To the casual eye, the battered commercial strip along St. Clair Avenue east of East 55th Street in Cleveland would look bleak, unwelcoming and rundown.

Michael Fleming, director of the St. Clair Superior Community Development Corp. sees something else: a street of hidden treasures and rich potential.

Since taking his post a year ago, he’s devised a turnaround plan that could make St. Clair the city’s next hot neighborhood, based on its location just off I-90, its record as a busy local commuter route and its deep history as a stronghold of the city’s Slovenian immigrant community.

The hook is to build on existing businesses and augment the neighborhood’s identity by turning into a regional center for upcycling - the art and craft of repurposing throwaway items and discarded construction materials to make something new, useful and beautiful.

Upcyclers turn old roof slates into picture frames; plastic soda bottles into sculptural flower bouquets; salvaged lumber into furniture; and melted black vinyl from old LPs into jewelry and serving bowls.
The movement is growing in Cleveland, and Fleming wants to make St. Clair its regional headquarters.
“We’re pretty stoked,” Fleming said in one of several interviews about the neighborhood over the summer. “We’re calling this Upcycle St. Clair.”

Fleming’s vision has attracted a prestigious $375,000 grant from ArtPlace, a private-sector spinoff of the National Endowment for the Arts. Other grants came from Charter One Bank and Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, the county’s public arts fund.

A cadre of artists and creatives, including project manager Nicole McGee, a veteran upcycler who specializes in floral bouquets made from discarded plastic bottles, have joined the project.

In February, they launched thewildly popular Cleveland Flea, a market that convenes monthly at the Slovenian National Home at 6409 St. Clair Ave., and Sterle’s Country House, 1401 East 55th Street, a traditional bier garden that resembles a Swiss chalet.

Headed by entrepreneur Stephanie Sheldon, the Flea now attracts more than 5,000 people for monthly shopping sprees. The next one is scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 12.

More activity is on the way soon:
- On Saturday, Oct. 26, an army of artists armed with paint and brushes will convene to decorate sidewalks, crosswalks and building facades with stenciled patterns based on classic Slovenian folk motifs.

- On Friday, Nov. 8 entrepreneur Lauren Krueger will open Collective Upcycle, a pop-up retail shop in a vacant former department store in the colorful “Copper Top” Building at 6202 St. Clair Avenue, known for its twin copper cupolas. Artists will sell furniture, decorative items and artworks made from recycled materials or salvaged construction material at prices from $1.50 to the low three figures, Krueger says.

- By the holiday season, baker Deborah Jones plans to open Impassioned Bakery at 6421 St. Clair Ave., where she’ll offer everything from traditional Slovenian delicacies to traditional Jewish challah. Her goal is to create a community gathering spot.

- Other new establishments including an art gallery, a dance studio and other businesses are to follow.

- Entrepreneur Tracy Dillard of Cultured Bazaar Designs will spread the impact of St. Clair throughout the region by filling vacant storefronts with upcycled products produced in the neighborhood. Her idea is to help the artists market their wares and to advertise St. Clair’s new identity. The first windows are planned for Shaker Square and Chagrin Falls, she said.

Fleming said he’s inspired by the revivals of Tremont, Ohio City, Detroit-Shoreway and Collinwood as vibrant neighborhoods based on an influx of galleries, restaurants, theaters, coffee shops and bars.

But while those comebacks took decades, he thinks St. Clair can rebound more quickly, in part because each new neighborhood revival will reinforce the others.

“I think it can happen faster [in St. Clair] because the precedent has already been set,” he said. “Lots of neighborhoods are springing up now; it was a zero-sum game before, but I don’t think that’s the case any more.”

Given the St. Clair neighborhood’s proximity to downtown, University Circle, and the East 72nd Street exits off I-90, it has the potential to draw customers and visitors from around the region, Fleming says.

It would be easy to peg Upcycle St. Clair as an example of gentrification, in which well-to-do newcomers push out older businesses and residents.

But Fleming says vacant houses throughout the neighborhood need to be renovated and repopulated.

And he wants to strengthen existing businesses including Shelli’s restaurant; Louis Slapnik & Son Florist; Sheliga drugstore, which sells bicycles, produce, fine wines and Lasko beer from Slovenia; Empress Taytu Ethiopian restaurant; Smrekar Hardware and Azman Quality Meats, which took top honors in the city’s annual Slovenian Sausage Festival competition in September.

“We really cherish them,” Fleming said of the local businesses. “My goal is not to make a neighborhood that prices people out. At the same time, we want to make it easy for people to make investments.”

The neighborhood assumed its character as a Slovenian haven more than a century ago when Slovenia, a Slavic country northeast of the Adriatic Sea and sandwiched between Italy, Austria, Hungary and Croatia, sent waves of poor immigrants to the U.S. in search of opportunity.

“If you’ve been other places, you see that this isn’t a backwater. It’s an incredible, diverse city.”

After World War II when Slovenian professionals sought to escape socialist rule under Josip Broz Tito, who absorbed their country into Yugoslavia. Slovenia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991.

By the ‘90s, according to theEncyclopedia of Cleveland History, Cleveland’s ethnic Slovenian population had reached 50,000. Famous members of the community have included former Cleveland mayor and U.S. senator Frank Lausche, and polka king Frank Yankovic.

Today, a dispersed Slovenian community is still anchored to the St. Clair neighborhood by St. Vitus Church, established in 1893, and the Slovenian National Home, built in 1924 as a gathering place for concerts, weddings, banquets, dance performances and other celebrations.

Bordered by downtown to the west, Hough to the south, and Glenville and University Circle to the east, the neighborhood today has a diverse population of 10,000 residents.

It employs 10,000, largely in manufacturing, in firms that that include Sifco Forge Group, which makes precision parts for helicopters and military jets; and Horsburgh & Scott, a maker of gearboxes.

Fleming’s initiative has Slovenian elements woven deeply throughout. They include “Kurentovanje,” a pre-Lenten street festival that took place in late February and will repeat next year in early March.

In the spring, the non-profit LAND Studio and Agnes Studio, a Cleveland graphic design firm, installed “Doors of St. Clair” in a vacant lot in the 6000 block of St. Clair Avenue.
 
The colorful doors, arranged like a large folding screen, spell out the neighborhood’s name when viewed from one direction. Viewed from the opposite angle, they appear to be covered by Slovenian folk art patterns. St. Clair Superior Development used them as giant post-it boards to collect ideas for the neighborhood’s revival.

Locals are energized by the project.
“Hopefully it will bring more people, because the old Slovenians are dying off,” said sausage maker Frank Azman.
“What Michael is doing is wonderful,” said Shelli Slapnik-March, owner of Shelli’s restaurant.

She worries about violent crime in the neighborhood, including a recent double homicide just a few blocks away, but she feels that if safety can be improved, St. Clair Avenue just might rebound.

Noting the success of the Cleveland Flea, she said she plans to open a booth at the market in November to sell her locally famous barley soup, which she hopes will attract new customers to her restaurant.
“Oh my god, the flea is fantastic,” she says. “It’s right out of New York City.”

Fleming said that police raids in the middle 2000s largely removed the drug gangs that once infested the neighborhood. Then a wave of foreclosures and abandonment left scores of houses vacant during the recent recession, which created new settings for crime. The trick, he said, is to repopulate the empty houses.

“We see vacancy as an opportunity for something positive,” Fleming said.
A slender man with a gently persuasive manner and a penchant for dark suits, Fleming, 37, comes to his post as a former executive chef with extensive restaurant experience.

As a student at Shaker Heights High School in the early 1990s, Fleming ran a cheesecake catering business out of his family’s home.

While earning a bachelor’s degree in international relations at Boston University, he became head chef at a local bar and a restaurant.

He later spent a year in Spain working at a hotel outside Madrid where he perfected his Castilian and learning the finer points of Spanish cuisine, followed by a stint as a chef at several restaurants in Miami Beach.
He eventually tired of the long hours and demanding physical work, and returned to Cleveland to find a new direction.
Neighborhood development became his passion.

After earning a master’s degree in planning at Cleveland State University’s Levin College of urban Affairs, Fleming worked at the Midtown Inc. development corporation before taking over St. Clair Superior Development Corp., where he succeeded former director Cory Riordan.

Fleming said his travels opened his eyes to Cleveland’s richness and potential.
“If you’ve been other places, you see that this isn’t a backwater,” he said. “It’s an incredible, diverse city,” he said. “It took all that travel for me to appreciate how valuable it all was.”

If he succeeds on St. Clair Avenue, Northeast Ohioans will see the neighborhood as he does – a legacy waiting to be rediscovered.

Original Article