Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  “What’s that?” I asked the pilot. His name was Mark. He wore a University of Buffalo cap and his beard was transparent white.

  “That’s the Cheerios,” Mark said.

  The General Mills plant fills millions of boxes a year, but it’s the last living link to Buffalo’s title as America’s Granary. As the river uncoiled, we passed another grain elevator, as tall as a housing project. Its concrete walls had flaked away, exposing a network of steel bones.

  Every bend of the Buffalo River revealed another empty elevator, each bearing the faded logo of a brewery run dry: Schmitt’s, Cook’s, Carling, Fred Kuck Malting. The gray cylinders were tombstones for Buffalo beers.

  “Don’t they look like castles?” Mark marveled. “They just go on as far as the eye can see. Down in Youngstown, Ohio, they took a grain elevator and made a shopping mall out of it. I keep threatening to paint them white and start a drive-in movie theater.”

  The sky was packed with fleece. On the bank, four men emerged from a door at the bottom of a tower. Farther on, boys dipped lines into the water, angling for fish too toxic to eat. A heron swept the surface on dragonfly wings. The trip felt tranquil and eerie at the same time, as though The Wizard of Oz had been remade as a dystopian science fiction movie and we were floating through the monochromatic ruins of the Emerald City.

  “Why doesn’t anybody use them anymore?” I asked Mark.

  “They haven’t been used for decades,” he said. “Nineteen-twenties-ish. The whole industry, because of trains, became obsolete.”

  “So why aren’t they torn down?”

  “The cost of tearing them down would be frightening.”

  And nobody wanted the land. Other cities were building condos and shopping malls on the water. Buffalo still thought of its river as a damp industrial access road.

  “There’s very few things that Buffalo has done perfectly,” Mark said. “They have perfectly separated the citizens from the waterfront. Buffalo is the last city of its size I’ve seen to regentrify. They keep moving farther and farther out.”

  EVERY GREAT LAKES CITY hopes that all the college students, all the factories, all the congressional seats that have disappeared to the Sun Belt, will someday come home—for the water. Not to sail on, not to look at out the window of a condominium—but to drink.

  For the last half century, the Great Lakes states have been on the losing end of a migration that would have baffled our nomadic ancestors. Ignoring thousands of years of prophetic wisdom, going all the way back to Moses and Aaron, Americans have been moving away from fresh water and into the desert. In the most recent census, the two fastest-growing states—Nevada and Arizona—were two of the driest. Michigan, the state with the most drinking water, actually lost people. Some of those migrants were looking for work, following factory jobs down south. Others just couldn’t stand another gloomy Northern winter. Those cold-weather refugees have been learning that the climate so well suited to year-round golf is not as well suited to providing millions of people with life’s most essential element: H. Two. Oh.

  In the late 2000s, Atlanta endured its worst drought in a century, inspiring Georgia governor Sonny Perdue to pray for rain. Lake Lanier, the reservoir that waters the endlessly growing colossus of metro Atlanta, shriveled to a shiny puddle. Georgia restricted car washing and lawn watering and shut off outdoor fountains.

  At the same time, San Diego experienced its driest summer in recorded history. The hills were charred from autumn wildfires. California was so tapped out that the state tightened pumps carrying water from the Sacramento River to San Diego, and water authorities urged San Diegans to tear up their grass, replacing it with cacti and succulents.

  These developments were viewed with some satisfaction by Northerners.

  “They can have all the water they want,” said Hugh McDiarmid Jr. of the Michigan Environmental Council, pointing out that the Great Lakes contain six quadrillion gallons of surface freshwater, or 20 percent of the world’s supply. “All they have to do is move here.”

  There’s plenty of cheap land. In Buffalo, I met a young Harvard Law graduate who had bought a house for $5,000, paying his mortgage and taxes by renting out the upper floor. Living for free allowed him to use his expensive degree at an immigrant aid society. Buffalonians have been waiting decades for this crisis.

  “When the ‘bomb’ goes off—in 1990, 2010, or whenever—it could lead to the biggest rush since Sutter’s Mill,” Paul Jays of the Buffalo Courier-Express wrote in 1981. “But the ‘gold’ will be fresh water and cities like Buffalo—in what might be called the Water Belt—will be sitting right on the Mother Lode.”

  The South’s water shortage was also regarded with some alarm, because every once in a while, someone looks at a map, draws an imaginary line from Chicago to Albuquerque, and thinks, “Wait a minute! If we can pipe oil across Alaska, we can pipe water from Lake Michigan.” Bill Richardson, the former governor of arid New Mexico, had his region’s plight in mind when he told the Las Vegas Sun that Northern states need to stop hogging all the water.

  “I want a national water policy,” Richardson said. “We need a dialogue between states to deal with issues like water conservation, water reuse technology, water delivery, and water production. States like Wisconsin are awash in water.”

  With that envious remark, Richardson tapped into the greatest fear of every Great Lakes politician: that all those folks who fled to the Sun Belt would try to take the water with them. Richardson was not the first desert chieftain to look covetously at the lakes. In 2001, President George W. Bush tried to talk to Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien about piping water to Texas. Chrétien wouldn’t discuss it. Three years later, trying to win Michigan, Bush declared, “We’re never going to allow the diversion of Great Lakes water.”

  Water is an even more emotional issue in Michigan than in New York. In New York, the Great Lakes are an upstate concern, peripheral to New York City residents; in Michigan, they define the state, geographically, culturally, and historically. Michiganders see themselves as guardians of the lakes and have raised holy hell about issues as minor as exporting bottled water from local springs. When a Georgia congressman introduced a bill to study the nation’s water use, two colleagues from Michigan condemned it as the blueprint of a Sun Belt plot to steal the Great Lakes, thus draining Michigan of its last remaining economic resource.

  “My constituents are not going to support diverting Great Lakes water, particularly to areas of the United States that have lured jobs and people from Michigan,” snarled Representative Candice Miller, R–Lake Huron.

  In other words: You wanted to go live in that sand box. Don’t come crying back to us when you can’t find anything to drink.

  Taking water from the Great Lakes is not the same as taking coal from West Virginia or oil from Alaska. The Great Lakes are not giant reservoirs to draw on whenever the nation needs a drink. They’re an ecosystem. It has been said that exporting water from the lakes would be like exporting sunshine from Arizona. Draining the lakes would destroy fish spawning grounds and steal water from farmers. Thanks partly to the same climate change that’s had the South thirsting, the lakes are as shallow as they’ve ever been, which would require dredging harbors. They haven’t frozen over in recent winters, and no ice means more evaporation.

  “Water diversion is the third rail of Great Lakes politics,” says Peter Annin, author of The Great Lakes Water Wars. “It’s the one issue that unites Democrats and Republicans. Bill Richardson’s 2008 presidential candidacy ended because of his comments. You throw Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York out of the mix, it’s really hard to win an election.”

  To seal off their water from the rest of the nation, those states, along with Minnesota, Indiana, and Wisconsin, negotiated the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact, which bans large-scale transfers of water outside the region. After ratification by all eight governors, it passed Congress and was signed by President Bush o
n December 8, 2008. The compact’s framers pushed for approval before 2012, when the Southwestern states would, as happens every ten years, gain more congressmen at the Midwest’s expense. (New York and Ohio lost two seats apiece, while Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Illinois each lost one; Texas gained four; Florida, two; Georgia, South Carolina, Utah, Arizona, and Nevada one. The Water Rush is at least another census away.)

  The South needs water. The Midwest needs people. Maybe it’s time the two regions worked something out. Think of how much less energy we’d expend moving the people to the water, instead of moving the water to the people. Beckoning the Sun Belters home is not an idle appeal. The Great Lakes basin is home to thirty-three million people. But its water can support millions more. William Frey, a demographer who has studied the Sun Belt migration for the Brookings Institution, thinks the South’s water shortages may “spur a U-turn” in that decades-long pattern. Moribund Upstate New York may finally have a chance to recover all those kids who buggered off to California with their SUNY master’s degrees.

  ON THE EVENING I left Buffalo, I returned to Riverside Park, for a sunset ceremony. A dozen people stood in the grass, where the land begins to subside toward the river. All held percussion instruments, or at least solid objects that could be clicked together rhythmically. One woman held a wooden spoon and salad tongs. Another held a pair of sticks shed by one of Riverside Park’s tenured elms, which are so thickly and exhaustively branched that the loss of a few twigs won’t alter their network of veins cast in wood.

  “This is the only place on the eastern coast where you can see the sunset over a body of fresh water,” Bonnie said. Then she thanked me for bringing my notebook. “We can only get the media to come out when we have a murder.”

  The Niagara River flows north from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, and Buffalo is on the east bank. (This also places it east of Canada, a geographic quirk not quite as remarkable as Detroit’s location north of Windsor, Ontario.) We looked over Strawberry Island, hollowed to a cay by the mining of sand and gravel for the concrete that built Buffalo. Beyond was Grand Island, the last barrier between New York and Ontario.

  It wasn’t a beautiful Great Lakes evening, not one of those Lake Michigan sunsets that are ephemeral strata of salmon and smoke. The sun’s withdrawal was more felt than seen. The light mellowed from noon white to eight o’clock orange. The air cooled, until the entire park felt like shade.

  Drumming away the light was the idea of Mercy Delacruz, who had seen a similar ceremony on Venice Beach, when she’d lived in Southern California. Mercy played an African djembe, a profound counterpoint to a snare drum and a tambourine.

  In Los Angeles, drumming had been “more of a meditative thing,” Mercy said. In Buffalo, it was a shamanistic exercise to drive away demons—the drunks and muggers who haunted Riverside Park. In its own way, it, too, was a communion with the water, a plaint for a reunion.

  13.

  The Second Great Recession

  Ted Michols watched Slavic Village fall apart. A retired trade magazine editor, a bachelor, a man who likes to sit on his porch and watch Classen Avenue passersby he’s known fifty years, Michols has lived his entire life in a little square house his grandfather bought in 1923. It’s the kind of house that used to be good enough for everyone in Cleveland: eight hundred square feet of domesticity in the middle of a pond of grass where a Virgin Mary is flanked by floral suns of marigolds and an American flag. He shared it with his brother, another bachelor who died in 2005. Now he’s alone. His old school friends want to know why he never followed them to the suburbs. To them, Slavic Village is the Old Neighborhood, but no longer the neighborhood they grew up in. “It’s changed,” they say delicately. That’s Cleveland code for “the element moved in,” which in turn is code for “black.”

  Michols stayed because Slavic Village is Polish—unlike many urban neighborhoods, where integration is the period between the arrival of the first black and the departure of the last white, Slavic Village only changed halfway. At Seven Roses, the cabbage-and-pierogi buffet on Fleet Avenue, the newspapers and lunchtime gossip are about doings in Kraków and Warszawa. And staying in Slavic Village meant staying in the parish of Immaculate Heart of Mary, where he had been baptized.

  “The one good thing about living here is you have a lot of friends,” Michols said. “We were working on the sidewalk, about ten people stopped and talked. You don’t get that in the suburbs. People don’t talk.”

  But he had fewer friends than before the housing crisis. The house next door disappeared first. The couple who lived there had paid $17,500 for it, in 1977. At that price, they should have been sheltered for life, but “they liked to buy stuff,” Michols observed, so they borrowed and borrowed against their equity until, in 2004, they lost it to the bank. A fireman picked it up for $25,000. Like a slumlord, he painted it and rented to a woman on Section 8, who was so clueless about housekeeping that Michols had to mow her lawn. From owner to low-income renter, the house was moving down in the world. Eventually, a corner of the foundation collapsed, causing the floor to sink four inches. The tenant moved out, and the house was demolished, leaving in the grass only the outline of its basement. The same thing happened across the street, where an absentee landlord bought out an owner and rented to tenants who sold drugs. After they set the house on fire, Michols went to court to have the place demolished.

  Frugality was easy for Michols. Having inherited his house, he’d never made a mortgage payment. Having no children to educate, he never thought of borrowing. So he was astonished by the appliance repairman who divorced his wife and abandoned his house, owing $83,000. And by the speculators who were paying double what the old-line neighbors knew the properties were worth.

  “Sometimes, we’d look at some of those homes and we said, ‘This is going for eighty-six thousand dollars? What is going on?’ The bank wasn’t looking at applications.”

  As the loans went bad and the houses emptied, the scrappers arrived, tearing out furnaces, aluminum siding, and water pipes right in broad daylight. To discourage scavengers, signs reading “THIS HOUSE DOES NOT HAVE COPPER PLUMBING” were posted in windows. But Classen Avenue became such a magnet for thieves they even broke into occupied houses. A kid from down the street tried to burgle Michols, but Michols chased him off. Only a neighbor who mowed the vacant lots prevented Classen Avenue from reverting to presettlement prairie.

  Clevelanders have a saying: “Cleveland’s pain, the nation’s gain.” It means “A lot of shitty stuff happens here, but we hope the rest of America can learn from our misfortune and avoid the same crap.” The foreclosure crisis that would drag the American economy into its deepest slough since the Great Depression arrived first in Cleveland, and nowhere was it more severe than Slavic Village. The 44105 zip code, which covers southeast Cleveland, was the scene of more housing speculation than any place in the country. Unfortunately, the rest of America wasn’t paying attention.

  Slavic Village was settled in the late nineteenth century by Poles, Czechs, and Bohemians who’d been imported to break a strike by native-born workers at the Cleveland Rolling Mill. They worked ten hours a day, six days a week, for wages that kept them just a bit more comfortable than barnyard animals, and built $400 cottages with even smaller mother-in-law cabins out back. Slavic Village was sooty, it was overcrowded, but it was also one of those self-contained ethnic ghettos that perpetuated Old World languages and customs for decades after babcia and dziadek arrived on the ship from Danzig. The church where you were baptized, the department store where you bought your communion dress, the high school where you finished your education, the factory where you spent your working life, the tavern where you spent your after-work life, the house where you raised your family, the hospital where you died, and the graveyard where you were buried were all within a few miles of each other. Unto the third generation, children grew up speaking Slavic languages at home, hearing them during Mass at St. Stanislaus (Polish) or St. John Nepomucene (Czech), and arg
uing in them at the Alliance of Poles, the Czech Sokol Center, or the Bohemian National Hall. The storefronts on Fleet Avenue and Broadway were labeled with poorly envoweled names: Stepke’s Hot Shop, Glinka’s Tavern, Divorky Hardware. Nobody minded a small house, because the tavern, the church, and the social hall were extensions of the living room.

  That all changed after World War II, of course. Slavic Village’s children moved to inner-ring suburbs such as Garfield Heights and Parma. (Parma is Cleveland’s Cleveland, the butt of local jokes about pink flamingos and bathtub Madonnas. The Drew Carey Show’s original theme was “Moon over Parma” and in 2010, a radio host spoofed Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” with “Parma State of Mind.”) The suburbanites returned for polka bands and pierogi-eating contests at Slavic Village Fest, but when their parents died, the middle-aged offspring had no interest in their childhood homes. They sold out to absentee landlords, who rented to Section 8 tenants. By the 1990s, Slavic Village, which had never actually been a village, was no longer entirely Slavic either. It was more than 50 percent African-American. After the slumlords came the speculators, the house flippers. Ohio had some of the weakest lending laws in the nation. Slavic Village, a neighborhood full of unwanted dwellings, was ground zero for exploitation. Between 2000 and 2010, Slavic Village’s population dropped 27 percent, on its way down from its all-time high of seventy thousand to twenty thousand. During a time when banks were willing to write mortgages to anyone, for any amount of money, there was cash to be squeezed out of empty houses. Here’s how one scam worked, according to Tony Zajac, an aide to Slavic Village’s city councilman Anthony Brancatelli. When Zajac’s aunt was eighty-nine, her son moved her into a nursing home. He put a “PRIVATE SALE” sign on her ten-room house, offering it for $40,000. The buyer took out a $90,000 mortgage, stating on the purchase agreement that she intended to use the balance for rehab. Instead, she split the money with the mortgage broker and the appraiser who had conspired to falsify the home’s value.