This weekend, the missus and I went to Cleveland to visit the International Motorcycle show. I also wanted to see how Cleveland, the city, was coming along. (I must be a market segmenter’s nightmare.)

I had been interested in Cleveland for decades, due to its similarities and dissimilarities to Buffalo. I’ve never actually spent time in the city, always passing it on my way to somewhere else.

The similarities are obvious. Both are aging Great Lakes cities which have seen better times. The butt of national television jokes. Perhaps Dennis Kucenic (sp?) helped to prolong this with his quixotic run in the last Democratic presidential primary race. Most don’t know that he was also the “Boy Mayor” of Cleveland during the 1970s, bringing the city to the brink of bankruptcy.

The city had set up a municipal electricity corp. Dennis helped to keep consumer rates low by not “wasting” money on things like repairs and maintenance. As a Wall Street Journal story depicted in the 1970s, Dennis left the city broke and in the dark.

But Cleveland had stirrings back then. It was the home to five theaters similar to our own Sheas. All within a block of each other. And all closed by the mid-1970s. A grassroots effort to save them started in the late seventies. Sound familiar?

Yet Cleveland had resources Buffalo did not. As recently as the mid-1970s, it was the ninth largest corporate headquarters town in America. Think about that. If you don’t know what that means, think of huge corporate support of local cultural and public institutions. That support rarely appears in branch office towns like Buffalo.