A version of this story first appeared in Rustwire.

I think that troubled cities often tragically misinterpret what’s coolest about themselves. They scramble for cure-alls, something that will ‘attract business,’ always one convention center, one pedestrian mall or restaurant district away from revival. They miss their biggest, best, and probably most marketable asset: their unique and slightly off-center character. Few people go to New Orleans because it’s a ‘normal’ city — or a ‘perfect’ or ‘safe’ one. They go because it’s crazy, borderline dysfunctional, permissive, shabby, alcoholic, and bat shit crazy — and because it looks like nowhere else. Cleveland is one of my favorite cities. I don’t arrive there with a smile on my face every time because of the Cleveland Philharmonic.
– Anthony Bourdain

It’s branding season again in my hometown of Cleveland. The Plain Dealer just announced plans to help rebrand the Mistake on the Lake “to change not only the look and feel of our region’s ‘capital city’ … but also the way the world and Clevelanders themselves look at it.”

Well, good luck with that. One need only examine the history of Cleveland’s branding campaigns to know past efforts have been a bit of a mess. There was the corporate-driven, perhaps overly optimistic motto “Best Location in the Nation,” coined by Cleveland Electric Illumination Co. in 1944 and adopted by city leaders. Then the Plain Dealer itself stumbled with a hopelessly hokey 1981 bumper-sticker insert reading, “New York’s the Big Apple, but Cleveland’s a Plum.” You don’t differentiate your city identity through omission, i.e., “we are not New York.” You do it by declaring what you are. And no Cleveland, you are not a plum. Sorry.

What is it? Well, it is a gritty city in a region increasingly known for its resilience. If Cleveland were a boxer it would be Rocky — raw eggs and all, beef-punching workouts to boot. And in this age of American excess and crumbling infrastructure, Cleveland is cool. From Governing magazine:

[A] certain fascination with places that have fallen on hard times like the Rust Belt … has taken hold. Part of it is the scruffy, industrial look. It may also be a rejection of cities with gleaming condo towers, bistros and boutiques that were once so trendy yet now seem so frothy and fake in the wake of the economic meltdown … The other fascination is the defiance these Rust Belt cities have shown.

Call it Rust Belt chic. Originating out of the blog i will shout Youngstown, Rust Belt chic is part aesthetic: the warmth of the faded, and the edge in old iron and steel. It’s also part old-world, working culture, like the simple pleasures associated with bagged lunchmeat and beaten boots in the corner. And then there is grit, one of the main genes in the DNA of American coolness. Cleveland-bred and New York-based writer Pete Beatty sums it up this way:

… the inevitable human tendency toward nostalgia, the birth and death of punk, the early, hardscrabble days of hip-hop, downtown/heroin chic, Bukowski, Taxi Driver, Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, The Outsiders, steeping in a stock of history: white flight, urban blight and renewal, crime, deferred maintenance of both the physical and notional infrastructure.

Rust belt chic? Belt and Image by Dylan Johnson at Etsy.

The problem for Rust Belt branding is that folks who make the official branding decisions — mayors, developers, marketing consultants, and their ilk — barely give Rust Belt chic a sniff. “Cool” to these folks means a rock hall exhibit or an aquarium. It means largely showing off what you have that other cities have instead of differentiating yourself from the pack.

So what would a Rust Belt chic branding campaign look like? Well, as far as mottoes, there is “Cleveland: You’ve Got to Be Tough!“ The saying was birthed on a T-shirt in the ’70s by Daffy Dan, Cleveland’s iconic haberdasher. The saying is simple. True. Cleveland is both rough and lovable, and Clevelanders’ attachment to place arises out of the shared experience of getting up when so much around you has fallen down.

Or how about this beauty, originally arising out the Cleveland Chaos movement and recently put to graphics:

It refers, of course, to the Cuyahoga, which was so polluted with industrial effluent that it caught fire numerous times before it was finally cleaned up. The key to this tag line is turning a perceived weakness into a strength; that is, we caught our lifeblood on fire making your country, and then we cleaned to remake ourselves.

As for marketing places and events, the following short list of nominees have my Rust Belt chic branding vote.

1. The industrial flats: At the spot where the mouth of the Cuyahoga meets Lake Erie, this is the place where Cleveland was born. The once-swampy landscape morphed into industry, then abandonment, then a spot of nightlife, then into what comic Mike Polk famously referred to as a “Scooby Doo ghost town.” The area is intriguing, not only because it fosters Cleveland’s best pieces of public art — its old bridges — but because it is slowly morphing into Cleveland’s version of muscle beach. Joggers. Kayakers. Folks carrying weights along unused railroad lines that wrinkle the topography with history. Rust Belt chic for sure.

2. Polka happy hour with DJ Kishka: Eastern Europe has deep roots not only in Cleveland, but the Rust Belt in general. Polka was huge in Cleveland for decades, with “America’s Polka King,” Frankie Yankovic, hailing from the area. Now polka gets played on turntables by DJ Kishka, who entertains a mix of old Poles and young hipsters once a month at spot on the city’s Near West Side called Happy Dog. (Click here for the full monty.)

3. The Glass Bubble Project: In the shadow of the West Side Market, the Glass Bubble Project is part gallery, part performance art, part DIY everything, part retail, part ad hoc bar. Besides the beautiful blown glass, there is a rooster, birds flying around via a hole in the roof, and a hot water tank collecting residual heat from a kiln fashioned via an old oil drum. Quirky and hardscrabble, yeah. Beautiful industrial design, yeah. Cleveland, yeah.

So now for the big question: How do you reduce it all to a marketing slogan? You probably can’t. But if this city is going to brand — and they are, because that’s what cities do — then let Cleveland be. Because nobody likes a fake. Especially when the Rust Belt brand is about being as real as possible.

We’re looking for the goofiest city re-branding campaigns ever! Got a lousy city slogan or a mind-bogglingly bad p.r. campaign? Put it in the comments below! We’ll publish the best (worst) later this week.

Photo: BB and HH

Living in the Rust Belt, one becomes accustomed to things that many people would find shocking. Examples: Not long ago, I saw the façade of an abandoned building fall out of itself on fire and into the street. Firemen and neighbors gathered around to look. Nobody was surprised, really. It was more a communal experience than anything. Not a few weeks later, I went for a jog and came upon another building that had been reduced to a skeleton of twisted metal that had its insides sunken in. It was quiet. The smell was of a cooled burning.

Such scenes of destruction are prevalent in post-industrial cities like Cleveland, where I live. The commonness of vacancy, disassembly, and decay can be damn near Mad Max-ian. Don’t believe me? Spend a day in Detroit. Chunks of the city feel like real-life versions of the fictional setting in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. An excerpt:

On the far side of the river valley the road passed through a stark black burn. Charred and limbless trunks of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly in the wind. A burned house in a clearing and beyond that a reach of meadowlands stark and gray and a raw red mudbank where a roadworks lay abandoned. Farther along were billboards advertising motels. Everything as it once had been save faded and weathered.

Depressing, eh?

I don’t think so. Detroit to me is a special place. In fact I don’t feel the modern ruins littering the Rust Belt landscape are a negative. Rather, I believe that Cleveland and Detroit and other cities that have borne the brunt of a broken system are also home to something else: a possibility tied the ubiquity of so many vacant and crumbled things.

After all, “every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” Picasso said that. Picasso could have painted Detroit the way it is. In Guernica, he kind of did.

Destruction and decay get a bad rap in America. Cities have died and shrunk since the onset of civilization. Cities are not immune to death. Yet here, we treat urban decline like leprosy, as it goes against the grain of the American philosophy of growth, expansion, and construction.

Being broken is the key to transformation. The future of America is about re-imagining the geographies of its past. Anton Chekhov once said, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

Photo: Tito PerezIt’s not easy to perceive value in ruin. Self-flagellating is common in these parts — it can be toxic. We are fucked here. We are cities with tubes and prosthetics in an arena where Manhattan and Silicon Valley dunk on everything. But what we really need to be doing is winking at each other in self-confidence.

Why?

Because the America of Times Square and Texas-style growth is an illusion that is barely keeping itself from falling apart, whereas the Rust Belt has been able to stare at the pieces of a broken paradigm for some time now.

So is the future really here? I think so. So does Alex Krieger, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. From a Fortune article:

“The notion of a walled city, a contained city — that’s an 18th-century idea,” [Krieger said]. And where will the new ideas for the 21st century emerge? From older, decaying cities, Krieger believes, such as New Orleans, St. Louis, Cleveland, Newark, and especially Detroit — cities that have become, at least in part, “kind of empty containers.”

The question becomes, then: What can spark a perceptual change not only in the Rust Belt but in the American psyche? A change from the avoidance of failure to the need for it — from the hate of ruins to the possibility inherent in them?

Enter ruin porn.

Ruin porn, an artistic movement centered on photographing the scenes of post-industrial decay, has been called condescending to Rust Belters. It has been called a necessary evil. It has been called masturbatory art. I call it a tool for changing perception. Let me explain.

Photo: Tito PerezRuin porn has “outed” urban decay. It did this through the simple act of caring to look. Before that, ruins in America really were a pornographic experience: a scene from the underbelly, of and for the poor, the scrags. It was a private affair dirtied through the interaction between the filth of the aesthetic and the guilt of the observer for having to live with it. But by outing and framing it, and by capturing the inherent beauty in broken things, ruin porn exposed the failure and decay, thus clearing the secrecy, the shame, and leaving room to see less emptiness and more space.

The lie behind the motive to say “there is nothing to see here” becomes the truth behind the courage to look. And through that, we feel our past in the ruins, which allows an enlightened view of where it is we want to go.

Ruin Porn has the potential to be the tip of a powerful perceptual movement that allows America to change the way it has confronted its structural failures in the past. If we look at regions like the Rust Belt and all we see is emptiness, then the subsequent escapism will simply lead to more hollowing out. But by framing ruin, what we may find is that what we once called dirty we can now call clean.