice, or, for that matter, to pour your grafitti, over the true works of art in the city – its infrastructure and outer structures.

A man lived here for many years, over fifty, and hung on to his home until he died around 2014.

The one block long street has three homes that are occupied, three that are dillapidated (i’m standing on the porch of one of them), and the rest, gone. Blocks of homes have been demoilshed steadily since 2010, when the big push for complete clearance began, as Clevelanders learned to let go (LeBron James-style) of their once sacred historic landsacpes, and, scenes like this, which were completely common, are now becmoing rare.

Both apartments on either side, abandoned for many years, and many other homes are also gone from the block. With the latest funding another big push on demolition of these structures  begins in 2023.

I got a good vantatge point from the home across the street, sitting up on a hill. The home dwellers had seen me a couple of times, shooting, and we’re good witth me being on their property. When this location appears later on in this book, i’ll explain a an interesting event that occured there, that will give you and idea about reality, where no one controls what’s gonna happen, and random incidents occur as a result. You’ll also learn what’s striking and interesting, but, over time, you’ll know it. 

The abandoned apartment to the right has also been here for many years in this shape. Both buildings have been standing so damaged and for so long, the back of the structures have collapsed.

In front of the building, a reservoir was created where similar apartments once stood, many of them.

These new reservoirs, where urban run-off is filtered by nature before going into the sewer system.The open land was once filled with similar apartments, torn down in 2017, and replaced with one of these new reservoirs that filter urban run-off before entering the sewers.

Homes like these are typically occupied by the owner until death, and, by that time, with taxes unpaid and the home a wreck, it becomes property of a governmeny land bank, storing the empty buildings and spaces until development occurs.

Typical of the hundreds of homes that have disappeared from a stretch of the city called the Forgotten Triangle, which is made up at five different neighborhoods and it’s quite big. Running through the middle of the forgotten triangle is the Opportunity Corridor, a new 400 million Dollar parkway that was built through the largely abandoned lands to reach University Circle and the Cleveland Clinic from the southside freeways.

Thus, with the Corridor already spurring large construction projects, in, what was, the most desolate secions of the city, these sites will soon be more than gone.

The Oppurtunity Corridor project and it’s parkway has spurred a new funded purpose to these old blasted-out neighborhoods, whose residential sections were dwarfed by the dozens of large facories that were once here, and that, RealStill has documented since 1978, along with every house and home in the Triangle.

The Triangle, that became known as the Forgotten Triangle by the 1990s, got its name because of the extreme abandonment, that began on a hot summer night in 1975, when 28 homes went up in a windy fire storm. From that day on the triangle began its long slow descent into nothingness, and, what a wild place it was. One that I experienced fully and one that I shot with the camera over and over again.

Origianlly a largwe Hungarian neighborhood, part of the biggest group of Hungarians outside of Europe, in the 1970s the ethic mix began to change as more Blacks moved in, and the immigrant Europeans, actually poor hard-working folks themselves, departed to move up the hill into a different section of the large Hungarian neighborhood that stretched out to the border of Shaker Heights.

The elderly lady had just moved out and next door a day prior to this shot.

Its twin next door was saved.

Notice the truck filled with scrap. It’s owned by the hard-working man who lives next door, who, like many East Clevelanders, don’t let a thing go to waste, particularly, brick and metal.

Another example of the oddchitecture, abundant around the city. What were they thinking?

Another oddchitecture example, that, particularly in East Cleveland, is quite the thing. In fact, I can no longer delineate qualities Cleveland between structures that I deem odd and those that I deem not odd. Ever since I took this particular shot, I came to the realization that in fact just about everything is odd here.

With the last of the giant rowhouses and ancient classic apartment buidings gone, there’s little demand for electricity.

Originally, the Willson Avenue Temple, it became the Pilgrim Baptist Church, but has been abandoned for many years.

Originally, the Willson Avenue Temple, it became the Pilgrim Baptist Church, but has been abandoned for many years.

Catalpas were planted over 100 years ago as ornamental trees. They are really native to river bottom land, on the Ohio river and Mississippi, but were brought into industrial cities and used on the grounds of many homes, as ornamnetal plants. Only they look that way for half the year.

With beautiful white blossoms in June and some decent color in October, it’s deceptive, because during the winter months when there are no leaves on the trees, the Catalpa looks downright creepy, with huge cigar shaped pods and branches gnarled similar to Japanese maples. Like so many structures in this city,  it’s  a gothic-looking thing, and is eerie.

Last occupied by a squatter/scrapper/handyman, he left a couple of months prior to the shot.

What we all call ivy, technically, is not that, but a creeping vine. You can understand how the term Ivy League school became identified with Boston, but the plant is more rampant in these old industrial cities, that were clearly in their own league of indutry and homes.

Abandoned since 2008, and untouched since then.

In the background along the tracks are many abandoned factories that utilized the railroad including the site i have shot from – The McDowel-Wellman Company, the original builder of the famed Hulett Unloader.

Shot from the roof of the old Wellman-McDowel plant, where the Hulett unloaders were fabricated to be assembled on site around the world.

The dozens of closed factories that line the high line were, at one time, big customers of the rail line.

Originally a Catholic Hungarian church.

Berea Sandstone and South Euclid bluestone, particularly. Berea, was used extensively here. It ages, in cities, from buff golden to black and soot-like. Many of the citiy’s gothic masterpieces are made with this local stone, and often draped in the creeper vines whose leaves turn the brightest reds.

Many places in organic descent lose entire back walls, leaving, sometimes, only the brick facade out front.

Peaking early on October 12, 2022, the vines drape the north wall of one of the plant buildings.

Skyscrapers and industrial neighborhoods set in the Forest City.

From the 1870s, this old factory still stands, where all kinds of safes and locjs were built, definitely heavy industry.

Cleveland cooperative stove company had a very long in early history in Cleveland, and it has been left in a state of organic descent ever since it closed in the 1982.

The location that provided these views – the roof of the Wellman-Seaver Company, a famed and long-running firm that made the Huletts and many other industrial loading and unloading infrastructure projects consisting of docks and machinery.

Passing numerous factories, like the Cleveland Cooperative Stove company, the National Lock and Safe company, Westinghouse Inc., the Cleveland Automatic Machine company and more, including the structures that I am taking all these pictures from, which is the McDowel-Wellman-plant which is the original manufacturing facility for the famed and loved Hulett unloaders.

McDowel-Wellman was sold off a few times, and, by 1988, there was no presence in the city of this company, that also built coal and ore docks, and all types of bulk loading and unloading machinery. Nevertheless the plant was in operation until 2013, utilized by a Russioan producer of rail lines and switches. It was a union shop as well.

All this in a small section of a neighborhood, in a city, once filled to the brim with this industry.

In Cleveland, often people will often stay in their individual rowhouse even as all the other homes go up in smoke, as was the case here until 2020, when the tenant left. 

The place was actually burned up bad on nthe side and back. There, the bukding has completely collapsed.

Street signs are a rarity in East Cleveland. Some sections are entirely devoid of them, that, combined with dark streets at night, and huge potholes, makes driving hazardous.

While shooting this spot, the home-made ghoul behind me would warn me about the “creatures in the field.” which, now included a photographer.

There might be creatures in the field, but there’s still residents on Roxford Road.

The founder of the steel industry in Cleveland, that actusally began as Newbirgh and Newburgh Heights, died suddenly at the height of his industrrisl powers. He was so beloved by the workers that the entire plants of worjers showed up for his funeral, 8,000 strong, and the workers built this monument, which is the very first thing you see from the main entrnace, in a cemetery that houses all the dead industrialists from the famed Millionaire’s Row, including John  Rockefeller, himself, who lived on his huge eastate that bordered this Lakeviw Cemetery where he, and his family are buried.

He was a New Yorker and spent many more years there, disliked Cleveland for some things, but returned in death to the place he made, at one time, the oil capital of America, that made him the richest American as well, like Mr. Cisolm, who came from Scotland and built the local steel industry.

The Victoriasn Era garden cemetery is well represented in Lakeview Cemetery on the east side of the city, that extends its hours in the fall to whenever sunset occurs.

The object was recently auctioned by Sotheby’s in its big outsider, of outside art autumn sale fetching 3.2 million snicker bars.

I was shooting from a family’s porch across the street, when this guy was walking by. He recognize me as the picture man, and saw me this very day in the morning shooting the apartment building he was walking in front of.

Curiously, when I was shooting in the morning I ran into the family who were leaving in their car, and we struck up a long conversation, particularly about East Cleveland and its condition, here, on Charles Street. Their view was part of that scenario. She was fairly depondent about and would always lower her head and speak to the ground, while talking about a life, with children, on the block.

I came back around near sunset to reshoot and when i pulled up, smelled smoke, and thought, another one of these abanodoned places was torched. But to my surprise and sorrow it was the family’s home that i had spoken to seven hours previous. Despair can be quick in these places.

When they cruised off after talking, little did they know that they would retun to a scene similar to what they are surrounded by.

I shot this house enough to get to know people who lived across the street and on either side of it. Everybody was a long hauler and I lived there their entire lives, and remembered 14 years ago when there was a family in this house.

Warner and Swayze, a tool and die manufacturing company, also Bill telescopes, and they built this to domed observatory at the top of Taylor Road hill in East Cleveland. God knows why, an observatory should be out at least in the country if not on a mountaintop in Hawaii.

In 2006 I spoke with a couple of people who had been rehabbing the entire observatory into a home. The family had money. Unfortunately he was a major coke dealer and ended up in prison, and the property went to hell. The scrappers had taken off all the copper from the domes over the years and much, including a beautiful bronze astronomical plaque set into the main floor, were taken.

The headquarters, home and main bakery for Hough, which had a chain of bakeries all over the city and county.

It may have been a chain of stores, but it always felt like a mom-and-pop joint and was well loved.

The plant that never dies in its abandonment.

I know everyone on the block, with half the homes gone, quite well. Their time has come, because the enormous Cleveland Clinic has finally spurred growth in this forgotten section of the Fairfax ghetto. Market value for an occupied home on the block might be 25,000, but recently has incresed at 15 times that price.

Shot from an old factory across the street where many more barrels of toxins were dumped. One could get cancer out here doing this.

The classic ghetto street is a reminder of how huge swaths, at one time, looke across the city.

Here, peak autumn occurs on All Hallow’s Eve, where what’s dead is remebered, and reminds some of us of the idea of universal mortality in all things that live. Today we pump up the day with our love of entertainment, partying and fun. Aside from the billions spent, and the day becoming another reason for adult partie., it’s still OK to have fun and humor, on All Saints Day, or Dia de los Muertos.

Shooting a bombed out Roxford Road, while high up on my ladder shooting the red leaves and vines crawling over a ruined building, in blocks that have seen so much drug dealing, gangs and violence it ain’t funny, suddenly i heard a ghoul adressing me.

Creatures in the field? That’s great. And i’m one of them.