#randomtowns roadtrips usatravel ohiotravel lakeerie route6

[randomtowns]

Lorain, Ohio

It didn’t help my opinion of Lorain to have it always be gray each time I visited. Northeast Ohio just has this as its default setting, and any sunny weather is just a temporary fluke that will be resolved in just a few hours. Lake Erie, a beautiful jade color in the sun, is a foreboding, soupy swath that stretches infinitely to the horizon. There are rarely ships around Lorain. No one likes to go out on boats when the weather isn’t good, and the few commercial barges - mostly carrying coal - stick to the deeper channels, mostly out of view from the lake’s southern shore.

But it’s not just weather. Lorain is depressing and seems to know it’s depressing. Highway 6 is fronted by former hotels turned retirement homes, and its main street that follows the Black River upstream, Broadway Avenue, is haunted by abandonment and yellowing “for lease” signs. The few people around at the meeting of these two streets seem to be going in for court dates at the local courthouse. Lorain is still the seat of its namesake county. Most people rarely see the insides of courthouses beyond the odd traffic court appearance, where a friendly and empathetic judge shows his or her appreciation for your pleasant demeanor and punctuality by reducing your fine slightly, or even dismissing your ticket on a technicality if you show up in a shirt and tie. Instead, they’re mostly patronized by those caught in the system: the poor, the jobless, the addicted. And those groups all hang out outside seemingly before and after their court dates, usually to smoke. It’s caused me, over the years, to associate courthouses with the contradicting smells of low-quality cleaning products, artificially cooled air, and tobacco smoke.

Shipbuilding left long ago, and Ford closed its plant here in 2005 as part of a larger restructuring. US Steel still operates here. (That’s a sentence I’m sure I’ll have to revise within the next few years.) The steady decline of the steel industry has its larger poster children: Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Toledo, Detroit. The words “Rust Belt” leap to mind, along with images of crumbling warehouses and idle, rusted machinery. But those are larger cities and can at least mostly absorb the job loss. Pittsburgh, the most heavily reliant on steel for its economic vitality, has bounced back the most. But these cities retain a little bit of hipster and cool culture. The grittiness is attractive to some, and they wear their cities names like a badge of honor and proof of cool.

But then there are cities like Lorain. Lorain is not dead. Lorain is not Gary, Indiana or East Saint Louis. Instead Lorain has been limping along slowly throughout the decades. Lorain is not cool. No one moves to Lorain and then brags about it. It’s just far enough from Cleveland to not be able to take advantage of that area’s great nightlife, but is just close enough to be under its sphere of influence and fails to make its presence known. Most people from outside the region have never heard of Lorain. But it was still the 10th-largest city in Ohio in 2010, and its population has only seen a reasonable decline from its 1970 census peak of over 78,000.

The thing is that it’s a town full of nice people. There are nice houses, some nice parks and I could see it being a nice enough place to raise a family. But the stigma over its head as an industrial town has kept it from finding the same bedroom community fortune of some of its neighbors. As the country continues to deindustrialize, the future is not terribly bright for Lorain. Lorain will, of course, survive, but the thriving it needs (and probably deserves) is likely to remain out of reach.