I spent Saturday, May 23, 2009, through Monday, May 25, 2009, in Cleveland in order to attend the wedding of a friend I'll call M. I won't talk much in this entry about the wedding or the people there. During the weekend, I caught up with a number of distant friends and acquaintances.
Though a short trip, I had enough spare time to spend in Cleveland that I got the feel of the city. Cleveland is a city of churches and hospitals. I say this because these two features distinguish it from other cities: the large campus of the Cleveland Clinic which dominates one part of town, and the countless churches one sees (especially when driving on Euclid Avenue). Also, the city is very green, like many east-coast cities, and thus (outside the small-ish downtown core) is pretty and suburban. For instance, a tour we took brought us by many nice parks (especially along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard), which included some "cultural gardens": Jewish, Italian, Slovakian, Polish, and lots more European groups. Incidentally, as we drove around, I noticed that each bus stop--at least all those along Euclid Avenue--has a historic plaque about the surrounding neighborhood: a nice touch. I also noticed while driving that all the traffic lights take a long time to cycle.
On our tour on Sunday afternoon, we noticed the downtown streets were remarkably empty. I wonder if it's the city or the time of year--Cleveland's population is 500k, of which 140k are students. That makes the city a college town. In late May, perhaps the students are either studying or have already left for the summer?
Saturday Activities
A friend, Do, of mine and I arranged to fly to Cleveland together. This plan, however, was foiled by my bus running close to half an hour late, making me arrive at the airport too late to check into my flight with baggage. Luckily, the airline had another direct flight to Cleveland leaving twenty minutes after the one I was supposed to take! They put me on it on standby and I got a seat. I'm glad it worked out, but still feel bad that Do traded his original seat to get a middle seat next to my assigned seat on the flight which I didn't get to take.
We arrived, met up, and got a rental car to drive out to a M's family's second home for a pre-wedding barbecue. On the way, Do observed, surprisingly, that the bus to the car rental location (not a long ride) passed some random business parks that were closer to the airport than the car rental agency. The home where the pre-wedding barbecue was held, in town called Lake Avon, backed right on Lake Erie. All of us attendees, at some point or another, climbed down to the rocky beach and skipped stones on the lake. The stones were perfect for skipping, though it took me some time to relearn how. The house's backyard, with beautiful large maple trees, had no fence between it and the neighboring house, thus leaving a wide-open space. The weather was perfect: low 70s and sunny. In all, the setting was beautiful, especially when the sun was setting. Absolutely amazing. I wish I took pictures, but Do took many and maybe I can link to them here.
Later in the evening, after the grown-ups left, us young-uns danced on the porch.
On the way to our hotel, we saw something cool from the highway and decided to stop and take pictures.
Sunday Activities
I took more pictures on Sunday.
Do and I had most of the day to kill before the wedding. To do so, we first walked to the Cleveland Museum of Art, passing the greenhouse that is the Cleveland Botanical Garden on the way. We were surprised by how decent the museum was and ended up spending nearly two hours there. We probably would've rated the museum even more highly (and have spent more time there) had its regular-collection wing with 19th century European art (including impressionism) and modern art been open. (From what we could see, the rooms looked set-up and good, but were scheduled to open a few weeks later. Why couldn't M have scheduled her wedding better? ;) ) In fact, the whole museum was undergoing long-term renovation and expansion. Neither really seemed necessary to me; the museum and its collection already look to be in pretty good shape.
We browsed the regular collection, containing American art (all years) and European art (up until the 1800s), then spent a good chunk of time in the museum's impressive "armor court." Filled with old armor and weapons, it was the coolest section of the museum. For more details on what I thought and liked in the museum, see the pictures and their captions.
We saw a special exhibit of photography by Lee Friedlander. Frankly, I didn't see the art in his work. The nature pictures look messy, jumbled, more documentary than anything. The pictures of architecture, people, and objects weren't much better. I'd find occasional ones I liked, but they're accidental. As one person quoted in the exhibit said, "What was new about Friedlander's work was ... his talent for turning familiar photographic errors into beguiling puns and puzzles." I say there's a reason certain things are commonly considered errors. Friedlander would understand my complaint about these cluttered images; he himself described one painting: "I only wanted Uncle Vern standing by his new car (a Hudson) on a clear day. I got him and the car. I also got a bit of Aunt Mary's laundry and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on a fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and seventy-eight trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more. It's a generous medium, photography."
We also visited a special exhibit of statues from the Central African savanna.
After the museum, we headed downtown to take a Lolly the Trolley tour of Cleveland in order to efficiently get an impression of the city. The picture-worthy places are described in the pictures. Here are some comments about what we saw that I didn't photography: many buildings downtown are made with big, solid bricks. The tour started by driving by piles of rocks used for concrete, passed buildings devoted to utilities and other industries, then passed on Jay Avenue by the brick houses in the "Ohio City" neighborhood. We saw the location of the West Side Market and its adjacent green market. We drove by the many museums in University Circle. (The Museum of Art is one of these. We'd already seen this area pretty well on foot.) We also passed near playhouse square, with its respectable count of seven theaters. The restaurant district (the warehouse district), by the way, seems to be on East 6th Street. It's relatively small.
Some neat facts about Cleveland:
- It seems most of Cleveland's cultural institutions were financed by wealthy donors, not the government.
- Some people with mansions on Euclid Avenue specified in their will that their houses should be torn down after their death. Other mansions were razed for other reasons. Not many exist any longer.
- The Cleveland Indians baseball team sold out its home game 455 times in a row.
I liked that the tour guide tried to emphasize local businesses, pointing out, for instance, a gourmet shop, a pita place, a place that makes burgers with fries on the burger, various restaurants, and a few immigrant grocery stores carrying imported food (e.g., Italian, German). Also, he mentioned the
Cleveland Federal Reserve's Money Museum, which could be interesting.
As for the wedding, I don't have much to say. The ceremony, some of which was in Polish, was held in Amasa Stone Chapel, a pretty church on the Case Western campus. After the wedding there was food and dancing--
M and many of her friends and family can dance--at Severance Hall, and, naturally, a post-party (in this case at our hotel).
Do took many more pictures than I did, but put only a
small selection of them online. His selection consists mostly of photos of the wedding, a complement to my photos because I generally didn't take any pictures at the wedding.
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