Almost a half-century to the day since Robert S. Wyly went to the top of the terminal tower (see Cleveland RSW), I tried to do the same, to update some of the images. After a flight from Hong Kong to Chicago for a conference in Valparaiso, Jatinder and I managed to reserve an extra day for wandering around Chicago ... or, perhaps a bit farther. How about Cleveland? How far is that? Oh, about three hours or so. Five hours later, Jatinder was horrified to discover that geographers don't have licenses, and thus mine could not be revoked. Sadly, the Terminal Tower was still closed, in that long, ongoing nightmare of parochial paranoia in post-9/11 America. The security guards told me that there were plans to re-open the observation deck at some point, though. Off to see the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame instead. We only had ninety minutes, so we moved at the pace of the average contemporary music video.
A few months later, however, stubborn resolve finally paid off. A trip through Chicago and Gary, Indiana brought temptations to go to Cleveland for a day before heading for an expedition in Detroit with Dan Hammel and Mark Davidson. I had booked an appointment for a flight over the city, from the Burke lakefront airport; it's more affordable than one might anticipate. But security concerns persisted: this time it was a TFR, a temporary flight restriction imposed outward beyond a four-mile radius from downtown Cleveland. Joe Biden was in town for a fundraiser. Larry, my gregarious pilot, drove me out to the County airport instead, and we ventured southwards towards Youngstown. Still ... what if I waited just an hour or two longer, until the TFR was lifted? Finally! Another kind pilot, Jennifer, finally took me up and got permission from the control tower to circle over downtown, so long as we avoided another Cessna pulling an advertising banner. "We don't get to fly over downtown very often," she said; "It's only when we have someone who wants to do something like a photo-shoot that we can go into that airspace." Finally, I could update some of the images of Cleveland half a century after those iconic shots of the mid-century, mid-continental industrial powerhouse. The images are clear and sunny, and therefore perhaps a little bit deceptive. The real story is one of the counterfactual, of what cannot be seen: there's no smoke, and yet that also means all those jobs are gone. The postindustrial service economy hasn't made up for all that was lost, all that was actively destroyed.