McClelland, Ted. The Third Coast: Sailors, Strippers, Fishermen, Folksingers, Long-Haired Ojibway Painters and God-Save-the-Queen Monarchists of the Great Lakes. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2008.
In The Third Coast, Chicago-based writer Ted McClelland embarks on a three-month circle tour of the Great Lakes in search of a common regional culture.
I’ve been wanting to read a book like this since I came across Barry Cunliffe’s Facing the Ocean in a bookstore in Glastonbury. Facing the Ocean posits that (archaeologically, at least) the people of the Atlantic coasts of Europe , from Ireland to Iberia, are more like each other than like their own inland countrymen. I suspected the same might be true for the people of the Great Lakes (I personally feel more in common with Buffalo and Detroit than with the rest of Ohio).
I won’t attempt to analyze McClelland’s entire book, but rather the three chapters where the Great Lakes meets the Rust Belt: Chapter 21, The Irony of Buffalo (including Buffalo and Erie, PA); Chapter 22, Ethnic Jazz (Cleveland); and Chapter 23, Black Bottom Blues (Detroit).
The Rust Belt subculture of the Great Lakes culture is summed up perfectly by McClelland’s companion on a boat trip down the Buffalo River, past the decaying remnants of long-forgotten industry:
“There’s few things that Buffalo has done perfectly. [But it has] perfectly separated the citizens from the waterfront.”
There is the same disconnect between the waterfront and the citizens in the next two waning industrial powerhouses McClelland visits. Although he acknowledges the Cuyahoga River’s role as a still-significant waterway, and in Detroit he visits the Mariners’ Church (not to mention the only floating post office in the U.S.), people in the Rust Belt don’t seem to embrace maritime culture in the same way as the fishermen and Boat Nerds of the Upper Great Lakes and Ontario. There isn’t anyone in the Rust Belt who seems to feel, as Ojibway chief Raymond Goodchild does, that there are “medicines in the water that belong to the people.”
Rather, Cleveland and Detroit are portrayed more as ethnic and “urban-eccentric.” McClelland nails Cleveland’s Rust Belt chic appeal:
This might be Cleveland’s moment…. In America’s hippest urban neighborhoods there’s nothing cooler than looking uncool. From coast to coast, alienated, countercultural twenty-three-year-olds have raided Cleveland’s closet for Penguin sport shirts, Jack Nicklaus golf pants, chunky glasses, and granny skirts…. They think bowling and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer make a great night out. Cleveland’s thrift stores and alleys could become major tourist attractions.
But, he adds:
Cleveland isn’t cool enough to pick up on that. Instead, it flogs the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Detroit is less Rust Belt Chic and more a poster-child for urban decay. McClelland visits the Heidelberg Project, which aims to revivify a declining neighborhood through unconventional public art installations. The neighborhood, judging by the map, has seen the business of a bulldozer lately – a typical strategy employed by shrinking cities to reconfigure their neighborhoods to suit half the population they were originally designed for. In the chapter, McClelland encounters a mess of feathers in one of these vacant lots. A neighbor tells him that a hawk swooped down, killed a pheasant, and ate it on the spot — a sure sign that nature was starting to reclaim a once-dense urban environment.
McClelland’s book, though far from exhaustive, accomplishes the next best thing: it shows Great Lakes people as they are, in all of their unique glory. It issues no judgment and draws few conclusions (other than if you attempt a circle tour of the Great Lakes you might return with a new-found love of hockey).
As far as I can tell, there is no similar travelogue for the entire Rust Belt region. But until there is, the canon of Rust Belt literature is far from complete.
