This is only my second time in Cleveland so the neighborhood I picked for lodging, while covering the Republican National Convention, was a crap shoot.
I got lucky. Tremont is about a mile due south of the convention center and I had planned on just renting a bicycle, thinking it would be easier pedaling in and out of the downtown area than taking a cab or Uber.
I was wrong.
On Sunday, friend wife and I decided to do some reconnaissance in the hope that my internet-mapped route would be as easy as it looked but as Sunday wore on, the police, fire and all of the outsourced security (that’s most of the security here) began to cordon off an ever-growing swath of perimeter for the convention which officially started on Monday.
By the time they finished it was more than a mile wide and half a mile deep.
And when Annie read to me a “dos and don’ts” list from the city, included in the “don’ts” was “no bicycle locks within three miles of the convention center.” Hah! The apartment we’re renting is closer than that.
From what I read there are 15,000 credentialed media here and judging by what I saw Monday on the convention floor, we account for most of those in attendance.
We disgusting reporters, to use the presumptive nominee’s adjective, are allowed on the floor for an hour at a time but other than us and the delegates, the most remarkable thing about the Quicken Loans Arena is that it is mostly empty. Maybe that will change by Thursday’s official nominating ceremony.
Annie and I decided to take this morning off and bicycle around town but we soon found that outside the our lovely neighborhood of trendy shops and churches (I’ve never seen so many churches) is a belching, noisy industrial belt.
That’s the good news.
When I finished my interviews on the floor of the convention yesterday I started to make my way back to the location where an Uber driver had dropped me early in the day but by the time I got there I discovered that Uber was no longer allowed inside that particular area.
“You must get to a Green Zone,” the application admonished me and so I slogged on until a few blocks later the Uber software signaled I was in an area they could work.
But calling the area outside the secure perimeter “green” is like calling a mother of six a virgin.
The guy that rented us our bicycles seemed a little crazy when we talked but one thing rang clear: Cleveland is unbelievably corrupt.
It is run, he said, by a few men who pad their pockets large at the expense of most of its people. Its population, I’ve learned, has dropped by two-thirds from a high of more than a million.
“Check your sources,” is what they taught me in Journalism school and yes, four out of four Uber drivers just nodded when I asked them - it’s a forgone conclusion that Cleveland is corrupt.
What’s left here are mostly low (and I mean really low) income black people and while downtown Cleveland is secure, the neighborhoods around it are a kill zone.
Although I’m not seeing it on television, while Cleveland focuses on presenting itself as best as it can in the national spotlight, the crime pages in the newspaper (not the front page) are foreboding.
From page nine of today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer: Cleveland Homicides, weekend deadliest of 2016.
Annie had told me of reports of two killings, one a child, Sunday night at a Peace Rally in a park on the East side of Cleveland.
Meanwhile, the local news stations tout how safe and secure things are at the convention.
I had trouble finding that information online and remarked to her, “well, perhaps it was just a drive-by shooting and maybe those are so frequent here that it’s a ‘dog-bites man-story’” which is to say no story at all.
And so I looked a little harder and found a report of 12 killings last Friday night.
Unrest in the black communities across America is like nothing I’ve seen, but I was just a kid when the race riots of the 60s were in full bloom.
And I fear that my bicycle vendor was correct, like all of the critics of the national media. And that a few people and a few giant corporations are controlling the message from Cleveland.
They are certainly controlling the violence inside, but not outside of the tiny perimeter in Cleveland that Uber ironically calls “The Red Zone.”
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