The Coracle "sermo liber vita ipsa": Thursday's Place: Coventry Road

There is one in every city, although by the time we notice them they are on the verge of becoming tourist traps. The stages are familiar:

1. A middle class neighborhood is established.
2. The established middle-class leaves for the suburbs, a new immigrant class enters.
3. It becomes a lively, if poor, immigrant neighborhood.
4. The old immigrants are assimilated into the mainstream culture and leave the neighborhood.
5. Increasingly, shabby homes and businesses begin to develop as subsequent residents are transient.
6. Discovery of the neighborhood by students and artists looking for cheap digs; the shabbiness becomes chic.
7. Full integration of the younger, counter-culture population.
8. Increasing desirability of the area based on inexpensive housing, opportunities for start-up businesses, and a cultural cache based on the neighborhood's recognized hip-ness.
9. Invasion of the gentrifiers; rents rise precipitously and local businesses offer increasingly expensive, exclusive goods.
10. Full tourist appeal with tour bus stops and photo opportunities; so much so that the absence of cultural viability goes unnoticed.

So, North Beach and Haight-Asbury in San Francisco; Venice Beach and Silver Lake in Los Angeles; Greenwich Village, East Village, Williamsburg, etc. in New York, Squirrel Hill and Shadyside in Pittsburgh; Adams Morgan in D.C.; Dinkytown in Minneapolis; Ocean Beach in San Diego...well, the list goes on. As I noted, there's at least one in every city.

In Cleveland, Ohio, it was Coventry Road. Well, it's now known as the Coventry Village and it's not, technically, in Cleveland, but in Cleveland Heights. No one really cares much about that distinction, except maybe the Cleveland Heights Chamber of Commerce. It's a short drive, or mid-length walk, from Severance Hall, home of the Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Case Western Reserve University, the University Hospital system, the Botanical Gardens, and many other sites. It includes the most interesting cemetery in the metro area.

So, let's follow the process, shall we? I'll make some stops along the way for the sake of cultural or personal commentary.

The area was farmland that was converted to a neighborhood in the late 19th century for the burgeoning middle to upper-middle class community. At first, large houses were constructed.

Well, imagine it in 1900 and without the self-consciously "hip" paint job.

The working class, who cannot afford grand homes, begin to move into a collection of stately and handsome apartment buildings. This growth was aided by conveniently placed streetcar lines.

Above is what was my building. I was always saving for one of those apartments with the wrought-iron terrace that overlooked the courtyard. Mine was on the first floor with only two windows and no cross breeze.

By the 1930's, the established middle-class had begun to move further away from the city, as public transportation improved and as cars became more available, and an incoming ethnic population replaced them. In the case of Coventry Road, the original demographic of the new neighborhood was made up of displaced European Jews.

As the immigrant population of the metro area became assimilated, they, too, began to move away from a neighborhood that was now regarded as too close to the city to offer a comfortable life. The number of empty houses increased and the apartments began to host an increasingly transient population, which caused the neighborhood's decline as there were fewer long-term residents with strong community roots.

Students, mostly from nearby CWRU and Cleveland State University, then began to discover the formerly gracious apartments, with remarkably reasonable rents, and move in. Along with them came artists, actors, writers, musicians, criminals, and less-talented hangers-on to populate the area. As it is now the mid-sixties, and the full cultural revolution is occurring, Coventry Road becomes the locus for the beats, then hippies, in this portion of the Midwest.

As a nod to times gone by, even the contemporary street signs need to be groovy.

By the mid-1970's, the hippies have faded away but those with some smarts have opened bookstores, record shops, clothing emporia, and bars with live music. The last business from the pre-counter-culture days, a corner deli, remains and serves as the spindle for neighborhood life. Also, as the unofficial headquarters for the Cleveland chapter of the Hell's Angels.

By the time of my residency, it was known as Irv's Deli, and was a place notorious for stale bagels and criminal activity. It was great, in other words.

Across the street was a dive that was known by various names through the years, although I always think of it by the name it carried in the 1970's, The Saloon. I regard it fondly as it was the first place in which I was paid to play in a band.

An unprepossessing street presence, matched by its clientele


My earliest audience, back when smoking in bars was not only allowed, but normal.

Of the many things to be experienced on Coventry, it was the one place to find avant-garde books, records [it was where I bought my first "grown-up" music: the Sgt. Pepper album], and even films that were not available anywhere else in the city in those days before Internet commerce. Coventry Books, with its unadorned sign, sold a lot of European experimental literature, including the full catalog of Grove Press; Record Revolution carried recordings [on vinyl] of all of the groups that, while rarely played even on FM radio, were well-known to the 20-somethings of the era. A proper coffee house could be, and still can be, found on the corner.

And the local cinema, the Heights Art Theater, would show a representative collection of European films, even in the days when those films were considered "obscene". In fact, their viewing of Louis Malle's "The Lovers" in 1959 resulted in a police raid, several arrests, and eventually an appearance before the Supreme Court, an event which occasioned a justice famously to state that while he couldn't define pornography, he knew it when he saw it. The Theater would win the case. As it was a five minute walk from my apartment, I would often enjoy Lina Wertmuller films and the Friday night showings of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show".

Coventry Road was also the home of of D.A. Levy, Jau Billera, and Harvey Pekar, three members of a loose confederation known as The Cleveland Beats and credited with serving as sentinels for the New Bohemian era in American letters. There was certainly a proliferation of small periodicals dedicated to verbal expression that could be found in the neighborhood, most of them published for free on "borrowed" mimeograph machines. One of those crudely printed quarterlies, Harpoon! [God help me, that was the name] would hire me as editor, a job that became, during the two years of its existence, one of my favorite experiences.

I don't think it was because of my editorial ability so much as it was because I taught at a high school and had access to a mimeograph machine.

Well, you get the idea. A lot happened in that small area that, while a minor echo in the greater cultural history of the United States, provided those of us of that generation and inclination a place of freedom. Now that my parents are deceased and my friends and remaining family disseminated throughout the rest of the world, my occasions to return home are few and far between. However, when there, I still stay at a nearby hotel just so I can roam those streets again, lament that it is a shadow of its once vibrant and creative self, and marvel how it is now firmly locked in step #10 as a tourist region where people gawk rather than groove.

And that's okay, as that kind of feast is in perpetual motion.

Since I'm cleaning nostalgia out of both my head and my computer files, here are some more photos.