One interesting thing, of course, is that unlike most of the West Side of Cleveland, which was heavily agricultural and was at one time known as “the grape capital of the country”, this specific plot of land was almost certainly never farmed at this scale before.

This piece of property, along what was then Pearl Road, was essentially downtown Ohio City in the earliest days of the community and then became the famous “Irishtown Bend,” a neighborhood invariably described using both the term “shanty” and the term “hovel”. After the Irish moved out, much of the land was eventually converted to industrial and warehouse use. And of course the plot itself happens to be on an extremely unstable hillside.

Here’s how things were laid out in 1858, just after Ohio City was annexed by Cleveland. The plot of land that the Ohio City Farm is on today is the triangle formed by Pearl, Bridge and Franklin Streets. (This is from the “Hopkins Map” of 1858.)

And here’s how the same plot of land was built up in about 1892. (This is from the Sanborn Insurance Map.)

Notice that Hicks St. and two adjacent alleyways (Pearl Alley and Terrace St.) run across the middle of current Ohio City Farm space. None of those streets exist north of Bridge St. today, although all three streets (now renamed W 24th Pl., W 24th St., and W 23rd Pl.) do still run along the east side of the West Side Market south of Bridge.

One thing that amazes me about the map above is all the streets and houses that would today be on a fairly steep hillside. Basically Terrace St. — the alley to the east of Hicks — would be at the top of the hill today and River Bed St., a section of which you can see in the upper right corner of the 1892 map, would be at the bottom. The drop there is approximately100-110 feet. I’ll need to look into this further, but one explanation might be that the hill has eroded much further to the west now.

Here’s the same space today.



Almost no buildings. Very few streets. In the late 20′s the eastern end of this area had been cleared to build the viaduct that would take trains into the new Union Terminal (known as Terminal Tower today). By 1961 the forces of Urban Renewal had managed to tear down pretty much everything north of Bridge Ave and east of West 25th St. In 1963 the Riverview Terrace housing development opened. By 1999 it had become just as blighted as the shanties it replaced and the county housing authority tore down all but the high-rise part of it.

So over its long history, large scale farming of this property was probably just not in the cards.

Until today, when a bunch of Burmese refugees are planting fancy restaurant crops there.

A process that was supposed to be all about removing barriers and increasing access to the lakefront now appears to have evolved into a project that has no purpose besides putting some consultants and contractors to work.

On this “New” West Shoreway, can folks from Lakewood still drive to and from work without stopping for lights? Of course — wouldn’t want to inconvenience them! Are there still lots of ramps chewing up acres of lakefront property? We actually get more of ‘em! Get rid of the scary tunnels? Nope — more of them too! Is the road following the same tortuous route? Definitely! How about the unsafe bridge? Definitely keeping that!

And now in this process of improving nothing, ODOT is also planning to tear down some of the few remaining old buildings on the east end of Detroit Ave for — as Mandy clearly proves — no reason at all. And without really telling anybody about it. Amazing.

I hate to say it, but the City needs to shut this project down and start over. It might mean forfeiting a ton of money, but there’s no point in spending anything on a project that is taking us so far away from our original goal.

For a refresher on the basics of that goal, look at Chicago’s Lake Shore Dr. between Randolph and Roosevelt. Even at up to 10 lanes of traffic, that section of Lake Shore is far preferable than the current and future freeway that ODOT wants to give us.

I think the core issue in both the West Shoreway and Innerbelt situations is that the City feels that it has no expertise in transportation planning and so has simply handed all the decision making over to ODOT. ODOT then designs whatever it wants. And in all cases, what ODOT wants is to move traffic through an area as quickly and as cheaply as possible.

Here’s the deal: Sometimes “quickly and cheaply” isn’t what’s best. Sometimes it’s best if traffic doesn’t move quickly. Believe it or not, sometimes it’s best if traffic slows down or even stops! Sometimes it’s best to pay a little more and get something nicer.

But since ODOT are the “experts” — and because they control so much of the money — we defer to them and end up with what they want instead of what we want.

Cleveland and Cuyahoga County need to tell ODOT what we want and simply refuse to accept any designs that don’t meet those goals. We need to realize that we are actually the “experts” on our own communities. We need to start acting that way.

For years the only Turkish in Cleveland was at the Anatolia Cafe in Cedar Center. But things are changing — quickly!

I took the kids and our current Iraqi student guest Mustafa to a fairly new restaurant, Dervish, in Avon last night. Had a really great time. I’m not enough of an expert on Turkish food to know whether the various kababs we had were spectacular or just excellent, but Mustafa proclaimed them to be “exactly” like what he gets at home. So that’s gotta be pretty good.

Anyway, we probably didn’t have to go that far to get our kababs. There are (or will be) two Turkish restaurants near our house all of a sudden.

Just opened in Tremont, the Istanbul Turkish Grill, is on Professor near the corner of Starkweather. No reviews yet, but Doug Trattner blurbed it in Scene Magazine.

Later will come Alaturka, in the old Kan Zaman space at 1917 W. 25th St here in lovely Ohio City. According to the Plain Dealer, it’s going to be run by Yashar Yildirim, one of the owners of Anatolia Cafe! So that’s a good pedigree. It sounds like the restaurant should be open this fall.

Really looking forward to trying these out.

Slate: Why Do Foreigners Like Fanta So Much? Very interesting history of the product. Did you know it was created by the Nazi arm of Coca-Cola in the 40′s? Or that it was used to make soup?

Consumer Reports: Teen defensive driving school improves confidence, skills. The school in question, Street Survival, only costs $75 for a full day’s instruction and looks like an excellent investment.

This article also links to Consumer Reports’ recommendations of the best cars for teens. The comments on that second article and this earlier one on the same topic are extremely interesting.

Consumer Reports obviously puts far more emphasis on electronic stability control than their readers do — insisting it be on any of their recommended cars and calling it “the most important safety feature since the safety belt,” because it can prevent accidents from happening instead of just protecting drivers in an accident.

Their readers seem to think that anti-lock brakes and airbags — on all cars since the early nineties — are plenty of protection for their kids. That and making sure the kids drive a huge vehicle. Many comments take issue with the “luxury” marques on the list. (Presumably on there because these brands were the first to adopt some of these safety systems.) There’s definitely a “my kid doesn’t deserve to drive that” vibe to the whole thing. I wonder how many of those folks have purchased expensive computers and televisions for those same kids…

It’s pretty clear: the Java team at Sun (now at Oracle) has done far more to destroy the concept of “write once, run everywhere” than the supposed “proprietary” bad guys at Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe. Every single update to Java breaks something. There are no concepts of “backwards compatibility” or “forwards compatibility” in the product.

After years of this kind of bad behavior, the Java development community has simply given up on trying to deal with testing on different Java versions. Now most vendors say they work with one or two specific releases of Java and that no others are supported. Many of them actually ship their products with a version of Java embedded inside.

What that means for large enterprises is that we have to deploy all those special versions of Java along with the applications that use them — at 100MB per Java instance. It’s crazy. And we pretty much have to ignore the ongoing critical security issues that Java has since many apps won’t work (or at least aren’t supported) with the newer patched versions of Java. This is crazy of course: Java integrates with browsers and attempts to interface directly with “the Internet”. Along with other products that plug into browsers (like Flash, Silverlight, and Adobe Reader) Java should be right up there on the “critical to patch” list. But it isn’t because it can’t be.

The whole thing would be funny if I didn’t have to actually deal with it.

NY Times: Botanical Gardens Look for New Lures Here’s another article that mentions the recent financial tribulations of the Cleveland Botanical Gardens — although this time the problems are implied rather than the focus of the article. It does put the issue into a broader context though: Many similar organizations are having to scramble for money, not just ones that made a poor choice to expand at the hight of the economic bubble.

NY Times: What Do You Lack? Probably Vitamin D I’ve been taking a vitamin D pill every day for a little while now. I read that it could help with my mild psoriasis. I can’t say that there’s been a significant improvement there, but it looks like there are some other possible benefits. Since I’m susceptible to sun poisoning, I guarantee that I don’t get enough sunlight to make much vitamin D on my own. It also looks like the standard recommended dose of Vitamin D may be way too low.