Urban Disturbance

As I walked out of my house this past Sunday morning I noticed something a little strange - the hood of our Honda was cracked open just a bit. Uh oh. The driver-side door was unlocked; I've done this before, it's easy enough to forget to lock it. I jumped in and turned the key - the engine turned over but no spark, as they say on Car Talk. I popped open the hood and well - no wiring harness, no spark plugs. Someone had stolen the wiring right out of my car! Damn!

I've lived in the city for 20 years now and in the Southern Tremont/Metro area for 13. In that time I have had one car vandalized, had the plates stolen off of my van, my garage broken into and had a bike and lawn mower stolen, had a table stolen off of my front porch, and now this. I guess that is not too bad a track record for the time involved - I remind myself that when my sister lived in Manhatten I was amazed to hear that someone had stolen the eye shades out of her car; that and being mugged on the subway. I feel that crime is pretty low in Cleveland.

But still. It is aggravating. My neighbor had the stainglass windows stolen out of his Victorian home in the middle of the day. I have cleaned up buckets of trash off of the street and sidewalk including unbagged dirty diapers and a chicken carcass. I have been on my front porch as I watched some kid let his pit bull crap on my lawn. I have seen numerous homes go into foreclosure and become boarded up eyesores that have not been rehabbed. I have called in drug dealing to the police more times than I can count, I have witnessed drag racing on my residential street. I have had some idiot kid try to intimidate me by tailing me and revving his engine. I heard gunshots at night and there have been two murders within a block of my house that I know of - one was a robbery at a convenience store and the other may have been a drug deal gone bad.

I used to feel 'if you care about the city, you should live in it.' That was going to be the topic sentence for an editorial I never wrote. I believed it fervently. When I first bought a house in the city I proudly used the term 'urban pioneer' (until I heard that the phrase was racist because what about the people, largely nonwhite, who came before me?) But now I feel less like a pioneer and more like a - victim. Sometimes. Especially when the spark plugs are stolen right out from under the hood of my car.

On the other side of the ledger - my young neighbor, Jerrod, who tells me he 'lives for it' when I tell him not to work too hard - he's helping me rake leaves. Or the three young sisters who stop by to leave presents, cards and their school pictures. Or my neighbor, who organized a prayer vigil in the dead of winter for the young mother who died in that convenience store robbery. There is the music of many languages, the smells of Puerto Rican cooking, the West Side Market, the local church that still conducts services in German.

It's my job to market the city and Tremont to young professionals, visitors, shoppers. Which I proudly do. I also spend a lot of time with the 'grassroots' - block club members who have lived here for decades - doing neighborhood cleanups, writing grants, staffing meetings. The trick is to balance the competing concerns of the new well-to-do and the old been-here-firsts, and do what is right for everyone.

But where do I fall? My love of old architecture, walkable streets, church steeples, history, diversity and urban texture, even if it includes some urban grit, is giving way. Giving way to concerns for safety, convenience, schools. My wife and I have a young daughter, just nine months old. How do we want her to grow up? Where?

My feeling that the personal is political, that I could change things by being a part of it, is diminishing. I now see things in broader, bigger terms, of forces largely beyond the control of any one person. And while this makes me feel less angry at times about personal loses, it makes me feel less passionate about the city. And that makes me sad.