According to the report “100 Leading Locations for 2012” by Area Development Online, 34 metropolitan areas of the Rust Belt made the Top 100, including the pre-eminent architectural showplace of Columbus, Indiana which was ranked number one.
Below is a list of those Rust Belt metropolitan areas that made the Top 100 in 2012. Congratulations to each of them, especially Columbus, Indiana.
1. Columbus, Indiana
9. Morgantown, West Virginia
12. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
16. Dubuque, Iowa
17. State College, Pennsylvania
20. Trenton-Ewing, New Jersey
24. Holland-Grand Haven, Michigan
29. Waterloo-Cedar Falls, Iowa
30. Ames, Iowa
33. Baltimore, Maryland
34. Williamsport, Pennsylvania
37. Sandusky, Ohio
38. Ann Arbor, …

I had my first opportunity to attend ArtPrize in Grand Rapids last Saturday. My oh my, have they ever hit upon a huge economic development success. Touted as the world’s largest open art competition, covering more than three square miles in the city’s central business district, ArtPrize is simply mind-boggling, inspiring, amazing, and entertaining all at the same time.
 
 
 
 
 
 
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All told, in 2102, you could see 1,517 entries (from 45 states and 56 countries) on display at 161 venues by walking the entire nine mile trail. It is quite amazing. ArtPrize offers a …

Browns fans, I often think, are gluttons for punishment. But this video, shot by Cleveland’s own Matthew Hashiguchi, explains it pretty well.

Browns Bus: Cleveland Heights Chapter from Matthew Hashiguchi on Vimeo.
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Recently a new mural, the second this summer, was completed on the Glenwood business corridor on the south side of Youngstown. The mural project is part of collaboration between the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation, a local community development corporation, and the Youngstown Playhouse, one of the oldest active community theatrical groups in the country.
The mural itself was designed and executed by local artist Christian Mrosko. Its themes represent both the playhouse’s mission of providing local live theater, and the character of the surrounding African American neighborhoods.
 
 
 
 

 
– Sean Posey
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Ok. My post from yesterday stirred up a lot of shit. That was not my intention, I swear–at least not to attack anyone personally, just to make a point about art and community development in Cleveland.
But whoa, check out the city of Hamtramck in Detroit. These people are so cool! I’m having a hard time recovering from watching this video. All I can say is, way to go Hamtramck!
 
Hamtramck City Council on Street Art from Metro Times on Vimeo.
I literally know nothing about this town except I think it’s Polish …

I spend a fair amount of time thinking about how Cleveland’s large philanthropic and nonprofit sector impacts the city. A lot of my friends work in this secor. In fact, in Cleveland it’s sort of hard to escape. Like anything, in some ways it’s good, but in some ways it’s bad.

I just returned from a trip to Chicago. Of course, my favorite part was a bookstore. This bookstore was in the hipster neighborhood, again of course, and it was filled with interesting stuff, books and zines on contemporary art, revolutionaries, sex, fiction. There’s really just nothing like it in Cleveland, and I don’t mean that to knock our bookstores, they have to be general, less niche, because the city is smaller of course. But that’s what I love most about big progressive cities. All those cutting edge ideas, people experimenting. It made me depressed about Cleveland.

 
Flint’s Claressa “T-Rex” Shields is a high school senior. She is also the first woman to win a gold medal as a boxer.
A team of Los Angeles filmmakers has launched a Kickstarter campaign to tell Shield’s story. They have already passed their goal. The group says they were interested in not only Shield’s remarkable story (she is the youngest and one of the first women ever to compete in Olympic boxing) but also set in the backdrop of Flint, Michigan, a town that has struggled so much from the loss …

This commercial aired during the last Super Bowl. It seems to borrow from the “Imported from Detroit” ads by Chrysler in highlighting the strength and endurance of hard-luck Rust Belt cities. Its focused us Buffalo and it’s an ad for a local television station, I believe.
Chrysler wasn’t the first company to seize on the blend of nostalgia and sympathy for Rust Belt cities in an attempt to move products. As we’ve reported, Levi’s famously used Braddock, Pennsylvania to sell jeans, and Pallidium boots used Detroit’s industrial ruins to sell boots.
As …

Like every life, every house has a story. No two are the same. And as every life must come to an end, so must every house.
Births, graduations, death, and dreams are the stuff in the life of a house. When a house becomes abandoned, and is it decays, there are no gravestones and no obituaries—no public eulogies. In many of America’s shrinking cites, where entire neighborhoods empty out, there are often no neighbors to tell the tale either.

This is often where I enter, camera in …

This is a personal theory so take it for what it is. Want to know if a city is cool? By cool, I mean young, edgy, colorful (I’m making myself sound like an old person here and not a cool person), but here goes. The telltale sign is street art, or rather the term used to describe it.

So today, Cleveland City Council comes across my Twitter feed saying “want to stop graffiti in your neighborhood?” And there you go, unequivocal proof that Cleveland is uncool.