HIGH IN THE BASEMENT

In his “Metaphors of a Magnifico,” American poet Wallace Stevens wrote about individual perspectives on the same experience: “Twenty men crossing a bridge/Into a village/Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges/Into twenty villages/Or one man/Crossing a single bridge into a village.”

Last week, Ingenuity Festival director James Levin took about 30
people across the subway level of the Detroit- Superior Bridge. How you
see that iconic bridge — with its lace of white concrete arches
reaching 3,112 feet across the Cuyahoga river valley, 96 feet above it,
and the graceful hump of grey steel girders in the middle — is
certainly a matter of perspective.

The bridge’s subway level is where the streetcars used to run. They
descended into openings in the middle of Detroit Road on the west side
and Superior Avenue on the other. In between, beneath the cars and
trucks, streetcars carried people in and out of downtown until 1954.
The entrances were paved over, and more than half a century later,
entire transit stops with glazed porcelain tile walls remain entombed
there. Like a catacomb of trolley transportation, the place has been
sitting empty, quiet, all but forgotten, save for the county engineer’s
twice-yearly, free, self-guided tours.

Levin was showing the place to people with a different perspective.
What if this arc — with views up and down the Cuyahoga, including
downtown and the lake — were open as a venue for performances and
art installations?

“It’s a strategy for a shrinking city,” says Terry Schwarz of Kent
State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative. “When
Cleveland was bustling with people, we needed this to move them. Now we
don’t need it. But it’s still here. It’s publicly owned.”

Levin and Schwarz see the obsolete infrastructure as a resource, a
distinct piece of Cleveland that could be used again as an attraction,
at least for a weekend. They and a handful of other collaborators
— including the engineer’s office and All Go Signs director Chuck
Karnak — are calling the idea “The Bridge Project.” It’s slated
for 4 p.m.-midnight Friday, September 25, and noon-midnight Saturday,
September 26. Admission will be free, but donations will be
accepted.

What will actually happen those days is still taking shape. The
first-time event has almost no budget and is dependent on the
cooperation of not only the county engineer’s office, but also the
Flats Oxbow Association, the restaurant Massimo di Milano (which is in
a former bank building at the west side of the bridge; its basement has
a defunct doorway to the transit stop), plus a slew of individual
artists, many of whom were involved in Ingenuity Fest.

Among the committed projects are a café setting at the west
end, which will present Opera Per Tutti’s performance of Act II of
Puccini’s La Bohème. Levin hopes to secure a liquor
license for that location. Poet and band leader Ray McNiece will
present a spoken-word-and-music program based on “The Bridge” by the
early 20th-century American poet Hart Crane of Garrettsville, Ohio. The
Tom Jarmusch film Sometimes City will screen. NASA engineers Jay
Horovitz and Rich Reinhart will present a video installation using
NASA-based images and animation. Video artist and CSU professor Qian Li
will show a site-specific video. Artist Laila Voss also plans a video
installation, which will be projected on the still and crystal-clear
surface of water that has filled an old staircase down to a lower level
of the bridge. Shannon Gallagher, a representative from the county
engineer’s office, says the water is from a spring that was disturbed
during bridge renovations years ago.

Several groups will present visions of design and architecture. A
round-robin design and architectural showcase called Pecha Kucha will
feature local luminaries discussing ideas. Graduate students from Kent
State University will present site-specific ideas as part of a
class.

Several of the artists who came on the bridge tour last week were
still forming their plans. Some of them were seeing under the bridge
for the first time. The question seemed to hang over the entire
proceeding: What could you do if you had a weekend’s access to this?
Filling an iconic old bridge with performances and art is the kind of
project that could get the world’s attention. Levin says that if
Ingenuity was a 26-ring circus, the Bridge Project will have less
activity.

“The bridge itself is what we’re showing off,” he explains. But it
doesn’t end there. “This will be the suggestion of something that might
happen on a larger scale in the future.”

mgill@clevescene.com

This article appears in Aug 5-11, 2009.