The 2050 Issue | The Devil Strip | June 2021

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· Vol 9 · Issue #6 · thedevilstrip.com

Akron’s Community-Owned Magazine Local News Made By Local People for 35 Years

PAGE 26: Professional Bowling is Back in Akron After Departing 50 Years Ago

PAGE 41: Once Infamous Innerbelt Freeway Commemorates 10 Years as Park

PAGE 43: Akron Set to Explore the Skies of Venus on Blimp

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There are over 3,000 children in Ohio’s foster care system available for adoption.

Discriminating against anyone who wants to adopt because of their sexual orientation robs those children of loving, forever families.

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IN THIS ISSUE Summit Artspace 140 East Market Street Akron, Ohio 44308 Board of Directors: Philathia Bolton, April Couch, Emily Dressler, Sharetta Howze, Rita Kelly Madick, Dominic Moore-Dunson, Bhakta Rizal, Audrey Worthington directors@thedevilstrip.com

Akron News, Art & Culture:

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Publisher: Chris Horne chris@thedevilstrip.com

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Editor-in-Chief: Noor Hindi noor@thedevilstrip.com Audience Development Director: Floco Torres floco@thedevilstrip.com Membership Director: Jessica Goldbourn jessica@thedevilstrip.com

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Reporters: Public Health: H.L. Comeriato HL@thedevilstrip.com Equity and Inclusion: Noor Hindi noor@thedevilstrip.com Economic Development: Abbey Marshall abbey@thedevilstrip.com

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Digital Manager: Sonia Potter sonia@thedevilstrip.com Art Director: Chris Harvey harvey@thedevilstrip.com

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Client Solutions: Director: Anna Adelman anna@thedevilstrip.com Assistant: Allyson Smith allyson@thedevilstrip.com Distribution Manager: Derek Kreider derek@thedevilstrip.com Copy Editors: Megan Combs, Dave Daly, Emily Dressler, Shannon Farrell Freelance Contributors: Emily Anderson, Angie Agnoni, Abbey Bashor, Martha Belden, Nahla Bendefaa, Julie Ciotola, Kyle Cochrun, Jeff Davis, Nic deCourville, Megan Delong, Ace Epps, Ken Evans, Charlotte Gintert, Charlee Harris, Zinga Hart, Jillian Holness, Todd Jakubisin, Dani Jauk, Josy Jones, Jamie Keaton, Diane Pitz Kilivris, Laura Lakins, Marissa Marangoni, Sandy Maxwell, Brandon Meola, Vanessa Michelle, Yoly Miller, Melanie Mohler, Brittany Nader, John Nicholas, Brynne Olsen, Susan Pappas, Ilenia Pezzaniti, Michael Roberts, Arrye Rosser, Mark Schweitzer, Marc Lee Shannon, Teresa Sroka, Karla Tipton, Paul Treen, Steve Van Auken.

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6 250,000 BY 2050 8 BY 2050, COMMUNITY HEALTH WORKERS HOPE THE CITY NO LONGER NEEDS THEM. THIS IS THEIR STORY — AND THEIR VISION FOR THE NEXT 30 YEARS 12 MEET AKRON ZOO’S NEWEST ANIMALS 16 THE 2050 ISSUE 17 IT AIN’T YOUR GRANDPA’S LOCAL NEWS ANYMORE 18 A NORTH HILL — ONE NEIGHBORHOOD DEMONSTRATES HOW TO ACHIEVE WORLD PEACE 20 NEW/NATIVE 24 SOUTH HOWARD STREET AND THE FLATIRON II 26 PROFESSIONAL BOWLING IS BACK IN AKRON 29 THE GREEN CITY ON A HILL: A 25 YEAR REVIEW 31 NIGHTLIGHT CINEMA COMMITS TO A “YEAR OF AKRON CINEMA.” 33 “GUILT-FREE” BEER, HOW CAN YOU SAY NO? 37 IMAGINING DOWNTOWN AKRON IN 2050 40 AKRON BRINGS HOME TWO AWARDS 41 INNERBELT FREEWAY COMMEMORATES 10 YEARS AS PARK 43 AKRON SET TO EXPLORE THE SKIES 45 AKRON ADDRESSES CLIMATE CHANGE THROUGH INNOVATION Want to help make The Devil Strip?

Write to noor@thedevilstrip.com.

Find us online: www.thedevilstrip.com Facebook: facebook.com/thedevilstrip Twitter: @akrondevilstrip Instagram: @thedevilstrip

Our Mission The Devil Strip connects Akronites to their neighbors, our city and a stronger sense of purpose by sharing stories about the people who make this place unique.

The Devil Strip is published monthly by Random Family LLC. Distribution: The Devil Strip is available free of charge, limited to one copy per reader. Copyright: The entire contents of The Devil Strip are copyright 2020 by Random Family LLC. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission of the publisher is prohibited. Publisher does not assume liability for unsolicited manuscripts, materials or other content. All editorial, advertising and business correspondence should be sent to the addresses listed above.

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Editors Note

H

i, readers!

This issue of The Devil Strip will feel a little different than those you’re used to. Instead of focusing on Akron’s past and present, this issue focuses on its future — both the future that city leaders are working toward right now, and the futures that our community and artistic leaders envision The first few pages of this issue are dedicated, as The Devil Strip usually is, to journalism. Our reporters spent this spring exploring a couple key goals guiding Akron and Summit County policy right now: Growing the city’s population to 250,000 by 2050; reducing health inequities in our city, particularly around infant mortality

and child asthma; and WHAT WHAT WHAT ABOUT THE ARTS. But after that, we’re stepping into the world of fiction.

We invited several young and emerging community leaders to envision what Akron will look like in 2050, focusing on the spaces they know best. In these pages, Katie Beck invites us to a thriving North Hill; EbaNee Bond imagines a radical space for lifelong learning; Emily Anderson celebrates the brewery of the future; and more.

The futures we imagine, like most stories in The Devil Strip, are optimistic. We believe our city can be more sustainable, more equitable,

What we believe: STORIES MATTER. We believe the most important stories are the ones we tell ourselves about ourselves, and that this is as true for cities as it is for individuals. For better or worse, every city’s chief storyteller is its media. We take responsibility for our work because we know it shapes the way Akronites see each other, and the way we see each other influences how we treat one another.

OUR WORK IS FOR AKRON. This is our reason for existing, not merely our editorial angle for stories. We are advocates for the city of Akron and allies to its people, so we may be cheerleaders, but that won’t keep us from challenging the city’s flaws. What’s the point of being part of the community if we can’t help make it a better place to live?

OUR WORK SHOULD BE DONE WITH AKRON. We would rather build trust through cooperation and collaboration

than authority. Our place in the community is alongside it, not standing outside looking in or standing above it looking down.

WE CARE ABOUT YOU, NOT JUST YOUR EYEBALLS. Sometimes, we love a good fight with the status quo. But conflict and antagonism will never be a way of life for us, especially not to boost clicks, views, comments, shares and “eyeballs.” We are watchdogs to hold our leaders accountable, not to keep the neighbors up all night with our barking.

WE LOVE OUR NEIGHBORS. Our stories humanize the people in our city. We not only want to counter sensationalized and alarmist reporting but to eventually render it obsolete. We advocate for justice, freedom and equality because those qualities make this city, and our lives, better.

Akron’s Community-Owned Magazine

healthier and friendlier, and we believe the first step in working toward that future is the act of imagining it.

begin living it.

Community Outreach Director Floco Torres and former editor-in-chief Rosalie Murphy commissioned the stories you’ll read in the coming pages. Equity and Inclusion Reporter Noor Hindi edited them, and Art Director Chris Harvey created illustrations that bring each to life.

Note: Rosalie Murphy, our former editor-in-chief, originally came up with the idea for the 2050 issue, commissioning emerging community leaders for the stories you’ll read in the coming pages.

— Rosalie Murphy, former editor-inchief, and Noor Hindi,

All of us, with every vote we cast, every dollar we spend and every hour we spend working or volunteering, are creating the city that our children and their children will inherit. We hope this issue will help you imagine your role in Akron’s future — and

JOURNALISM SHOULD LIVE BEYOND THE PAGE. Information without context or connection is inert. We believe journalism can connect people to each other, our city and even a sense of purpose. Though our work begins on the page, both printed and web, we promote and plan events so people can meet faceto-face where real life still happens.

PEOPLE OVER PROFITS. The local businesses, nonprofits and civic organizations who support The Devil Strip are part of our community and are as vital to our culture as our artists and musicians. That’s why we don’t accept ads for national chains, things in large metros outside Summit County or businesses that profit from the exploitation of women.

We are not a coat hanger for advertising.

follow online. One thing that makes art, dance, theatre, music, film, food, civic engagement, biking, hiking, and public space so great is that all these things can bring us together, helping us find new friends and have fun with the ones we already have. That makes us all a little happier. That’s what it’s all about.

What is a devil strip?

The “devil strip” is the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. The precise origins of the term are unknown, but it’s only used in Akron. Today, the devil strip is what connects residents to the city — its public space, its people and its challenges. The Devil Strip seeks to do the same thing.

WE GET ONE SHOT AT LIFE, SO LET’S HAVE FUN. We want our readers to fall in love with Akron (again and again and again), to buck the temptation to only live vicariously through the people they

June 2021 · Vol 9 · Issue #6

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Since its peak at about 290,000 residents in the 1960s, Akron has lost a third of its population. How will it bring people back?

Writing, reporting, illustration and photos by Abbey Marshall

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century ago, Akron was the fastest-growing city in the country.

With four major tire manufacturers located in the city, industry and opportunity was attractive.

Between 1910 and 1920, the population swelled from 69,000 to 208,000. By 1920, half the tires in the world were produced in Akron.

But after 80 years of leading the nation in rubber production, industry began to sputter to a halt. By 1982, not a single passenger tire was built in the city.

As a result, population numbers were gouged by a third since the 1960s, when the city peaked at 290,000.

Now, Akron has slightly fewer than 200,000 people. But officials have set an ambitious goal: to recoup some of what they’ve lost and grow the city’s population by 26% in just 30 years.

Strategies for growth When Dan Horrigan took the mayoral reins from Don Plusquellic in 2016, he set an ambitious goal: get 250,000 people in Akron by 2050.

The reason for setting that goal, aside from the snappy branding of “250,000 by 2050,” is to recoup about half of what Akron had lost.

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“When you look at Akron’s trajectory loss, our peak was 290,000 and we’re right around 200,000 now. It’s the idea we could climb more than halfway back to our peak,” says Jason Segedy, Director of Planning and Urban Development. “It is ambitious but view it as a guiding star. Even if we get half that goal, that’s a major win.” The goal is not simply about bringing people in — it’s also about retention. The city cannot grow without serving the people who already live here, Segedy says, as many Akronites ultimately leave for the suburbs.

So far, the focus is on “stopping the bleeding” before the city can move into meaningful growth, Deputy Mayor for Integrated Development James Hardy adds.

According to census data, the city has not grown since the 1960s, but retention efforts in the last decade appear to be working. Between 2000 and 2010, there was an 8.3% drop in population, translating to about 18,000 residents. But between 2010 and a 2019 estimation (2020 census data is not yet available), there was only a .8% loss, or 2,000 residents.

In an effort to turn retention into growth, the Horrigan administration has identified housing policy as their key strategy.

Development in Akron slowed significantly after the population boom, with 64% of homes in the city built before 1960 and more housing built during the Great Depression

than since 2000. In 2015, just 14 new houses were built in Akron.

Much of the city’s remaining housing stock is not only old but in disrepair.

In 2017, the city released Planning to Grow Akron, a report outlining its strategy to stimulate the housing market and attract residents to live in Akron. That report detailed the state of housing, problems facing the market and proposed solutions. One of the solutions to the downtrodden housing market was a 15-year property tax abatement, which meant residents who built new homes or significant additions did not have to pay any property tax on the home or addition for 15 years.

The program, launched in 2017, is intended to spur population growth by spurring the construction of new housing in the city.

Though the city is forgoing nearly $2 million in property taxes through the program, city officials view it as a success. In contrast to the 14 homes built in 2015, development has since boomed, with approximately 1,800 housing units completed or in the planning, design and construction phases in the last four years.

Home values are rising too, in line with nationwide trends, says Deputy Mayor for Integrated Development James Hardy.

“For the first time in a long time, we’ve seen a significant increase in property values,” Hardy says.

“We’re getting more equity in

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homes that people lost and thought they wouldn’t get back in the 2008 housing process.”

But Hardy and Segedy both acknowledge how much work is left to be done.

A second report, Planning to Grow Akron 2.0, was released May 12.

It builds upon the first report, but also addresses gaps and poses more complex problems and solutions. For example, Segedy says the city also needs to focus on rehabilitating old homes as well as building new ones.

“This report focuses on how we can strengthen the housing market to get more investment in capital in homes that are already here in developed neighborhoods that already exist,” he says. “We need to be strategic in how we realign our neighborhoods in a 21st century reality.”

A main task will be to modernize the city’s zoning code. Akron is heavily zoned for single family housing, but Segedy says they want to aim to make neighborhoods more walkable and friendly to duplexes and multifamily houses as well.

Making growth equitable At the time of the 2017 report, approximately a quarter of the city’s housing was in “great” shape while another quarter was “extremely distressed.” The remaining half was at a tipping point: Older homes in middle-class neighborhoods that thedevilstrip.com

city,” she continues. “There’s a lot of immigrant families that want to build new homes in the city but face barriers. There needs to be a more equitable process.”

Both Boyes and Beck agree that trust is crucial in neighborhoods that have faced disinvestment as the city focuses on huge investments in areas like dtowntown.

In addition, they call for more inclusive housing policies that won’t leave some people, such as renters, behind.

The tax abatement quality may be attractive to developers, but unless a landlord in a new building reduces rent as a result, renters are seeing few if any benefits from programs like the tax abatement.

Meanwhile, data from the U.S. Census Bureau found between 2000 and 2018, median rent in Akron jumped 48% while incomes rose just 29%. The city plans to address wealth distribution and equitable homeownership with the newest housing strategy report. needed a boost.

Planning to Grow Akron 2.0 looks at strengthening the market in “middle neighborhoods,” which make up half the city’s housing and are at a “tipping point.”

Segedy says by targeting these middle neighborhoods, which are often adjacent to disinvested neighborhoods, conditions will also improve in those surrounding areas.

But each neighborhood faces unique challenges and has individual needs, people working for economic development at the neighborhood level say.

“Even if [the people making policy] live in the same city, each neighborhood has its unique set of challenges,” says Tina Boyes, executive director of Kenmore Neighborhood Alliance. “The more we can do that’s engaging residents and improving visual spaces for residents gives folks hope. Those are visual and relational cues that things are looking better.”

Boyes says her neighborhood, categorized as a middle neighborhood in the report, is at a crucial point. Kenmore, which lost 12.7% of its residents in the past two decades according to data from the city, is susceptible to losing families to adjacent suburbs of Barberton and Coventry Township.

The Neighborhood Alliance has worked to revamp Kenmore Boulevard in recent years, branding the neighborhood as an arts and music district with recording studios, music shops and concert venues.

Eight new businesses opened on the boulevard in the past year.

“Everything we’re doing under Planning to Grow Akron 2.0 boils down to: Are we creating wealth for existing residents who historically

have not been able to access it?”

Hardy says. “There has been a systemic exclusion of many residents — particularly residents of color — in property ownership. That is still the fastest and most effective way to build generational wealth.

“We are trying to correct a century of systemically racist housing policy,” he continues. “There’s going to be only so much the city can do on the equity issue without the state and federal government coming in and transforming the way they deal with housing.”

Despite the challenges, everyone who spoke to The Devil Strip seemed optimistic about the goal — given caution, thoughtfulness and inclusion in how to achieve that growth.

“It’s going to be hard work,” Boyes says of the 2050 goal. “The investments we’re making right now over the next 3–5 years are going to define what Akron looks like in 10, 20, 30 years. We need to invest in points of opportunity throughout the entire city.” // Abbey Marshall covers economic development for The Devil Strip via Report for America. Reach her at abbey@thedevilstrip.com.

Even still, Tina says neighborhoods like hers need substantial city support to be on track for the population growth they want.

Meanwhile in North Hill, unlike many other areas in the city, the neighborhood’s population is growing because of its high refugee resettlement rate. Still, the neighborhood has a higher percentage of renters than average and experiences its own unique set of challenges.

Katie Beck, executive director of North Akron Community Development Corporation, says she is concerned about the city’s allocation of resources across the neighborhoods.

“A big problem in this neighborhood, and really all over the city, is the issue of absent landlords,” Beck says.

“That needs to be addressed in some way, for sure, because many refugees are being taken advantage of.

“But we also need to find ways to develop new housing for local families to own and build within the

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By 2050, community health workers hope the city no longer needs them. This is their story — and their vision for the next 30 years.

Above: Community health worker Ericka Malone at Stoner-Hawkins Park in West Akron.

Reporting, writing and photos by H.L. Comeriato

E

ricka Malone leans over the edge of a wooden park bench. She loops a finger around the bottom of her shoe and steps into a pair of black, lace-up heels.

Behind her, a few neighborhood kids huddle near the playground. They scatter, laughing in the afternoon sun.

This neighborhood is part of the 44320 ZIP code, where infant mortality rates are among the highest in the state.

Kids born here are less likely to make it to the playground because they’re less likely to survive infancy in the first place.

Malone has lived here most of her life, and is now one of dozens of state-certified community health workers trying to change the way we think and talk about infant mortality. Every day, she helps new parents navigate everything from breastfeeding and applying for

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Medicaid benefits, to accessing mental health care and finding safe, affordable housing.

between 19 Summit County agencies designed to reduce infant mortality and preterm births across the county.

By 2050, she hopes the supportive communities she helps build each day are plentiful, and that parents, caregivers and babies no longer need the services community health workers provide.

Since then, the county’s overall infant mortality rate has fallen by about 9%.

But for community health workers, that decrease isn’t a simple victory.

But the work required to reduce infant deaths across the city may span generations. And to make real change, Malone says community health workers will have to adapt — and train a new generation of health workers to carry the torch.

Racism affects health outcomes for both moms and babies In 2016, the infant mortality rate among Black infants in Summit County was 4.5 times the infant mortality rate among white infants.

The following year, Akron mayor Dan Horrigan appointed Tamiyka Rose as the city’s health equity ambassador and secured state funding for Full Term First Birthday — a collaboration

In 2019, Black babies born in Summit County were still 2.8 times as likely as white babies to die before their first birthdays — and more likely to be born early and underweight.

Community health workers like Malone address that disparity on the ground, working with clients to help them access prenatal care, transportation, fresh foods, educational opportunities and even help paying rent and utilities — all resources that lessen stress and help ensure the delivery of healthy, fullterm babies.

But Malone says Black parents need more than just resources to help their babies stay healthy during their first year of life. They also need spaces to heal from the generational trauma of racism and connect with their babies

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and one another.

Why are Black infants at such a high risk?

Across the country, Black babies experience far higher rates of infant mortality than white babies. Akron is no exception.

Rose says that isn’t because Black Akronites are “less healthy,” but rather, because they experience the effects of centuries of systemic violence and inequity.

“The good news is that our infant mortality rate dropped,” she says.

“The bad news is we have a huge disparity still, and that disparity is because of the structural racism in our society.”

Nationally, Black parents are 50% more likely than white parents to give birth prematurely, regardless of other factors like income and education levels.

According to Summit County Public Health, nearly 18% of Black moms living in Akron gave birth prematurely thedevilstrip.com

Left: Community health worker Ericka Malone at Stoner-Hawkins Park in West Akron.

last year, compared to just 8.2% of white moms.

The trauma that Black people experience as a result of racism builds up over time, contributing to preterm labor, says Dr. Ciara Dennis-Morgan, clinical director at Minority Behavioral Health Group in West Akron.

In neighborhoods across the city, parents may struggle to pay rent, find safe housing and access mental healthcare — all barriers that heighten stress levels.

When pregnant people experience chronic stress, the adrenal glands release high levels of cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone — which studies have linked to premature births.

Currently, the city’s goal calls to reduce premature births to the national average of 9.8% by 2025, and completely eliminate deaths caused by unsafe sleep.

Low birth weights and premature births put babies at risk — but so do other factors Babies born prematurely may face a higher risk of death and long-term health complications, including issues with the brain, lungs, eyes and heart.

But environment — whether home or

Right: Community health worker Deatra Hunt near the Reach Opportunity Center at Summit Lake.

neighborhood — can also pose risks.

Sleeping in bed with an infant or putting babies to sleep with siblings is never safe, says Rose. Instead, babies should always be put to sleep alone, on their backs and in a crib or foldable playpen.

To help reduce sleep-related deaths, initiatives under Full Term First Birthday provide playpens to new parents and caregivers for free.

Maintaining a healthy diet is also essential to a healthy pregnancy, but decades of racist housing and zoning policies have affected the availability of fresh produce in many neighborhoods.

When people who are pregnant can’t easily access nutritious foods for themselves, their babies may not get the nutrients they need to stay healthy.

Shaleeta Smith, manager of Maternal Child Health at Summit County Public Health, says she’s had trouble finding fresh foods in her own neighborhood.

“Within a five mile radius, all there is is corner stores, and there’s no healthy fruits and vegetables available at my disposal,” Smith says. “So when we talk about disparities,

Akron’s Community-Owned Magazine

I really feel like we have to think [about] more than just what the data tells us.”

How mental health care and strong support networks help keep babies healthy To counter accumulation of trauma and grief, Black parents also need access to free or low-cost mental health care.

“Years ago, we used to think about postpartum and connecting women to services after they have the baby,” Dennis-Morgan says. But over the last decade, a more holistic and preventive care model has emerged.

Through the Ohio Department of Medicaid, Full Term First Birthday sponsors six infant vitality initiatives across the city, including the Centering model — a collaboration between the Summa Health Equity Center, Project Ujima and the Minority Behavioral Health Group.

The CenteringPregnancy Program brings pregnant people together in a circle with their healthcare provider and 8-12 other expectant parents due at the same time.The circle provides a safe, supportive space to talk through victories and challenges.

After their children are born, parents

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move on to the CenteringParenting Program and maintain those connections as their children grow.

‘I am all the things that I didn’t get as a kid.’

For nearly four years, Malone has worked as a community health worker through the Summa Health Equity Center, managing a full caseload and facilitating Centering Circles.

Before she became a community health worker, Malone was a young mom herself.

At just 12 years old, she became the primary caregiver for her own newborn child, and a handful of her younger siblings.

“I pretty much did it all by myself,” Malone says. “I grew up in a very abusive, alcoholic, substance abuse, any-and-everything-youcould-imagine home, which is why I became the mother of two by age 15. My mom — between her addiction and prison bouts and just life — I basically raised all of my siblings.”

In 1999, Malone graduated from Firestone High School at the top of her class. She became a licensed cosmetologist and barber and an The Devil Strip

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Left: Community health worker Deatra Hunt near the Reach Opportunity Center at Summit Lake.

ordained minister.

Now, she provides holistic support for new moms facing many of the same challenges she did.

“I am a caregiver. I’m a lover. I’m an educator. I’m an encourager,” Malone says. “I am all the things that I didn’t get as a kid. Any and all ways that you can show a person love and honor and respect, that’s what I try to do. Because I know the importance and value of having the village.”

For Malone — the mother of two adult children and three teenagers — the care and community she helps provide as a community health worker is second nature.

“I try to meet [people] with love, whatever that looks like — which is probably why this job stresses me out so damn much,” Malone says. “I try to show up and be a trustworthy person in their lives and show them that I’m honest and open and truly here to help.”

Right: Community health worker Ericka Malone at StonerHawkins Park in West Akron.

The knowledge held by Black birth workers is often shared and passed down through generations.

“You have to have the heart to do this work,” says Deatra Hunt, a community health worker with Minority Behavioral Health Group.

“There’s no way you can do this work and not be emotionally vested.”

On a spring day near the shoreline of Akron’s Summit Lake, Hunt’s earrings glint in the sun. Today, she’s hopeful about her work. But it isn’t always easy.

“I did [have a client] and the baby passed away at 6 months old,” Hunt says. “This was a client that was close to me. I’d take her places, I’m watching the baby and holding the baby, and that sense of loss…”

For Hunt, 51, who has five children of her own, helping moms, parents and caregivers navigate their grief and joy is both painful and edifying.

A legacy of community health and birth work

“People have to realize their own pain and deal with it the best they can,” she says. “So when they bring it up, just being there and going through the memories and offering that support. That makes it hard, but it’s so worth it. That, too, is a labor of love.”

For centuries, Black women have provided infant and maternal care as doulas, midwives and birth workers.

With support from community health workers like Hunt, new parents can tackle other issues, like pursuing new

“I’ve been in the game for way longer than I’ve had an official title,” she adds. “I’ve been doing this as long as I can remember.”

10 | The Devil Strip

job and educational opportunities.

“A lot of times, it’s that one peg,” Hunt says. “It’s that one thing, that you just don’t think is wrong. If you help them with that, now they’ve got a little ‘oomph’ in them to move on to other things that are going on in their lives, to change things.”

What does the future look like?

At Stoner-Hawkins Park, the setting sun turns the playground gold.

Malone sits on a bench near the basketball court. Behind her, a pair of toddlers race toward a swingset.

Right now, Malone is training and mentoring the community health workers who will carry her work into the next decade. The COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t made it easier.

“With all the disparities that have come to the surface because of the pandemic — the number of additional lives lost, the digital divide, the additional healthcare issues — I pray that the fallout from this, three to seven years from now, won’t be as bad as I think it’s going to be.

However,” she says, “I think it’s going to be heavy.”

Before she hands over the reins to a new generation of community health workers, Malone hopes to see a drop in infant deaths and premature births, along with an increase in the kinds of support networks families need to help babies thrive.

Malone’s bigger vision — one she acknowledges may not materialize in her lifetime — is this: “all the systemic barriers will be gone, generational racism and generational poverty will cease to exist. Black moms, Black babies and Black bodies don’t have to keep dying, Lord, at the hands of each other or by police or the U.S. government.”

“The day I no longer have to talk to my clients about domestic violence cases. The day I don’t have to talk to slumlords who are evicting them for whatever reason. [The day] that all babies are happy and healthy on their first birthdays. The day I don’t have to clock in to do this work anymore,” Malone says. “That’s when I will have arrived.” // H.L. Comeriato covers public health at The Devil Strip via Report for America. Reach them at HL@ thedevilstrip.com.

Malone’s work isn’t just about her West Akron neighborhood — or the women she works with every day. It’s about a much larger hope for future generations.

june 2021 · Vol 9 · Issue #6

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Above: The Wild Asia Exhibit at the Akron Zoo opens to the public on May 29, 2021. Photo Ilenia Pezzaniti Right: The Wild Asia Exhibit at the Akron Zoo homes Red Panda’s, Tigers, and White-cheeked Gibbon’s, all which are endangered species. Photo Ilenia Pezzaniti

Meet Akron Zoo’s Newest Animals

By Aja Hannah, photos by Ilenia Pezzaniti

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even critically endangered animals opened Akron Zoo’s Wild Asia on May 29. This season, guests will get to meet Sumatran tigers, Eko and Diburu; red panda sisters Coco, Lulu and Penny; and white-cheeked gibbons Milo and Parker.

Eko is a big, lazy boy from the Oklahoma Zoo. This 4-year-old Sumatran tiger likes to lay in the sun, lounge in his pool and sometimes spray people with urine when he gets annoyed with the attention. He is kept separate from the female Diburu because tigers are usually solitary animals. Diburu, a 3-year-old from the San Diego Zoo, likes to use the keeper stairs to get to her loft. She’s a skinny lady and very curious. She likes to watch the people going by and the animals in the other exhibits.

Marketing and PR Manager Elena Bell did mention that they have breeding recommendations for the tigers so there may be cubs in the future.

The red panda sisters, born in the

12 | The Devil Strip

Kansas City Zoo, are about 1.5 years old. They are cute burgundy fluffballs about the size of baby blackand-white pandas. They are definitely more graceful than traditional baby pandas. They like to climb branches in their exhibit and eat bamboo and sit with their fuzzy butt facing you much like a corgi would. Because their usual habitat in the Eastern Himalayas is much cooler than summers in Akron, they even have an air-conditioned alcove so they can strip bamboo at their leisure.

While the public’s focus is on the red pandas, Bell believes the gibbons may be the underdog that the public grows to love. A gibbon is a lesser species of ape. As requested by the public, the gibbons are the muchanticipated primates that have been added to the zoo. Milo and Parker are also a bonded pair with a large exhibit. They met in October 2017 in Cheyenne Mountain Zoo and they came to Akron Zoo together.

They can also grow their family. Their towering exhibit is certainly large enough for it. Right now, these two are super excited to settle in and swing around on the ropes. Parker,

an inquisitive lady, likes to sit up on the roof and keep a lookout while Milo is a show-off for visitors. The gibbon exhibit has multiple viewing areas with large windows. Viewing areas cover several stories into the air with a treehouse structure at the very top. There is an indoor section of the exhibit as well as a slide at the very top for kids to go through.

Wild Asia has that new smell too and there are meticulous, special touches everywhere. Tiny decals were hand-placed on the windows of the viewing areas to stop birds from slamming into them. The tiger and gibbon exhibits have special double doors that almost open into the exhibit. They are called training walls and they can be used for educational programming. The director of Red Panda Network, Ang Phuri Sherpa, visited the Akron Zoo from Nepal and consulted on the Wild Asia elements.

A handwoven bamboo sunshade from Shanti Farms hangs in the red panda exhibit. On opening day, live entertainment will feature the traditions of Burmese, Nepali, Mon and Hmong cultures from the local Asian American community.

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Tickets to the member-only preview event have already sold out. Wild Asia is the second of a two-part $17 million capital project, the largest expansion for Akron Zoo to date.

Planning began in 2014 and the first part, Landon & Cynthia Knight Pride of Africa, was opened in 2019. Wild Asia was slated to open in 2020 and — as anyone can guess — the pandemic brought it to a halt.

As a special note, the tigers and primates are susceptible to COVID-19. These species are all classified as critically endangered and facing habitat loss in the wild. People are destroying their homes for palm oil plantations. Palm oil is used in food, drinks and hygiene products.

At Milo and Parker’s old home, a free app was created so you can scan barcodes of products before you buy it and the app will tell you if the palm oil in your product is sustainable. It’s called Sustainable Palm Oil Shopping App. // BIO: Aja Hannah is a writer, traveler, and mama. She believes in the Oxford comma, cheap flights, and a daily dose of chocolate. thedevilstrip.com

Left: Marketing and PR Manager Elena Bell leans against the Wild Asia Exhibit’s entrance wall. Photo Ilenia Pezzaniti Right: One of the Red Panda’s at the Wild Asia Exhibit climbs down a tree limb, heading inside where it is cooler. Photo Ilenia Pezzaniti

d Bottom Left: Parker, a White-cheeked Gibbon, is one of two at the new Wild Asia Exhibit at the Akron Zoo. Photo Ilenia Pezzaniti Bottom Right: Bamboo is grown and monitored at the new Wild Asia Exhibit at the Akron Zoo. Photo Ilenia Pezzaniti

Akron’s Community-Owned Magazine

June 2021 · Vol 9 · Issue #6

The Devil Strip

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Pick Your Own Flowers available at SVSM Garden

by Emily Anderson

Have you ever been driving down Market Street and noticed that coollooking garden next to St. Vincent-St. Mary High School?

That’s what Alyssa D’Amico did, every day on her way to work. D’Amico has a passion for gardening and farming.

She couldn’t help but wonder if she could get involved in that garden that looked like it had so much potential.

One day she decided to check it out, and that’s how she came to be the caretaker of the flower gardens and organizer of Heads Up Flowers.

D’Amico has a wide variety of farming experience — she spent her 20s at WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) and learned about growing food. She’s worked on expansive private farms and urban gardens.

“I used to think flowers were a waste of garden space,” says D’Amico,

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who believes strongly in the value of growing food and feeding people.

She changed her mind after working with adults with disabilities and using gardening, flowers specifically, as a therapeutic activity. “Flowers are important too,” she says, noting the meditative qualities of caring for and arranging them and the positive effects of their beauty.

Heads Up Flowers is a project at the SVSM school garden that provides “you-pick” hours for the community each week, pop-up events and a flower stand. During “you-pick” hours — Mondays from 6-8 pm starting July 5 — visitors pay $10 cash or Venmo and are provided with some pruners and an empty jar. You walk through the flower garden and fill up your jar with a bouquet to take home.

All of the flowers are grown from seeds by D’Amico, who starts everything at her home with grow lights and a small hoop house in

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her backyard. This season there will be zinnias, cosmos, marigolds, snapdragons, strawflowers and herbs like mint and basil, just to name a few. Perennials like echinacea and daisies are coming up and there is a whole patch dedicated to dahlias.

During the you-pick hours, people are encouraged to bring a blanket and their kids and hang out. D’Amico wants the space to belong to the community, and for everyone to feel comfortable in the garden with the flowers.

D’Amico added a cashless flower stand to the gardens, which will be filled with picked flowers ready to be arranged into a bouquet. This is the third year she’s taking care of the gardens at SVSM, and she’s gaining knowledge and confidence all the time. She’s looking forward to observing the land and working at her own pace.

At the end of the growing season,

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D’Amico dries flowers for wreaths she sells. Her favorite flowers to use are strawflowers because they look exactly the same when they’re dried out, and they last forever. “They hold a lot of memories,” she says.

Currently, D’Amico has her own caregiver business for adults with disabilities. Her evenings and weekends are spent in the garden, but she says it hasn’t stressed her out yet. For more information, visit the website www.headsupflowers. com or follow Heads Up Flowers on Instagram and Facebook.

A S o t

S o b a c N d i N

L The Heads Up Flowers gardens are y located at 249 W. Market Street. Youa pick hours are every Mondays from a 6-8 pm, starting July 5. t c // Emily Anderson writes stories and h bartends in Akron. Follow her on A Instagram @ladybeerdrinker. i c m thedevilstrip.com

Right: STA students of all levels perform in a choreographed Taekwondo showcase - Photo by Nahla Bendefaa

Sunshine Taekwondo Academy Celebrates two-year anniversary with event highlighting four-time Guinness world record holder Dinesh Sunar

Top: STA students as young as 3 years old perform traditional Nepali music Photo by Nahla Bendefaa Bottom: Dinesh Sunar during his parlour demonstration Photo

by Nahla Bendefaa

by Nahla Bendefaa April 2021 marked two years of Sunshine Taekwondo Academy. For owner Kaushila Khanal Karmacharya, that is cause for celebration.

The event was a celebration of community leaders as well as a number of guests that were honored at the beginning of the ceremony. It was clear that gatherings such as this one had been missed over the past year.

Sunshine Taekwondo Academy is one of a number of Nepali-owned businesses in the Akron area. The academy not only offers Taekwondo classes, but also a space for young Nepali children to take traditional dance and singing classes, making it a cultural and social hub for the Nepali community.

Children of all ages took to the stage for performances. From martial art and Taekwondo demonstrations to several Nepali dance and music performances, children of all ages took to the stage to showcase the skills they had been honing over the past years and months.

Like many small businesses, the past year has not been easy to navigate as courses had to be moved online and public health mandates limited the kind of activities the academy could carry out. That made the event hosted by Sunshine Taekwondo Academy all the more exciting as it was the first time many of the children, parents and community members could gather.

The main attraction was the presence of Dinesh Sunar, also known as “Parkour Dinesh,” a stuntman and parkour athlete who has broken four Guinness World Records to date. As the star billing of the event, Sunar made use of the academy space to showcase his daredevil skills. A fan favorite, Sunar’s showcase was met with chants of “superman” from the audience.

Akron’s Community-Owned Magazine

Most recently, Sunar has submitted evidence in March 2021 to break the record for “most standing full twist somersaults in 30 seconds.”

With the current record being eight somersaults in 30 seconds, Sunar managed to do 13 in 30 seconds. The Guinness World Record certification process can take up to 24 weeks.

A self-taught parkour artist and stuntman, Sunar has worked on more than 50 Nepali and Bollywood movies. He is also certified by the World Freerunning Parkour Foundation. In the past, Sunar had broken the record for “most twisting backflips off a wall in a minute” and then “in 30 seconds.”

“It was not easy, but he used to watch TV and movies and used to practice on the sand [in his village in Nepal],” Karmacharya says, “Later on, he learned on movie sets and then got a teacher.”

when he was getting ready to come to the United States. Karmacharya is currently working as his mentor and visa sponsor while he works on Guinness World Record submissions and America’s Got Talent auditions.

While staying in Akron, Sunar is taking Taekwondo classes at Sunshine Taekwondo Academy for the first time in his life. He is also assisting around the academy with daily administrative tasks.

You can stay up to date on Sunar’s parkour and his work as a stuntdouble on his Facebook page and YouTube Channel. // Nahla Bendefaa is a journalist, photographer and content creator from Akron, Ohio by way of Kenitra, Morocco. She enjoys rewatching Friday Night Lights, painting and confusing Spotify’s algorithm while making her way through a seemingly never-ending tea collection.

Karmacharya and Sunar did not meet each other until late 2020

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B

efore we begin our fiction section, allow me to speak from the heart for a moment.

As I write this, I am 28 years old, and I spend a great deal of time thinking about climate change. It’s part of every decision I make, from where I shop to how I travel to whether or not I want to have kids. If that feels shocking or overly personal, I encourage you to ask your family members or friends under 40 for their thoughts. Polling data show that I have quite a few peers.

This anxiety is evident throughout popular culture, too. Climate change — or rather, our failed efforts to stop it — is an element of almost every dystopia. Water is scarce, food is limited, extreme weather events have decimated our cities. You’ve seen all these movies.

In most of those dystopian futures, we also see rampant economic inequality, allowing some to dodge the most severe impacts while others drown in them. In others, white supremacy reigns, locking migrants, refugees and people of color out

16 | The Devil Strip

of power and limiting their agency.

In most, technology exacerbates these trends and facilitates their advancement, surveilling us and rewiring our minds and our relationships. You’ve seen all these movies.

“Right now, the [dystopian] stories that many of us are telling about ourselves are hurting us,” climate journalist Kendra Pierre-Louis writes in her 2020 essay Wakanda Doesn’t Have Suburbs. “It is not universal— there are cultures Indigenous to North America, for example, that are still enacting a different story—but this story of inherently destructive humans is the most mainstream.”

“We need different stories, ones that help us envision a present in which humans live in concert with our environment. Ones in which we eat, play, move, and live in ways that are not just lighter on the Earth but also nurturing to us as humans, with at least some of the trappings that many of us have come to expect of modern life.”

We need different stories… that help

us envision a present.

like for the people who live within it.

The Devil Strip believes, and has always believed, that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves matter.

Growing up in greater Akron in the 1990s and 2000s, the stories I heard and internalized were downtrodden, albeit not quite dystopian. You’ve heard all these stories too: “This place is dying. The weather sucks. People are leaving. If you want to succeed or to live an interesting life, you need to leave too.”

The next pages contain a series of those visions, imagined by emerging Akron leaders and Devil Strip writers.

We’ve presented them as if you were reading them in a copy of The Devil Strip you picked up in February 2050, so that they might feel like a cohesive whole. That said, these are a few of many possible futures. They are not in themselves business plans or policy proposals.

We don’t believe that about our present, and we don’t believe it about our future, either.

We’re not here to pretend that, in the next 29 years, clever thinking and dedicated activism can solve all Akron’s problems. We know we can’t control global economic forces or unchecked viruses. We’ll undoubtedly be grappling with lots of new problems by 2050.

But they could be seeds for both of those things — imagined futures from which we work backwards, all the way to today, when we take our own first steps toward realizing them.

— Rosalie Murphy, editor-in-chief Note: Rosalie Murphy, our former editor-in-chief, originally came up with the idea for the 2050 issue, commissioning emerging community leaders for the stories you’ll read in the coming pages.

But we can’t work toward a better future without, first, believing that a better future is possible, and second, imagining what that future will look

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thedevilstrip.com

Tips, Tricks & resources for good neighbors

It ain’t your grandpa’s local news anymore Unless your grandpa is cool

by Chris Horne Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021.

These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

I am old now. Not the old I thought I was at 36 when I launched The Devil Strip online, but old enough that, 36 years later, I’ve lived a whole other life and my byline hasn’t appeared in these pages in ages. Honestly, I’m surprised we’re still printing magazines.

So shout-out to Gen XXX for reviving print like Gen X did vinyl. Otherwise, we’d be just another snortable infopowder like everyone else. I don’t know what hipsters are called now, but they’ve been on a roll. I forkin’ love how they brought “The Good Place” back and made substitute swears a thing.

Point is, plenty has changed as time and technology continued their ruthless advance, but the basics are the same.

Humans are wired to connect and form communities. However, by the mid-2010s, we were swamped with twin epidemics of social isolation and chronic loneliness, which became the kindling for a fire that manifested as widespread polarization, misinformation, civil unrest and news deserts. Pundits called it a threat to democracy itself.

I’d argue the greater threat was 400 years of propping up white supremacy and misogyny, in which journalism was also complicit, but still. It was bad news.

Fortunately, our license to be nosey and go anywhere we want gives local news organizations an unmatched

opportunity to connect people to each other, our cities and shared purpose by creating the common ground where our community gathers. Journalists can be the folks who know all the other folks and introduce them to the folks they need to know.

Sure beats being in a profession that the public has less confidence in than banks and the criminal justice system.

The most important story remains the one we tell ourselves about ourselves because our thoughts and behaviors are interconnected. When you tell yourself you’re worthless, you treat yourself poorly. Conversely, the quickest way to believe you’re worthwhile is to treat yourself well.

Cities are like that too, which is why we keep whispering sweet somethings in Akron’s ear.

The Devil Strip has always been created for, by and about Akronites, but by doing that, we’ve influenced American journalism too. Back in the day, local news mostly amplified crime, scandal, conflict and tragedy.

When you center the worst things about a city, the underlying message is that only a fool would try to improve a place that’s so clearly a lost cause.

Today, most indie news orgs know what we always have: More people need to care more about where they live if we’re actually going to make a difference.

What better way to accomplish that than to show our readers how many of their neighbors already care enough to get involved? That’s why we focus on everyday Akronites who wouldn’t dare wait to be elected for public service or appointed to leadership before they stepped up to meet the needs they see.

Akron’s Community-Owned Magazine

To find and share these stories, we opened our newsroom to basically anyone, even when they didn’t have prior journalism experience.

About 25 years ago, that became the Neighborhood Network, which has equipped and empowered thousands of locals to shape the story Akron tells itself about itself, earning hundreds of them some fun money and lifetime shares in our co-op.

No, local news co-ops haven’t swept the country as I’d hoped, but our unique approach has, so I’m happy.

Setting aside the Midwestern humility of my adopted home, I even think this is why America is doing so much better these days.

Well, that and Elon Musk finally decided to keep his weird ash on Mars.

The Devil Strip didn’t push journalism in this direction alone. It took a wave of indie news orgs like ours to reimagine the whole thing from scratch. We kept what works — a commitment to values, ethics, truth and free speech — but were unafraid to dump the rest, borrowing some good ideas and loaning ours out too.

Of course, like sponsored content and jeggings, legacy local news is still with us. However, what first seemed like the imminent death of local news was really legacy local achieving its Super Saiyan form, accelerated by hedge fund ownership and the rage they monetize with ads.

These once proud mastheads are now just husks masking a skeleton crew who localize and listify wire stories from sister publications and “news” items formed by AI journobots that cobble together bits of pseudo-public conversations so they can feed it back to us for easy clicks. If these bullshirt artists were all we had, America would be royally forked.

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The good news is that, while traditional outlets were pivoting to self-flying jetpacks, The Devil Strip and our buddies figured out how to use local news to build and strengthen social bonds. Because we carried that flag long enough, there are finally more of us than our diminished corporate counterparts.

Hey! Speaking of flags, know the one flying over city hall? The Devil Strip helped Akronites make that happen!

I still don’t understand why they wanted to put an agitated possum on it, but sometimes democracy gets strange.

Akron, like everywhere else, still has its challenges. And no, strangers aren’t out here holding hands, singing Kumbaya, but that’s mostly because 30 years ago we realized no one washes their hands nearly enough, dudes especially.

Yet, we’ve made progress. The Devil Strip has messed up plenty, but each time, our people — our co-owners — have helped us make it right.

We’ve made friends. We’ve had fights. We’ve even married and buried a few folks. It’s been hard sometimes, but we’re surrounded by so many Akronites who’ve committed themselves to making life here better for everyone that we’ve never lacked the motivation to keep going.

Now that’s said, since our population has topped 330,000 people, I think it’s cool to stop growing for a while. // Chris Horne is the founder and former publisher of The Devil Strip Local News Co-op, who tricked his smokeshow wife into living out of a self-driving electric hover RV so they could travel the country after their kid, current U.S. TikTok Laureate Madeline Horne, went to college.

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| 17

North Hill — At the intersection of art and innovation

One neighborhood demonstrating how to achieve world peace.

by Katie Beck

Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021.

These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

O

n any given Saturday night, the multi-lane intersection of North Main Street and East Cuyahoga Falls Avenue bustles with people on foot, bike or scooter. Delivery drones fly above picking up orders of local cuisine and homemade goods for customers within five miles.

Packed soccer courts circumvolve with players yelling at every failure and grinning with every success.

Each storefront alongside the road

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stands with its own bold design and cultural homage, welcoming guests for drinks, art, retail and unique experiences.

Multigenerational families gather in People’s Park, an outdoor public green space with swinging hammocks tied to trees and picnic tables filled with homemade food and restaurant take out. The chatter of different languages undulates like waves from an ocean: bursts of Nepali jokes and laughter, whispers of Arabic prayers and songs of K’iche’ voices belted.

This year, Akron was named as one of the top cities to visit in the United States by Travel and Leisure, with North Hill as a contributing factor due to its diverse array of experiences for visitors, as well

as its corresponding equity. The investment and development of physical infrastructure leading up to this national debut was the catalyst that has centered and benefitted the residents directly.

Not only has Temple Square seen a sparring of activity from outside travelers, but also the business district on Howard Street, which highlights the history and contributions of the Black American community in the area. Music clubs, local shops and small restaurants manifest the power of the surrounding neighbors. At the intersection of East Cuyahoga Falls and Howard is the North Hill Heritage Courtyard which has an art installation erected with market stalls, grills and seating.

Mayor Hsa Win is a long-

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time resident of North Hill and acknowledges what makes North Hill so unique.

“This is a place where we take care of each other. Our homes, our businesses and our performances are all at the center of who we are and now the rest of the country is starting to recognize that,” says Win. He sees his time in public office as a chance for young immigrants to see themselves in political positions some day. “I never thought that I could be mayor of a city until I came to Akron.”

————————————At the North end of the All-American Bridge stands Waters Park, a public greenspace on the eastside of North Main Street’s beginning edge. Senior thedevilstrip.com

local dancers who rent the space to share their work to international professionals who are attracted to the neighborhood, the 500-seat theater has welcomed thousands of artists since its opening in 2028.

“After the COVID pandemic, I felt inspired to reconnect people and there was an opportunity to address a major barrier: language.”

citizens play shuffleboard every week.

The tennis and soccer courts fill with teenagers when school lets out and remain packed until midnight. An amphitheater, inspired by classic Greek drama, provides a platform for children to practice and perform in peace. At the southern peak of the park, an assemblage of visitors rotate between the seating that faces downtown. It is the best view of the city skyline.

In the purview of this site stands a colorful polymer cityscape, connecting the city’s own downtown to the structure of the art piece, installed by Polymas, Akron’s largest sustainable manufacturing facility.

The company started production in 2027 after purchasing the building that once housed St. Thomas Hospital. Elsa Mash, one of the founders of Polymas, moved to North Hill in 2024 after graduating from the University of Akron in Polymer Engineering.

“After the COVID pandemic, I felt inspired to reconnect people and there was an opportunity to address a major barrier: language.” Mash herself is a polyglot as she grew up in several different countries while her parents traveled in the U.S. Army.

“I had to adapt wherever we went.

I was quick at learning the basics of any language, but it was never

enough to really communicate.”

Mash and her co-graduates collaborated on ListenERS, an ear piece that was built for cross-lingual conversation, allowing speakers to hear interpretations in real time.

They designed it with the North Hill community in mind by creating easy-to-use technology with recycled materials. The ListenERS have revolutionized the ability to provide language access and have proven to be useful for other creative settings.

Mash says when Polymas started production, she knew that the strength of the workforce would be essential to their success. “We wanted to dismantle a system that has thrived off the exploitation of workers, especially in communities of color.” In its nearly 25 years of existence, Polymas has created 10,000 high-wage jobs for North Hill residents, and they’re not done. The company plans to expand next spring with a second facility for a new product that is in the works.

—————————————At 8:00 p.m. every Saturday night in Temple Square, the doors of GumDip Theatre swing open for audience members who have excitement for a live band or the revelation for a theatre performance. From

At the box office, there are ListenERS available for those who do not have headphones, and instructions are written in the digital program of how to connect them to the theater’s app. When the curtain rises, audience members hear an opening announcement in their native language, and the production continues in their native language.

This experience is a special local feature of the ListenERS as it does not interpret in real time, but instead plays recordings of the lines on cue recorded by local interpreter-actors, who have created their own field of work.

Sital Bal-Beck, an actor and artistic director of Gum-Dip Theatre grew up in a multicultural home and was born the same year the theater opened.

“It’s been incredible to witness the caliber of work that is produced here.

It’s begun to heal many community members.” Bal-Beck, along with an ensemble of 20 multilingual actors are commissioned per project that comes through the theater. The public response to this element of

performance has been resoundingly positive and has dramatically affected the diversity of audience members attending.

This type of performance model has grown quickly throughout the country for concerts, plays, musicals and even stand-up comedy. As the number of climate refugees entering the U.S. increases by the year, leaders in North Hill have built a pathway for people of all language capabilities to enjoy live arts and other cultural experiences throughout the business district.

“Hundreds of people sit next to each other without the ability to speak directly. But when they all see the same play, they all share the same breath. Their experiences are different but their presence is serendipity.” // Katie Beck is a creative community builder, director, writer, facilitator, speaker, and artivist who works to build spaces that highlight and prioritize underrepresented voices.

NEW / NATIVE 2050

by Josy Jones Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021.

These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

NATIVE Name: Jordania “Jordy” Sheppard Occupation: Student, Saint V! Don’t let the halo fool ya.

Age: 17, well, I’ll be 17 in a month so I’m practicing saying it.

Hometown: Akron, Ohio Current Neighborhood: Uhm - the slippin-est* neighborhood in Akron.

West Hill.

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What do you wish was more on Akronite’s radar? I wish more Akronites came to the games at Saint V. Like, it’s a Catholic school or whatever, but that doesn’t mean we’re soft, ya know? The sky-hockey games are slippin’, for sure. The battle of the bands! This electrobanjo and flute hip-hop duo won last year. Tons of action. Slip worthy*.

Check us out!

What is your favorite local cultural asset? I think my favorite local, cultural asset is the community fire pit at the bottom of the Glendale Steps. They say those steps are super old, or whatever. Across from the steps, there’s a huge pit that the community helped to build. It’s HUGE. Like big-big. At West Fest, it’s

really cool. We all walk down and tell stories, play music, dance, make wishes. It didn’t used to be there...it’s been there as long as I can remember tho. Ma’ always says it came around at the right time, when West Hill was discovering itself, ya know? West Akron got a splash park, and we got a huge fire pit. Can’t play in a splash park in the winter tho, so jokes on them! LLAH!* I don’t like them anyway, our schools are rivals and they beat my equestrian team in the high jumps last year. It’s fine.

When did you fall for Akron?

That’s easy. My family took a trip to Detroit when I was like 12. I hated it and wanted to go back home immediately. I knew then that Akron was home, and everywhere else was trying to be like us. Why leave?

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Where in Akron do you like to escape? I can’t tell you that, or my mom would come snooping! BUT I really like to ride my horse, Blossom.

I got her for my 15th birthday. She’s pretty great. Kind of a jam, but still great. I like to take Blossom out on walks at night. The click-clack of her hooves is relaxing. Is that weird?

Why should everyone try your favorite restaurant? My favorite restaurant is obviously going to be Donuts and Dialogue. Like, yes, my mom owns it. But also, like, I’ve met some slippin’ people there. You can go in and just drink coffee and get school work done OR you can go into the chat rooms and meet random people. I walked into the chat room last week and met this guy Kev from

thedevilstrip.com A

the sky-hockey team at my school and we talked about some slippin’ stuff. He collects relics of the past... like comics! I didn’t even know what a comic book was! We have comic chips now, but a long time ago, they used to like...print stuff on paper for people to read! It seems so inefficient, but slippin’ too. * Laughing loud and hard * Slippin/Slip worthy - (slang) Cool, awesome, hip, amazing

food cultivation and native and local food production. We have a lot of successful community gardens in the area, but I think we should be paying more attention to growing foods that are from this land to help restore the nutrients and help support the local ecosystem of native wildlife. If we want to continue to repopulate the Earth’s ecosystems, we have to start in our gardens. And more fruit trees!

West Hill has an entire orchard! We should all have orchards of local fruit growing in our neighborhoods to pick as we please. So I’m working on that.

NEW Name: Barbara McClelon Age: 68 Occupation: Retired Teacher, Currently Community Garden Volunteer Hometown: Phoenix, Arizona Current Neighborhood: Cascade Valley What do you wish was more on Akronite’s radar? I think Akron has done a really good job with its own sustainability efforts, but I think there could be more emphasis on wild

What is your favorite local cultural asset? The North Hill Language Network (NHLN), hands down! They are so beneficial to this community. I truly believe there should be more people in Akron with 3 to 4 languages that they can navigate at a beginner level. Like me, I can now understand a little bit of French and Burmese because I go on their market tours once a week where they teach you how to ask questions and listen in the various languages in North Hill. They even have an intermediate class they offer

Akron’s Community-Owned Magazine

where they allow you to improve your conversational skills in different languages! Now I’m in North Hill at least once a week negotiating the price of fufu and trading dragon fruit for cabbage. It’s remarkable!

When did you fall for Akron? I visited my mom before she passed a few years ago. I came up to finally deal with her estate. She was in Kenmore. I met her neighbors and realized why she liked living here. I kept trying to convince her to move to Arizona, but she always refused.

Her neighbors helped me clean her house and sort her things. I was a complete stranger, but they knew my mother enough to help me. And I thought, this is where I should have been all along. You don’t get community like this in the desert!

Where in Akron do you like to escape? I love Summit Lake. Being near water after being in the desert for so long does something for me.

People canoeing. Feeding the ducks.

Reading a book (a physical book, I haven’t gotten into this virtual reading they do now). It’s nice.

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Sometimes I like to go to the Summit Lake Tunnel-rarium. It’s a local ecosystem aquarium. The Community Development Corporation built these windowed tunnels underground where you can walk down and see the fish. I heard it was built to negate the rumors about alligators in the lake, but it’s pretty cool to go down there and sit and watch the fish. They keep me company while I read!

Why should everyone try your favorite restaurant? Oh there’s this Nepali-Soul fusion place in Highland Square now called Nah-Imma-Stay.

It’s only take out, which I always find hilarious, but they have these Collakora bites (they’re greens and onions, fried into small appetizers) and Mac-mosas (Mac & cheese samosas)!

SOOO good. They have other options if you are cutting back on fried food (as I should be).

NEW Name: Harper Lee-Daniels Occupation: Architect & Adjunct Professor The Devil Strip

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Age: 41 Hometown: Miami, Florida Current Neighborhood: Downtown What do you wish was more on Akronite’s radar? Preservation is always a big thing for me. One of the classes I’m teaching is Vintage Structures. I’m hoping to educate as many students in architecture as possible about how and why to preserve old buildings. Part of why I like Akron is because I think lots of people agree that the old buildings add to its character. I mean, look at the brick road leveling project being conducted by the city. How many cities do you know that are going through leveling the brick streets in their city? How many people even have brick streets anymore!

What is your favorite local cultural asset? The students. I’m still new, but the young people here are remarkable. Really. They are starting their own initiatives so very young. A lot of my own students are volunteering for the brick leveling project and even interning for community development corporations to help them register their historical buildings. I wasn’t doing that at 20.

Definitely not.

When did you fall for Akron?

When I came here to meet my wife’s parents for the first time a few years ago. They’ve always lived here, and Samantha had moved to Deland, Florida, which is where I met her.

We’d been dating about six months, and she brought me to PorchRokr! It was so cute...it made me feel right at home. So when we decided to move here, it was a no brainer. My favorite part of the festival is the tightrope walker. There is this guy who literally walks a tightrope while playing ukulele songs about the acts you can see each hour! It’s so cool!

Where in Akron do you like to escape? Can you escape in Akron?

Everyone knows each other, so it feels a little hard to “escape.” If we are talking about escaping my students, I like to go to the Vintage! It’s a bookstore in West Akron. They think books are obsolete, so I never run into them there haha!

Why should everyone try your favorite restaurant? Honestly, I’m very simple when it comes to food.

It’s changed a lot over the years, now everything is spicy and some type of fusion. It’s fine, but it’s just not for me. I prefer a nice, simple pizza. No toppings. Just cheese. My favorite place is a little pizza place in Kenmore on the Boulevard. They’ve been there

for years, apparently. Pierre’s. And then I sit out front and watch the kids use the skate ramp next to the library.

It’s a nice, simple treat.

NATIVE Name: Samantha Lee-Daniels Occupation: Visual Artist, Freelance Virtual Designer Age: 35 Hometown: Akron, Ohio Current Neighborhood: Downtown What do you wish was more on Akronite’s radar? I wish more people knew about the Pay Rent, Make Art (PRMA - pronounce Perma) program! I love it! My wife, Harper, and I live in the Bowery and we get three months out of the year rent free. As an artist in the building, we sign a lease that says we will create an art installation for three designated months. My last lease was for March, July and December.

I created an installation for the downstairs window for the first two months and then did a final exhibition in the foyer in December.

There’s a theatre artist who lives in the building, I think he lives on the 5th floor? He creates silent theatre shows for the front window. He leaves the set up in the window, and then posts the times for his window performances! It’s super cool. Last time he did a silent performance called “Disappearing,” a commentary on his mourning the transition from books and paper to digital consumption. It was really moving.

My wife really resonated with it.

What is your favorite local cultural asset? Firestone Park’s business district is a nerd’s dream!

My wife makes fun of me, but I want them to change their name to the Firestone Virtual District! You can try on clothes virtually, then learn how to use a gizmo through a virtual learning tour. They’ve got virtual horse care courses. Oh! A Walk in the Park Cafe just got that virtual vintage gaming room! I’ve played Tetris there for hours!

When did you fall for Akron?

When I was about 15, there was a second wave of the Green New Deal that came out. It was a real adjustment. The rail system went in and everyone was getting money to make their household more green.

I don’t remember a lot of the stuff my parents were doing to the house, but I remember a lot of renovations I didn’t understand.. I just thought it was annoying. I was young. Anyway, it seemed really strange at the time,

but Akron embraced it the best it could. We worked as a community to be devoted to lowering our footprint.

Scooters, bikes and horses were everywhere...and if you didn’t know how to ride, I know I didn’t, each neighborhood set up a community barn and gave riding lessons. It was... it was a weird time, but I think I fell in love with Akron’s ability to adjust as a community. Now riding your horse to the grocery store is normal and teenagers think it’s uncool to drive your family car unless you’re going out of state. It’s wild when you think about it. I’m still really proud of Akron for that. A lot of places are still struggling with the transition.

Where in Akron do you like to escape? My twin sister Sonia and her family live in Maine. I like to take virtual walks with my niece, Zeze.

She’s 13 now and since they live in Maine, I don’t see her in-person as much as I’d like. But she’s taught me to use the cloud. She likes to call and virtual chat in the cloud so my sister won’t hear her complaining about her barn chores. It’s nice to get to see her, and it’s a nice escape from the everyday. It’s really neat that you can sit next to each other virtually. I feel really connected to her.

Why should everyone try your favorite restaurant? I don’t have a favorite restaurant yet, but [Merriman] Valley has this cool place, Garden to Glass! They have this greenhouse and you walk through their garden and pick your vegetables and fruits for your smoothie. Then you give them to the clerks and watch them make you a smoothie on the spot. It’s a little pricey and time consuming, but I love how fresh it is. If trying to figure it out for yourself scares you, they have recipes for smoothies on their board. I recommend trying Valley Juice, which is apples, pears and beets! So great.

// Josy Jones is a Cleveland native, an active community member and writer.

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South Howard Street and The Flatiron II

Reporting and writing by Charlotte Gintert Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021.

These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

W

hen the city announced its plan to redevelop downtown twenty years ago in 2030, I had my

doubts.

As far as I could recall, the only revitalization plan that saw any type of success was the Main Street redevelopment that took place from 2019-2021. Even that took time to find its feet thanks to the economic turmoil caused by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. So, the announcement that Akron was going to begin something four times the scale of the Main St. project sounded ludicrous. However, as we well know, this is a project that actually worked.

24 | The Devil Strip

The irony was that it was more of a restoration than a reimagining.

The success of reopening continuous corridors for retail and dining, such as Front St. in Cuyahoga Falls, and in Akron’s own Bowery District encouraged the city to pursue further restoration of its downtown.

After the pandemic, Americans wanted to eat at restaurants with sprawling sidewalk seating, shop in stores instead of taking chances with online purchases and gather to celebrate whenever the opportunity arose. Additionally, we finally started to face the reality of climate change.

We began to drive personal vehicles less as cities increased convenient public transport services.

After Akron reinstalled the electric streetcars on Exchange and Market street, and Metro RTA improved its service in the neighborhoods, Akronites also began leaving their cars in the garage more often. The streetcars took advantage of the main

and already wide corridors, which had been widened back when Akron had its original trolleys. The central driving lanes were converted back to the trolley lane, with the outside driving lanes left for automobiles.

All of these changes gave us something I doubt any of us old timers imagined would happen, the return of South Howard Street. It was a bold plan, for sure. But, federal funding for civic investment and green infrastructure made it less risky.

Today, we see a downtown street grid very similar to the original of the 1800s, when Howard ran all the way to Bowery Street and served as the main retail and business district. The redevelopment of downtown wasn’t a full historic restoration project, of course. There were never any plans to resurrect the Pennsylvania & Ohio Canal down the middle of Main St., despite the lazy river potential.

The disaster of the Innerbelt was finally and fully removed, weed filled parking lots were torn up

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or transformed into green spaces and some of the old brutalist buildings from Akron’s first urban renewal project of the 1960s were demolished. No love was lost on those since, let’s be honest, they weren’t attractive to begin with and had been mostly vacant for decades. Corporations no longer needed massive office buildings for their workforce as working from home had become the norm since the pandemic. Therefore, all those crumbling, maze-like parking decks could be removed too.

Today, the Northside district is no longer an island and we can walk a nice loop from there all the way to Lock 3 and back, with dozens of shopping and eating options along the way to distract us. South Howard being a pedestrian-only corridor allows the explorer to gather and relax, and the restaurants to double their outdoor seating capacity for those of us who still prefer to take our meals outside. thedevilstrip.com

If walking isn’t an option due to the weather, you can make almost the same trip using the electric trolley which makes a loop from Northside, down Main Street over to Bowery then turning north on Quaker. That street was also extended to run parallel to Howard, almost in the original footprint of old Canal Street.

Unlike South Howard, Quaker is open to traffic, making it easy for deliveries or pickups.

Of course, the crown jewel of this project was the new Flatiron Building, known as the Flatiron II. The original stood where the old metal and glass PNC tower is now, so the planners put it at the “Y” intersection of Bowery, St. Howard and Quaker instead. Thanks to the Americana Revival trends of the 2030s, the new one looks almost exactly like the original though.

The first Flation was built in 1907

by Mahlon H. Long and Howard H. Taylor in the footprint of their wooden frame Triangle Building. The building was designed by architects Charles Henry & Son. The first floor was occupied by the Long & Taylor Cigar shop and the upper floors by other offices and businesses. The

old Flatiron was home to doctors, lawyers, jewelers, hat shops, candy stores and barbers. It was even the location for the Akron Bar Association for a time.

The urban renewal movement of the 1960’s brought the Flatiron down and tore up South Howard Street to make way for Cascade Plaza. For decades, its loss was symbolic of the destruction of old Akron and the “good old days.”

We who never saw old South Howard Street or the Flatiron still mourned their loss decades later. For those of us born after the Rubber Age who have mostly known decades of stagnation, the Flatiron represented an Akron we wished to see again.

My favorite painting in the People’s Art Museum of Akron is still Raphael Gleitman’s “Winter Evening,’ a cheerful depiction of downtown in the 1930s.

Usually I write about buildings that have been around much longer than the Flatiron II, but it seemed appropriate to highlight it on its 20th birthday, when the city is celebrating the success of its last and most audacious revitalization project.

The Flatiron II is mostly a residence, with just the ground and basement levels available for retail. The second through fifth floors contain midrange apartments and the sixth floor is home to two luxury apartments.

Since the Flatiron II was based on the original, it isn’t very tall. But it is a landmark already.

Today the retail offerings are Cascade Candies, Akro Hair and one of Norka Beverage’s soda and milkshake counters. It is also home to a hat shop like its predecessor. The beloved 142 year old Hatterie triumphantly returned to South Howard Street when it moved to the Flatiron from Chapel Hill in 2035. That historic event was particularly pleasing for this hat enthusiast. Of course, the basement is where the New Rathskeller restaurant is located. The Rathskeller is one of Akron’s favorite microbreweries and the area’s only German restaurant.

Ironically, the reconstruction of South Howard St. and the Flatiron II took down most of Cascade Plaza which in turn had destroyed the original streets and buildings. It is almost poetic that the new anchor of the

district, the Flatiron II, would not only be a reconstruction of a landmark the city lost, but that it would become home to businesses like The Hatterie that have weathered all of Akron’s storms, and the New Rathskeller, which are resurrections from another time.

For someone like myself who is interested in Akron’s past and its future, the Flatiron II and the return of Howard St. is a dream come true.

I happily eat my words of twenty years ago about the project, and look forward to spending many more years enjoying the district. // Charlotte Gintert is a retired archaeologist who has been covering Akron’s architectural history for The Devil Strip for over 30 years.

She never tires of digging through Akron’s past. She also still manages to get out with her cameras. You can check out her photos at www. capturedglimpses.com. If you still use Instagram, you can follow her @capturedglimpses.

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Professional Bowling is Back in Akron After Departing 50 Years Ago

by Dave Daly

Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021.

These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

When major league baseball’s popularity declined and nearly folded 25 years ago, it was not obvious to me or other sportswriters what would fill the void. Football was already technically more popular than baseball, and basketball was definitely ascending. So it was surprising, to say the least, when the bowling alley became the preferred venue for the princes and paupers of society to show up and cheer on their favorite athlete.

You youngsters may not even remember The Great Demise, as we used to refer to baseball’s dramatic fall into near obscurity. By the late teens, attendance was down and minor league teams were folding faster than local newspapers. In the early ’20s, after the great pandemic

further damaged the brand, it came to light that the World Series had been rigged for the last 50 years and almost nothing could stop that ship from sinking. Cue “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

Fortunately, we live in a world filled with baseball fans! By moving minor league teams international to baseball hotzones, the MLB was able to position itself in the global market.

And now, with major league teams following suit, the game has truly gone worldwide. Before we know it, there will be a team on the moon.

With baseball at its lowest point stateside, a void was created that needed to be filled. Interestingly enough, a sport relegated to older men with paunches would rise to the occasion. Why? How? Wait, did you say bowling? These were all questions I asked back in the ’20s when things were unfolding before my very eyes.

Maybe it was the pandemic, or the end specifically. People wanted to get out and do something as a group. Bowling is the sort of sport

families and friends can do together, regardless of experience or expertise.

Also, bowling and libations go hand and hand. Perhaps another driving factor was the conversion of oldschool alleys into hybrid spaces that offered better food, entertainment and a keen social setting for youngsters. It didn’t hurt that popularity in football plummeted as the evidence of severe injury became harder to ignore.

relocated to Seattle. Even with the PBA’s departure, Northeast Ohio has always had a decent bowling culture. Back in the teens, you could catch young folks out at some of the more chic establishments flirting, drinking and perfecting their game.

Its ascendance to global sports dominance in the ’30s and ’40s also nicely coincided with Akron’s return to relevance as a city and cultural center.

Another contributing factor, at least financially, was the partnership between the Professional Bowling Association (PBA) and various Esport leagues. Competitive gaming was and still is huge around the world. Offering up alleys for Esport competitions during national and international tournaments brought the PBA a lot of revenue. Gamers also got burned out after competitions and needed a way to release their energy. Throwing a heavy ball at pieces of wood was exactly what the doctor ordered. Regardless, bowling rose in popularity like a phoenix from the ashes, and Ohio was ready.

That is why it was fitting when Mr. LeBron James, the King himself, became the majority owner of the PBA, decided to once again move the headquarters back to the city where it all began. As it turned out, there was a space available downtown that would be perfect with a little elbow grease and retrofitting.

Akron has a rich history with the sport. After its formation during a meeting in a Syracuse, NY, hotel, the PBA was headquartered in Akron from 1958 to 2000, when it was purchased by another party and

When the Rubber Ducks, Akron’s now-defunct minor league baseball team, played their last home game in August of 2026, it was unclear what would become of their home field, Canal Park. The park was maintained and open to the public. Right field became a dog park. Concerts came and went. One year they flooded a section for ice-skating after a fire in Lock 3 closed the rink down. That didn’t go so well.

James saw an opportunity to invest

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in the stadium and create both offices and competitive spaces for tournaments. Although it took several years longer to secure financing, design and build, the final product is here and it is impressive, to say the least.

“The whole Trump era really turned me off to golf,” James reminisced during the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

“I was looking for a sport that offered both concentration and finesse that was a little easier on the knees. Bowling is what I found,” he continued. “I started researching and learned the PBA originated in Akron. I knew what I had to do.”

He did something, alright.

The PBA Canal Park facilities are gorgeous. They spared no expense and went right for the strike, creating a world-class competitive space.

Remnants of the past remain too.

They designed the lanes to fit where the old field was and the layout is still the same as the sandlot of yesteryear.

Stadium seating still remains and fans can watch multiple games at once sipping on a beverage while munching on some popcorn. A retractable ceiling allows for outdoor play during the warmer months.

Perhaps the greatest innovation in traditional 10-pin bowling was realizing it could be played outside like bocce and, well...lawn bowling!

Players have even learned to adjust their stance and release for the elements.

James is committed to continuing the trends already developing in the sport over the last two decades. “I didn’t realize how diverse the sport had gotten until I became involved.

The building blocks for creating a sport that is representative to all were already laid. I just jumped on board and ran with it.”

All hail The King for giving Canal Park a new lease on life as a professional sports venue. Stay tuned for next week’s piece folks. If bowling hasn’t got you excited, I’ll be talking to professional Parkour champ Doug Doogey about the 2050 finals coming to Akron and how he anticipates the competition will go!

Be well, Dave Daly // Dave Daly is a sports contributor and nature aficionado for The Devil Strip. If he’s not at the alley or on a trail, best check the theater for a Harry Dean Stanton film festival.

An in-depth look at an Charea Harris exhibition: My bedside table

by Charlee Harris Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021.

These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

C

harea Harris is most often described as quiet and shy.

“I come from a large family of extrovert artists who speak their mind,” she says.

Charea, whose great-grandmother Jacqueline Harris opened the first fine art gallery in Kenmore, comes from a long line of artists and creatives.

“When you grow up around so many artists it can be difficult to find your lane creatively and be your person outside your family’s reputation,” Charea says.

To find her place artistically, Charea began documenting different aspects of her life she felt made her unique.

“I unconsciously started this project when I was five years old. I received my first camera at the Kenmore Community Center reopening and started taking pictures of my room.”

“After going through my childhood camera, I realized that I had documented most of the major changes to the Kenmore neighborhood just from taking photos of my room, and more specifically, my bedside table, which is what I photographed the most because I was drawn to the way the light illuminated the glass,” she says.

In 2026, Kenmore received state funding to upgrade its community center, adding a state-of-the-art photography studio and arts center.

The Incorvia Center for the Arts was named after longtime community center supervisor Alice Incorvia.

Alice spent years taking the lead in bringing art programs to the Kenmore Community Center and spreading art through the community with several art installations on Kenmore Boulevard.

Akron’s Community-Owned Magazine

“I want my legacy at the Kenmore Community Center to be that I worked really hard to provide the amazing people of Kenmore — and all of Akron and beyond — fun, quality programs, art classes, summer camps and special events at affordable prices” says Alice Incorvia.

the action on the Boulevard. The Container Village took just two years to complete and comes equipped with a gym and community garden.

“My husband and I always wanted to retire but stay close to the action of the city,” says Tina Boyes, who after serving two terms as Akron’s mayor also purchased a container home.

“We sit on our patio and just listen to the buskers fill the air with beautiful music.”

Tina was raised in Kenmore and spent 25 years assisting in its revitalization, serving as the executive director of the Kenmore Neighborhood Alliance and creating building guidelines and community incentives.

After taking photography classes conducted by photographer and long time Kenmore resident Dan Rowland at the community center for most of her youth, Charea began to volunteer at the Kim Jacobs Breast Cancer Resource Center, working in the food pantry and taking photos at local events.

Tina and many other longtime residents are excited about the “My Bedside Table” exhibition. Walking through the show, you cannot help but feel like you are reading someone’s diary. It feels very personal like you’re reviewing something that is supposed to be private. It’s a perfectly maintained visual timeline and personal journal.

“The center changed so much that year. The organization was able to purchase the building and add housing and rehabilitation services.

2036 was truly an exciting time to live in Kenmore,” she recalls.

“I realized that what makes me unique is my journey and that although I can be soft-spoken and shy, my photography speaks volumes and tells my story.”

2036 was also the year in which five of the areas recording studios united to form an independent artists’ cohort geared toward the advancement of local independent arts. With the help of the Kenmore Neighborhood Alliance and The Summit FM, they kicked off the first Moon Breakers International Music Festival. The festival was the first of its kind, bringing lots of international acts to Kenmore, many of whom stayed to take advantage of the cohort and community geared towards independent artists.

“After that first festival, the Boulevard completely changed. Thai Soul Fusion Grill expanded into a brewery and we added a fine dining restaurant down the street. Kenmore Komics became a comic book museum and Marvel’s official movie screening location,” Charea recounts.

In 2040, after becoming the creative director of her families contemporary art gallery, Charea purchased her first home in the Container Village, a small complex of prefabricated shipping container homes designed to be eco and energy-efficient. The complex provided affordable options for longtime residents that want to downsize in style and stay close to

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The exhibition features large scale photographic images taken with several different camera methods ranging from smartphones to a Canon DSLR. These images were taken over the last 30 years and detail not only the changes in Charea’s life but also her community. Each image is from a different year and spotlight different items on Charea’s bedside table, which remains the same throughout the years.

“What started as just test shooting in my room has become the gateway to me finding my creative identity separate from my family, but interestingly, the bedside table never changing acts as a subtle reminder that my family will be there to support me in this journey.”

“My Bedside Table” will be on view from April 10-28 2050 at the Akron Art Museum. // Charlee Harris was born and raised in Akron, Ohio. She loves her family, her community and has a passion for creative expression. As an avid arts advocate, she is the creative director for the East Ave. Flea Market and an AmeriCorps VISTA at the Kenmore Neighborhood Alliance.

The Devil Strip

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The Green City On A Hill: A 25 Year Review

by Eliza Vild

Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021.

These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

I

n the United Nations Sustainable Development Report, Akron was named the most edible city and the fifth most sustainable city in the United States. From the Rubber City, to a hollowed out city with horrendous health disparities to the green city on the hill, how did Akron get here?

According to former Akron mayor and current HUD Director, Valerie Olamina, “It has been a series of grassroots organizing and policy changes that started generations ago but can be first understood in the passage of the Urban Agriculture Ordinance in 2025. It came on the heels of the 2020’s race riots and it forced the city to update an outdated city planning system. Neighbor-led feedback with green infrastructure that included walkable streets and public spaces designed with people and the planet in mind is what ultimately led to the growth of the then dying city. Director Olamina chuckles and adds, “Of course that only really began to happen once Lily Madrone took office and named me head of the Office of Integrated Development.”

In 2025, Akron’s local food scene consisted of 80 food pantries, 75 community gardens, five public food forests, four farmers’ markets, five urban farms, two community production kitchens and eight farm to table restaurants. Much of Akron was a vacant shell from 1925-2025, marking a century of planning decisions that hollowed out the urban core, creating ghettos that by 2025 had created some of the country’s

worst health disparities. These health disparities were caused by one of the largest income gaps in the country directly resulting from racist planning practices. These enforced toxic building practices and made local, healthy, fresh food scarce in Summit Lake, University Park, Sherbondy Hill, West Akron and East Akron.

Now, fresh free food is made available on every city block. Food pantries are no longer needed, and 80% of public spaces have edible or native landscaping, making the city into a large food forest. We have woven urban farms, wildlife and grazing corridors throughout the city.

Our neighborhood business districts are thriving, and 95% of food markets and restaurants are directly farm to table. Local businesses are now 89% of the local workforce with 70% of those businesses focused on local food.

Former Councilman and Current Executive Director of Agape Community Development Cooperative, Ben Atreidis states, “In 2025 we still had much of the same council members and mayor that we had since the Trump presidency, so corporate welfare, environmental degradation and unemployment were just considered good business and development practices back then.

Elected and appointed officials had a difficult time understanding the consequences of these actions.”

A series of policy wins and losses were the catalyst for change.

Starting in 2025, Urban Agriculture Ordinance got progressive grassroots organizations started down the path towards Akron becoming a green city on the hill. The legislation revised planning codes to include urban agriculture corridors. In 2027 grassroot groups lost the fight to create a regulatory body around the Akron Food Charter.

But shortly after, organizers passed the 2028 Water Runoff Incentive which gave tax incentives to residents and businesses that had onsite runoff water management. This limited the amount of water going into the sewers. In 2029, Akron Food Hub was formed in the city, creating a grassroots space to train local food producers and growers as well as provide a large production kitchen.

In 2027, California’s crops that were the country’s primary food source failed due to the drought that has made California into a wasteland today. Nationally, the Proud Boys

attempted their second facist coup in 2028, and in 2029 gas and oil prices skyrocketed with a depletion of federal reserves and a lack of green infrastructure.

So in 2030, a number of grassroots organizers ran on a progressive ticket for Akron mayor and city Council. Our ticket’s main argument was that we had to go with localizing our economy, which would prioritize Akron’s people and Akron’s environment since we could no longer depend on the federal government or large corporations.

This happened to coincide with the charter amendment that limited council and the mayor to two terms.

We won six city council seats with three of those seats belonging to people under the age of 40. I was also the first transperson elected in Akron. We also elected our first female mayor, Lilith Madrone. Mayor Madrone immediately appointed Valerie Olamina and we began to see the changes we so desperately needed.

HUD Director Olamina states that changing of the old guard, along with ward feed-back technology established in 2032 changed how local legislators saw food policy.

Grassroots organizers started using phrases like, “We must GROW the garden of Eden to return” and “Keep Akron shady” to influence legislators.

Akron City Council passed legislation to create areas throughout the city zoned for urban agriculture that were all connected via edible parks, as well as LEED certified and mixed income apartment buildings. The legislation also included business districts with apartments above shops, open air seating, venues and markets, which allowed more home businesses and vegetable stands. Food truck pods

were created in areas that once lacked neighborhood amenities.

These infrastructure plans began in 2034 and broke ground in 2036. By 2038, when Valerie Olamina became Akron’s first African American mayor, infrastructure for Akron’s rapid population growth began. Akron has tripled in size between 20402050. This was in large part due to Akron’s access to fresh water and the new administration’s commitment to developing the city with food and housing that were not only accessible, but prioritized the health of all residents.

Mayor Olamina appointed Ms. Little Wolf to Head of Integrated Development once in office. Ms Little Wolf is the first Native American in charge of a city department and had a fresh take on the city’s sustainability goals introducing city wide composting in 2040 and grazing corridors in 2043, allowing wildlife and cattle pasture within the city. In 2045 she began working with the Cuyahoga Valley National Park in reintroducing the buffalo to these grazing corridors and the park. In 2047 she began annexing suburban land for mass grain production to strengthen our local food system.

Nadia Moss, mother of two, owner of The People’s Grocery on Howard Street and generational resident of the Black Jazz District and Cascade Valley, is grateful for the changes in the city’s development practices.

“My people were dying,” she states.

“Babies couldn’t even make it in this city because of the lack of nutrition throughout a mother’s life when I was a kid. Our neighborhoods were disinvested, eminent domained, gutted, pumped full of drugs and guns. Then in the 2010s or so they tried to sell our lands off to the highest bidders without our say.

Our people had no land and were dying much younger than white folks. No one wanted to connect it to food and land until we started electing progressives and putting forward term limits. Now we’ve had two female mayors and two African American Mayors and our city is thriving.”

really suffers much from high blood pressure and our babies are healthy.

And you know, when people started flooding here from the west coast, my mother and grandmother were terrified they would get pushed out like past generations, but Mayor Olamina fought hard for us. And now look at us! The average age expectancy is 90. Many of us own our own businesses or work for a small business and our babies are thriving.

I hope that we continue in this direction. Akron has become a leader not just in Ohio but throughout the world.” // Beth Vild, the COO and Director of programming at The Big Love Network, Akron’s only environmental health equity organization, and the Founder of Wild Woman Designs and Consulting, creating food forests throughout Akron. Beth began community organizing 19 years ago in a progressive home in a sea of white supremacy in Tuscarawas County.

Moss’s eyes lit up as she described her kid’s experience growing up in Akron, which differed from hers.

“My kids and I can walk down the street for our lunch. My people have their own businesses and no one

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Nightlight Commits to a “Year of Akron Cinema”

by Ken Evans

Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021.

These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

Starting in July, The Nightlight Cinema is committing to a year of showing only movies filmed or produced in Akron or Summit County at its main downtown Akron theater. The cinema nonprofit will also offer additional showings of local films across its four other theaters including the Nightlight Drive-In at Portage Lakes. This commitment represents over five hundred shows across five theaters and signals a new era for the maturing and innovative film community in Akron, Ohio.

“We have been working to build a community around film in Akron since 2014 and this is a way for us to honor that commitment,” says Moby Darin, Director of The Nightlight Cinema. “We have so much talent here in Akron and so many amazing creators that we decided to commit to this year as a way to showcase and celebrate our community.”

Over the past fifteen years, the quality and number of films produced

in Akron have grown exponentially.

For example, according to AkronSummit County Public Library records, in 2035 just ten films created in Akron reached international audiences. However, just last year in 2049 the area released 202 films to theaters around the world.

According to actor Zach De Nardi, the creator of Akron’s Blanket Fort Media, “The idea that Akron could be a center of film production would have seemed absurd even just twenty years ago.”

But that is all different now.

The catalyst for this change occurred after the almost complete collapse of the Hollywood-based film industry following the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. As audiences increasingly switched to home streaming services, studios and theatres began to struggle.

“The whole industry tanked in 2028 and everyone had to change what they were doing,” says De Nardi.

The result of this downturn was a Hollywood that took fewer risks and invested in fewer new ideas.

Critics increasingly bemoaned the play-it-safe attitude that resulted in bland uninspired films motivated by

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profit rather than the quality of their storytelling.

While this has always been a criticism leveled against Hollywood, most industry professionals agree the 2030s may have been the worst decade in cinema history. “The release of Grown Ups 14 was a particularly dark day for movie lovers,’’ De Nardi says exasperated.

In this vacuum, local filmmakers started to fill the gap. Not only did the audience get more creative content from local productions but they also got more films told from an Akron perspective.

“Over the past decade the most popular films at the Nightlight have been about Akron, our struggles, our triumphs, our eccentricities,” says Darin.

Furthering this translation were technological advances that allowed small teams of creators to make blockbuster caliber films. Much in the same way that new technologies changed who could produce music in the 2010s.

“Many of Akron’s most prominent filmmakers started out using their cell phones to make Tik Tok and YouTube videos. What their parents saw as goofing off became careers and meaningful art for many,” says De Nardi With obstacles removed, a renaissance has occurred in Akron and other cities throughout the Midwest. Small, locally based teams could now execute projects that used to take millions of dollars and hundreds of people. This change has not only brought a new industry to Akron but a new way of sharing the city with the world.

Most of all though, according to Darin, this change created more community around film in Akron.

“When you can have the actual people that made the film discuss it before or after the showing, audiences get a deeper and more communal experience,” Darin says. ““Ultimately, that is why the Nightlight was created, to bring Akron together around a shared appreciation of film,” says Darin.

Darin explained the Year of Akron Cinema will share a whole range of films from established companies to amateur first-time creators and will feature a combination of old and new productions. “This year is not

just about showing local movies but showcasing what this community can do when it comes together and creates.”

The Year of Akron Cinema will open with a gala at the Nightlight’s downtown location on Friday, July 1st for Nightlight members. In addition to food and drink the evening will also showcase film shorts by University of Akron film students.

For July, the Nightlight will premiere four new films.

July 2nd to July 15th “Roselawn,” produced by Blanket Fort Media and based on the work of local poet Brooke Horne explores the lives of working-class families trying to overcome poverty and racism in Akron during the housing and eviction crisis of the early twenty-first century.

“Caucho,” from Wingfoot Light and Magic, tells the story of a giant oozing and tentacled rubber monster that tries to destroy Akron. Set in the late 1970s, “Caucho” is inspired by the monster movies of the 1950s and seeks to show what Akron lost as economic priorities changed.

July 16th to July 31st “Akron Made,” is a documentary from the Potier Sisters, highlighting the history of Akron’s economic revival in the 2030s as the city invested in green manufacturing, safe nuclear energy, airship production and creative placemaking.

“The Barberton Horrors Vol. 1” from Rubber Ball Productions and based on the local comic book series of the same name. Paying homage to horror classics, the film centers around a group of ninth-graders trying to stop a murderous child possessed by a demon after he dons an old Sun Rubber Co. Mickey Mouse Gas Mask. // Ken Evans finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home.

“Over the past decade the most popular films at the Nightlight have been about Akron, our struggles, our triumphs, our eccentricities,”

“Guilt-Free” Beer, How can you say no?

by Emily Anderson Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021. These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

Tiger Street Cafe has been steadily gaining popularity since it opened its doors last summer in the heart of Akron’s downtown. If you haven’t had the pleasure of visiting yet, don’t let the humble storefront deceive you - this place changes everything you thought you knew about beer.

Inside Tiger Street Cafe you can enjoy one of their six rotating house beers on draft, or try one of their original kombuchas.

They serve a quaint selection of energy bars and vitamin tonics something for everyone. The space is simple and open, with room for live performances and dancing.

The most popular beer at the cafe is a lager called Take it Easy. It’s intended to introduce the public to Tiger Street’s beers and has a very traditional flavor. Other beers

currently on tap include a “Funky Farmhouse Ale” brewed with locally grown wheatgrass, a “Roasty Toasty Porter” that comes with a shot of house espresso on the side, and a purple strawberry wheat beer called “Garden Party.”

Alex Brown, the owner of Tiger Street Cafe, is a biomedical engineer. They worked in a research laboratory that focused on liver tissue regeneration for 10 years before deciding to switch gears and focus on their true calling: brewing beer full time.

Alex’s journey to becoming a brewer was one of curiosity and experimentation. “My parents got way into cooking when they had to quarantine together in 2020.

We were always eating exotic, adventurous dishes in our house after that. My dad loved kombucha and kimchi, and my mom was always pickling things in the fridge.” A passion for cooking and fermentation turned to a passion for homebrewing for Alex in college. After graduation, they came to a dilemma.

Alex tells us, “When I started working in the liver lab and seeing the effects of alcohol first hand, I started

Akron’s Community-Owned Magazine

questioning the morality of brewing and getting my friends drunk. I made it my mission to find a way around this issue.”

And so they did. With the help of a team of Ph.D. candidates, Alex has developed a beer that has far less harmful effects on your liver and brain than other alcoholic beverages.

The cafe is named after the place where their original research lab was located, Tiger Street.

Is it still beer? “Technically yes,” Alex says, “It’s still made with barley, hops, yeast, and water. It’s still beer.”

All of the beers brewed at Tiger Street are made with the addition of regenerative molecules that combat the harmful effects that alcohol has on the liver and brain - biotechnology that Alex helped to develop themself.

It’s also full of electrolytes, mood stabilizers and vitamins.

Tiger Street Beers still get you drunk, but they don’t give you a physical or mental hangover the next day.

Compared to traditional beers, preliminary studies show that Alex’s beers are likely to be 75% less damaging to liver tissue over time,

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and 40% less damaging to brain function over time.

Tiger Street is one of just six other beer breweries in Akron. During the Brewery Boom of the ‘10s, Akron was home to over 30 breweries.

While the last 30 years have seen unprecedented popularity in sobriety from alcohol, it seems that this brewery - with it’s combination of nonalcoholic options and less damaging beers - is just what we were missing in Akron.

Maybe with these new developments in biomedical technology and renewed public interest in drinking, wte’ll see a few more popping up in the near future.

You can Get Tiger Street Cafe’s Take it Easy Lager and Tiger Stripes Kombucha in most of our area grocery centers. The cafe is open every evening. Visit their website to see upcoming events or to reserve the space. // Emily Anderson still has stouts from 2020 in her basement

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Structural ghosts shed light on Akron’s past

by Karla Tipton Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021.

These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

T

he school rises up in a shimmering display of light, yet it’s grounded in memories as solid as cornerstones.

The holographic installation of Goodyear Middle School was constructed by holo-artist Sami Stoneman. It’s located at the property where the Rubber Bowl sat until it was cleared in 2018. Stoneman’s creation is as solid as his name, though his work is made of light.

“When I went there, it was one of Akron’s last remaining schools built with an architectural design style that married practicality with beauty,” said Sami, who attended the school from 2007 until 2010. Sami’s class was the final middle school graduating class before it was temporarily used to house the elementary school students displaced when Seiberling Elementary closed.

Decommissioned in 2017, Goodyear Middle School was originally known as East High School and was built in 1918.

Although the holographic installation is not located on its original site — which through the years has been the location of an auto mall, an office complex, and now a helio-rideshare lot from which people pool on aerial rides to travel to their jobs — former students describe the building made of light as uncanny in its penchant for calling forth memories of childhood.

“The classroom felt just as it had when I attended Mrs. Tuchman’s English class,” says Hayley Renner, 64, who was a student in the early ‘00s. “Shivers went up my spine.”

The holo-construction, which earns a place in the Guinness Digital Guide as the largest hologram ever built, is augmented with classroom audio and visuals of students and teachers chatting before class, lecturing and then being dismissed by an old timey sounding bell.

“I remember the sound of that bell like it was yesterday,” says Jeremy Wiseman, 72, who attended in

the early 1990s. He has visited the installation twice for the hour-long tour around the perimeter and inside the holo-constructed classroom and cafeteria.

“It really brings it alive,” said Eillian Talib, 23. “Kids having to walk to school, or take a ground-bus. Then they had to spend the whole day there. It’s sort of wild to think about.”

The contrast between now and then couldn’t be more stark. Ninety percent of classrooms in the mid-21st century are virtual. Teaching personas are generated by artificial technology based on composites of psyche-scans donated by distinguished educators from the past two decades. The idea of a flesh-and-blood teacher instructing at one location for many hours of the day now seems archaic and inefficient.

The concept of a virtual reality enclosure was first imagined by science fiction writers a hundred years ago, beginning with a short story by Ray Bradbury in 1950. The technology became a reality in 2030 with the first anime theme park, Wyden’s Forest in Tokyo, built entirely of laser-generated matter, beams and fields.

What inspired Sami Stoneman to bring the school back from the dead?

high school because of Covid-19 school closures. After earning his undergraduate degree, he was awarded a post-graduate fellowship at the BIT, where holography was originally developed.

Pandemic struck again in the second year of his graduate studies, and he had to return home after member EU countries closed borders when a deadly Covid-21 variant surfaced in Poland in 2022. Other countries followed suit, and a repeat of the 2020 pandemic was avoided, but left international students in the lurch.

These interruptions in his education and the social distancing required would impact Stoneman’s work for the rest of his life.

“Life changed for me while I went there,” he said. “My dad died my first year of middle school. I realized I didn’t identify with the gender that was forced on me. And an amazing teacher, Judith Griffiths, helped me learn to channel my pain through art.

That’s when I was first drawn to the light.”

“The whole pandemic experience made me rethink what I wanted to accomplish with my art. So much of what we all went through at that time was experienced alone. Whether it was music, video or doing a virtual tour of a museum, it was mostly devoid of the influence of our peers,” he said. “I wanted my work to be fully experienced on a very personal, very subjective level.”

Sami is talking about holograms, of course, but there’s a little bit of heaven present in his work, as well.

“I went from believing in nothing, to believing in the transcendence of art.”

Sami returned to the U.S. and earned advanced degrees in visual media and architectural design at the University of Florida.

After his middle school years, Sami’s mother remarried and the family relocated to Miami, Florida. In high school, he gravitated to both the sciences and the arts, and was top of his class in both.

In his senior year, he scored an international scholarship to study physics and electrical engineering at the Berlin Institute of Technology (BIT), but was forced to work remotely for his final year of

Akron’s Community-Owned Magazine

He caught the imagination of Roy Bezos, CEO of Amazon-Disney, Inc., with his proposal for a holotheme park in Orlando. The park merged cutting edge light tech with big concept storylines that were eventually spun off into billion-dollar movie franchises, “Moon Beserkers” and “Johnny, Seeds of Dark.”

place where my life was changed, Goodyear Middle School. My life was in chaos and might have gone down a darker path if it wasn’t for the influence of my art teacher.”

The idea of recreating the place where his life changed forever wouldn’t let him go. At age 50, Sami used the considerable royalties he had made through his association with Amazon-Disney, and returned to his hometown in 2045 to begin work on the project.

“I wanted to show how a person’s life can change because of those small moments, when words imparted by a caring teacher can actually matter,” he said. “Knowledge used to be shared in brick-and-mortar institutions, before schools were replaced by online learning centers and alternative teaching pods.

“History teaches us to honor our roots,” he said. “I wanted Akron to remember its urban beginnings, when teachers were human, and not AI-bots, and when ideas were founded in truth rather than software.” // A native of Barberton, Karla Tipton earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Kent State University and spent 14 years as a staff reporter and editor at the Antelope Valley Press in California before returning home. She is the author of two time travel romantic fantasy novels.

She keeps busy writing, working in the IT field, playing rock guitar, photographing urban settings and enjoying the local arts and music scene.

But Sami wanted his creations to do more than entertain.

“I became obsessed with the

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Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful? Imagining Downtown Akron in 2050

by Jennifer Kidd Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021.

These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

I

’m making my way down the music corridor to Glendale for the monthly Akron Symphony performance on the steps. I find myself thinking about how lucky we are that after the pandemic the arts came back in such a strong way. It became so clear to all of us that the arts are where we turn for comfort, for inspiration, for community.

As this area grew in size and became what we now call the music corridor, everything nearby began to sound different. It sounds like children learning and playing music. It sounds like beautiful voices echoing through the buildings and around the trees until they make their way to your ears. It sounds like friends briskly walking arm in arm to the next venue so they don’t miss the upcoming act. It sounds like pianos and violins and trumpets and drums. It sounds like old friends catching up as they gather for a meal before an outdoor performance. It sounds like laughter.

It sounds alive.

I listen closely and I hear the students practicing inside of The Open Tone Music School. I love it when they leave the windows open. I can’t help but think of the music being created by the kids and how it starts with one small note and grows for years to come. It is such a joy to see former students teaching the next generations. The students must be preparing their sets for this year’s International Rubber City Jazz and Blues Fest. Every year of Jazz Fest has been wildly successful, bringing in legends from all over the world. This year’s headliner is none other than Teagan Brown making her big return home.

While walking past the LeGrair Vocal Academy, I pause to listen. My advice is always pause to listen. World class vocalists reside here. The boom in music education throughout the past 30 years in Akron has been such a gift. I will never cease to be amazed at the amount of talent that comes from here and comes home here.

I head south and run into an old friend standing outside the bookshop. There are always old friends at the bookshop. I stop in the record store to say hi and see what the new releases are. I buy a vinyl re-issue of “Where in The Hell is Akron, Oh?” I run into the small

Akron’s Community-Owned Magazine

grocery to grab a drink and some fresh fruit. I pick up some flowers for another friend on the way out. I pass the outdoor tables and hear laughter and warmth. I pass the picnic area and see kids playing and frolicking while their families gather. All of this in downtown.

I look up and scope out the marquee to see what is coming up at the EarthQuaker Pavilion. EarthQuaker Devices has never shied away from bringing a good time to Akron.

Their pavilion grand opening giant balloon parade catapulted the annual EarthQuaker Day to permanent nextlevel status.

I walk through the venue alley and hear “1-2, 1-2, let’s try that again” as sound checks take place. The music fans gather up front and the tour vans all line up around back. Who ever thought that venue hopping could be a thing here?

Next weekend is the North Hill International Music Festival. What started off as a small festival of world music put together by the Himalayan Music Academy has grown into something beyond our wildest dreams. Ten stages of performers and artists from all over the world will be stretching from North Hill down to the Glendale Community Steps. You can see an overview of the

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pop-up restaurants, shops, theater performances and other activities online. Bring your appetite. Hands down, the best food of the year.

I encourage you to pause and listen and imagine what you’d like to hear 30 years from now in 2080. Imagine where you’d like to hear it and who you’d like to hear it with. Imagine the kids of today picking up their first instrument and what that will look like in 30 years. Imagine that future.

It’s all possible.

The title for Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful? is taken from a 1982 album and song by Akron legends The Waitresses. // Jenn Kidd is a multimedia artist and creative consultant who spends a lot of time thinking about the future of downtown Akron. She currently serves as the Creative Director of the Historic Arts District and General Manager of Musica. She asks that you support artists voraciously when things return to normal.

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An Interview with Ave Hummings, 2050 student commencement speaker for Akron’s School of Life & Impact.

by EbaNee Bond Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021.

These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

I

n 2021, analysis after analysis reported that the continual mistreatment of humans and resources would produce disastrous outcomes that would lead to society collapsing on itself. By the early half of the 2030s, 37% of the workforce was walking off their jobs, college enrollment had been decreasing by 11% annually for five years, public transportation couldn’t support the 45% increase in mobility needs for people who couldn’t drive their cars due to unaffordable gas prices and the price of food and water had increased 27%.

Fortunately, The School of Life & Impact (SLI) started preparing for this in 2025 right here in Akron, OH. I got the chance to sit down with Ave Humming, a student from The Akron School of Life & Impact’s recent 20th graduating class who also happens to be the daughter of one of the founders.

EbaNee Bond: Tell us about how The School of Life & Impact got started.

Ave Humming: My parents and the other Co-Founders of The School

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of Life & Impact were so passionate about creating more sustainable relationships with each other and Mother Earth. They didn’t like to see each other muddling their potential and were just so thirsty to do something different. They started with learning about different facets of personal and community development and critically defining what community meant to them. For them, community not only meant having shared values but focused on the idea that you couldn’t separate community from proximity. So, they began with investing in a block and buying every property on it, including a church and school building.

As they began to build culture on their block, more and more people wanted to be a part of and buy into the community. That’s when they realized that they needed a process for including outsiders and that’s where The School of Life & Impact came into play.

They made it so that all new aspiring members had to go through a three year educational and experiential learning camp known as The School of Life & Impact. Upon completion of the camp, aspiring members had to then go before a council of founders and wise members in a week-long ritual ceremony where the council collectively decides if the member is in alignment with the vision, mission

and values of the community and are ready to be a contributing member.

Twenty-five years ago the coalition started with a block and their own education. Now, we have a whole neighborhood and eight different SLI campuses across the country. It’s really beautiful.

What is The Akron School of Life & Impact (ASLI) like?

At ASLI, no one majors in anything but the thing they want to explore and the impact they want to make locally, but with a global mindset.

Classes are more so discussions and project-based and are either hosted in the community centers or right in people’s living rooms. The only mandatory classes are on improving learning skills, isms, cultural phobias, trauma, breathing, personal finance, sociology, history, interpersonal skills and self-expression. Beyond that, we aren’t forced to learn anything but instead have agency in our own learning so we end up being more confident and proud.

How does the school operate and sustain itself?

Everyone in the collective agrees to a personal income cap at $200k/ yr. All additional income is invested back into research and development for the growth and expansion of the community. Anyone making less than $200k/year agrees to donate a small percentage of their monthly income. Also, the majority of profits

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from businesses started by those in the community go back into the community.

Tell us a little bit more about yourself, Ave, and what influence both the coalition and ASLI had on you.

I was born in Akron but I got to spend a lot of time in different places across the country growing up, kind of like army brats but instead of visiting different military bases, my bases were different School of Life and Impact campuses. Akron was just more like homebase. It was very cool.

Every campus had its own culture and unique impact based on its environment.

There couldn’t have been a better way for me to grow up since I kind of like to be detached from fitting in and enjoy taking in a lot of information from my environment to try to make sense of it all in a way that’s productive.

The coalition helped and were very intentional about building my identity and work ethic at a young age. I was raised to have a strong sense of contributing to the family and community in a way that was true to me but also filled a gap.

If you ask me to describe myself, I would say that I’m introverted but funny as hell. I’ve been described as brave and intense, which is quite thedevilstrip.com

contrary to what people think of as an introvert. I’m objective, insightful and very imaginative.

What do you most admire about your parents and the rest of the founding members?

The fact that they didn’t really care to get buy-in from outsiders nor did they care to do the ‘politically nice dance.’

They said that it took them a while to come to that point but the founders understood that if they had each other and a focus on the collective, that’s all they needed. I think it’s really swaggy that they knew to protect my generation from the future. I have so much respect for them and their prudence. People from all walks of life are craving something different and we have that.

You mention the word community a lot. What does the community look like?

It looks like love and healthy humanity in action. We play games, sing, dance and enjoy our free time together. Families eat together, which is important. We have thriving farms that members of the collective maintain to sustain our community.

On some level, we barter for goods and services and try the best we can to keep everything within the community.

Do you have friends who went the traditional educational route? If so, what do you think is different from their experience and the experience of The School of Life and Impact graduates?

We have a strong sense of dignity and worthiness, consideration and protection. We have a deep respect for ourselves and each other because we wholeheartedly embrace our differences. We want everyone to shine. It’s so beautiful. We all get to be bold artists and architects of our lives. If you shine, it makes it more natural for me to shine.

Also, nobody does celebrations like us!!! So much love and so much fun, so much!

What are you most proud of?

Two things. In our communities, there’s no such thing as poverty.

That’s not even for the birds in the sky or the lilies of the field. There’s no sense of competition for resources. To us, poverty is the absence of family or community. There’s collaboration to maximize resources. Nobody walks around like, “Am I tripping, or does this not make sense?”

The other thing that I’m particularly proud of is the execution of our

ARTS Aa Lw a rV E ds Special thanks to our 2021 Arts Alive Sponsors:

yearly convention, which always has a turn up weekend. Planning for that turn up weekend launched the #1 music education program in the country. This is not your ordinary music education program. People learn how to launch the most robust and unique music festivals. People learn the engineering, science, and research side of creating music technology, including anything that requires electricity or batteries, coding the software programs, designing of stages and structures, working with the city’s civil engineering department, etc. This production is inclusive of all skillsets, from science and technology to the arts and humanities. Everything from people working on the festival participants’ experience, marketing the event, handling legalities, to the actual performers, artists and more. People learn so many transferable skills while creating experiences of a lifetime from scratch.

No one has a major, but they have a desired impact to work toward… what was yours?

The question that I sought to answer is how might we better serve all of God’s creations, in all of their glory.

I conceptualized and implemented experiments using technology to provide highly personalized growth plans for not only individuals

but for our social and ecological environments as well.

At a traditional university, this might look like majoring in human potentialization with specialties in computer programming, homeostasis, cooperative sustainability and electromechanical engineering.

Sweet! What’s next for you now that you’ve graduated?

Continue to work to protect the future generation. Stay tuned for what I mean.

Any final words that you would like to leave us with?

Akron is now a lighthouse for the marginalized, the underestimated and the under potentialized. There are now other cities who have replicated our model and more and more people are dwelling in love.

There are not enough words or ways to pay homage to my parents and the School of Life & Impact team. I simply leave you with, thank you, because the future ain’t what it used to be. // EbaNee Bond is a podcaster, facilitator, creative, elevator and champion of fairness. She’s from Mansfield, OH and has lived in Akron for 12 years. She can be reached at EbaNeeBond@gmail.com.

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by Emily Anderson

Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021.

These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

L

ast month, Frankie Page was invited for the fourth time to attend the North American Biodiversity Summit (NABS) in Chicago. She attends every year as a representative of Akron, networking on behalf of us all with environmental advocates and engineers from around the world. The last three times she went, Akron was invited as a participating city but not nominated for any awards. This year was different. Frankie came home bearing two prestigious awards - Most Improved Neighborhood Biodiversity (West Hill) and Best New Pollination Program (Merriman Valley).

Frankie Page is the founder of Bright Green, an organization that has been spearheading green initiatives in Northeast Ohio since 2034.

Bright Green, in collaboration with the Akron-Canton Regional Food Bank and the local government, has made Akron a midwestern leader

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in lawn conversion and biodiversity protection. Allowing native plants to thrive where tidy grass once lived helps clean carbon dioxide from the air, supports a stable food chain in our ecosystem and protects the natural reproduction cycle of local plant and insect species.

Bright Green has been focusing on improving the biodiversity in West Hill specifically for the last five years, which is one reason why Frankie was so proud to accept the Most Improved Neighborhood Biodiversity award for this area.

The residents of West Hill work together to maintain a large community garden full of native edible plants and frequent educational workshops on how to sustainably collect and use food from them. Volunteers use donated space for keeping bees and community composting, and the use of toxic chemicals has been nearly eradicated.

According to Frankie, “West Hill has been on the cutting edge of community cooperation and sustainable living for the last 30 years. The hard work, unity and thoughtfulness displayed by the neighbors in this area should be an

inspiration to everyone. This award is for them - they earned it!”

Merriman Valley’s award was no small feat, either. “The Valley already has so much protected green space that we wanted to focus on another aspect of biodiversity in this neighborhood,” Frankie explains. “With enormous participation from the residents and local businesses, we increased the pollinator population by 30%!”

Pollinating insects, like bees and butterflies, feed off the pollen of flowers. Many native plants produce flowers, they’re just oftentimes kept cut short and never get the chance.

By allowing plants to grow and produce flowers, we provide insects with more food. This strengthens the food chain and the entire ecosystem.

In the Valley, Frankie and her team got local businesses to integrate pollinator-attracting plants into their landscaping, residential yards were allowed to grow wild around the edges, and five businesses started rooftop gardens.

While Bright Green has made great accomplishments this year, they’re eager to get back to work come spring. What do they have planned

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next? They’re turning their attention towards the Downtown area, which is cleaner than ever and ready to be utilized. “The lack of gas-powered vehicles on the streets these days has opened up so much more available space for growing,” says Frankie, who dreams of one day hosting the NABS in Akron.

D o 2 T i o

If you’re not already involved with the Bright Green movement here in Akron, you should be! Whether you have a small window box or acres of field to work with, there A are ways you can participate. Start p by building a compost system in “ your yard, volunteering with a nearby community garden or simply h choosing not to use toxic chemicals b on your property. To learn more about our native plants here in Akron, visit T the West Hill Local Garden or check i c out the Bright Green website. d // Emily Anderson’s favorite native species is Sambucus canadensis, also T i known as elderberry. t w p a o f a t

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thedevilstrip.com

Once Infamous Innerbelt Freeway Commemorates 10 Years as Park

by Ken Evans

Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021.

These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

M

ay 30th will mark the tenth anniversary of Akron’s Innerbelt Park.

Built in the footprint of Akron’s infamous Innerbelt Freeway project, it later became known as the “road to nowhere” after displacing hundreds of families and local businesses.

The park has since transformed into a city landmark and has been celebrated nationally for its innovative design and healing themes.

The origin of Innerbelt Park started in the late 1990s, just 12 years after the completion of Akron’s Innerbelt, when it became clear that the project’s original goals were not being achieved. After nearly twenty years of disuse, the Innerbelt Freeway was formally decommissioned in 2015, and community and city leaders came together and began proposing ideas

for the empty space.

Moira McCaulley, Akron’s Director for City Parks, explained some of the park’s history.

“Akron’s 2018 downtown plan proposed for the Innerbelt area to become a commercial and residential space once again. However, the rapid redevelopment of the University Park and Middlebury neighborhoods caused many development priorities to shift eastward, leaving the Innerbelt as a consistent low-priority project for the city government.”

Moria explained that parks had long been called for in the space and some early attempts were made to show the potential of the area.

“One attempt was by the League of Creative Interventionists, who hosted a 500 person dinner at one long table in the middle of the roadway in order to ask residents what they wanted to see happen to the Innerbelt. Out of that project grew the Innerbelt National Forest project and a later park called Towpath Landing.”

The idea was popular and the Towpath Landing was expanded twice over the next decade.

Akron’s Community-Owned Magazine

The late 2020s brought boom times for Akron as the region redeveloped, focusing on green manufacturing, airship development, central shipping hubs and a surprisingly robust media industry. However, this progress left out the Innerbelt Freeway, leaving the roadway to fall into disrepair. Moira noted that while the Innerbelt did become a favorite destination for photographers who loved to contrast the crumbling roadway with the everimproving downtown backdrop, the area mostly, “became an unwelcome reminder of Akron’s past mistakes.”

Over the next decade, calls for its renovation became louder and a proposal for a park was laid out in the 2030 Downtown Akron Plan.

After 20 years of promises and false starts by the city government, Ohio Governor Emilia Sykes helped to form a commission in 2036 to finally address the dilapidated and underused area. It was understood at the time that the Innerbelt Freeway area was going to become a park but community and city leadership wanted more than just additional green space for the city.

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“We conceived of the park as a kind of a city-scale kintsugi,” — the Japanese art of mending porcelain objects with golden lacquer — for Akron. “However, we wanted to go beyond beautification,” says State Senator Robinette Moore, Park Commission Member and former Councilmember for Akron’s Ward 6 during the park’s construction. “We wanted a park that could be a space for teaching, reflection, and hopefully healing of the divides that so often plagued Akron.”

The Innerbelt Freeway was a part of a lingering national trend in US cities that prioritized interstate road development over the needs and objections of BIPOC communities. Under the guise of urban improvement, these road projects regularly targeted or simply dismissed Black communities, displacing hundreds of families and isolating segments of once connected neighborhoods.

“We wanted the new park to preserve that story but also be a space in Akron where individuals and groups could have complicated conversations and explore ideas around personal identity and history,” The Devil Strip

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Moore says.

Pastor James Talbert, another member of the commission, and a key voice in shaping the park said we wanted a space to “convene the conveners.” James explains the hope of the park was to create a space where the community could have open conversations that would move issues forward.

“We helped design a park that not only details the history of the lost neighborhoods but also tries to represent the diverse nature of Akron using art and compassion as teachers.”

According to Moira, “It was agreed early that the park would be large, encompassing the whole area between West Market and Opportunity Parkway but leaving room for restoration of Howard Street. The park would be a mixture of thick woods and open fields crisscrossed by paths that allow visitors to explore the park and easy access to the Downtown area for the adjacent neighborhoods.”

Found along a number of the paths are large pieces of engraved glass etched in white that show lost elements of the neighborhood and showcase quotes from past

residents. “The goal is to preserve the history and living memory of how the park came to be while at the same time highlighting the natural environment,” says Moira.

Visitors to the park can download audio tours to their DynaTAC device or their Google Glass that tell the story of how the Innerbelt Freeway developed and offers recorded interviews with those that lived in the neighborhood.

The park includes unique gathering places throughout but the most famous is the Douglas Table and High-Point Chapel.

The Douglas Table pays tribute to the thriving Douglas Street destroyed by the Innerbelt’s construction. Sitting in the middle of the park’s central field lined by purple flowering trees is a permanent concrete table that can sit up to 202 individuals. “The table has hosted everything from prayer events, gaming competitions and, most notably, a special session of the Ohio House of Representatives.”

In the center of the largest wooden area of the park is the secular HighPoint Chapel. The large modern chapel is made from intricately laced glass and steel featuring an all-wood interior illuminated through large

clear windows accented with stained glass. Moria explains that, “HighPoint takes its name from the Greek meaning for the word Akron.”

The space hosts groups throughout the year to discuss everything from personal identity to Akron’s local history. It also hosts a variety of public and private events. Moria points out with a smile that she will be married in the chapel in October.

Moria says “the park tries to be a lot of things to a lot of people, and while that is often a recipe for failure, for us it helps showcase the dynamic nature of Akron. The park exists as a celebration of our collective future nestled within a remembrance of our troubled past.” And while she admits it can be tricky to balance at times “it’s the type of challenge that Akronites enjoy.” // Ken Evans finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home.

Akron set to explore the skies of Venus on blimp

by Ken Evans Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021.

These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

In three months’ time, an Akronborn Astronaut, in an Akron-built spacecraft, will lead an international crew to explore the skies of Venus.

Not in a traditional landing craft, but in a blimp that will hold the astronauts aloft for the entire mission. This maiden voyage will not only continue the human exploration of worlds beyond Earth, but will also signal a new age for the often dismissed and downtrodden city of Akron, Ohio.

Venus, similar to Earth in size, was long ignored for exploration because of the runaway greenhouse effect

devastating the planet’s surface.

With an average temperature of 788 degrees Fahrenheit and atmospheric pressure more than 92 times that of Earth, “Standing on Venus would be like standing a mile below the ocean with temperatures hot enough to melt lead. It’s basically hell!” Captain Kailynn Simonetti, Commander of Laputa 6 Mission says. “However, we are going to stay well above all of that.”

To get around this, the Laputa 6 Mission will attempt to place the crew not on the surface of Venus but safely in the upper atmosphere.

“In Venus’s thick atmosphere, about sixty kilometers above the surface, the temperature and pressure are relatively Earth-like.” It is so Earthlike that when Simonetti steps out of the spacecraft she will not need a pressure suit as they do on the Moon, Mars and Asteroid mines.

She will only need an oxygen supply

Akron’s Community-Owned Magazine

and protection from the clouds of hydrochloric acid. “I might be planning some break dancing,” Simonetti says, smiling.

Captain Simonetti explained that this “zone of hospitality” was known for decades but it wasn’t until 2019 when unexplained traces of phosphine gas ー a chemical marker for life ー were found in the atmosphere that scientists started to really make plans to study Venus long term. “The Soviet Union had deployed a few short-lived probes to the planet and had even launched a few balloons to study the atmosphere, but most major exploration had stopped by the late 1980s.”

Simonetti was chosen for this historic role because of her leadership in developing the fifth generation moon bases and the third generation Mars bases. Her designs and guidance

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while landing these advanced human habitats, have proved vital for laying the groundwork for what experts say will soon be a transition from mere science stations to moderately selfsufficient colonies on the Moon and Mars.

But it was her identity as a proud Akronite, and the city’s key role in building the spacecraft, that secured her place as mission commander.

Initially, there was controversy at the selection because another Ohioan, Astronaut Neil Armstrong, was the first to set foot on the moon.

“Some at NASA felt there shouldn’t be two Ohioans representing such great milestones, but I just think we make great astronauts,” Simonetti explained. In the end, lobbying from local Akron industry leaders and politicians helped keep Simonetti’s place on the flight roster.

“I told NASA an Akronite better be The Devil Strip

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the captain since it was Akron that built the damn thing. We designed it, built it, and if they would have let me, we would have launched it into space too! But that damn Elon Musk always gets to launch American projects into orbit.” Dr. Michael Smalley, CEO of the recently formed Akron Airship Collective, exclaimed while aggressively poking his desk.

Akron’s voyage from tire manufacture to airships mecca began In the early 2020s. In 2021 LTA (Lighter Than Air) Research and Exploration began developing airships in the original Akron Air Dock. Following this, a regional planning commission identified that Akron’s association with rigid airships could help bring more of this type of industry to the area. Impractical when developed in the early 1900s, Ridgid Airships ー or Zeppelins, as they’re also known — found a renewed relevance in the early 2020s as technological advances permitted them to lift heavier loads and land without ground crews. This local investment worked to center and grow the new industry in the Akron area. Akron is now home to fifteen large companies that build rigid airships, blimps and other lighter-than-air aircrafts. Akron-built ships can be found aiding in Antarctic

research, supporting infrastructure projects in other countries, delivering packages, and even helping to fight the remaining effects of climate change. Dr. Smalley added, “We created this industry and only Akron could produce the technology needed to make it to Venus.”

This regional focus inspired a partnership to form between LTA Research and Exploration, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, and the Ohio Airship Company to seek a NASA contract to build the Virgil Probes. The car-size robotically controlled blimps laid the groundwork for the exploration of Venus throughout the 30s and 40s and proved that the technology was safe to use with a human crew. Dr. Smalley boasted, “The Virgil probes met every mission parameter and exceeded all expectations. Hell, three of them are still working! That’s Akron engineering for you!”

With the backing of its partners, LTA won the contract to build the Laputa Spacecraft line that would take humans to Venus. Building new facilities throughout the city, the development and construction of the ships have been centered almost exclusively in and around Akron.

Expanding on the idea in the NASAs H.A.V.O.C (High Altitude Venus Operational Concept) proposal, the spacecraft carrying Simonetti and her crew will dock with the Venus gateway station in orbit. From there, the crew will resupply and rest before detaching the front half of the Laputa 6 and descending into the Venusian atmosphere. At a height of about 80 kilometers, its parachutes will deploy. From here, the heat shield surrounding the spacecraft will drop away and a blimp contained within the body of the craft will inflate. This will allow the ship to level off and float around the upper Venusian atmosphere.

The next step, and most historic part of the mission, will see Laputa 6 dock with the Laputa 5 Test Habitat, currently floating in Venus’s atmosphere. “When I step outside the airdock onto the catwalk between the Laputa 6 and 5, I will be the first person on Venus and the first person in history to visit three different worlds,” explained Simonetti. Adding, “It’s an honor to carry this responsibility.”

from the blimp, fire a return rocket, and make its way back to the Venus Gateway to prepare for the voyage home.

When asked if she could share what her first words on Venus will be, Simonetti simply smiled and said, “You’ll just have to watch with the rest of the world.” However, she did provide us with a different insight. Ever since the early days of spaceflight, NASA has permitted mission crews to name the ship.

Captain Simonetii let us know that the main ship will be called The Gulliver, and the blimp lander will be christened “The Akron.” // Ken Evans finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home.

After a month-long mission, the crew compartment will drop away

Hot Glass Jam

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Free Glassblowing Demos Meet some local businesses Neighborhood Network - The Well CDC Elizabeth’s Bookshop - Gardening 101 with Barb

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Akron addresses climate change through innovation and collaboration

by Kristi Tabaj Disclaimer: The following is a work of realistic fiction for our special 2050 issue, published in June 2021.

These stories are meant to spark imagination, not forecast the future of Akron.

I recently thought about how much our relationship with nature has changed, all prompted by the passing of one notable anniversary. It’s been just over 30 years since 2020, the year of the global pandemic. When the initial lockdown occurred, we isolated at home and distracted ourselves by taking up new hobbies.

We tried to evade COVID-19 by getting outside as space and fresh air made it more difficult for viral transmission.

Some turned to their own backyards to escape and with it discovered birding and gardening. Cars packed the trailhead parking lots of Summit Metro Parks and Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Stores sold out of bikes and kayaks.

planning for the weather much more interesting.

Climate change and its accompanying impacts were difficult to see in the early 21st century in Northeast Ohio. Initially, the slowly increasing temperatures didn’t appear to impact us much. It meant a few hotter days in the summer and some unusually warm winter days. We continued to operate business as usual.

However, we started to see more heavy rain and high wind events bringing flooding and power outages. The number of poor air quality days increased. Concerned citizens began to wonder if the state would agree to start piping water from Lake Erie to the dry Western U.S. Floods, hurricanes and wildfires along with the increased cost of living drove thousands of people to the Midwest.

The influx of people to Northern Ohio, including the Akron area, brought up questions about the impacts of the growing population on the environment.

I took to the outdoors and found refuge in local state nature preserves like the Cooperrider-Kent Bog, Herrick Fen, and Portage Lake Wetlands. I hiked through the winter and really paid attention to the weather. Weather whiplash, such as beautiful sunny and spring-like days followed by intense temperature drops and wild winds, could extend or derail a hike.

One of the biggest concerns involved aging infrastructure. Older buildings were prone to experiencing flooding.

Power outages proved challenging as residents struggled with freezing in the winter and sweltering temperatures in the summer. Both sets of circumstances had health and financial implications, not to mention the emotional strain.

Although we know Northeast Ohio weather can be wacky, climate change made predicting and

These concerns set in motion a series of efforts to reduce emissions, focus on conservation efforts and adapt to

Akron’s Community-Owned Magazine

climate change. In the earlier part of the century, most efforts to address climate change focused on mitigation or reducing emissions. Adaptation efforts and actions taken to address the problems resulting from a changing climate needed to happen at a much faster pace. With Akron’s history of invention and innovation, the city and surrounding communities were well-positioned to address some of the biggest challenges through nature-based solutions.

Structural innovations in gutter design and permeable pavement as well as rain gardens helped alleviate some community and home flooding concerns. Advances in toxic mold management developed in Akron in the early 2030s alleviated black mold health concerns linked to flooded spaces. Homes constructed over the past 25 years have benefited from temperature-regulating insulation and windows. These designs all originated from Akron.

By 2035, Ohio caught up to neighboring Great Lakes states in ramping up its clean energy portfolio.

Akron and surrounding communities committed to less concrete and more green spaces. Rather than further spread development outward, Summit County adopted measures to concentrate building within cities.

Underlying all of the climate change mitigation and adaptation progress over the past 30 years is something we most often fail to acknowledge. Our collective and collaborative efforts allowed us to achieve what we have today. Just like the pandemic, the efforts were not always as successful as we hoped.

At times we had to backtrack and change course to move forward.

Concentrating growth within city centers also meant reductions in vehicle use. With the addition of multi-use lanes for bikes, scooters and other alternative transportation options, Akron saw a 30% increase in people choosing to walk or bike instead of using a car.

These measures helped protect critical green spaces throughout the county, especially those areas surrounding the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

Although the City of Akron’s longterm investments to reduce sewer overflow concluded in 2028, improvements to further reduce flooding issues were ongoing. The city relied on homeowners and businesses to help slow the flow of water to its combined sewer system.

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Sometimes progress did not move fast enough. We experienced loss along the way. Working together, no matter how small the effort, we have been able to create a more hopeful future. I won’t be around for another 76 years, but the collective efforts over the past 50 years towards creating a better environment will live on. // Kristi Tabaj has been a climate change adaptation advocate for over 30 years and continues to submit comments on various documents produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

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j u n e 19 lock 3

AKRON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA SUMMER CONCERT SERIES

OUT SIDE VOICES

Christopher Wilkins, conductor Dione Parker Bennett, soprano Brenda Hanna Justice, soprano Pastor Henry Payden, baritone ASO Strings ASO Symphonic Winds

July 9 - Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens July 11 - Hale Farm & Village August 1 - Goodyear Metro Park August 8 - Firestone Park August 15 - Forest Lodge Park

2 0 2 1

A FREE community-wide celebration featuring the works of: J. ROSAMOND JOHNSON . FLORENCE PRICE JULIA PERRY . JAMES WELDON JOHNSON NKEIRU OKOYE . WILLIAM GRANT STILL GEORGE WALKER . JESSIE MONTGOMERY KIMBERLY ARCHER . CLARICE ASSAD OMAR THOMAS . MIGUEL DEL AGUILA FREE ADMISSION — All performances subject to change — All performances begin at 7:30 pm For more information, please visit akronsymphony.org

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DANIEL HORRIGAN, MAYOR

Sunday

CINEMA Family-Friendly Themed Movie Nights Enjoy a special themed topic like nutrition or fire safety, starting at 8 pm, followed by a movie.

Fresh Air Fitness Free Classes for All Levels

Thursdays

7–10 pm with

Wednesday

Concert Series

LOCK 3 Stage 7–9 pm BEGINS JULY 2

Fridays

June 12 Russell Thompson and Michael Austin Project

June 26 Old School Soul Presents Yard Games, Drink Specials, Music & More

MIDNIGHT STAR For tickets visit Lock3Live.com

Visit Lock3Live.com for dates and locations of movies throughout the city.