by Barbara Ruben

About the author: Barbara Ruben was the editor of the former quarterly magazine Environmental Action.

On a slate gray day the wind off Lake Erie whips stray Cheetos bags, Burger King coffee cups and dry brown oak leaves past barren blocks of pockmarked and boarded buildings. Hunkered between a padlocked loan shop and the defunct 61st Street Pier seafood carryout, the garish marquee of the long- shuttered Fascination Playland is bereft of most of its yellow and red lights. Scrawled on the doorway of the former adult bookstore and movie house is a somehow fitting epitaph for this post-industrial ghost town: ‘There was not much love from God.”

A Cleveland Brownfield

But if this scarred block of Cleveland’s east side hasn’t seen any...