People Keep Coming Back to Cleveland

There's something that sets Cleveland apart from other large cities: a sense of community. As diverse as Clevelanders are, we are all loyal to this city we call home. We love Cleveland unconditionally and want only what is best for it.

Signs of renewed vitality were everywhere. Downtown warehouses had been turned into lofts and restaurants. Several old movie palaces had been transformed into Playhouse Square, the country’s largest performing arts complex after Lincoln Center. The lakefront boasted the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, in a futuristic design by I. M. Pei. The Cleveland Clinic had become a world center of medical innovation and was spawning a growing industry of biotechnology start-ups. How had so depleted a city managed to preserve and enlarge upon so many assets? And could a city that had once been a national leader in industrial patents in the 19th century reinvent itself as an economic powerhouse in the 21st?

“It’s the people,” a woman who had recently arrived in Cleveland said when I asked what she liked most about the place. As with so many transplants to the area, she was here not by choice but by virtue of a spouse’s change of job. They had traded a house in Santa Barbara and year-round sun and warmth for an old estate on the East Side and gray winters and sometimes torrid summers. And yet they didn’t look back. “We’ve been amazed by how welcoming everyone is,” she added. “We’ve never lived in a place where everyone is so involved in its future.”

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