As The Land celebrates another great year of community journalism, we’re looking back on favorite stories from the past 12 months. In this edition, we’re recalling some of the great arts and culture reporting our writers did in 2024.
By Lee Chilcote
On the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, a small corner bar on the west side of Cleveland was filled with the sounds of rock, blues and jam band music. It was jam night at Spotlight Cleveland, and the tiny, wood-paneled bar – what the owner calls a “micro venue” – was full of people. As the night went on and the cozy space filled up, people spilled out onto the patio, where they huddled together in the cold, drizzling rain and carried on talking and laughing.
In the past year, two music lovers on Cleveland’s west side, Corrine Henahan and John Dewey, have transformed what used to be a smoke-filled, run-down corner bar at Madison Ave. and W. 87th St. into a loving tribute to the local music scene. The project is a direct result of their own grit and determination. After falling in love with the building and buying it at the height of the pandemic, they put in two years of sweat equity before reopening it as Spotlight Cleveland.
By Gregory Burnett
A fascinating look at local black photographers and their work recently opened at the Cleveland History Center.
The display, housed in the drawing room of the historic Bingham Hanna Mansion connected to the museum, is titled “History in Their Hands: Black Photographers in Cleveland, Ohio, 1968-Present. ” It tells the story of legendary photographers like Charles J. Pinkney, the late James “Jimmy” Gayle, former Plain Dealer photographer, the late Van Dillard, former Cleveland Press photographer, and a new generation of artists including Mychal Lilly, Gina Gayle, and Amanda D. King. Alongside each piece is a description and a bit of history behind it.
By Aja Joi Grant
Rooms to Let (RTL) has been making space for artists to ignite homes, buildings and storefronts with art, interaction and performance for 10 years. These places have been otherwise abandoned and left to the elements, due to economic changes within the Slavic Village neighborhood.
From 2014-2021, Rooms to Let utilized vacant homes that were slated for demolition, which were plentiful in the aftermath of the 2008 housing crisis. The only real solution was to demolish these homes; they were bringing down the property value of the surrounding residential area, directly impacting community members, according to Greta Thomas from Slavic Village Development. Artists were given free range to paint, install, and fully revive these residential spaces with previous stories and histories, into one final reimagining before being torn down.
By Kevin McLaughlin
For nearly four decades, John Ewing has served as director at the Cinematheque at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Cleveland’s University Circle district. On June 30, he will show his final three films — three of his all-time favorites — before, like Alan Ladd in Shane, he rides off on his horse to final credits.
The Land sat down with John Ewing for a bit of reminiscing and to talk movies.
“The most satisfying thing,” he said, “is that we got it going at all.” Ewing co-founded Cinematheque in 1985 alongside Ron Holloway, a film journalist for Variety magazine, and philanthropist George Gund III. “Once you do it, nobody can take it away from you,” he said.
By Taylor Wilson
At the corner of East 79th Street and Hough Avenue, a grass lot is all that remains of the Seventy-Niners Café, the bar where the spark of the 1966 Hough Uprising was ignited. Fifty-eight years later, a new Cleveland Civil Rights Trail marker stands in its place, commemorating the uprising and its significance in Cleveland’s civil rights history.
The marker, placed by the Cleveland Restoration Society, a non-profit dedicated to preserving and protecting historic buildings and locations, serves as a reminder that the Hough Uprising was not just a response to a single incident, but rather to years of systemic racism, discrimination and social injustice.
“It’s our hope that by acknowledging the events that happened, that people learn from them, that we don’t repeat the issues that would have caused this type of event,” Margaret Lann, director of Preservation Services and Publications for the Cleveland Restoration Society, explained.
By Dahlia Fisher
Born and raised in the city of Cleveland, Quartez Harris remembers the difficulty of growing up in the public school system. Labeled in elementary school as a student with a reading disability, it was impossible to imagine that writing would become the center of his adult life. But Harris had something to say about education and its intersection with poverty and racism, and poetry was the medium he would use to share his voice.
In 2020, Teaching Cleveland lauded Harris’ poetry collection, “We Made It to School Alive,” as a book that “Every teacher in Cleveland should read.” For the span of the next few years, he was everywhere – from articles on Cleveland.com to discussions on stage at The City Club of Cleveland to doing workshops at schools and libraries in and around the city. He was even awarded the prestigious title of Ohio Poetry Association’s 2021 Poet of the Year.
But when the publisher, Twelve Arts Press, went out of business and the book went out of print, this important poetic narrative documenting the experiences of Cleveland students and the people who care for them all but vanished. Until now.