Leah Santosuosso didn’t live in Clark-Fulton for much of her childhood, but she still considers the neighborhood home more than anywhere else.
Her family has been running Johnny’s on Fulton since 1938. When I first walked into the Italian restaurant to meet Leah for a photowalk, I felt the urge to ask “shoes off?” I didn’t want to track mud on the leopard print carpet.
Leah’s family is all over Johnny’s. With near-religious symbolism, the walls are covered in paintings referencing moments in the lives of cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents and great-grandparents. It’s an encrypted family tree, only readable to those who know the stories.
“There’s this feeling here,” she said. “My Grandpa Eugene even said he could feel his parents here. He said that when he was in his 80s, like, ‘I can feel my parents here.’ And I can feel that too, even though I didn’t know them.
“It’s a very real thing to me, and it’s something you don’t find anywhere else. There’s a very unique and specific feeling about this place I get when I’m here, and that extends to the neighborhood.”
Leah invited her friend Nena Roy, who lives about a mile away from Johnny’s, along for our walk.
We started across the street at St. Rocco Parish. The church building has gone through a handful of iterations, but the parish dates back to 1914 when Italian immigrants first began organizing it.
St. Rocco, the church’s namesake, is the patron saint of dogs. His legend says a dog nursed him back to health when he was sequestered away in a cave with the plague. Leah remembers year after year of the annual St. Rocco festival. Back in the day, she said, those lucky enough to win at the festival’s carnival-style games would be rewarded with puppies.
“Puppies?” I asked. “Like, alive puppies?”
“Dead puppies,” Nena joked.
When we walked up to St. Rocco, its towering front doors were locked. Around the back of the church, we interrupted a brother’s phone call with his mother. His phone case had a picture of Jesus on it.
We were looking for Father James, a priest Leah knows because he often eats at Johnny’s.
“Well, which one?” The brother said. “There’s two Jameses here.”
Leah’s James was out, but the brother let us take pictures in a small chapel before politely shooing us along.
Leah sees Clark-Fulton’s streets through the filter of her family’s branching legacy, but she’s also an avid reader and author of local history. As we walked down narrow alleyways and passed lively porches, she flipped through eras in her mind. Her personal memories, and family stories passed down through generations, blended with recorded history.
She stopped in front of a yellow house, the front lawn enclosed by a matching yellow wooden fence. Her Aunt Rita used to live there. She tried to piece together the home’s history: Her grandparents moved in there with her aunt, then to Florida, after they got too old for the stairs up to the apartment above Johnny’s.
When Leah’s grandparents came back to Cleveland to visit, they stayed with her family for months at a time. Leah was still in grade school, and she would listen intently to stories about their early days in Clark-Fulton. They poured themselves into the neighborhood, and it gave them a life in turn.
Leah’s ancestors moved to Clark-Fulton from Italy during a wave of European immigration around the turn of the 20th century. Over the next century, the neighborhood became the heart of Cleveland’s Latino community.
“One thing I really like is that you have this Italian center here, but then mixed with the Hispanic cultures,” Nena said.
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
We stopped at a building that used to be a funeral home on Fulton. Now, it’s an event space. A big sign out front displays its name: The Party Rican.
Nena and Leah called it iconic. It’s easy to love the name, but beyond it, the business’ mural-covered walls celebrate the neighborhood’s personality. It’s what Leah loves about Clark-Fulton.
“I can kind of picture in my mind’s eye what it used to look like,” Leah said. “Having that ability to kind of toggle back and forth, like, this is what I think it might have looked like then. These are the people who live here now. This is who I picture having lived there. It gives you a feeling of safety and home.”
I met Leah at Johnny’s again one night in October. The place was closed, so I laid our pictures out on the bar. Leah picked up a picture I took of a man’s necklace. It was a crucifix with a boat anchor behind it.
Her grandfather would have loved that, she said. He was a Navy man. Her Great Uncle Johnny was in the military, too. Air Force. She pulled out the memoir he wrote about his life.
Leah’s great grandparents named Johnny’s after him. They were sitting at a long table in the restaurant one night when Great Grandma Louise doubled over in pain. Johnny was fighting in World War II at the time, and she was overcome with dread. He was in trouble, she could feel it.
The family found out a few weeks later that the plane Johnny was in had been shot down, and he was missing.
He survived a stint in a prisoner of war camp, and when he came home, he told his mother that he was calling out for her when his plane went down. It was the same night she felt that pang.
Watching Leah trace the threads that tethered her personal world to Clark-Fulton made me pause. All that from a picture of a necklace.
“There’s kind of an element of intuitive connection to family that I always identified with really strongly,” Leah said. “I think that’s another reason why I feel like I’m at home here because I feel like I have that connection to my family members through time and space.”
More information about the pictures
Leah, Nena and I took all of these pictures on Tuesday, July 29, 2025.
You can see who took each picture, along with some more details about the places and people in them, down below.
Thanks to CatchLight and Report for America for supporting my work as Signal Cleveland’s visual journalist. A few years back, they partnered to create a program that places photojournalists in local newsrooms throughout the country. Signal Cleveland and I joined that program this year.
- The front window of Johnny’s on Fulton. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- Franklin Galko, a regular at Johnny’s on Fulton. He’s been going to the bar every week for 28 years. He’s become a part of the family, Leah said. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- A light leak on a negative created the green streak over what was a picture of a yard. Credit: Nena Roy
- Clark-Fulton has a handful of narrow alleyways lined with garages. Credit: Leah Santosuosso
- The bell tower at St. Rocco Parish. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- The front doors to St. Rocco Parish’s church feature a stained glass portrait of St. Rocco. In the image, he’s pulling up his robe to reveal a sore or wound on his leg. It’s a reference to his legend: a dog licked his wounds and brought him food when he was ill the plague, saving his life. Credit: Nena Roy
- A figure of a young Jesus displayed in the chapel behind St. Rocco’s main church. Credit: Nena Roy
- A brother at St. Rocco parish talks with his mother on the phone. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- The house that Leah’s Aunt and grandparents used to live in. Credit: Leah Santosuosso
- A home with a well-manicured garden. Credit: Leah Santosuosso
- The sun beams through a tree. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- Darrin Daanish stands in his driveway. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- A mural. Credit: Nena Roy
- Murals cover the outside of the Party Rican. The building used ot be a funeral home, but it’s not an event space. Credit: Leah Santosuosso
- Children on a porch in the residential blocks around Johnny’s on Fulton. Credit: Leah Santosuosso
- An old Chrysler New Yorker and a boat parked in an alley. Credit: Leah Santosuosso
- A toy car on a roof. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- A man wearing a necklace. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- A statue of a child praying in St. Rocco’s garden. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- A painted garage in an alley. Credit: Leah Santosuosso
- A well-worn mud path leading from a street to an alley. Credit: Leah Santosuosso
- A statue of St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost things and lost souls, at St. Rocco’s garden. Credit: Nena Roy