#1. Paint it green/orange/rainbow swirls. Whatever. The point is, it needs some lacquer, like makeup, to spruce it up.

#2. Put some chairs on it. (Tables: bonus!)

#3. Add some barriers so cars can’t drive onto it. Slabs of broken concrete work nicely. Lovely planters are also good if you want to get fancy about it.

The city commissioners of Dayton, Ohio have voted unanimously to approve a plan to make the city more “immigrant-friendly.” Entitled, Welcome Dayton Plan-Immigrant-Friendly City, the decision is an encouraging step towards greater cultural and ethnic diversity, social and economic justice, and community revitalization in the hometown of the Wright Brothers.

Kudos to the City of Dayton for getting it right and rejecting the racial and ethnic bigotry spewed by too many in Arizona, Alabama, and Georgia that advocated and approved anti-immigrant laws. My guess is those states are going to rue the day they passed their restrictive immigration laws.

Rust Wire is honored to have been given permission to reprint this article by Cleveland’s foremost muckracker, Roldo Bartimole, a former Plain Dealer reporter and local folk hero with encyclopedic knowledge of the region and the guts to tell it like it is.

He has written this piece about how Cleveland’s elites have enriched themselves at the expense of the Cleveland Public Schools as a matter of course for decades. He was inspired by a recent Plain Dealer article that reported 300 CMSD teachers have been given a stay from layoffs.

Civic corruption comes in many forms. We have been hearing a lot about corruption these days. However, the focus is very narrow. Unnecessarily so.

It is my first time in Detroit and I am riding shotgun down the main drag that is Woodward Avenue with a long-enough-to-keep-safe lens equipped camera in hand. I sat on the edge of my passenger seat ready to capture some of that choice disaster porn I had heard so much about. In between snapping pictures of what looked to be bombed out buildings, I was struck by the feeling that I was witnessing something truly unshroud. Glide down one street akin to Park Avenue, make a sharp right turn and find yourself smack in the middle of an episode of The Wire. It felt like I was witnessing weeds bursting from cracks in the cement. Burgeoning culture at its boiling point. I was intrigued.

As a subscriber of Rust Wire for over a year and as a city based farmer, Cleveland resident, and a local food advocate that has found himself employed as a direct result of agriculture I wanted to share my thoughts on urban food production with you and your readers. This letter is in response to the August 29th post entitled Cleveland and Agriculture: Are We Asking the Wrong Questions? There were three main points that the article posed that I would like to address one at a time.

1. Dedicating 80% of vacant land to urban farming is not positive

The blog notes that the positives of urban farming are overstated, that Cleveland Schools would get almost no benefit from 1,000 acres of agriculture, and that vast amounts of land being dedicated to urban farming would seriously inhibit other development programs.

Recently I have written a lot about physical abandonment and loss, or how vacancy can be a dispiriting and anger-provoking bit of sightliness: a skull at the societal banquet. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. As in abandonment there is also an opportunity to play.
To play is to ultimately recreate. To recreate monotony into entertainment—to recreate passivity into a kinetic interchange with the physics around you—to recreate what otherwise is into what could be through an outside molding of one’s inside imagination. To that end, play is the perfect …

History was made yesterday in the city on the crooked river.

Ten cyclists moved one Frank Lanza approximately 1.4 miles into a new apartment in Lakewood, completely by bicycle!!

Ok, before we go any further, for the sake of honesty and professional ethics, we must admit, there was a truck involved for moving a bed, couch and giant antique radio. But other than that, Cleveland’s burgeoning bike scene crossed a new milestone, following behind great bike cities like Portland and Davis, California in completing the time honored tradition of the bike move.

In this city of ghosts we live our lives with little victories in the shadow of many defeats.  We seek out archetypes and images that keep us going, superheroes: those that will save us. What else do we have when it seems like everything that is happening is happening to us? The Rust Belt, the region of consequences—the villains are everywhere…
Hollywood has come to Cleveland to shoot scenes of destruction and people scattering. I venture to say the extras in this particular case aren’t.

The Avengers are here. The film will …

The protest movements that have changed the world — for peace, civil rights or labor justice — have always had rallying songs that inspired devotees and informed the masses. The smart growth movement is no exception: sprawl and the general shortcomings of the American suburb have been a favorite theme among musicians ever since the invention of the cul-de-sac.

Rock music over the last five decades literally teems with songs about loneliness, alienation, disaffection, conformity, overbearing authority, and general malaise as they relate to the modern suburban landscape. And as time has gone on, the cries have only gotten louder.

The first musical rattlings of protest began nearly as soon as sprawl itself in the early 1960s.

Check out this great coverage of our photo show in Cleveland last night.

The show will remain up at Cleveland Public Art for six weeks, for anyone who couldn’t attend.

I want to thank all the photographers who contributed and everyone who came to the show. I hope you guys had a good time.

The event was a big success and we’re very grateful for the awesome coverage by Jennifer Lindgren at Channel 3. It is really nice to see such positive coverage of the city from the local news. I am happy we got to contribute to that!