Customer Reviews

Cleveland: The Flats, the Mill, and the Hills

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I enjoyed the pictures of places I had driven past or worked at for thirty plus years - much of the landscape changed while I worked there but more has changed since. Many of the places are weed patches now that used to be alive with men, machines, and traffic going to and from as well as part of the mills. I could only wish there were more pictures from when the place was really alive.

This book is important for lovers of industrial architecture of any rust belt city, and especially we Cleveland expatriates who miss our own days of photographing the ever-fascinating Flats area. Cleveland, the Hill etc beautifully conveys the simple majesty of working landscapes. The sun and shadow composition of the photos is splendid, so evocative of both times gone by, but in some photos, the present as well. Borowiec definitely has an artist's eye and feel for his material. The Flats are unique to Cleveland, and Borowiec captures the spirit and identity perfectly.

As author Les Roberts states in the Introduction to this book, "Cleveland is a tough town." The weather, politics, and economy requires that this city be tough. However, if you say you live in Cleveland, you may not actually live IN Cleveland. "Clevelanders" live in Shaker Heights, Bay Village, Brecksville, and many other cities that surround Cleveland. Thankfully, I have worked and played in Cleveland and am familiar with many of the neighborhoods depicted in Andrew Borowiec's book, Cleveland: The Flats, the Mill, and the Hills, but I have not seen them until now.

Contents:
Introduction: Living in Cleveland by Les Roberts
The Plates
Afterword: What's Left? by Rod Slemmons
List of Plates
Acknowledgements
About the Author and the Essayists

Commissioned by the George Gund Foundation, Andrew Borowiec took photographs of Cleveland for its 2002 Annual Report. However, once he was finished, the George Gund Foundation provided the support for their publication in an imprint of the Center for American Places. What you see is a Cleveland that many know but never see. The pictures, all in black and white and with only a couple of people, are stark, gritty, industrial, touching, and beautiful. Black and white is the perfect medium for Cleveland. Some photographs, taken in winter, seem colder; like a wind off of Lake Erie. Others, in the summer, seem hotter, more humid. Much like some of our summer days. In short, this is how Cleveland should look. The photographs that really make an impact are of people's back yards, overlooking the industrial Flats. Their choices of furniture do not seem out of place; car seats, mismatched chairs, makeshift tables. Gritty furniture for a tough people. Two photos require a careful reexamination - the disappearance of a small house for an upscale townhouse. All that remains of the house is its fence. It is strange that the fence seems to belong, but with a much different meaning.

Andrew's choices of Les Roberts and Rod Slemmons for the essays was a masterstroke. These two individuals add more depth to the wonderful photographs and provide excellent insight into Cleveland. While probably not popular with the Cleveland Travel and Convention Bureau, this is a book that all Clevelanders should read. For those that wonder about our fair city, it will reveal our industrial legacy. Slemmons;' essay is a perfect ending to this wonderful book, as he recalls the people that have populated this town. And in the end, you will realize that Les Roberts was correct, this is a tough city and Borowiec has captured it.

Andrew Borowiec, <strong>Cleveland: The Flats, the Mill, and the Hills</strong> (The Center for American Places, 2008)

Les Roberts, in his introduction to this volume, mentions that people don't show up in these photographs. He's not quite right; there are five photos of the eighty-seven in this volume that contain people. They are far away and blurry, or their backs are to the camera, but they do show up. And I think I get what Roberts was saying--that humans are in no way the focus of these pictures--and he's right, but I think there's another layer to this. The population density in Cleveland has been slowly eroding away over the past decades, like the backyards of the mansions along Lake Road or the cliffs that hold up the houses in Rocky River. You can't look at these photos, if you've lived here for a while, and <em>not</em> think about that.

I'm sorry to pick on Les Roberts, but the other bone I have to pick with his introduction (which I enjoyed a great deal, it's quite well-written and, while I am focusing on the things I disagree with, there's a lot more in there I don't have any problems with at all) was his focus on the classic-Cleveland vibe of these pictures. And that is there, of course, but my reading of Roberts' introduction was that it was there to the exclusion of modern Cleveland. Nothing could be further from the truth. While there are certainly pictures here that probably could have been taken thirty of forty years ago and would still look exactly like they do now, there are a lot of pictures here that use far more than Jacobs Field (or whatever they're calling it now) and that stupid-looking semicircular thing that looms over the west shoreway as you head downtown. Most of what those pictures use is more subtle, which to me makes it more powerful. There's one in particular (plate 40, listed as Elm Ave., The Flats in the key in back) that I'm almost sure was taken on the back porch of what is now Roc Bar, with those cheap wrought-iron tables that haven't been there for more than a couple of years looking over at a pile of salt that might as well be primeval. I love the tawdriness of that image. I want it on my wall somewhere. It's a perfect distillation of everything this beautiful, bleak book has to say. A perfect companion to the recent documentary <em>City/Ruins</em>. ****

Disappointed, expected a photo essay on the monuments to bygone greatness of the city and the American steel industry, all it had were photos of non-descript back yards and dead ends. If the goal had been to truly frame the location rather than simply illustrate the Annual Report it might have been worth the fifty bucks.

a little disappointing. Plowden would
have done an excellent job on this.
shows the decaying industrial landscape
of Cleveland form various viewpoints.