I am alone in a hallway behind a jury deliberation room, in podium posture, leaning on the register, gazing out the panoramic east windows on the 13th floor of the Justice Center. A packed courtroom awaits me. I raise up on my toes and fingertips, stretching every muscle of my legs and arms and back as i lean into the glass, then relax.
Beneath me is the Burnham Plan, three large rectangular parks bordered on the three sides by granite civic buildings, and capped at its north by a grand view of Lake Erie's shoreline. To the north, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's glass pyramid, the Great Lakes Science Center's hypnotic, trinitarian wind turbine, and the Browns' Shame Vessel all provide foreground to the intermittent white-caps charging the break wall and, beyond that, the thin, cloudy horizon.
Burnham's plan was this: leave the commerce and industry to the river. This broad tract would be where society enriched and managed itself. City Hall, The State Courthouse, Public Auditorium, The Board of Education, The Public Library, The Federal Reserve and Courthouse all surround these three simple parks. The buildings share a common architecture and common civic vision. Cleveland was once a city that understood itself.
Now, a century or so later, this cursed burg bangs it's head against the wall like an imbecile: this very plot of land the subject to a controversial plan to add a Medical Mart, whatever that is. Federal dogs are sniffing the contracts. To the south, the crumbling interstate thoroughfare is about to be replaced, a bridge span imagined over the exact spot of a long-forgotten mass transit tragedy. Back to the north, where the river meets the lake, the port has been run into the ground by incompetence and corruption, plans to modify it destroyed by obvious truths about the Great Lakes waterways. Federal dogs are sniffing there, too.
As a matter of fact, federal dogs are sniffing everywhere. A year and a half ago, FBI agents raided dozens of locations and offices connected to Cuyahoga County government; judges, commissioners, auditors, etc., all tethered together by the money they guzzle from the county Democratic Party.
I peer down across the street to the puddled roof of the County Administration building. It also sits on the perimeter of the Burnham Plan parks, but shares no architectural pedigree. It looks like it's trespassing, I think. Tear it down, brick by brick, and open the vaulted Burnham Plan to the Portal...
A tap on my shoulder distracts my inner civic planner. I pull out my ear buds and smile. The bailiff politely intones, "Good Morning, Mr. Bloomsday. The Judge is on the bench, waiting for you."
"I'm ready," I say. I follow her through a court staff only door, into the main hallway, then through the main double doors of the stinking, packed courtroom. I walk briskly to the center of the courtroom to my waiting podium, tucking my Ipod into my shirt pocket. Over a hundred eyes upon me today, plus a camera and a court reporter. "Good Morning, your honor. For the record, Ulysses Bloomsday, on behalf of the Cuyahoga County Public Defenders Office and the indigent citizens of the City of Cleveland." I raise up on my toes and fingertips, stretching every muscle of my legs and arms and back as i lean into the podium, then relax.
[photos: Dr. M.A. Sullivan, Bluffton U., Emeritus]
