Cleveland’s blowin’ up: Looking back at city with fondness

CLEVELAND — I was born in Georgia; but we moved before I developed any primal memories of the state. My childhood was peripatetic; I went to high school and college in Louisiana and had my first jobs there. When people ask me where I’m from I say Arkansas, but I’ve only lived here the past 30 years.

I guess I don’t really have a hometown.

But this is where Karen is from, where she has family and memories. She went to Cleveland State with Joey LoConti, the son of Hank LoConti, who opened the Agora Ballroom (which figures large in the mythologies of Bruce Springsteen, ZZ Top, Peter Frampton and Todd Rundgren among others) in 1966. She says after Joey was elected student government president at CSU, he filled up the Student Activities Center with boxes and boxes of doughnuts to thank his fellow students.

Or, Karen says, maybe those doughnuts showed up on election day. She can’t quite remember.

When I suggest that maybe those doughnuts fell off a truck it’s not because I know anything about Mr. LoConti, who was once described in a press release as a “financial, political and philanthropic pillar” of northeast Ohio (he’s also executive-produced four movies since 2016, including the Cleveland-centric

which was both set and filmed in the city), but because I always paid attention to the stories Karen’s father Yanko told me. I know how Yanko got his Chivas Regal. So I have some preconceived notions of how business is done in Cleveland.

I know what happened to John Nardi and Danny Greene, two criminals who tried to muscle in on the Cleveland mob in the mid-’70s. Greene was a Teamsters official who had ties with the Cleveland crime family run by John T. Scalish (aka John Scalise). After Scalish died in 1976, Nardi sensed an opening, broke off his ties with the Cleveland family and threw in with Greene’s Celtic Club. Soon open warfare broke out between the factions—cars were blowing up all over town and wise guys were disappearing.

In 1976, the proclaimed Cleveland to be Bomb City, U.S.A., with a reported 37 bombings in Cuyahoga County, including 21 in Cleveland. According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Cleveland led the nation in bombings that year. This was not an inconsiderable accomplishment, although we have developed a collective amnesia about it during the 1970s bombing attacks—most by radical underground groups such as the Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front, the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Puerto Rican liberation group FALN—that were almost commonplace in American cities in the ’70s.

New Yorkers especially got to be pretty blase about them. In his book Days of Rage from a few years ago, Bryan Burrough wrote, “Radical violence was so deeply woven into the fabric of 1970s America that many citizens, especially in New York and other hard-hit cities, accepted it as part of daily life. As one New Yorker sniffed to the New

York Post after an FALN attack in 1977, ‘Oh, another bombing? Who is it this time?’”

Karen says she was living on West Avenue at the time and didn’t worry much about it as the bombings were, by and large, an East Side phenomenon. I haven’t seen The Assassin’s

Code (it stars Justin Chatwin from Shameless and the excellent weirdo character actor Peter Stormare) but one story about it suggests the writers were inspired by the war between the Cleveland family and the Celtic Club.

If they didn’t base a character on John Nardi, they missed an opportunity. His reported last words, as he was being dragged legless from the wreckage of his exploded car, were: “That didn’t hurt.”

It occurs to me that the extraordinarily helpful woman at Destination Cleveland who facilitated our recent trip might not think this column reflects well on her city. So maybe I should say they don’t blow up cars in Cleveland much anymore, which we can all agree is good thing.

Now the most dangerous things downtown are the four varieties of app-activated scooters unleashed on the city streets that zip along at speeds up to 12 miles per hour (that’s five miles an hour faster than the Lime scooters plaguing the sidewalks of Little Rock and North Little Rock), making it possible to get from Progressive Field to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—which has, recently and regrettably, caved to the Philistines and begun spelling it “Rock & Roll Hall of Fame” and “the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame.” (While I prefer and generally employ “rock ’n’ roll,” I admired the consistency with which the Hall stuck to its guns by using “and.” Until it stopped sticking to them.)

Cleveland is a city I’ve been visiting regularly for 25 years, and I’ve developed more than a little fondness for it. Not enough perhaps to deck myself out in Browns gear (that would be a little bandwagon-y) but enough that I regularly check to see where the Indians stand in the wild card race.

(As of this writing, they’re half a game out of the second w.c. spot. Go, Tribe.)

The river hasn’t burned for decades. The downtown didn’t collapse when LeBron left for L.A. A nonprofit now runs the Agora Ballroom, and it’s moved east of downtown, but it’s still open. Even Mott the Hoople abides; the band played the Masonic Temple here in April, fronted by 80-year-old Ian Hunter.

It’s not his hometown either, but he got the heart and earnestness of the town. Cleveland rocks.