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.” (more…)
Rust Belt Reader 