West Park Story

Retired cop Ed Kelly, a wisecracking woman named Joyce, and two firemen have begun nursing beers and providing the afternoon's entertainment. Today's topic is a sore one: Cleveland's rule forcing its workers to live within city limits.

Last year, the police and fire unions finally succeeded in getting a state law to overturn it. But thanks to the inevitable appeals, they've been holding their breath ever since.

"Do you think it's ever gonna pass?" Joyce asks Kelly, the wizened Yoda of the group.

"It should," he offers in a low, gravelly voice. "The city has no right to tell me where to live."

Back in his day, it wasn't an issue. Cops didn't have to live in the city, but men like Kelly flooded to this neighborhood anyway. He bought a $17,000 house in 1962 and worked two jobs to send his kids to Catholic school. Life was good in this part of Cleveland, even when the Hough riots turned distant neighborhoods into war zones.

Forty-five years later, not much has changed for city workers here. Those in uniform catch a few hours of sleep before heading off to second jobs working security at Indians games, grocery stores, bars, or anywhere else that's hiring. Over at the firehouse, their colleagues spend 24-hour shifts cleaning up fires and mangled pieces of flesh on I-90, then devote their days off to carpentry, electrical work, or side businesses.

If the American work ethic is dead, you won't find the evidence here.

While the rest of Cleveland was hammered by layoffs, crime, and an epidemic of men abandoning their families, West Park not only survived; it thrived. American flags fly over carefully trimmed rose bushes. Rows of solid brick homes sell for prices on par with Lakewood -- with comparable safety. The concentration of blue uniforms has a way of discouraging bad guys from robbing the grandma next door or hawking their wares on street corners.

But there was one thing the resilience of West Park could never cure: the public schools. It wasn't just the miserable graduation rates or the decades of corrupt management that have made them among the country's worst. Once you've broken up gang wars or witnessed security guards hitting on sophomores in the hallway, sending your kids to Cleveland's schools seems tantamount to child abuse.

One refuge, of course, has always been the Catholic schools. But they too have now failed West Park's residents -- at least economically speaking. These days, the annual tab for three kids in high school can reach $30,000 -- a price not even two jobs and an Old Testament frugality can overcome.

So cops and firemen are left with a torturous dilemma. They were never the kind to hold off until age 35 and professional security before having kids. They tend toward old-school Irish Catholic values, which dictate breeding early and often. And more so than most, they're intimately familiar with the ineptitude of their employer. Few have faith the schools will ever improve. Their only choice is to flee.

"It comes down to public schools," says one fireman who refuses to provide his name.

So if the state succeeds in abolishing the residency law, many will take flight to Fairview, North Olmsted, and Parma, leaving whoever's left to write West Park's obituary.

It's easy to see why city leaders battle so hard to keep them. In 1982, when the residency rule was approved by voters, City Hall had recently gone into default under the disastrous reign of Mayor Dennis Kucinich, and school busing was pushing families out in droves. If they were footing the bill for city paychecks, voters reasoned, the least city workers could do was to stay and help staunch the bleeding.

A quarter-century later, Kucinich is distracted by presidential glory, and busing is a historical footnote, but the hemorrhaging has only intensified. According to the latest Census count, only New Orleans and Detroit are suffering greater evacuation. Allowing a mass exodus of cops and firemen from Old Brooklyn, Collinwood, and West Park would be akin to turning out the lights. After Detroit lifted its residency requirement in 2000, more than 20 percent of the police force fled in the first year, according to the Detroit Free Press.