There’s a part of the west side of Cleveland called The Flats, a low-lying area in the Cuyahoga River floodplain that leads into Lake Eerie. It’s very flat, hence the name, as opposed to the roller coaster hills of the Cuyahoga Valley. To anyone who lives in a Rust Belt city, the Flats are a painful but familiar sight: a former industrial center now a mix of trendy restaurants, professional class workplaces, luxury apartments, and upscale music venues. There’s a few parks in there for good measure, but rest assured, those parks are for polite white people. The Cleveland Police Department has been historically, let’s say, not friendly to 53% of the city’s population.
For the better part of a century, the area’s economic powers were pleasantly happy dumping nothing but industrial waste and turds into the river itself, one of the most polluted waterways in America at one point. When they realized cheaper labor could be found in China and Europe, rather than fix the problems of the area (economic and environmental), all the industry just packed up and left. I mean, literally. They just left.
“In the 1980s and 1990s, as manufacturing slowly dissipated throughout the United States, the Flats transformed itself into an entertainment destination.”
ThisIsCleveland.com
Gee, I wonder how in the passive tense that happened? Did the rain melt all that manufacturing like a snowman? A strong gust of wind just blow all those industrial jobs away? Did the Flats transform like a butterfly in a cocoon? No, of course not. Brutal globalization and remorseless gentrification did that.
After a decades-long stint with music venues (including the legendary Peabody’s Down Under), the area became a wasteland. Flats Forward Inc, a development non-profit, banded together some very for-profit entities to redevelop the crumbling area into a hub of piping hot gentrification. (Also, something they should redevelop is their 2005-ass looking website. Yikes.)
The average rent for a new one-bedroom apartment in the area is now $1500 – $2000 on average. For all you New York and California residents ready to tear me a new one, the median household income in Cleveland is $28,000 a year, a staggering 53% underneath the national average. That rent would be 86% of the income of an average Clevelander. In 2017, Cleveland has the second highest poverty rate in America for a city its size: 35%. One out of three. And the City of Cleveland Planning Commission didn’t see this as a dire economic emergency on the level of a man-made disaster. Obviously, the answer to a burning, polluted river was $1.3 million dollar condos.
There is few better depictions of gentrification than this. Decimate an industrial area. Fill it with businesses, homes, and workplaces meant for the upper middle professional class. Make them unaffordable for the people that actually live in the city. Make the former inhabitants unwelcome with racist police. Then swoop in, keep all the “rustic” aesthetic, or as This Is Cleveland called it “connecting grit and sophistication”, a stomach-churning phrase of marketing speak.
The hollowing out and repurposing of post-industrial areas, or creating spaces that evoke an idealized working class past, is a design philosophy called “industrial chic”. It’s the city version of “country kitsch”, those corny butterchurns and decorative straw brooms you can buy at Cracker Barrel. I prefer to call it working class cosplay, because that’s what is it: an artificial simulacrum of real lives that lacks any of the ugly reality of that lifestyle. Industrial chic takes intentionally unaesthetic spaces dedicated to brutal extraction and the mass exploitation of labor and commodify into a romanticized consumerism, since the industrial jobs that used those places are essentially gone forever.
“But adaptive reuse doesn’t necessarily guarantee interaction with our past. South of the new East Bank complex on Old River Road, the nineteenth-century buildings that line the street now house restaurants, stores, and offices. These structures may be a reminder of Cleveland’s past, but—like the replica of Lorenzo Carter’s cabin—absent large-scale efforts for collective memory, they neglect to teach us anything about our history.”
Belt Magazine
Lorenzo Carter was the first permanent colonizer of the area. (I refuse to use the term “settler”.) This connection to the past is what matters. In the Lorenzo Carter replica cabin, a Chippewa man was chained to the rafters after he was tried. The next day he was executed in Public Square, the very same place where they filmed a few scenes for the first Avengers movie in 2011.
It doesn’t have to resemble anything in particular, just capture the aesthetic feel of a former functional space. The impression of “authentic” working class life without understanding or experiencing the pain of that lifestyle; people who want to live inside a comfy grain silo and code scooter-sharing apps. Industrial chic paints a very narrow view of authentic working class life as manufacturing and industrial: crowds of flabby white dudes in hard hats. Most suburban spaces are cold and isolating, but industrial chic attempts to capture something more “authentic” by reusing old materials and buildings. Industrial chic also uses brick and corrugated materials, rusted metal, concrete, opaque glass, repurposed equipment (like a loom turned into a dining room table), exposed beams, and banded steel railing.
Materials that existed in places used to make things, that labor created, now just where pampered sales executives store their yoga equipment. It’s a working class aesthetic, one born of necessity and functionality, is now just another color pallette for the upper middle class to spend lots of money on.
There is a part of me that genuinely appreciates the recycling and repurposing of these spaces and materials, but I have to ask, who does it benefit? Does anyone think these developers are thinking of the people those empty buildings displaced? Or the average working stiff in Cleveland making less than $30,000 a year? Not even close! An ultimate irony: losing your manufacturing job then having to go work for a website call center that sell a set of non-functioning gears for $180.
It’s easy to be accused of gatekeeping here, like I’m saying anyone who lives in a converted loft is somehow a poser. Well, this isn’t highschool anymore. There’s no sense of authentic versus false in the sense it’s an objective line that you cross over. But the real effects of gentrification and this usage of “authentic” “historical” places is just another way for capital to make some bank off of a suffering part of the country. For the record, I’m also not against buying old stuff at a swap meet. The age of something is not the issue, nor really is the price. Price is arbitrary, and the only real value is the labor put into something. A piece of craftsmanship, like a loving restoration, deserves to be rewarded. The past deserves to be preserved.
A lot of industrial chic is a design aesthetic removed from the history of the object itself, projecting a false sense of authenticity from ownership and ignoring the painful and radical history that object can represent, just because it looks cool. This takes 2 forms: the fetishizing of “vintage” objects as cultural artifacts, and reproduction of them to look old and therefore more “genuine”. Hypercapitalism moves so fast that even the very old now is considered to be “new”.
Upper middle class professional flock to this because a: they can afford it and b: lack a sense of history and reality in their own sterilized lives, seeking it through their decor. The actual vintage stuff is too grimy or hard to get, but a nice, new, outsourced version of a $250 spotlight with “Olde Bronze Finish” is easy! Or maybe a $449 nightstand to store your Nintendo Switch and anal lube that “could have come right out of an iron works factory.” But it fucking didn’t. It came out of Indian factory employing wage slaves.
It’s pretending that post-industrialism happened somewhere else, and not in my own city. To other people, and not my neighbors. Industrial chic is a type of design nostalgia that wants to fake being “working class” in a very limited way while being distinctly upper class, slapping decorative rust on a brand new Audi, and pretending to live in a luxury factory that makes nothing for no one.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.