Member-only story
I’m a West-Sider
What are you?
I lived in Cleveland, Ohio for 24 years, always on the west side. Cleveland, in case you didn’t realize this, is actually two cities (at least). The east side is the old part of town with no grid or method to its madness. Once you cross that crooked river — the famed Cuyahoga which no longer burns thankyouverymuch — you’re on the west side. Nice, orderly grid so you know where you are even if you’ve never been at West 145th and Lorain Avenue in your life.
Novelty stores sell joke passports so east siders can go west and vice versa.
For people in Cleveland, however, it’s not really a joke. If you live on the east side there’s absolutely no reason to ever set foot across the river to the land of strip malls and bowling alleys. And if you live on the west side you never consider crossing the river to that insane tangle of streets that go nowhere.
I personally never went to the east side until I attended Case Western Reserve University wayyy out Euclid Avenue at roughly East 105th Street — aka 105 blocks from the center point of the city.
While the Cuyahoga seems to be the natural border between east and west, the true center of the city is downtown — which, let the cartographers show — is east of the river. Instead, the first street west of Ontario Street which bisects the Public Square…
