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The twilight of Toledo
Submitted by Michael Fielding on Tue, 01/06/2009 - 4:11pm.
January 20, 2008
I’m visiting a couple college friends in Toledo for the weekend. We have a sort of reunion each year. Sometimes it’s in Chicago, sometimes it’s in New York, where our other buddy lives. This time it’s in Toledo, where the other guy recently relocated to for his job. Toledo is like Gary, but funkier. It’s a small city, dead in many ways, but the little things that give it life really give it life. I pulled into town late Friday and drove through a downtown that – apparently – was the heart of a once a thriving industrial city.
Squat, century-old stone buildings and now-empty monolithic warehouses line the quiet artery of streets in this crossroads of northern Ohio. Its suburbs (yes, it has suburbs) are just like any other: strip malls and pancake houses, bowling alleys and unassuming ranch homes.
…“I went back to Ohio, but my city was gone. There was no train station, there was no downtown. … all my favorite places … reduced to parking spaces.” – “My City Was Gone,” The Pretenders …
But the city itself has a quirkiness that at once suggests it’s undergoing a rebirth (immaculately clean public areas, new curbs and gutters everywhere and condo rehabs in some of the long-empty warehouses) and living it up in the twilight of its years, Berlin-style: There’s a classy, welcoming supper club where we were the only white faces; Caesar’s Showbar, whose inconspicuous and windowless façade belies its status as the city’s dazzling showcase for local strippers and drag queens; the two liquor stores we found in a five-mile radius of downtown were out of pretty much everything we wanted, except for Hennessy, which was being purchased left and right with welfare checks and crumpled cash.
I’m well aware of the reputation of Ohio’s residents (at least among supposedly enlightened, progressive Chicagoans): They’re everything from arrogant to ignorant. They drive too wildly, lean too Republican and possess a major inferiority complex. Honestly, though, I’ve never felt that way about them, and Toledo’s few hundred thousand seem as warm and welcoming as any middle-class Midwesterner.
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