Volume 4 - Issue 2 - Summer 2012

If you find 28 year old manager and bartender Michael Smith behind the bar when you’re at Momocho you’re in luck. You don’t have to talk to him long to realize that not only is he friendly and welcoming, but he is also quite the character. A West Side native, he grew up and went to school in Sheffield Lake, then attended the Cleveland Institute for Medical Massage and has been working at Momocho for four years now.

Whether it was kismet or good luck, he found his current position on a Craigslist listing for a manager. “It was kind of a fluke,” he says, later stat-ing that finding his job at Momocho is one of his best memories in Ohio City. “I was broke and looking for a job and I saw a listing for a bartender and man-ager and I applied.”

On Friday, June 15th, Cliff’s Natural Resources hosted a day of service called Cliff’s Cares Day to help clean and spruce up Ohio City.  Hubbed at Fairview Park between West 32nd and West 38th Street, nearly 120 Cliff’s employees volunteered at six service locations set up throughout the neighborhood.  The projects included removing barbed wire from and painting the Kentucky Gardens fence, weeding and mulching the Fairview Park rain garden, sprucing up the Fairview Park baseball diamond, building and planting flowers in new planters at Fulton Foods and Vantage Place, and painting a house on West 50th Street.

Jim Bartolomucci, Vice President and Chief Risk Officer stated, “Cliffs' employees are committed to fostering community service projects across the Greater Cleveland area. We are delighted to collaborate with Ohio City Incorporated and help preserve a thriving community.”

This spring, Ohio City Shines, a community-wide initiative to improve the neighborhood, was launched. Its purpose is to create a more vibrant and welcoming neighborhood with an emphasis on participation from residents and stakeholders. The first project for the program was to train volunteers and hold assessments to determine what problems were in which areas, followed by clean-ups to address those issues. With help from Case Western Reserve and NPI, volunteers were able to use a spreadsheet to document blight and code violations that corresponds with a web application in which this data is entered.

Beth Mancuso remembers working in her mother’s garden as she grew up. She hated the weeding, it was boring and hot. “I’d put it off as long as I could, into the afternoon,” she laughs. “And by then it was even hotter.”

When she and her husband Al moved to Ohio City, Beth managed the St. Paul’s Patch Community Garden for eight years and began to garden in their own two-lot section near 45th and Lorain. “It’s quiet,” she explains, “and it’s taking care of those plants that I put in to grow to feed my family, so weeding became part of a bigger picture. It’s not a task in its own right, it’s part of the overall nurturing of the garden.”

The West Side Market is still the ultimate icon of local food, a place where many products are hand-picked or homemade, old-fashioned counter service still rules the day, and friendly small businesses anchor Ohio City while feeding all of Cleveland.

Or, as West Side Market Manager Christine Zuniga-Eadie puts it, “We’re so backwards, we’re forwards.” The market has changed, yet it remains a resource for the community.

Even as the market evolves, it continues to serve a critical role as a small business hub in the neighborhood. It is an incubator for 100-plus small, food-based enterprises, many of which – such as Campbell’s Popcorn and Orale – have expanded to other locations. 

The Cleveland Hostel, which recently opened on West 25th Street south of Lorain Ave., is not your grandfather’s youth hostel. This contemporary take on the classic hostel is a perfect blend of old and new that aims to lure international travelers to Ohio City.

Exhibit One: The View. At the recent grand opening party, the hostel’s roof deck was packed with guests, young and old, drinking, merrymaking and goggling at the sunset. Why wouldn’t they? The tiptop of the building offers a breathtaking view of the city.  

Since January 30th, drills and saws have buzzed in the rooms above Campbell's Sweets Factory, just one block south of the West Side Market. Now, Cleveland's first modern hostel has finally opened its doors. It began accepting travelers just a few weeks ago.