These photos were taken by Cleveland-based photographer Billy Delfs. A little about the Cleveland Ohio Surfers in his words:

“Cleveland Ohio Surfers surf the shores of Lake Erie. From what I learned, unlike the west and east US coasts where the waves are pulled by currents, the wind is what makes up waves on Lake Erie. It is usually cold when they surf, windy and wet; either in a storm or just before the lake freezes over. They wear wet suits to keep warm, to make the situation tolerable. I was cold this day. They come back often when the waves are just right. Once I counted 15. Sometimes I’ll stop and park on top of the hill overlooking the water to watch them ride.”

For more information, check out www.outofplaceomovie.com.

-Asian Carp invasion.

-Increased climate change-driven warming, in Lake Superior and elsewhere.

-Sewage runoff problems.

Sorry to keep bringing you down, but here’s two more stories, both from The Toledo Blade. This one is about threats to the Lake Erie islands, and this is a detailed investigative piece about the algae blooms that have infested the Lake this summer.

-KG

Now St. Louis is planning a major overhaul of Gateway Park and pedestrian access is finally getting the attention it deserves. Missouri Bicycle and Pedestrian Coalition has been following the process:

St. Louis and the National Park Service have unveiled five proposals to revitalize the St Louis riverfront area including the Gateway Arch. The five proposals are the finalists in a competition designed to uncover the best plan for improving the area. All the proposals include significant improvements to bicycle & pedestrian access in the area, which includes both the Missouri and Illinois sides of the river.

Currently, streets with heavy traffic and the I-70 corridor cut off the Gateway Arch grounds from the rest of downtown St Louis, making it difficult and even dangerous for pedestrians and bicyclists to travel between the two areas, which are separated by only a few yards.

MBPC is even reporting that some of the design teams are considering converting portions of I-70 to a boulevard in order to expand pedestrain access.

-AS

“We hear the horror stories of why businesses won’t come into the city of Detroit,” said Karla Henderson, part of Bing’s planning team. “So we know we need to change that perception.”

The $2 million system was designed by Detroit-based Compuware Corp. It is expected to save up to 100,000 staff hours annually.

Are you listening, Cleveland? Full story at Crain’s Detroit.

AS

Editor’s note: This piece is a guest editorial from William Black, an organizer of the Pages & Places book festival in Scranton, PA, in October. Here he describes a number of other developments happening in his hometown. -KG

If you know Scranton, Pennsylvania, as the setting of NBC’s The Office—the U.S. version of Slough, the depressed and depressing overcast English city in which the Wernham Hogg Paper Company was doomed to eternally, if comically, fail—then your impression of the city is sunnier than the one most Scranton area residents have held of their hometown for decades.

I say this as someone who, at age seventeen, fled the area as fast I could. The Great Depression was slow to reach what had been a boomtown built on hard coal and locomotives. As late as 1937 rich New Yorkers took the train to Scranton to shop on Lackawanna Avenue and dine at the Casey Inn Hotel, where one could still get real silverware laid across the fine china from a real linen napkin.

But when the market for anthracite did finally collapse, it signaled a long, nearly fatal tumult for Scranton. Beginning in the 1940s, the city lost, on average, 1,000 residents a year. The loss of population was so swift and so devastating that the city hasn’t had a downtown grocery store since the 1960s. A recent look at photographs from the 1980s confirmed my impressions of the time: the city was dreary and dirty, distinguished by sooted-over architectural details and an abundance of garbage in the streets and on the sidewalks.

Yet now there’s a palpable sense that Scranton’s time is just beginning.  Several of the city’s most significant architectural landmarks have been rehabbed or restored and will, within months, be occupied by several hundred new downtown residents, most of them between twenty-five and thirty-five years old. This month, the Commonwealth Medical College, the first new medical to open its doors in Pennsylvania in decades, is matriculating its second class.  The University of Scranton has begun construction on a large, and expensive, new science research center.

And Scranton has begun to carve out a new identity for itself as a center of arts and culture.

Much of the credit for the turn-around goes to Mayor Chris Doherty, who leveraged Scranton’s proximity to New York and Philadelphia, what’s left of the splendid boom era architecture, and its air of great untapped potential into $400 million of investment in a little more than eight years. That’s enough for a pretty attractive facelift.

But there’s something else going on, too, another force that has laid claim to a city with a reputation for drab isolation—a grassroots effort driven men and women between thirty-five and forty-five years old to remake the city in their own image.

Some of these men and women are developers who, growing up in the 1980s, have never suffered the deprivation that made earlier generations of Scrantonians, who lived and then died on the dwindling market for coal, cautious, even pessimistic, with their investments.  Some are entrepreneurs who have committed themselves to the kinds of boutiques and restaurants they used to leave town to enjoy.

What gives me the greatest hope, however, is the seemingly spontaneous, even reflexive effort by disparate people to build new and serious arts and cultural traditions downtowns.

Groups of college students whose classrooms are twenty or thirty miles outside of town have chosen central city locations to convene their writers and artists groups, and they’ve brought along a new generation of university faculty that has begun moving into the city, despite having to commute to school. A then-high school student with a fondness for old movies opened the Vintage Theater, which has become Scranton’s for-the-people by-the-people art house cinema and the new generation’s first choice venue for readings, salons, and other art-centric events.

And then there are the festivals.

Scranton has long been a city of ethnic festivals—Irish, Italian—but six years ago Marko Marcinko, a jazz musician who at a fairly young age was performing in New York City and in the Pocono region’s world class jazz scene with some of the biggest names in the business, launched the Scranton Jazz Festival, a three-day affair that has made good use of Marcinko’s connections and drawn increasingly large and enthusiastic crowds from New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia , and beyond.

More recently, the Pages & Places Book Festival, of which I am co-director, was created to make two significant contributions at once.  First, by doing what exceptional book festivals do, Pages & Places strives to offer a high end, daylong cultural event.  By “high end,” I mean that Pages & Places is bringing to Scranton the caliber of personnel and seriousness of topic that one would expect to find only on elite college campuses or at, say, New York’s 92^nd Street Y.  This year, for example, Christopher Hitchens is joining Jay Parini, the author or editor of more than 40 books, in a discussion about the people, books, and debates that have most shaped American civic life.  Joseph Sebarenzi, who was president of the Rwandan parliament in the days after that country’s hideous genocide, will participate in a conversation about how societies rebuild, or reinvent, themselves in the wake of catastrophe.  An Icelandic novelist and an Argentine novelist and their translators will talk about the ways that ostensibly national literatures inform each other, in a panel moderated by their publisher, Open Letter Press’s Chad Post.

All this sounds pretty elitist, doesn’t it?

Well, it ought to. That’s the idea, in fact. The festival’s founder and driving engine, Liz Randol, recognized what was already afoot in Scranton and identified the lack: of a cultural event that didn’t just serve the city’s extant population but brought to town precisely the kind of people—heavy weight writers and intellectuals and the people who go out of their way to hear them speak—that wouldn’t otherwise visit a small post-industrial city.

But this is not at all to say that Pages & Places is disregarding of Scrantonians. Quite the opposite. The Places part of the festival’s title signals the other half of its mission.

Places operates in two essential ways. First, all of Pages & Places highbrow panels are set in familiar local businesses—bookstores, boutiques, bars, restaurants. Likewise, the festival’s planning committee and board of directors are made up not of arts and culture administrators but area businesspeople, in fact many of the very same entrepreneurs I referred to earlier. The goal of this approach is to offer a singular cultural event that is, from its conception through its planning to its execution, as integrated into the larger working of the city’s revitalization, and as available to its residents, as it can possibly be without compromising the seriousness of its content.

Second, Pages & Places has implemented partnerships designed to draw local and regional cultural institutions beyond their borders and into the community. These partnerships began as cross-promotional endeavors, but these relationships are now driving toward bigger and more substantive partnerships on events to take place downtown rather than behind the walls institutions.

Scranton is a smaller, and therefore a lot easier to impact, than other post-industrial cities still struggling to invent new and functional identities.  But those of us who are starting to feel really good about our city’s emerging new image.

William Black teaches literature and creative writing at Johns Hopkins University but has accepted a post as Writer-in-Residence at Misericordia University in Dallas, Pennsylvania, in order participate in Scranton’s revival.  He is Co-Director of the Pages & Places Book Festival to held in Scranton October 2. He can be reached at bill@pagesandplaces.org

From January 2009 through January of this year, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Milwaukee and Gary, Indiana, discharged 41 billion gallons of untreated sewage and storm water into the Lakes, according to data analyzed by the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition.

“The Great Lakes are under siege from sewage overflows,” Jeff Skelding, campaign director for the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition, said in a statement. “This report underscores that we have solutions to keep our beaches open, our people healthy and our economy growing. Inaction, however, will exacerbate a problem that is already very serious.”

These sewage overflows are one of the most serious problems facing the Lakes, the report states. Among the problems this pollution can cause- beach closures, harm to wildlife and damage to the tourism industry.

It recommends a two-pronged approach:
- cities must separate miles of combined sewer pipes into sanitary and storm sewers and
- installing “green” infrastructure — such as rain gardens, vegetated roofs and pervious pavement — to capture and cleans this storm water and reduce the volume of storm water flowing off the landscape.

The bad news? “Communities in the Great Lakes basin (are) facing a $23.3 billion tab. Reducing the incidence of (combined sewer overflows) to a level the EPA considers acceptable would collectively cost the cities of Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Milwaukee and Gary, Ind., about $3.7 billion.”

The good news? This investment would be good for public health and the economy, with thousands of jobs created, according to the group.

Read the detailed, 40-page report for more information about sewer overflows and to see what different cities are doing to fix this problem.

-KG

That is the question posed by Center for Working Class Studies at Youngstown State University, in a critical article titled “A Renaissance for Whom?”

The authors point out that despite the success of high-tech start-ups in the city’s downtown, the average city resident has seen her fortunes decline during the current recession. And the situation wasn’t pretty before that.

“Much has been written recently about Youngstown’s Renaissance,” write YSU professors James Rhodes and John Russo on the CWCS’s blog. “Fox News, BBC, The Economist, Entrepreneur, and Inc. have all touted the local area as recovering economically.

“While all the publicity and positive representations have been great for the city’s self-image and provided much-needed momentum for economic development, both local leaders and most journalists have ignored the city’s real problems:  high unemployment, poverty, continued high crime rates, and the deterioration of the Youngstown’s neighborhoods.”

Rhodes and Russo point out that Youngstown’s Metropolitan Statistical Area has lost a net total of 9,000 jobs since the recession began. In March, the local unemployment rate hovered at 14 percent, among the highest in the state.

“The Mahoning Valley, like the nation at large, is in the midst of major social and economic upheaval,” they write. “Long-term unemployment contributes to drug abuse, crime, domestic violence, health problems, the break-up of families, and racial antagonisms.  Community support institutions are besieged by requests for help even as their economic support - whether from donations or state funds - is declining.”

Rhodes and Russo are absolutely right and their point is important to keep in mind. People are suffering in Youngstown. I’m not sure that diminishes the city’s success in certain initiatives–downtown revitalization and technology-based economic development–although it’s obviously troubling.

I think everyone hopes that someday these developing areas of strength will reach the point where they have a recognizable effect on unemployment, poverty and the associated ills. Perhaps Russo and Rhodes’ point is that the benefits won’t be as widely distributed as was the case with a manufacturing based economy. That may be true. There’s a certain paradox in progress, I guess.

-AS

The plant had been scheduled for outsourcing by overseas executives that spring. 350 people were told they were losing their jobs, despite the fact that the plant was turning a profit for the high-end suitmaker.

The Plain Dealer is carrying a great article about the struggle to save Cleveland’s Hugo Boss factory, Northeast Ohio’s last textile plant. The story follows the leadership of two women employees in a courageous and ultimately successful campaign to save their jobs. During the months-long struggle, their cause was aided by actor Danny Glover, Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland and Senator Sherrod Brown.

Plant employees Wanda Navarro, of west Cleveland, and Sheila McVay of East Cleveland.

You can read the article in it’s entirety at Cleveland.com: Part 1 and Part 2.

-AS

“People got sad and left.”

“Maybe the world gets broken so we can have some work to do.”

“People think there aren’t any frontiers anymore. They can’t see that there are frontiers all around us.”

-Braddock, Pennsylvania

This is the script from a relatively new Levi’s commercial.

I’ve heard there’s been some backlash to this campaign because Levis are manufactured overseas. Still interesting.

-AS

Editor’s note: this piece comes from our reporter in Washington, DC, Alex M. Parker. -KG

For years, environmentalists have pushed for the development of green and energy-efficient technologies as a way to curb climate change and prevent a future ecological catastrophe.

But Thursday morning, speaking to the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning D.C.-based think tank, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm said that focusing on global warming is the wrong message — if you really want to grab Americans’ attention, focus on the economic opportunities in a greener economy — especially for auto-dependent areas.

“The bottom line is, that if we’re not talking about jobs, then it’s not going to resonate across the country,” Granholm said, speaking to about 100 people in the CAP’s downtown office. “Maybe that’s just my view as a governor from the industrial Midwest.”

Granholm was in D.C. to celebrate the one-year anniversary of a $1.35 billion grant towards Michigan’s burgeoning advanced energy storage industry. According to Granholm, 16 new lithium battery plants — these are the batteries that go into hybrids and electric cars — will create 62,000 in the next ten years. Last week, President Obama traveled to Holland, Mich., to tout one of these new plants as a “symbol of where America is going.” (You can read more about the investment, and Obama’s visit, in this New York Times story, as well as this page from Michigan Advantage.

Perhaps buoyed by the lack of an election in her future — term limits prevented her from running for a third term as governor — Granholm was energetic, jovial, and emotional during the hour-long presentation Thursday morning. Wearing a red and black suit with open, high-heeled sandals and a large BlackBerry strapped to her belt — (the BlackBerry eventually became a prop when she discussed lithium batteries) — Granholm ignored the podium and paced dramatically back and forth while touting the battery industry and describing the challenges she faced during her first few years in office.

“Thank God I don’t have to run again,” Granholm joked after accidentally stumbling onto an eyebrow-raising double entendre. (It involved the word “member.”)

Occassionally, her voice cracked — such as when she recalled when Electrolux closed its refrigerator plant in Greenville, the tiny central Michigan town which was once known as the “Refrigerator Capital of the World.” She said that experience — as well as other massive job losses which occurred this decade — made her realize that Michigan must take advantage of its skilled professional workforce to retool its economy, and focus on clean energy as the world looks for alternatives to carbon-based machinery.

“Every single state has seen this shift in manufacturing jobs,” Granholm said. ‘We need all kinds of jobs, for all kinds of people. We are completely turning our back on this manufacturing opportunity and heritage.”

When asked by an audience member about recent Congressional efforts to pass stricter carbon standards and other environmental efforts, Granholm’s responded that we need to “get off the debate about whether global warming is occurring.” That provoked laughter and some applause–although it’s not clear that the audience realized what she meant.

Granholm also added that no matter who wins the election to succeed her, she feels that the state will move forward on this issue.

On Tuesday, Republican businessman Rick Snyder and Democrat Virg Bernero — the mayor of Lansing — won their parties’ nomination for the governor’s race.

Without mentioning either by name, Granholm praised their “strong” positions on clean energy development, and claimed that both would move the state forward.

“There’s a sense that we cannot turn back,” Granholm said. “In fact, in Michigan, there’s nowhere to turn back to.”