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Destination Lakewood

How a bar town became an immigration hot spot.

By Rebecca Meiser 

In 2002, Pittsburgh author and urban studies professor Richard Florida made waves when he declared that the success of new modern cities could be seen in the number of artists, gays, and immigrants they attracted.

At the time, it was a radical thesis, since city halls nationwide remained in hot pursuit of the magic bullet: the large company with the equally large payroll. They were quickly learning, however, that such corporations were more besotted with Calcutta than Cleveland. Florida's organic approach began to take hold.

Gays and artists would reignite the cultural nightlife of dying towns, he theorized. Immigrants would supply the numbers and entrepreneurial talent to replace the evacuation to the suburbs. "On average, [immigrants] are more risk-taking and more enterprising than native-born Americans," says Sanda Kaufman, a national expert on immigration. "They have a bigger desire to achieve."

Four years later, Florida's theories are articles of faith among city planners. But in Cleveland, it never quite worked as planned. Former Mayor Jane Campbell put together a group of consultants to woo immigrants to the city. They suggested advertising in foreign lands to get the city's name out, but those discussions yielded little success.

Yet while Cleveland stumbled, a most unlikely place was making it happen with much less effort.

With 150 liquor licenses in five square miles, Lakewood is best known for its $1 beers and bartenders with an aversion to the light pour. But it's quickly becoming a familiar name, from the Palestinian West Bank to the villages of Eastern Europe.

Go to Lakewood Park on a summer day, and you'll find picnic tables filled with women in burqas. Go to Caribou on a warm afternoon, and you'll find the patio tables occupied by Albanian men gathered for conversation and a smoke. There's an Arabic hairdresser on Madison, an Arabic Baptist Church on Detroit. Kids in the suburb's schools speak 38 different languages.

A century after the Slovaks built this town, the immigrants are coming back.

On a recent night at the Beit Hanina Social Club on Lorain, the West Side Palestinian community is celebrating an engagement aligning two prominent families. It's a chance for young Palestinians, who are permitted little contact with the opposite sex, to check each other out.

Young women dressed in burqas as silky and lacy as window curtains circle the room, pretending not to notice the boys slouching in the corner. But their eyes sneak glances as they pirouette and dance.

The boys blush like shy sixth-graders and quickly look away when they make eye contact. With mating rituals that would seem downright Puritan to most Americans, it's a wonder there are any weddings at all, laughs Elham Sliman.

The first wave of Palestinians arrived after Israel was established in 1948, leaving them without a homeland. Many Arabs arrived in Detroit, seeking jobs at GM and Ford. They came for the same in Cleveland -- and just kept coming. "Immigrants, if you notice, tend to copy each other," says Nasser Ased, unofficial spokesman for the West Side Palestinian community. "This is especially true with the Palestinians. They have no country at the moment, so they follow each other from city to city."

But as the years went by, they began to avoid Cleveland for the same reason the natives did: the horror of the city's schools. So they looked around for better education, equally low rents, and multi-tenant housing where large, extended families could legally reside. Lakewood had it all.

They began opening small groceries across the West Side, in neighborhoods Americans had long evacuated. Today, if there's a small store still operating on a street surrounded by neglect, chances are it's owned by Arab immigrants. After all, U.S. violence is child's play next to what many Palestinians have endured back home.

Word spread that merchants needed help in their stores, so immigrants began arriving in droves. Nahida Farunia's husband arrived from New York to help his brother-in-law open up a Dairy Mart. Elham's father opened up a convenience store and a gas station.

Back home, the increasing violence -- and the joblessness it created -- prompted not just families, but whole villages to move. Today, the Beit Hanina Social Club has around 8,000 people, all from the Palestinian town of Beit Hanina, where only 1,000 residents remain.

"I was at home at a few weddings, and I kept saying that they all seemed so empty," says Abdelbaset Sbeih, who moved to Lakewood when he first moved here. "Then I went to a wedding here and said, 'Oh, this is where everyone is.'"

Beit Hanina isn't the only town to witness mass exodus. Similar evacuations took place in the neighboring towns of Ramallah and Bireh, transporting entire villages to Lakewood, where they maintain a healthy distance from each other the way rival high schools do. For these clans, the competition has become truly American -- to see who has the better cars, more expensive jewelry, superior clothing.

"It's kind of like the competitiveness between neighboring towns' football teams," Sliman explains. "It's based on tradition."

Assimilation has not come easy, for their clannish protectiveness can be both good and bad. Once, an Arab girl at Lakewood High was spotted walking home with a black male student. Her mother and uncles were called. The girl was threatened for bringing dishonor to the community. She dropped out of school.

It wasn't an isolated incident.

"I get calls all the time from people telling me they saw my children hanging out with people of the opposite sex," says Farunia. "I laugh it off. I trust my children, and they trust me."

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