An excerpt from The Cleveland Neighborhood Guidebook (Belt Publishing, 2016).

I. GHOST STREAMS

Late May, the cusp of summer, I glide down the brushy side streets of Cleveland Heights. My bicycle jiggles over the occasional stretch of brick road, reminding me that pavement was originally invented to make biking easier.

I’m biking to Coventry Village, the Bohemian epicenter of Cleveland Heights, a swirling mixture of antiques, vintage toys, head shops, churches, grocers, hardware stores, funky imports, indie rock bands, revolutionary and countercultural books, cafes, acting schools, sports bars and culinary options that stretch from middle America to East Asia. They even have a place where you can get locked in a room and forced to solve complex riddles to escape.

A haven for the easily distracted, Coventry often lures me in with a simple mission in mind, perhaps a jaunt to Heights Hardware to fetch a screw for an ailing cabinet back home. An hour later, I find myself clutching a handful of Star Wars figures from Big Fun while wolfing down a bowl of French onion soup at Tommy’s, hoping to make a poetry reading at Mac’s Backs that I just found out about. At some point, it occurs to me that I never made it to the hardware store for that damn screw.

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More than a decorative element, the tree-lined median along Euclid-Heights Boulevard once flowed with electric streetcars that connected neighborhoods throughout the city.
More than a decorative element, the tree-lined median along Euclid-Heights Boulevard once flowed with electric streetcars that connected neighborhoods throughout the city.

II. GHOST WRITERS 

In the same way that Dugway was forced to the oblivion of its underground channel, Cleveland’s literary scene has similarly faced a history of suppression. And like Dugway Brook, finding that moment for its true, natural expression in the bluestone gorge of Lakeview Cemetery, Coventry serves as a node for the free flow of ideas and expression in Cleveland.

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As I approach Coventry Boulevard, I cross over the remaining half of the boulevard and stride toward a small gathering of people circulating among canopies and a makeshift stage on an open peninsula of land in front of the Grog Shop, a haven for indie bands. I pause to admire the marvel of the curved architecture looming above the crowd as apartments along the Boulevard seamlessly flow into Coventry’s retail district. This arc of buildings serves as a ghost relic of the streetcar line as it curved north onto Coventry Road. As a fixed rail system, streetcars could not make sharp turns. Instead, they made wide arcs to gradually shift direction, a common urban design pattern encountered in Cleveland Heights. 

With the streetcars gone, this bonus piece of open land has, since the 1960s, served as a neighborhood gathering and performance space, as Coventry shifted from a predominantly Jewish neighborhood to the center of Cleveland’s counterculture scene. But, recently, this space had been busted up by the installation of concrete planters and barricades installed to discourage community assembly. The loss of this space particularly struck Harevy Pekar’s wife Joyce Brabner, who recalled that the spot used to be a “haven for nonconformist and creative youth until overblown anxiety about flash mobs and kids hanging around without money to support local business led to curfews and what many felt was repressive redesign.” Through the park, Joyce saw an opportunity to return the area to “its earlier, youth- and arts-friendly state by removing the big blocky ‘people bumper’ planters that were installed to discourage assembly, and welcome back young people, street musicians, storytellers, chess players and others to a communal meeting and gathering space.”

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