To me, Cleveland’s Gordon Square neighborhood has always been a place with funky crosswalks, theaters and the art studio I interned at in high school. 

Makela Hayford’s Gordon Square is kicking a soccer ball with friends at Michael J. Zone Rec Center and tending to lettuce sprouts at Ithaca Court Community Garden.

A 1920s arcade building on the corner of West 65th and Detroit bears the name of the neighborhood. That’s not where Makela took me when we met in July. We walked (and drove), cameras in hand, from Lorain Avenue to Edgewater Park.

As we walked near Michael Zone on a summer weeknight, Makela shared the learning curves that came with her move from Kansas to Cleveland in 2013.

“My idea of neighborhoods growing up was only houses,” she said. “But here, it’s very much like, the food, the shops, the style of homes, all of it kind of makes up the community.”

She heard the typical East Side versus West Side narratives and the racial and socioeconomic labels that get foisted onto different neighborhoods. That made her feel conflicted when she decided to move from the far east border of Cleveland and Shaker Heights to Gordon Square.

Looking back, she half-joked that her past self must have been arrogant to put so much weight on the decision. She was so worried about the implications of where she lived on the larger picture of investment in different sides of the city.

“Your personal choice is not gonna save us,” she said, summing up the advice her mother gave her as she prepared for the move.

We put our conversation on hold to talk with a group of teens hanging out under the pavilion outside the rec center.  Two of them, JP and Damarieon, play with a travel basketball team. They wanted us to come take pictures at their practices, but we instead snapped a couple pictures as they shot around in the gym.

Makela and I were using film, so it was a few weeks before I was able to show her our pictures. In them, she saw why she likes living in the neighborhood reflected back at her. 

“Seeing the pictures, it’s like, wow, this is really art. Like, it’s not just me,” she told me. ”It’s kind of magical a little bit.”

Signal Cleveland’s photowalks are conversations about the city’s neighborhoods, guided by the people who live here and reflected in the photos they capture.

Want to take me on a photowalk around your neighborhood? Sign up here. You can also reach out to me by email and phone: michael@signalcleveland.org / (216) 704-0295

– Michael Indriolo, Signal Cleveland’s Visual Journalist

One picture in particular stood out to her. It’s the one above that shows a young man named Tay lying on a picnic table. 

I gave Makela some prints to take home. Later, I got a voice memo from her. 

“Another thought that came to me as I’m still staring at these photos, I was gonna say that part of the reason I wanted to go to Michael Zone was also to show Black people on the West Side,” Makela said.  

One of her issues with the West Side-East Side stereotypes, she explained, is that labeling the whole West Side white and gentrified in some ways erases Black people who have long called the West Side home.

“The West Side, we all deserve to enjoy it and be here and take up space,” Makela said. “Just being outside and enjoying the day, laying on a picnic table, for example. I think there’s something about it that shows that this space is for everyone.”

After living in Gordon Square for nearly four years now, Makela has a more complicated take on Cleveland’s East Side-West Side divisions. 

“You can kind of opt out of observing the inequality in Cleveland if you stay in the perfect zone over here,” she said. “That scares me, but then sometimes, it is a lot. As a Black person, sometimes it is a lot.

“I don’t think it’s wrong to want to hang out at a park like Michael Zone or be at the lake, or, you know, be able to walk to work or walk to the coffee shop,” she said. “But I think the question is, what am I doing, or what are we doing, to make sure that everyone can have that opportunity?”