Bollocks to the sports teams. As Phil said, it has one of the finest symphony orchestras in the world…and both Severence Hall and the Blossom Music Center are delightful places to hear it perform.
For the record, the Big Five U.S. orchestras have traditionally been
The New York Philharmonic
The Boston Symphony
The Philadelphia Orchestra
The Chicago Symphony, and
The Cleveland Orchestra.
All hail maestro George Szell.
When you return, you’ll see a line up of Joe Grescheky, Mr Rogers, Mean Joe Greene, Sophie Masloff, Chilly Billy, and Mike Bogaslowski. They will all want to kick your ass.
Leaving the Cubs aside, just like the rest of the NL does, Chicago, or at least the greater Chicago area, has an official minor league baseball team, the Kane County Cougers of the Class A Midwest League who play in suburban Geneva IL. My sister, even though she hates baseball generally, highly recommends the Cougers because they put on a good show at an affordable price.
Then there’s the Tampa Bay area, which besides having the Devil Rays, also has the Clearwater Phillies and the Tampa Yankees, both of the FSL.
Finally, there are the St. Paul Saints of the independent Northern League, who share their market with the Twins, and who have been known to outdraw the Twins on occasion.
Leaving the Cubs aside, just like the rest of the NL does, Chicago, or at least the greater Chicago area, has an official minor league baseball team, the Kane County Cougers of the Class A Midwest League who play in suburban Geneva IL. My sister, even though she hates baseball generally, highly recommends the Cougers because they put on a good show at an affordable price.
Then there’s the Tampa Bay area, which besides having the Devil Rays, also has the Clearwater Phillies, the Dunedin Blue Jays and the Tampa Yankees, all of the FSL.
And just to be complete, NY has another minor league team besides the Staten Island Yankees. The Mets’ short season league team will play in Brooklyn this year.
As for the original post, as a native and present Clevelander I second what PLDennison said earlier about the good points of the city of Cleveland. On the down side of the cultural front the city suffered a black eye this summer when the ballet went bankrupt, which it had been sharing the ballet with San Jose.
Back when I was in college, I did a review for the campus newspaper of an album by Cleveland art rockers Pere Ubu. I took a cheap shot at Cleveland just for the hell of it.
So, a week later, there appears a letter in the paper from a proud Cleveland defender, who plays up the symphony, the parks, what have you. I fully expected that.
What I didn’t expect was the letter in the paper a week after that defending me and attacking the first letter-writer. The symphony? She didn’t like it. The parks? Not all that impressive. Everything about Cleveland sucks, she said. It’s pretty cool when someone you don’t even know backs you up on something.
::puts on “fighting ignorance” hat::
No, no. We didn’t set Lake Erie on fire, or we’d have heard about it from Detroit and Buffalo, among other places. What caught on fire was the Cuyahoga River, which runs into Lake Erie. The flaming area ([pun]ironically, not an enclave of gay bars [/pun]) was around the area now called The Flats. These days, it’s a haven of bars and clubs, but back in 1970, it was where the deep-water port ships came in to drop things off. I don’t know where they moved that to, but somehow Cleveland managed to clean up a bit.
Now, the lake we filled full of sewage, mercury and other pollutants. (A-ha! The Big Mistake!) That, too has been cleaned up and now you can actually eat the walleye or lake perch without fearing for your own life!
::removes hat::
And Philadelphia has the Phillies and, just across the Delaware, the Trenton Thunder play very entertaining minor league baseball.
So, as I suspected, New York ain’t all that.
The section of the river that “caught fire” was about a mile and a half south of the Flats. It was a chemical spill that caught fire and was extinguished in about 20 minutes–on a slow news day. It was picked up as an example of the perils of pollution, but the memory has lingered that the “river” burned.
Similar “burning river” events have been repeated on multiple occasions in New York, Newark, Rouge (the Detroit suburb where Ford has its largest complex), Baton Rouge, and a few dozen other cities with rivers and industrial concentrations.
Aside from hoary old jokes and the name of a decent beer from Great Lakes Brewery, the burning river is no big deal.
Cuyahoga River Fire
Special thanks from all Clevelanders past and present to Mr. Randy Newman.
Oh, and the kielbasa’s really good there, too. Lots of folks of Polish extraction. And in certain neighborhoods on the West Side, there’s a bar on every corner.
So far the comments have been favorable to Cleveland,
27-0.
Cleveland is no longer stigmatized!