Magazine B The Neighborhood

[Octavis Uberstine]

RobSmith is the editor of Seattle magazine and Seattle Business magazine. Following a brief stint in politics after graduating from the University of Oregon, he began freelance writing when a friend landed a job at a small newspaper. A few months later he was offered a full-time position and, as Mark Twain said, "I had no other options," so Rob became a journalist. He likes getting paid to be nosy.

Following and , is a detailed look at the neighborhood as a cornerstone of life. In modern society, the neighborhood functions as another 'home', and we constantly envision our own ideal neighborhoods. Six 'ideal' neighborhoods- Krnerkiez in Berlin, Charonne in Paris, Seochon in Seoul, Greenwich Village in New York, Hampstead in London, Venice in LA- are introduced. We met with those who have helped sculpt the neighborhoods into what they are today- from the locals to the shop owners- to see what the six communities have in common and what sets them apart.

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thanks so much for posting this, its amazing how current it feels. $150,000 for the penthouse? unimaginable now! And those pictures are great. Pat Hearn looked so young! its amazing to think about how many people from that generation are just physically gone now.

Wow thanks for posting this. My husband worked for Sam Glasser during this time for about 2 years, which is how we got our apartment. According to him, Sam seemed to have a genuine interest in the arts and bought 2 paintings from him (then lost them!) and hired artists to do odd jobs and construction. We ran into Sam a few years ago at the Philharmonic with his new pianist wife - he was living in St. Louis gentrifying their loft district. Times change, people don't.

The picture with the the shop ENZ on St. Marks Place is now truly historical since it recently became another shop to sell "quick junk for tourists". ENZ (still owned by Marianne) is now on

2nd Ave next to Love Saves The Day.

I was the one who dressed the window that day and Perry can be seen in the photo doing the manequins hair :)

THE LOWER EAST SIDE -

POP GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD!

Wow. I actually remember when this article came out. I was living in a "3 bedroom" apt on Ludlow St (about 600 sq ft) w/ bathtub in kitchen at $425/mo -- a fantastic place. We painted the walls black & gold and put up beautiful collages and laid down a few layers of carpet (found on the street) and rehearsed our band all day. Barely employed, you could live on rice n beans n drugs. My boyfriend worked at Life Cafe, so there was always food and beer. 8BC was like a second home to us. There was always something incredible going on there. I remember reading this article at the time and thinking, Who are these ASSHOLES and why can't we just GET RID OF THEM!

Having said that -- the LES in the 70s and 80s was a rough, noisy, dirty, scary place to live. For every fun, fucked-up club night, there was a mugging at gunpoint or rape at knifepoint. It was the best place on earth if you were an artist, performer, writer, musician in your 20s. I'm glad I lived there when I did, but I would never wanna do it again.

Yes, I paid $3M for the Christodora House and I borrowed $2M of that at 24% interest. What a great building! What fun it was to renovate. The Black Panthers had been the last occupants. It was TRASHED. While my flooring subcontractors were installing the last of the oak flooring in the building, someone stole the engine and back seat out of their car which they had parked across the street from the building. The neighborhood was off the charts. I loved it. Sam Glasser

The survey became a psychology study of sorts. Do we prefer a classic name, merely placing us where we are on the map? (Park Woodlawn, Montford Park, Park Lawn.) Or do we want our neighborhood to seem trendy, aspiring to the coolness of our north-of-Davidson neighbors? (WooPa, MoFo, PaMo.) Two-hundred and eighty-six people responded with 96 names. The name with the most votes was simply Montford.

This was a number of years back, when my son was still small. I was visiting my home state of Wisconsin and my sister had offered to babysit, granting my wife and me a rare date night. We could have gone anywhere in Door County; as a tourist destination, it has a fair number of restaurants and bars. But we went to AC Tap, a roadside tavern on a lonely stretch of County Highway 57. I had a dirt-cheap Brandy Old Fashioned (the only cocktail you can order there without a fuss), and my wife had a dirt-cheap Miller High Life.

Owing to its excellent fried perch baskets, the Nite Cap was the closest the village of Palmyra came to fine dining. The other six nights of the week, however, it was a tavern. And though literally located on the other side of the tracks, it was a much-beloved gathering place for the townsfolk.

Imbibe is liquid culture. In every issue of the James Beard award-winning magazine and on our website, we celebrate drinks as a distinct culinary category, deserving in-depth exploration of the people, places, cultures and flavors that make the world of drinks so fascinating.

The year 1968 was auspicious in Cleveland theater history for two big reasons: I was born, and Dobama Theatre opened its doors on Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights. In the intervening 37 years, we have each changed a lot, Dobama and I, together and apart, for better and for worse.

Our playgrounds could not have been more different back then. Somewhere between the eras of Marilyn Sheppard and Amy Mihaljevic, I could toddle around unmonitored in the front yard of my Wolf Road home in Bay Village with little fear of being snatched . . . or maybe my parents' "Ice Storm" generation really was kind of slow.

Coventry, meanwhile, was cementing its reputation, one that persists to this day, as a hangout for an "edgy" crowd. It was an inexpensive place to live and was an attractive spot for a lot of intellectuals, teachers and otherwise unsavory, forward-thinking pinkos to live, drink and presumably take a lot of drugs.

Following a rather cushy upbringing and putting in the requisite five years at Ohio University, I came to Cleveland Heights in the early 1990s. It was the end of an era . . . and apparently the beginning of a new one. It still had a hippie-dippy vibe. Hang-abouts were still smoking cigarettes and playing Pente at all hours in the Arabica on the corner. My friends and I performed at open-mic nights in what they used to call The Yard out in front of that coffeehouse, a big open plaza where kids played hackey-sack and there was even more smoking.

It was also a depressed time. A friend who came to visit got his car broken into in the middle of the afternoon and has never been back. I was consistently hit up by a guy named Benny. Nice guy. He got most of my change, back when I still gave people change.

My introduction to Dobama was when I went to see "Nebraska" by Keith Reddin, a play about the effects of stress upon the men and women who work in nuclear weapons silos. Then as now, Dobama Theatre has been dedicated to plays with strong, left-leaning social messages.

The early '90s was also when Joyce Casey began her tenure as artistic director. Since then she has worked to maintain the theater's reputation for progressive-thinking plays, to reward her artists with pay (the performers, directors and artisans from the Age of Aquarius did it all for love, the amateurs) and to attract young, new audiences.

Their dedication to local playwrights is unequaled in Cleveland, presenting one world premiere a season. Eric Coble, Sarah Morton, Faye Sholiton, and, yes, even I have had new works presented for the first time either as part of the mainstage or Night Kitchen productions.

Crowley, best known for the groundbreaking and gay-stereotype-setting "The Boys in the Band," had had one ill-received production of "For Reasons" in Washington a few years earlier. The Dobama production seemed sure to be its second.

It was a big, big hit for Dobama. The show's run was extended an additional weekend, which afforded the playwright, with his L.A. entourage (Crowley does a lot of writing for television), the opportunity to come to Cleveland and see his latest work be vindicated. I will never forget when Joyce announced the playwright's presence in the audience following curtain call. We could all hear Scott in the dressing room; he yelped like a little girl. It was yet another touching, transcendent moment in the history of this little theater.

When the Winking Lizard restaurant moved in upstairs in 1998, the sounds of chairs scraping across the floor and newly installed toilets flushing directly over the audience's heads became a commonplace occurrence. Intimate, quiet productions have become almost impossible to consider for production, and Dobama has lost subscribers because of this, as well as all of the other inconveniences.

Meanwhile, the Coventry neighborhood has been evolving around this liberal bastion of free expression and authority-questioning drama. While the stalwart, funky and fun emporiums of the past (Tommy's Restaurant, High Tide-Rock Bottom, Mac's Back Paperbacks and Record Revolution among others) have held back corporate encroachment by consolidating into one co-operatively owned block in the middle of the street, new landlords at the extremes have done their best to maximize profit and lower the common denominator.

In the neighborhood where I used to get my eyeglass prescription filled, take tai chi lessons, get my groceries and ply my trade as a theater artist, I can now buy pizza, hoagies, sushi, burritos and ice cream. For every independent boutique that can't cut it, we get another place to stuff your face.

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