OBSERVATIONS FROM THE TOUR DE RUSTBELT

The S family travels through the Rustbelt came to a close, sadly, on Labor Day. But they gave me the chance to take the pulse of middle America this election year. A few highlights.

Our first stop was wonderful Cleveland, Ohio. I have long been a fan of the misnamed Mistake by the Lake and I think I won over my kids too, especially after the hearty $2.95 breakfast at the fabulous West Side Market. Surprisingly, I didn't see a lot of signs of political activity in this crucial battleground state. Perhaps that's because of the recent troubles in Cuyahoga County's Democratic Party. I am hoping that we passed through the city during a quiet stage of organizing and that canvassers are fanning out registering new voters by the thousands.

I wanted to stop in grim Gary and postindustrial Hammond, but my family was tired, so we took a spin up to the Chicago Skyway via Kline Boulevard, the nearly empty, wide highway that one of my Rustbelt intellectual friends, a native of northwest Indiana, calls the former driveway of the proletariat. Kline Boulevard passes the once-mighty steel complexes of Gary, places that provided tens of thousands of jobs just a generation ago, but now run with minuscule workforces. The S kids were bored but still impressed by the vision of the dark, satanic mills along the lake.

Up to Chicago, a city that has undergone an extraordinary metamorphosis under Mayor Richard Daley. I visit there frequently, but usually in the winter. This summer, with exquisite weather, we explored the city and its various neighborhoods. Two observations: 1) the white, rich North Side of Chicago is whiter and richer than ever. I have never seen so many young couples with strollers on a weekday in city neighborhoods like Lincoln Square and Andersonville. It feels a bit like Leave it to Beaver revisited. 2) The South Side is just as bleak as ever, a few pockets like the gussied up Bronzeville excepted.

Mayor Richard Daley has decided, like most big city mayors these days, to turn the city's built environment into a monument to himself. The process of beautification and job creation (public works has long been the lifeblood of the Chicago machine) began in earnest when the Democrats chose Chicago for their 2004 convention. Miles of formerly desolate stretches of city streets have been turned into greenways, with landscaped islands and trees. The wide and rather grim Ashland Avenue is a good example. The best of the landscape enhancements, in my opinion, are the various efforts to calm traffic on the city's residential streets. Cities laid out on a grid provide countless temptations for speeding. But now, many side streets are quiet because of the strategic deployment of speed bumps and traffic islands. Hooray for taming the great menace to urban life, the car.

But the limitation's of Daley-ification are clearest on the South Side. One of the highlights of our trip was an evening out with blog idol Kathy G of The G Spot and her husband Mr. G Spot. Adopted Chicagoans, they offered us a tour of Hyde Park (including a drive-by of the Obama "mansion") before taking us deep into the South Side to the New Apartment Lounge for the regular Tuesday night gig by the incomparable jazz genius Von Freeman.

What's crystal clear is that urban prettification hasn't done much for the vacant-lot strewn and boarded up streetscapes of places where the city's rich and white seldom venture. One lowlight that turned into a highlight: the S family car had trouble, leading us to a car dealership in Marquette Park, one of the formerly white, blue-collar neighborhoods that became infamous in 1966 when Martin Luther King, Jr. led open housing protests there. Alas, Marquette Park was not integrated then, and it is not now. It's a typically grim Rustbelt cityscape of rundown houses with mostly shabby shops and stores, left behind by its bitter white residents and left behind by city officials today. It's a reminder that, for all of Chicago's celebrated yuppification, it's still a city of sharp divides between rich and working-class, black and white. Buffing up Lincoln Park has not trickled down to Marquette Park.

Stay tuned for more on the Tour of Rustbelt, including watching the Democratic convention with my Limbaugh-loving family, walking a half mile to pick up a signal on my cell phone, and drinking beer with UAW members and fisherman talking about Sarah Palin.

RUSTBELT PLACE OF THE WEEK: CLEVELAND

Rustbelt urban life is full of juxtapositions, often jarring. The great cities of the Northeast and the Midwest were the boomtowns of the industrial age. Their cityscapes reflect the tremendous capital of the robber barons and industrial titans of a century ago. It's a risk to romanticize the corporate leaders of yore, for the Gilded Age was a time of staggering inequality. Working conditions in turn-of-the-century factories were abysmal. Debilitating industrial accidents were commonplace and, in the era before workers' compensation and insurance, a severed hand or a lost eye meant a lifetime of abject poverty. And urban environments were appalling and degraded because of unregulated industrial pollution. Rivers ran multi-colored with effluvia from factories, coal soot fell like black snow, and city skies were often dark with sulfur-laden pollutants. You can still see the traces of the industrial past on unrenovated limestone and marble buildings, discolored by pollution and often scarred by the effects of years of acid rain. But Robber Barons expressed their vanity by engaging in great civic ventures. Nearly every Rustbelt city, big or small, is chock full of museums, symphony halls, and--especially--libraries, open to the masses but bankrolled by the classes.

Cleveland, my Rustbelt Place of the Week, embodies this history. Its cityscape is littered with abandoned houses, ruined commercial districts, and rotting factory buildings. Like many industrial cities, it laid waste to much of its waterfront. The Cuyahoga River, so polluted that it once caught on fire, was the butt end of Cleveland's industry. Large stretches of the Cuyahoga, between the semi-gentrified Flats downtown, and the parkland south of the city, are still ruined by decades of industrial neglect. And the Lake Erie shorefront from downtown several miles eastward, is mess of highway, industrial and commercial land (much of it unused), and a little-trafficked airport. The disinvestment that has ravaged most Rustbelt cities has left its mark on Cleveland's downtown, though some of the fine nineteenth century, buildings once home to warehouses and factories, has been converted into apartments and restaurants. Still, it is striking, coming from the East Coast, at how little retail exists in downtown Cleveland. Other than the Tower Center (which has had a troubled recent past) it's damn nigh impossible to shop downtown.

Still, Cleveland is a beautiful city--one that does not deserve its long time moniker, "the mistake by the lake." It's West Side Market (pictured above) is one of the great urban markets in America. Last fall, I had a fabulous bratwurst sandwich from a little stall there, before heading over to the nearby Great Lakes Brewery to wash it down with a locally-brewed ale. Cleveland has some quirky and characterful neighborhoods. Just south of downtown is the Slavic Village, a neighborhood that is a hodgepodge of worker-built homes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And the jewel of Cleveland is the cultural district around Case Western Reserve University, home to all of the institutions built and richly endowed by Cleveland's once mighty upper class. There is enough cultural vitality in that part of Cleveland to support a lively Cinemateque, a weekly gathering of cineastes who can watch classic, obscure, and recent films that would never, never make it into a suburban multiplex. And Cleveland is home to one of the most robust movements for community economic development--a fact visible in the new housing and rehabilitation in many of its working-class neighborhoods.

Cleveland has more than its share of problems: chronic crime, deteriorating schools, housing abandonment, an inadequate tax base, and a deep and still-unresolved history of racial segregation. Yet, like all troubled cities, a visitor can find there too the signs of a great past, a vital present, and maybe, just maybe a more promising future.