Portrait of US Issue #27: Jon - Cleveland, OH
"There's something heartbreaking and also beautiful about the industrial ruin of the Rust Belt."
The stories we gather paint a picture of a community through the stories of the people who live there. We aim to capture important moments from their lives. Sometimes those stories are closely tied to the physical place where we meet someone.
Jon chose to meet us at the site of an old Standard Oil refinery in Cleveland. We spoke about what happened there and its lasting impact on the surrounding area.
My family moved to Los Angeles in the 1980s when I was a kid. And so I started growing up in a very urban environment. And then the family moved again to Dayton, Ohio, which is another Rust Belt city. We were in a suburb called Centerville, and there, it was this intersection of the built landscape and suburbia. I could go out my back door into a forest, and behind the forest was just sort of corn fields as far as you could see, but one day I went out to that field and it was gone. What was there was a whole bunch of construction equipment and they were building a development. That sense of permanence that the present has just shattered for me because I realized that this is how it happens, right? This is what older people mean when they say, like, you know, I go back to my hometown and I don't recognize it anymore. That was happening right in front of my eyes.
My name is Dr. Jonathan Wslasiuk. We are in a very weird part of Cleveland. It is the location of what used to be Walworth Run, a tributary of the Cuyahoga River, and it divides this neighborhood. There's a valley here, but there's no stream or river, and that is in part the product of the story of what happened here. This was the first oil refinery that John D. Rockefeller built, that was controlled by the Standard Oil Company that we came to know, even before they became the Standard Oil Company.
This was the era of where what petroleum meant was kerosene. The gasoline was just waste, and Rockefeller wrote about how at this time it was a fire hazard and fire insurance was very expensive. They just dumped it right into the river. The Cuyahoga becomes so polluted that it caught on fire multiple times in the 19th century, people died, entire parts of the flats were burned out. Instead of regulating the business, what the city decided to do was use the city's tax money to create at that time the most expensive water sewage solution and engineering feat to cover it and create this artificial system in the 1890s.
For me, it's kind of a story about what the next century would be about, where the public is paying the cost, while a few individuals are profiting at the expense of all of these communities around here. 150 years later, all that money is gone, and we've completely transformed the landscape to make space for this one business. It was only here for a generation or two and now it's gone.
There's something heartbreaking and also beautiful about the industrial ruin of the Rust Belt. If all of us just disappeared, it would only take a century or two before, you know, nature took its course and reclaimed it. So this isn't the story of like, you know, technology overcoming and destroying nature. I mean, it is. But, you know, the long game nature wins
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Another terrific interview.