I grew up on a Rust Belt street in a Rust Belt city: Colgate Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. The street had an alley. It had working-class kids born to working-class parents. Life on the street wasn’t idyllic. But that’s not how life is, particularly in Cleveland. The city can be exceptional in its realism. “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans,” said playwright Tennessee Williams. “Everywhere else is Cleveland.”
I remember my neighbor’s house, green with aluminum siding. The Mills family lived there. Mr. Mills, a Kenny Rogers lookalike, came up from West Virginia for a job in the mills. But by the mid-1980s the family left, moving to the bungalowed-suburb of Middleburgh Hts. Their American Dream was Cleveland’s American nightmare. By 1990, the city’s population declined by nearly 40% from its peak. The loss was due to folks like the Mills leaving, coupled with a growing absence of people moving in.
