We’ve had some great press about our kickstarter, including the lead piece in this week’s CoolCleveland. Check it out:

Continuing the Momentum of Rust Belt Chic, CoolCleveland

TipOff, Cleveland Plain Dealer (scroll down to “Another Notch)

New Online Publication To Explore Rust Belt Culture and Economic Development (Fresh Water)

We are amazed and grateful for all the support we’ve already received. If you want to join us to celebrate our launch, you can buy a ticket to our party on August 23 at St. John’s Parish Hall in Ohio City on August 23. For now,  tickets are only available as a $30 reward on the kickstarter.

Courtesy of the Plain Dealer

Hang an outdoor chandelier Downtown and call it “transformational”. The dissonance that illuminates as it hangs like a fib not a mile away from the Central neighborhood, with a poverty rate of 70%, will be nothing short of despairing. Said Daniel Boorston:

We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.

We can do better. I mean, we have to.

–Richey Piiparinen

We’ve launched a funding drive for Belt. Check it out. Tell your friends. Back us if you feel so inclined. But at the very least watch the video for David C. Barnett’s diety-esque proselytizing from the train yard.

“Belt,” a new online magazine to launch in September, will build on the astonishing success of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology, which proved there is a need for thoughtful, in-depth reporting and commentary on culture and economic development in Cleveland and other industrial cities. The book was produced, start-to-finish, in three months. It drew volunteer submissions from more than 80 writers, was profitable within weeks of publication and is onto its second printing.  ”Belt” will continue the momentum.

One comment we keep hearing about the success of Rust Belt Chic is that it puts words and images to what people are feeling in the city. Cleveland has few journalistic outlets producing meaningful culture or economic journalism and its only daily newspaper will soon lay off a third of its staff.  There is a need for the kind of storytelling Belt can produce.

We have run a beta-version through this blog for a year. We have posted a mixture of commentary, blog posts and guest contributions. We are ready to start running longer, commissioned articles and essays, and we have a staff in place ready to edit and write.

Belt will produced by Clevelanders, and the city will be our primary audience. But what is happening in Cleveland is pertinent to people in other Rust Belt cities–and what is happening in the Rust Belt is pertinent to anyone following the revitalization of post-industrial cities. So those interested in urbanism and cities will find us interesting. So too will anyone who values narrative journalism with a strong voice. Our writers and  columnists are experienced professionals with national publications under their, um, belts. We will run original, quality writing that does not shy away from controversy We will belt.

To get up and running, we need a full-fledged website, one that can showcase writing, images and videos, and allow visitors to search for and contribute to the topics we cover. And we need to be able to commission long-form articles and sharp commentary. So we are launching a Kickstarter campaign to raise seed money. Soon–any moment now!–the campaign will begin. We are eager to talk to anyone interested in this project, be they writers, potential investors or future readers. Contact us by emailing Anne Trubek at anne.trubek@gmail.com

Courtesy of img.ibtimes.com

“[T]he most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.” Writer David Foster Wallace

The story of the three Cleveland women kidnapped over 10 years ago and recently found alive in a house on the city’s Near West Side has captivated the national imagination. There is the miracle aspect from the fact that such situations rarely end this way. There is the hero aspect that is Charles Ramsey, the raw dog, uber-Cleveland man that tells it like it is (e.g., “Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little, pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms.”) But that is not what this essay is about. Rather, it is about our failure as a city, particularly a failure of priority.

On Monday, May 6^th, the feeling in the air as one of the girls-turned-women emerged into her freedom was torn. There was elation from the miracle that the supposed dead were alive, yet there was also a collective unease that comes with the reality that Cleveland can be a violent city, and that there was a need for a miracle in the first place.

Worse, the fact that the decades-long captivity occurred in the shadows of Cleveland’s revitalization success story, Ohio City—the city’s artisan district and home of the West Side Market—well, let’s just say it was enough to give many in this city pause. Including myself.

Specifically, the week’s events left me acutely aware that Cleveland is still comprised of remnants of a post-industrial community. For it is a city still reeling. Still struggling. Still failing the most vulnerable. And it is a city still culpable, if only through fostering a continued failure in leadership that refuses to build the city the right way.

Yes, like many cities, there are pockets of reinvestment, such as the gentrifying neighborhoods of Detroit Shoreway, Downtown, University Circle, Ohio City, and Tremont. And reinvestment in inner-city neighborhoods is needed, as concentrated poverty and segregation is no path forward. But Cleveland is not going to consume and play its way out of this. Re-treading the entertainment district into whatever urban revitalization fad appears to be going on in any given decade (hello microbrews) will only lead to what we always got: a perpetual state of “revitalization”. What will work is a real reconstitution of Cleveland’s neighborhoods; that is, a reconstitution of people, and not simply of place. To that end, think of the city as a net. No amount of investment will stick until we re-thread our community fabric, which involves growing the people that comprise a community in the first place.

How does a city do this? Well, the first step is to not get too cute, and to do the obvious realities right. No amount of beautification projects will save a post-industrial city. A city needs to focus on the basics, as you develop a city like you grow a child. Here, the psychologist Albert Maslow’s hierarchy of needs can help.

To wit, city leaders must prioritize physiological needs: eradicate food deserts, curb environmental threats, etc. Then, focus on safety. Not just manning safety force slots, but making sure those protecting us respect their duty. There are big questions about this in Cleveland. Also, shelter. Real local housing policies are needed, as are innovative educational and workforce development strategies. If you want to get creative, you can even leverage and strategize various needs together, like utilizing a glut of vacant storefronts into small business/entrepreneurial initiatives. Next, encourage social and cultural attachment so the benefits of community capital can be had. Don’t worry. If persons can breathe, eat, work, feel safe, and go home, they are likely to do this on their own. In fact that is the beauty of a hierarchy approach, as investment at the bottom turns into a self-fulfilling process up top. And then the icing on the cake: actualizing individuals, perhaps through fostering creative capital programs. That said, creatively classifying a city is doing it backwards. Said Maslow:

“A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.”

Of course while this makes intuitive sense to regular Clevelanders, it is confusing for the local leaders, if only through the advice of “revitalization” experts. For instance, in an article addressing concerns over whether or not Detroit’s investment should go to a bike path initiative, the author references an expert as to why the answer is “yes”:

As Peter Kageyama argues in his book For the Love of Cities, “In the city making ‘hierarchy of needs’ we see most communities focused on bottom-line, core issues of making cities functional and safe. There still are many communities that struggle to even deliver functional and safe but that is not the problem. The problem is when communities only focus on the functional and safe and never raise their aspirations.”…Ultimately, places that do not engage us emotionally do not feel worth caring about.

Clicking on the link above to Kageyama’s page, the expert details his thoughts and his audience:

I focus primarily on American cities though the ideas are relevant to any place. I pay particular attention to some of our most challenged places such as Detroit, Cleveland and New Orleans as they have become hot beds of social innovation as government and the “official” city-makers have struggled to reconcile shrinking budgets and diminished capabilities. Into this vacuum has flowed a new breed of city-maker – usually young, independent, unofficial, creative, rule breaking and entrepreneurial. These are the new “frontiersmen” and “frontierswomen” who are rebuilding these cities from the ground up.

There are a few problems here. First, while attachment to place is important, the logic is a bit flawed. A person insecure in various aspects of livability, like food and shelter, is not going to have their concerns addressed via an emotional connection to a given place. I am not saying developing place is bad. I am only saying such an approach is akin to investing in nice drapes as your house is on fire. Put the fire out. Protect your people. Grow your people. After all, according to economic developer Jim Russell, people develop, not places.

Second, local leaders are elected for a reason. To lead. And to serve and protect. “Frontiersmen” or “Frontierswomen” are not going to protect the preyed upon—notwithstanding Charles Ramsey, though I doubt that is what Kageyama had in mind.

No doubt, the events in Cleveland have shaken the city—yet another tear in an already torn city. And while the local and national news media is branding the escape of three women and one child as the “Miracle in Cleveland”, it wasn’t. At least not for us. We failed these young women. We failed the women before them. I hope this serves as our wake-up call. We will not play our way out of this. And if we continue to try, there will always be shame in the shadows of our revitalization.

–Richey Piiparinen

We’ll be out and about this week.

Come hang out with us at the Lakewood Public Library on Wednesday night.

And head over to the Cleveland Flea on Saturday so you can stop by, say hi, and check out our new tees.

Here at Rust Belt Chic, we’ve been thinking about making this blog into an online magazine. We would run long-form stories as well as commentary on policy and economic development. It would be, in effect, a magazine-version of the book, with the articles being a mix of reporting, personal essays and histories, as are the contributions The Cleveland Anthology, and the editorials  working towards the sorts of change and policy advocated by the term “rust belt chic”  Articles would be edited by a small staff and writers would be paid for their contributions.

That’s the thinking. What we need to move from talk to action are, well, funds. Money. Scratch. Benjamins.

We have not figured out how to find said riches yet, but we are working in our small-scale, DIY way to raise money for a new website design. We’ve printed up some super-cool t-shirts, and any profits from the t-shirts go into this funding this next venture.

shop now

Cleveland likes keeps its best stories buried. We haven’t found our Herotodus yet, or maybe I am just being lax about learning the history of my adopted home. So I was not surprised that I had not heard of Cleveland’s Charles Ruthenberg, pictured above outside the West Side Market. But I wish I knew more.

A quick sketch: Ruthenberg was a founder of the Communist Party of America, a longtime president of the Party, and he is one of two Americans buried in teh Kremlin. And he was a Clevelander who ran for mayor several time.

Charles Ruthenberg was born in 1882,  the son of Jewish immigrants whose father was a wealthy garment manufacturer in New York. Ruthenberg moved to Cleveland to work in the garment trades.  He supported Mayor’s Tom Johnson’s progressive values, and, in 1909,  he became a socialist. Ruthenberg said his converted to socialism happened “through the Cleveland Public Library.”

At his first socialist meeting in Cleveland, only 8 people there spoke English. The other 18 spoke German, Czech, Polish and Yiddish.

Ruthenberg was eventually convicted under the Espionage Act and sent to a workhouse in Canton for year. While there, he ran for mayor, and received 27,000 votes, over 25% of the total. He was again arrested in the riots of 1919, ran for office several more times. Then he became a communist, helped found the CPA and led the organization for many years.

He moved to the Soviet Union for during the 1920s, and when he died at 44, his ashes were interred in the Kremlin.

Unless someone does it first (game on!), I’ll do some more research on Ruthenberg, poke  about the archives and recover more of his story for curious Clevelanders. For now, some futher reading:

PD article from 1996
Rutherberg Archives
–AT

This post originally appeared at Burgh Diaspora.

Some people don’t like the term “Rust Belt”. Others absolutely hate the word “chic”. Please don’t call the shifting mesofacts of dying Great Lakes cities “Rust Belt Chic”. Given the reaction, a lot of it negative, I decided to blog about how I came up with Rust Belt Chic. Way back in 2006, Shittsburgh was associated with a kind of urban chic. The South Side Slopes celebrated in the New York Times:

“If Pittsburgh’s market were on steroids like New York’s, this would’ve happened a long time ago,” said one developer, Ernie Sota, referring to the recent spark of interest here. “But Pittsburgh’s kind of like an eddy. Things move slowly here.”

Mr. Sota, 56, is a prolific local developer who is constructing a series of nine ‘green’ town houses, called Windom Hill Place, into a lush hillside here. He was drawn to the Slopes by the views and villagelike feel, which, for him, conjure memories of visits to Prague and Budapest.

“It’s just kind of quirky, funky and real, more organic, built by Europeans and other immigrants,” he explained. “The only other American cities that I find as geographically interesting are maybe San Francisco and Asheville, N.C.”

Emphasis added. At the time, I thought of Sota’s sense of Pittsburgh place as unique to the city. I’m not from Pittsburgh. I don’t live in Pittsburgh. I didn’t go to school there. I’m a geographer. Pittsburgh appeals to my sensibilities. Pittsburgh is my Paris.

The geographic scope of Pittsburgh urban chic became Rust Belt Chicupon meeting Phil Kidd and John Slanina in Erie, PA for a Rust Belt Bloggers summit. They introduced me to Youngstown. I was hooked.

Rust Belt Chic always will be ironic. People are attracted to shrinking city hellholes. However, the hellhole part is misunderstood. What I mean is seeing opportunity hiding in a community struggling with survival. There’s just something about Youngstown that stirs passion in me. I’m not gawking at ruin porn or glossing over everything that is wrong. I love Rust Belt cities. I love Rust Belt culture. I’m proud to be from the Rust Belt. That’s what Rust Belt Chic now means to me. It’s personal. It’s who I am.

For Pittsburgh, I could sense the tide turning. I see the same transformation taking place in other Rust Belt cities. A pejorative, Rust Belt-ness is an asset. It’s a starting point for moving forward, not a finish line or a civic booster campaign. Rust Belt Chic is in the same vein as rasquache:

Rasquache sensibility that has become an important component of Chicana and Chicano art. The word, rasquache can be used in several senses. Its most common use is negative and relates to an attitude that is lower class, impoverished, slapdash and shallow. For this reason Tomás Ybarra Frausto who has written the cogent essay “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility” begins by stating, “One is never rasquache, it is always someone else, someone of a lower status, who is judged to be outside the demarcators of approved taste and decorum (in Richard Griswold del Castillo and others, Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985.Los Angeles: Wight Gallery, UCLA, 1991, p. 155)

However, as the case of several other terms and concepts (most notably the term and concept Chicano itself, which traditionally had a negative sense), the Chicano movement has turned the traditional notion of rasquache on its head. This important Chicano cultural sensibility has been particularly used to address, by means of a stance of resistance that is humorous and ironic rather than confrontational or hard-edged, the harrassments of external authorities such as the police, the immigration service, government officials, social services bureaucrats, and others. Chicano art that is rasquache usually expresses an underdog, have-not sensibility that is also resourceful and adaptable and makes use of simple materials including found ones, such as Luján’s cardboard, glue, and loose sand.

Rust Belt Chic turns the traditional notion of Rust Belt on its head. The Rust Belt is lower class, impoverished, slapdash, and shallow. At least, that’s how it looks from the coast, in New York City. Rust Belt Chic as a place to be is a form of resistance. It’s also a hot new trend and a threat to those neighborhoods that make my heart beat faster. From San Antonio:

“I see a lot of progressiveness happening lightning quick now. When I came from Los Angeles as a visitor in 1992, I saw all these magic spaces you could rent for 300 or 400 a month. But I would laugh because there was little or nothing going on. I could get together some event with a friend or two and everybody thought it was so cool and innovative – I was just copping what I had seen in LA.

San Antonio has gotten a lot more popular with Austin and California types discovering what a jewel this town is. Eclectic little restaurants and coffee places and shops growing up along Broadway and throughout Southtown. We’re being seen by a lot more cutting edge people by being open to contemporary signage and logos and creative design. With that, unfortunately, comes more expensive retail spaces and taxes are going up.

There is a charm and real-ness to San Antonio I hope we don’t lose in the process. San Antonio is a non-materialistic town; people aren’t looking at your shoes or what kind of car you drive. When I leave San Antonio, it’s that real-ness that brings me back, every time. I left LA, and I left Austin because I got so tired of the trendy-ness. We’re growing fast, we’re drawing an eclectic market that will support artists. However, there will be a compromise. I don’t want to see it get too uptight.”

–Robert Tatum

Pittsburgh is Rust Belt Chic Paris. San Antonio is Rasquache Paris.When Richey Piiparinen and I were in San Antonio to do fieldwork, we were both struck by the Rust Belt Chic qualities of the city. At the time, we weren’t familiar with rasquache. We are now. I see a lot ofsimilarities between Pittsburgh and San Antonio, particularly the way both places are under-appreciated. They enjoy a cult following. Hopefully, neither one will become the next Austin or Portland.

Rasquache is further along, much further, than Rust Belt Chic. In fact,Rust Belt Chic is rasquache:

This called to mind a passage I’d read in Have You Seen Marie? It’s an unusual book for a writer whose work has been at turns bawdy, avant-garde, and politically trenchant. Entirely autobiographical, Marie is a short, illustrated story with a childlike tone about Cisneros searching the streets of King William for a friend’s lost cat while mourning the loss of her mother, who died in 2010. I read Cisneros the passage I’d thought of: “ ‘King William has the off-beat beauty of a rasquache, and this is what’s uniquely gorgeous about San Antonio as a whole.’ ”

She smiled. “Rasquache is when you make or repair things with whatever you have at hand. You don’t go to Home Depot. If you have a hole in your roof, you put a hubcap on there. Or you fix your fence with some rope. That’s rasquache. And then there’s ‘high rasquache,’ which is a term the art critic Tomás Ybarra-Frausto coined. He lives here. Danny Lozano knew high rasquache. He’d serve you Church’s fried chicken on beautiful porcelain and use Lalique crystal for flowers he’d cut from an empty lot.”

“And that was one of the qualities that drew you to King William?”

“Not just King William but San Antonio. A kind of elegance of found things. San Antonio has that soul. It’s not, ‘We gotta copy what we saw in New York.’ No! It’s going to come out of our own idea of what we think is beautiful.” She stared at me as if to make sure I understood. “But that’s also what’s getting lost. People feel like the city’s got to look like someplace else. Our mayor needs a stylist. He thinks he has to dress like a Republican. Pues, he’s Chicano! He’s got this gorgeous indigenous look, and he would look so cool if Agosto Cuellar, one of our local designers, dressed him, or someone like Franco, or Danny, or John Phillip Santos—he dresses totally San Antonio cool. He should do a style column for Texas Monthly.”

I allowed that Santos, who is a regular contributor to this magazine, does have singular style (the last time I saw him, in December, he was wearing a horsehair charro tie and ringneck python boots) but joked that there might be a preponderance of leather pants in his fashion advice. Cisneros waved the joke aside.

“Our problem is that we can’t recognize or celebrate what we have. We have this inferiority complex in Texas that we have to look elsewhere. Well, who knows more about inferiority than Chicanos? We grew up being ashamed because the history that is taught to us makes us ashamed. The whole colonial experience surrounding the Alamo is meant to make you feel ashamed.”

In writer Sandra Cisneros, I sense a kindred spirit. As a Rust Belt native, Erie no less, I felt ashamed. I come from failure. I have no culture worth celebrating. Anywhere else must be better. That’s why we leave. Brain drain.

I, too, was drawn to King William while in San Antonio. It is New Orleans (creole) and Pittsburgh (parochial). It’s like nothing I’ve experienced before. I get that boom town vibe of a place that is cool before anyone knows it is cool:

Russell has seen what’s coming before. “When the buzz starts – when San Antonio embraces the brain gain, goes in the right direction on the talent economy and hipsters start to get wise to the neighborhood assets that are here – once the hipsters get wind of it – you’ll have to beat them away with a stick,” he said.

I think that’s the concern of Robert Tatum. About a year ago, such a notion was unfathomable to Cleveland. What will the compromise with gentrification look like in Ohio City? Will somebody utter the words, “He dresses totally Cleveland cool”?

Danny Lozano knew high rasquache. He’d serve you Church’s fried chicken on beautiful porcelain and use Lalique crystal for flowers he’d cut from an empty lot.

Rust Belt Chic is served.

Jim Russell