Wading through a field of chest-high wildflowers with André Dailey and Jennifer Mischer in North Collinwood was a literal “stop and smell the roses” moment.
André’s neighbor planted the flowers in the lot she bought next to her house. At one point, Jennifer said, the city cut them all down, thinking it was just some overgrown vacant lot. And billed the owner.
The neighbor replanted the flowers and put a fence around the yard.
The field stuck out to André when he was looking to buy a home in North Collinwood, where he grew up, after returning from a stint in the military.
“I saw this flower field, and it was just like a stroke of genius,” André said. To him, the field, and all the work his neighbor puts into maintaining it, is an expression of deep care for the neighborhood.
“That’s a neighborhood that’s worthy to live in, in my opinion,” he said.
When André and I first talked on the phone to set up a photowalk, he asked if he could bring a friend along. Jennifer was that friend.
The two met at a small community group where residents talk through neighborhood issues and ideas. While André grew up in North Collinwood, Jennifer moved to the neighborhood from Los Angeles less than a year ago.
They took me north from Waterloo Road toward Lake Erie. As we walked and talked, I saw why Jennifer and André got along. When we got near the lake, André pointed out a blood plasma donation center that used to be a Walgreens.
When it opened, he heard a couple neighbors complain. “They said this was going to bring bums and crackheads into the neighborhood,” he said.
Jennifer hadn’t heard that story before. “That could be really helpful to people that need the money,” she said.
André is Black, and Jennifer is white. And in one way or another, almost every conversation they had came back to the different ways race and social class divide the residents of North Collinwood.
They didn’t dance around the disagreements. But they didn’t dwell on them either. Even when their conversations got heated, they got to a place that felt productive.
It’s more typical to get shut down or tuned out, André said.
At one of the first community meetings Jennifer attended, André suggested building a small play area for kids in a stretch of North Collinwood that wasn’t close to any larger parks.
“Jen was like, ‘Yeah, that’s a great idea,’” André said. “Everybody else was like, ‘Oh, good luck accomplishing that.’”
Jennifer lives north of Lakeshore Boulevard, right by Lake Erie, and André lives south of it. As North Collinwood grew more diverse throughout the 20th century, Lakeshore became a dividing line between Black and white residents.
As the decades have passed, that line has gotten blurry, André said. But there’s still something in the way the boulevard cuts the neighborhood in half that betrays a history of racial discrimination.
After the walk, I felt like I needed to learn more about that history.
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
I read about Euclid Beach Park, an amusement park that used to exist in North Collinwood. In 1946, the park’s police officers beat Black residents trying to enter in protest of the “whites only” policy at the park’s roller rink, swimming areas and dance hall.
Cleveland City Council outlawed racial discrimination at amusement parks in the city in 1947, but Euclid Beach Park kept its ban against Black people by leasing the roller rink and dance hall to private clubs outside the law’s scope. The park closed its swimming areas a few years later.
Throughout the 1970s, there was a string of attacks on Black students at Collinwood High School. In one instance, a mob of white residents and students smashed windows and damaged furniture in the school, forcing about 200 Black students to barricade themselves on the third floor. Three Black students were stabbed in September 1974, and a white student fatally shot a Black classmate a month later.
Someone’s experience of North Collinwood can differ wildly depending on the part of the neighborhood they live in. And the part of the neighborhood someone lives in depends on, to some extent, their skin color and how much money they have.
“I think that there’s a cultural difference in priorities, and it’s never really acknowledged,” André said.
André values amenities like shady trees and bike lanes, but he questions whether or not prioritizing those things conflicts with meeting residents’ basic needs. The nearest hospital and grocery store are both in Euclid, he said.
“It behooves us as a city to handle those things: food, housing, health, education,” he said. “All those are first. Everything else is only second to that in mind.”
André isn’t shy about voicing his opinions. He has sparred with neighbors and elected officials over what’s best for the neighborhood and where investment is most needed. In his view, the limited money available for neighborhood projects often ends up going to parts of North Collinwood that already have more than others. Most people don’t respond well when he calls that out, he said.
“Folks are essentially responding like, ‘You’re saying what I’m doing is not good,’ and nobody was ever saying that,” he said. “We’re actually saying it is good, and to bring it over here because it’s good for everybody, you know?”
I sat down with André a few weeks later to show him his pictures. I’m always curious to see how people react when I lay out prints on a table in front of them.
When we take pictures during a walk, we pluck out little fragments of an experience. Pictures pull people, places and moments out of their surroundings and freeze them in time, leaving us with a whole bunch of pieces. Then, we get to decide how to put those pieces back together.
Seeing the pictures from our photowalk arranged together made André pause. He was looking at the things he sees every day, he said, but they all felt so different. What felt mundane during his daily routine seemed profound in a picture.
I pointed to one of my favorite pictures, and commented on the lighting in it. The picture shows a group of guys hanging out in the shade outside an apartment building while the sun beams overhead.
“This picture tells a story for me,” André said. “This tells a story of third spaces.”
There used to be a McDonald’s right at the entrance to this apartment complex, and André often saw these same guys hanging out there over coffee. They would sit at their table and talk for hours, he said.
The McDonald’s was torn down sometime between 2014 and 2015. The guys lost their hangout spot, but it seems like they found a new one.
“When I look at this, I see people who are constantly willing to adapt to whatever is taken away,” he said, “and still be able to find, you know, scratch out some place for themselves, some little bit of hope.”
More information about the pictures
André, Jennifer and I took all of these pictures on Monday, July 21, 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.
- A field of wildflowers. Credit: André Dailey
- A shed on the edge of a field of wildflowers. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- Trees cast shadows on a home. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- A home on a residential street. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- A home on a residential street. Credit: Jennifer Mischer
- Mere Keyes stops for a picture as he walks down East 156th Street. Credit: André Dailey
- A woman walks along East 156th Street. Credit: André Dailey
- Cars parked in the lot outside a repair shop on East 156th Street. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- Homes line a residential street. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- Craig Egler fixes a generator outside an apartment building on East 156th Street. Credit: André Dailey
- Craig Egler fixes a generator outside an apartment building on East 156th Street. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- A residential street off East 156th Street. Credit: André Dailey
- Vines surround the back of a home on a street that dead-ends at Lake Erie. Credit: Jennifer Mischer
- Felix and his dog Nemesis sit on the front steps outside their home. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- Homes along Lake Erie. Credit: André Dailey
- A culvert flowing into Lake Erie. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- Tabernacle Baptist Church on East 156th Street. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- Construction crews are moving the Euclid Beach Park, pictured here, to a vacant lot on Lakeshore Boulevard that used to house a McDonald’s. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- People walk through the parking lot of what used to be Dave’s Market on Lakeshore Boulevard. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- Children play in a bounce house outside the Collinwood Recreation Center. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- A biker rides past the basketball courts at Humphrey Park. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- A crack in the tennis courts at Humphrey Park. Credit: Jennifer Mischer
- A biker rides past Humphrey Park. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- A pedestrian walks down Waterloo Road. Credit: André Dailey
- Seating areas along Waterloo Road. Credit: André Dailey
- A boarded-up apartment building on East 156th Street. Credit: André Dailey
- Apartment buildings on lakeshore Boulevard. Credit: André Dailey
- Friends hang out in the shade outside an apartment building off Lakeshore Boulevard. Credit: André Dailey
- Friends hang out in the shade outside an apartment building off Lakeshore Boulevard. Credit: André Dailey
- Marian Flanagan smiles for a picture. Credit: André Dailey
- A doorway to the Waterloo Arts building. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- Plants in André’s greenhouse. Credit: André Dailey
- Sunlight falls in a yard through the trees. Credit: Michael Indriolo