Free Dragons & Dwarves by S. Andrew Swann Page B

. . .
    Not until we made a wrong turn.
    We hit the messy intersection where MLK feeds into Chester—one of the main East Side arteries downtown. We were caught at the light, and the area had a surreal feeling at this time of the morning. There were no cars anywhere, no people on the street, and the streetlights gave the whole place the feeling of a recently abandoned stage set.
    The campus of Case Western loomed off to our right, the sprawling campus an aesthetic jumble of architectural styles, ranging from the Gothic church closest to us, to nineteen-sixties institutional. Floodlights illuminated the fluted stone sides of the church, and as I looked up at it, one of the gargoyles yawned.
    The light changed, and instead of heading west down Chester, toward downtown, the van turned east, down Euclid. This wasn’t a good sign.
    “Where are we going?” I asked.
    Silence.
    We rolled down Euclid, the only vehicle on the street. We drove under the Conrail tracks and passed the downhill side of Lakeview Cemetery, then we came to a rather inauspicious signpost.
    It said, “Welcome to East Cleveland.”

CHAPTER EIGHT
     
    E AST Cleveland is an object lesson of what not to do in the face of demographic change.
     
    Around the 1900s, East Cleveland was a high-rent bedroom community for the Cleveland elite that couldn’t quite make it to Millionaire’s Row. There are still quarter-million dollar homes in some East Cleveland neighborhoods—the catch being that they’d be five to ten million anywhere else.
    The 1960s changed that. During the end of that decade, middle-class blacks started buying a lot of homes in the inner ring eastern suburbs. In Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights—neighboring communities to East Cleveland—there wasn’t a panic among white homeowners, despite the attempt by real estate speculators to inflame passions.
    Due to that one outbreak of sanity, both Shaker and Cleveland Heights have some of the most desirable—and expensive—real estate of any inner ring suburbs. Which sinks that oft-used chestnut linking “changing neighborhoods” and falling property values.
    East Cleveland suffered no such restraint. White flight broke the sound barrier. In the space of two years, most of the existing residents sold at a loss rather than face a black face across the driveway.
    The crash in property values and the exodus of population nearly bankrupted the city government, and the plummet in city services continued the collapse in property values. Abandoned properties proliferated, the crime rate rose, businesses moved out. . . .
    By the time the Portal opened, East Cleveland was fighting a standstill battle against urban rot.
    The Portal nailed the coffin shut and put a shotgun to the corpse. All the absentee landlords—who, even if they did nothing to keep up with the property, gave tenants and the city someone to sue—disappeared. The twelve months of chaos after the Portal opened gave everyone with a stake in East Cleveland legal ground to claim it as a loss, dumping the property on the city. The government suddenly found itself in possession of over half the property in East Cleveland, much of it uninhabitable. Everything collapsed.
    In the decade since, everyone—at least everyone human—with any sense had left the floundering suburb. Some to Euclid, some to Cleveland Heights, but most back into Cleveland, where the Portal was becoming an investment magnet, and money was going to actually rebuild many of the city’s neighborhoods.
    Not so for the urban purgatory that was East Cleveland. The vacuum created by the city’s depopulation was filled with other things. There’s no accurate census. But any brave soul who’d stop to do a random head count would find that three out of five of those heads weren’t human—or even humanoid.
    Most of the streetlights were out, so as we drove down Euclid the buildings on either side were little more than looming shadows. Occasionally a storefront would be