Collinwood Arts Festival | Brewed Fresh Daily

George Nemeth · Collinwood Arts Festival

July 6th, 2009

Tom on the Waterloo Arts Fest:

Collinwood is a neighborhood in Cleveland with a rich history and a bad reputation.

I was born there, raised there and well, my family moved just before I had to go to high school.

The area was getting bad in the late 80’s. I remember seeing drunks, pimps and a murder victim being pulled from a building when I was 14 years old. The Hells Angels used to frequent the motorcycle shop on the corner of 149th and Lakeshore. I used to have to walk past it to get to and from my school, St. Jeromes

When my parents moved my brother and I to the Westside of Cleveland, I swore that I would never go back to Collinwood. There’s no fun there.

Forward to 2009.

After reading the local paper and reading blogs, I was seeing that my old neighborhood was going through a change. A couple of years back, my mom moved back to Collinwood to live near the Euclid Beach area where she grew up. (She used to rent from the Humphrey family.) One day I decided to drive around the Waterloo area of Collinwood. I was looking for the old black bomb marks left over from a failed mob hit in the 70’s and I was looking for the barber shop my father used to take me to. The barber and the bomb marks were gone.

But I noticed something amazing. There area had color. It was bright…

via Collinwood Arts Festival | The Daily Bragger.