Nine Inch Nails @ The Agora

Trent Reznor

Twenty years ago today Nine Inch Nails played the Agora.

This was a dam-bursting moment. Maybe six people in Cleveland noticed when Pretty Hate Machine was released in 1989. In the months and years that followed, as the record gained recognition and momentum, the people of Cleveland began to claim Trent Reznor as one of their own (he's actually from Pennsylvania.)

The radio station The End trumpeted the impending release of Broken in 1992, but then never played anything from it because, as DJ Maria Farina told me, it wasn’t “radio-friendly”. However, no one could ignore The Downward Spiral, and it was universally lauded when it was released March 8, 1994.

Except in Cleveland, where Scene Magazine queried, “how many times can you rhyme ‘hole’ with ‘soul’, after all?”

“All this nihilistic, self-loathing, misanthropic, suicidal posturing is getting to be a bit much, Mr. Self-Desruct. Either jump or come in off the ledge.”
- John Soeder, Scene Magazine

Rolling Stone would eventually rate the album as the 32nd best of the 1990s, between Dylan's Time Out of Mind and The Slim Shady LP. But, you know. Opinions.

The day tickets went on sale for NIN’s first concert in Cleveland since they broke nationally, due in large part to their performance in the original Lollapalooza in 1991. The Agora sold out in less than ten minutes. I didn’t have a job and so was on the phone (because that’s how we used to order tickets) and bought two moments after the lines opened, unaware of my great fortune.

Opening acts include an entirely forgettable warm-up who I remember had some kind of non-lesbian, girl-on-girl thing, followed by a terrifying, horse-faced clown in a tall, pointed witches' hat who began his set by reciting the Wondrous Boat Ride poem from Willy Wonka. That would be the first time I had seen or even heard of Marilyn Manson.

Diana and I had arrived early enough to get great seats in front, you could see the band perfectly over the crowd on the floor. The place was completely packed by the time the headliner began their set, and what little moshing had started during the opening acts got crazy.

I think I stayed in my seat until they played Closer, and then I couldn’t handle it anymore, I wanted to be down there, not sitting. I gave Diana a little apology, handed her my glasses and shoved my way onto the floor.

 Set List 5/9/94

Pinion
Terrible Lie
Sin
March of the Pigs
Something I Can Never Have
Closer
Reptile
Wish
Suck (Pigface)
The Only Time
Get Down, Make Love (Queen)
Down in It
Big Man With a Gun
Head Like a Hole

Encore:
Dead Souls (Joy Division)
Help Me I Am in Hell
Happiness in Slavery

Once upon a time (because I cannot speak for today) being in a mosh pit was not actually dangerous. Maybe I’m kidding myself. But pushing and jumping and picking people up and moving them around is a very exciting way to enjoy a loud, fast concert.

First time I did what your father used to refer to as “slam dancing” was seeing The Replacements at Mem Aud in 1987. At one point I was body surfing and suddenly they were all gone and I landed flat on my back. About a half a dozen hands reached down and helped me right back up - wind knocked out, suddenly upright. Dizzying. Transcended. Stupid.

[tangent]

The Agora show was my penultimate mosh pit. My last would be exactly eight months later, when against my own better judgement I attended NIN's return to Cleveland at the behemoth CSU Convocation Center on January 9. I ran into Diana and her co-workers, and that was awkward. She had moved out a few days earlier. Previously, I was a svelte, 25 year-old member of an underground theater troupe. Now I was 26 and gaining weight, waiting tables in a chain pizza restaurant, and getting divorced.

Exiting the pit that January in 1995, I had a bad feeling in my abdomen. Two months later I would have a hernia operation. Limping out, I stopped an old lady, incongruous in the surroundings, but recognized her, and assumed she must be a friend of my mother's.

"Oh, hi!" I shouted. "Good to see you!" She blinked her eyes at me, blankly. I had made an error. That was Jane Scott.

[/tangent]

At the Agora show, Reznor did not say much, if anything, between numbers. At one point he asked, "Anybody like Scene Magazine?" The audience response was comically uproarious. Then he added, "Yeah. I like to wipe my ass with it."

Scene's Pete Chakerian reviewed the show as the success it was, however.  Reznor "seized the crowd" and "stalked the stage with reckless abandonment."

"You could just smell the sweat in the air ... the rest of the evening kept the same breakneck pace ... Spectacular ... Reznor started tearing up the joint."
- Pete Chakerian, Scene Magazine

If the editors were embarrassed by the gushing of their critic, they tried to make up for it with a photo in the gossip column featuring a fluffy-haired Reznor with his former 80s synth-pop trio Exotic Birds with the caption, PRETTY Hate Machine.

After just a few songs I was back, seated with Diana … the first song in the encore left me shocked and confounded, because I knew every word of the song and couldn’t for the life of me know from where. NIN had recorded Dead Souls for The Crow soundtrack and like a lot of other folks my age we had “discovered” Joy Division in 1988 when they released a singles collection (more nerdy shit: This is why it makes sense that they are playing Love Will Tear Us Apart in the party scene in Donnie Darko.)

What lingers is the memory of a girl in the mosh pit who was near me for just a moment. She shouted, OH FUCK because she’d dropped her cigarettes, I saw them on the floor about to be dashed to bits when I threw out an arm and shoved this big guy to one side, she didn’t miss a moment but swooped her hand down and caught her smokes.

She threw an arm around me, kissed my face and intimately screamed, “I LOVE you for that!”

Song of Spider-Man (book)

The first thing you notice, opening the book Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical In Broadway History, is a black and white photograph of several famous people. Bono, the Edge, Julie Taymor (if you are the kind of person who knows who she is) and then ... who the hell is that guy? Tall, awkward, bespectacled, in a frumpy suit jacket and jeans, totally out of place with these arbiters of cool.

That would be Glen Berger, the playwright. Or in musical parlance, the book writer, or because when this picture was taken, the show still belonged to Taymor, he was to co-book writer. He is also the author of the book, and stumbles his way through through six years of Broadway history, a sympathetic enough character, except he left me wondering where beneath spineless dithering lay the cunning professional who managed to surf the corpses to this production's eventual conclusion.

I never cared about Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark one way or another. One CLE theater colleague and Facebook friend (you know who you are, Moritz) was obsessed by this production, recounting every misstep which for a time seemed to be daily. I do believe his concern was for the health and well-being of his fellow Equity performers ... but there was a lot of internet glee had at the show's expense. Whatever. Lots of Broadway shows are terrible, I didn't feel the price-tag could necessarily have made it any worse.

During FringeNYC last summer our stage manager Diana went to see Turn Off The Dark with her family, and said it was the greatest theatrical experience she had ever seen. No exaggeration, that's what she said, she was over the moon about that show. I had my doubts, but I didn't see it, did I? It is like Ishtar, most people who mock it haven't seen that, either.

But I did rip through this book pretty fast. Maybe that is because Berger writes for a lot of PBS children's programming. There is a major plot hole, however, about a quarter of the way through, where what seems like an ordinary, large-scale Broadway production goes from an exciting project, entirely on-track, to suddenly a media-hounded piece of garbage, hæmorrhaging cash. Like, somewhere between the end of one chapter and the beginning of another, this just happens. This is long before the injuries start.

For a lark, I checked out the soundtrack from the library. I was curious. And most of it is really good -- which is even more surprising when you know I find U2 to be kind of irritating. But the song Rise Above actually got me a little choked up. Boy Falls From the Sky was also quite affecting. And Pull The Trigger is kind of ... fun-kay.

I wish I had gone to see this show.

Love In Pieces (execution)

Orpheus & Eurydice

The proposal that I made was simple. Present Sarah Morton's Love In Pieces in an actual house. An intimate setting, for a small, select number of people.

In late fall, I had opened the proposal up to those actor-teachers who were available and interested. They all were. We held meetings at the house to discuss, somewhat by consensus, exactly what shape this production would take.

The size of the audience was dictated by the smallest room - the bathroom - where four, perhaps five people could comfortably stand and watch the scene.

The play is made of four scenes. I knew from the 1998 production (which, yes, I have on VHS) that the scenes might range from ten to twelve minutes in duration. We could lead audiences of four from one room to another, with each scene performed simultaneously, four times, once for each party.

Who would lead them? We would require "guides" ... and lo, we had guides. We should have a Host, to receive "guests" but also to act as front of house, for the duration of the performance.

Serving drinks, this was a no-brainer. Guests would be asked to check their cellphones, to avoid interruptions or distractions. Inspired by Sleep No More, each guest would be provided a domino mask, and be instructed not to speak during the performance.

Finally, we would require some way of allowing each scene to start at the same time. The shorter scenes would require a post-scene "event" at some "staging area" in the house. One which would contribute to the mood, not distract from it. Not break any boundaries. Not just seem like time filler.

There would be dancing, chocolate and alcohol. Guests would be encouraged to write secret messages. They would get their feet wet (literally).

Also, Andrew suggested some friends he had at Oberlin, musicians who might be interested in playing before and after the performance. A live duo, piano and bass. Incredible.

The company met, and grew, with new members added as we discovered we needed them. Including the musicians, that came to sixteen. We came together just a few times at the end of last year, and in January, with a plan to begin rehearsal in March. Everyone was made responsible for their own scene. I had made my desire for this event clear, and they understood.

I am at a place in my life where it feels like I am constantly surrounded by competent, talented and motivated artists that I can trust. It is a heart-bursting feeling.

Cupid & Psyche

We sent email invitations, inviting a select audience to a "private house party". With a company of sixteen, we could each only invite a handful of guests, and put together a list that seemed appropriate. Someone would inevitably be left off, but there were no arguments among the company. We never argued about anything.

How best to describe how it all came off? People were delighted. They were amazed. They were surprised. We did receive a few notes the first night (there were only three performances) that we immediately incorporated into the next.

We, the performers were also surprised. We haven't really sat down to debrief yet (we really should do that) but we did have the chance prior to the performances to perform each of our scenes for each other. I was so happy to see each of them in these realistic settings.

I had cast myself as Antony again, this time hopefully with the middle-aged "presence" I had been lacking in my late-20s. My acting partner and I had the chance to perform the same ten-minute scene four times in a row in quick succession, to entirely different audiences of five or six. Each time we became bolder and the scene grew, and grew. It was such a rewarding experience.

What we, the actors missed, and would never receive, was a sense of what our guests experienced. Each party would track the play differently, maybe starting in the bathroom and ending in our bedroom - which meant moving from horror to hilarity. Or starting in the attic and ending in the basement - from commitment to disillusion.

All guests were informed the dress would be "cocktail formal" which might have been setting the bar a bit high, but we were all delighted how festive everyone looked. It did seem appropriate.

After Orpheus and Eurydice have their moment in the Underworld (the basement, with sick red and green lights) the guests were led to a kitchen. Suddenly Orpheus/Andrew begins to sing a haunting love song, that warbled up the steps - between each scene we could hear him, beneath the floorboards - and guests might dance. Is that Eurydice further off singing harmony? Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't.

Andrew had written the song just for this production. As with Hades and Persephone, all were moved.

Guests responded:

"Heartbreaking, heart-warming and hilarious." - L.

"A theater girl of many years ... last night felt like the first time." - S.

"A crazy mixture of voyeurism and live action game of CLUE." - J.

"I dreamt of teeth, sheets with words on them, wings, camels, elephants and the river Styx while Miles played trumpet on a cloud." - D.

"I cried in a kitchen dancing with strangers." - S.

And so we concluded, opened and closed within a fortnight, all on our own dime with no expectation of return but the response of those invited. I felt I had been most rewarded, receiving this opportunity to indulge in the fantasy of getting a second-chance to interpret a much-beloved script on your own terms, to redeem a concept you held privately in your own mind and then to discover that the picture you had was right, that it could actually be like that, and that others could also be touched by it.

Only, and I dearly hoped this would be the case, so too might be the playwright. I am a great fan of Sarah's work, and have been grateful to act in or direct several of her plays. When I asked permission last fall to present Love In Pieces, she said yes, but that didn't mean I wasn't nervous about her response to the final product, especially one as experimental as this. So she gets the last word:

Sarah Morton: "The entire experience - the live music, the beautiful acting, the creaky stairwells, the enchanting silent interludes - made me feel like I was walking through a fever dream, which is exactly how it should be."

UPDATE: BorderLight Theater Festival presents The Right Room, a new play by David Hansen and directed by Jasmine Renee, July 16 - 19, 2025. Help support our production by dropping a donation on our GoFundMe campaign! 

Love In Pieces (play)

Love In Pieces is a short play, written by Sarah Morton. When Cleveland Public Theatre had a new plays festival, it won the top prize, the Chilcote Award, in 1997. With this honor came a full production the following season, and premiered at Cleveland Public Theatre in February, 1998. I was an actor in the company.

This 40-minute work consists of four scenes, depicting famous couples from mythology and literature: Antony & Cleopatra, Laertes & Ophelia, Orpheus & Eurydice and Cupid & Psyche. Each scene departs from its traditional narrative to paint original portraits of love in crisis.

The playwright makes clear in her stage directions that these are not four separate plays. For example, the set should remain simple, each scene resembling the other, to create what she calls a "dreamlike fluidity." Also, though she concedes the play could be performed by eight actors, or "two very versatile ones," she believes the play works best with four actors playing each of the younger and older roles.

So it was in 1998, where I and Triste Crawford played the first and third scenes, and Doug Rossi and Michelle Pristash the second and fourth scenes. Cleveland Public Theatre promoted the work as an (odd) choice with which to celebrate Valentine's Day. Our costumes and Oliver Sohngen's set were largely white, with red accents, the set like a wedding cake, or more like a bisected cheese wheel.

Doug Rossi (Laetres) & Michelle Pristash (Ophelia)

Critical response to Sarah's work was strong, the Free Times calling the show "both post-modern and old fashioned" and "smart and sweet." The Plain Dealer praised her for having "a gift for using both the visual and verbal elements of theater to create complex, striking work."

Scene Magazine spared little restraint, and with this work sincerely called Sarah Morton, "a nascent playwriting genius."

Each performer received uniformly positive notices ... with one interesting exception. Plain Dealer critic Marianne Evett noted that "David Hansen does not have enough presence and command as the old warrior Antony." Cleveland Public Theater made the mistake in 1995, when I was not yet twenty-seven, to cast me (in a different production) as a fifty year-old former Marine. Only twenty-nine, I agree that I made a young and scrawny Antony. More on that later.

Suffice it to say, the show was successfully produced, and I was very happy to be part of that.

Poster, CPT (1998)

As for Love In Pieces, it was produced one more time, produced by a third party for the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival. The best that can be said about this version is that nytheatre.com recognized strength in Morton's writing, but that there were serious issues with the director who cast herself in all four female roles, acting against a single male partner. These actors had apparently little chemistry and the performance included breathtakingly long scene breaks.

Shooting bull in the rehearsal hall last fall (continuing yesterday's post) I remembered this play. Four scenes, two set in bedrooms, one in a bathroom, the fourth one the road out of the Underworld. The CPT production was presented in the cavernous former ballroom that is the Levin Theatre. True, it was in the round, which was exciting, but hardly intimate.

Each scene a two-hander, three couples and one set of siblings. Impotence, abuse, disappointment, doubt. You can make these feelings span the distance between character and witness, but what if you closed that gap, made the audience need to lean in, to listen carefully, or make them truly feel they are walking in on something they shouldn't be seeing?

These are the personal moments we all feel in every relationship, that we desperately work to keep secret. Set them in their natural habitat ... what would that be like?

Except for the road out of Hell. That would take some imagination.

Anyway, that was my proposal. I offered it to the company. You want to put on a show, this is the show I am offering, because then I would believe in it. And they all jumped on board.

Tomorrow: Love In Pieces (execution)

Love In Pieces (concept)

It is a common refrain among actor-teachers in the residency program, the suggestion that we put on a show!

"We should stage a showcase," one suggested my first year, like it's the most natural thing in the world. They are young, and energetic, with no children, no need to sleep, nor any previous experience producing any kind of event.

I have been a producer, in my fashion, and I hate slap-dash amateur shit. You can do good work on the cheap, but that's the point - the work has to be good. All of it, from the moment your guests enters until after they depart. Expectations raised must be expectations exceeded, and so on.

I never rose to seriously consider any of these calls to "put on a show". When I was an actor-teacher, I knew I had to concentrate on that work, and had time for little else. As their supervisor, I know they need to concentrate on their work, and have time for little else.

And yet, for the past thirteen years, the same refrain. "Let's put on a show!" Mickey Rooney is dead, get back to work.

This past fall, however ... we were taking a break from rehearsal and Andrew says, "We should put on a show." Ugh. Come on, man? What? Where? Be specific. You don't put on a show for its own sake, you have to believe in it.

After Sleep No More, Emily, James and I had dinner in Chelsea. The subject came up - we should do an immersive show. That would be so much fun. Sure. So is Disneyland. I put it out there - okay, what would we do?

That was the stumper, where it all fell down. Everything each of us suggested would really just be a site-specific play, no different from any number of shows staged at CPT or the 78th Street Studios. The audience might stand, or be guided from one space to another. But it would still be: We, actors. You, audience. In a theater, even if it was some kind of non-traditional one.

The most non-traditional space perhaps, more unusual than a cemetery or an abandoned hotel, is a private residence. Some person's home or apartment or condo, into which strangers (or near-strangers) have been invited. Especially when the expectation has been raised that this will be some kind of special event. Not something informal. A house, but not a house. A performance space.

In the past several years I had been fortunate enough to experience performances of I Dreamed of Rats and It Was a Set-Up in a single room of a private residence with a limited audience. You felt you were part of something special, that you receiving a gift.

Andrew said, "we have a house." Of course, he doesn't have a house, three actor-teachers have been renting a place on the Near West Side. A small house, not a large house. Not even as large as my house, and my house is not that large.

Questions to be answered; What is the point in performing a play that close to a tiny audience, if the story you tell is mundane? If it is private, it must be personal. If it is close, it must be intimate.

And then I remembered Sarah Morton's Love In Pieces.

Tomorrow: Love In Pieces (play)

Summer of 2004

Any given year can be packed with exciting events, personal and professional. The right song can send me spiraling into memory of summers where nothing significant happened at all.

However, the summer of 2004 went from strength to strength, each successive event more startling than the last.  

Grandfathers

Late spring, we visited my grandfather Henrik in Florida, for his 100th birthday. He'd made it, mind intact. Counting down, he had previously announced he was five! (when he was 95.) He was two! (when he was 98.) Now he was zero. As the man said, second childishness. But not oblivion. Not yet. Never oblivion. He also had all his teeth.

At around the same time, we lost Toni's grandfather Calvin, our first child's namesake. Diagnosed with cancer, he was gearing up to fight it, but that fight never came. Awaiting chemo, a blood clot lodged in his heart and he was gone.

We had prepared for a long good-bye, and were stunned by no good-bye at all. We were grateful he had the chance to meet our child, who delighted him. No funeral, not a religious man, a memorial was planned for the end of the summer.

Spencer Tunick in Cleveland

This was also the summer experimental artist Spencer Tunick came to Cleveland and encouraged us all to get naked in public. Having tried and failed to find an indoor site for  a January shoot, they bumped the date to late June after securing the assistance of the city of Cleveland to stage what was (at that time) the largest mass-nude photo shoot in North America.

The photograph itself is almost beside the point, Tunick was at that time bringing with him a lot of attention, often raising interesting social questions simply by arranging these unusual events. The experience itself was an artistic event, with euphoric highs and irritating lows. Listen to this audio diary my wife and I created with the folks at WCPN, documenting the event for Around Noon, and you will understand what I mean.

This event fell neatly on our fifth wedding anniversary, June 26th.

Radio K

There are moments in time when I become suddenly very interested in new music. Obsessed, really. This year two things came into play which made it urgent to discover the hot new dance music. 1) This is the year I became a fanatically dedicated runner because of 2) The iPod.

Receiving an iPod for my birthday meant successfully being able to take music with me on runs, without requiring a cassette player, which is like running holding a brick that is tethered to your hand.

My brother introduced me to the University of Minnesota’s Radio K back in 1999, but using the “radio” feature on iTunes I was able to play it in my house all the time, and with the music store could spontaneously purchase whatever it was I heard that I never knew I lived without. Music by The Streets, Felix da Housecat, and of course, I Am The World Trade Center.


In a good and decent universe, this is the number one pop song of all time.

Mr. Shakespeare

This summer, and for only two seasons, my employer experimented with resuming a summer season (as opposed to fall-through-spring). One effort in raising awareness was imagined by Andrew May, who was impressed by a serendipitous promotional event that occurred when he was a young man in Chicago.

A performer on break from a Shakespeare festival downtown was reading a newspaper on a park bench in his compete, Elizabethan costume. A photographer happened to catch a passerby in the very second of an expressive double-take, and the picture made the front page of the Trib.

This is how I came to be Mr. Shakespeare, he wanted to recreate that moment but in Cleveland, and my job was to be seen all summer, at a variety of arts festivals and public events. The Rib Burn-Off, a Cleveland baseball game, the Cain Park Arts Festival -- I wasn’t handing out advertisements, I wasn’t putting on an act, I was just this guy who claimed to be William Shakespeare.

One day in early summer (and unfortunately before our costume shop had finished tailoring my beautiful, GLT-branded “plum” outfit) Andrew took me around Cleveland for a few preliminary, promotional shots.

The American Revolution

During its final year, Bad Epitaph Theater presented and I directed the Midwestern premiere of Kirk Wood Bromley’s The American Revolution.

Written entirely in verse, Mr. B. cast the story of the War for American Independence in the style of a Shakespearean tragedy along the lines of Henry V or Othello.

George Washington, traditionally depicted as an unknowable American god, is here a troubled and sympathetic general, finding his footing as general and becoming the man who would be First President. However, it is Benedict Arnold and his wife Peggy Shippen who provided an intimate dramatic tension, like Macbeth and Lady M., full of jealousy and scheming.

Our production was presented out-of-doors, on Wade Oval in University Circle, with bright costumes taking the place of any kind of set. Challenges included creating interesting stage combat with rifles and bayonets rather than swords, but interesting they were with swirling flags and the dramatic (though not frightening) sound of heavy wooden sticks beat against plastic garbage cans, which sound enough like guns and cannons without alarming the police.

Bromley’s clowns, the Rebel Mess (led by Ray McNiece as Appalachian beatnik Johnny Freeman) sang songs and hid from battle and lost limbs. It was awesome. Unfortunately, it was a very cool June that year which kept crowds low until the end of the run … and our final performance on Independence Day was washed out due to a sudden flash flood minutes after call time.

Highlight of the run was when the playwright and members of Inverse Theatre, who originated the work, made a trip to enjoy the performance. We feted them in grand Cleveland style at Nick’s place in Tremont.

As if we were not busy enough, there was a road trip to Maine.

I Hate This @ FringeNYC

That August was the first time I went solo at the New York International Fringe Festival, performing I Hate This (a play without the baby) in a 40-seat walkdown way out on Eighth Avenue.

While it was thrilling to share this work on a national stage, I learned some hard truths on that journey. I do not know how to handle being alone. Also, that a glowing review in The New York Times won’t do a thing for box office when no one wants to see a show about stillbirth.

However, it was that review which led a number of health and/or bereavement organizations across the Midwest to contact me and created the opportunity to carry Calvin's story far and wide and eventually across the Atlantic.

AIDSWALK/RUN

This year I became a runner. I had been an itinerant runner since I was an adolescent. Sometimes I would make a serious effort to maintain some kind of regimen -- ten years earlier, in 1994, I kept it up for several months.

But with one technological advance, I became a committed runner and have never stopped. As previously stated, that device would be The iPod.

For the first time, AIDSWALK included a 5K run, starting at Edgewater Beach. Running a race using the iPod (which I no longer do) gave me some kind of superhuman burst of energy and I broke twenty minutes for the first and possibly last time ever. That included that hill, by the way.

The kid was only a year and half, this was their first race. At first they were excited by all of the runners, starting all at the same time. But when we just kept going, running, running away and not coming back, and me with them, they started crying.

However, in 19 minutes and so many seconds I was back and when they saw me they smiled and shouted, DADDY RUNS FAST!

Summer's End

This epic summer closed with Calvin G.'s memorial, a glorious event where the extended family came together for a beautiful celebration of memory and music ... and someone ripped off our diaper bag, and with it two pair prescription sunglasses, my camera and her wallet. Instead of enjoying the celebration, I was choking down anger, on the phone with the Athens Police Department.

Coupled with a different theft in NYC a month earlier, I fell into a prolonged period of anxiety and fear. How can I care for a little person when I cannot look after myself?

Playhouse Square

Playhouse Square, circa 2006

This picture is truly surprising. Taken eight years ago for the Great Lakes Theater season brochure, the theme was "re-imagining a classic" and so here is Mr. Shakespeare holding the V-J Day nurse (Elizabeth A. Davis) only it's not Times Square, it's Euclid Avenue.

Full color people, black and white photo -- black and white like the Eisenstaedt photo, but today it just looks like another gray day in Cleveland. This is what Playhouse Square looked like when I began working out of the GLT office in the Bulkley Building.

Only eight years ago, and Playhouse Square was still pretty vacant. But that was about to change.

This picture was taken before the RTA HealthLine and accompanying street and sidewalk renovations. Before the IdeaCenter, Cleveland State University and Zack Bruell moved into all the empty space between my office and East 13th Street. Before we were joined by Cleveland Play House, and Great Lakes' move to the Hanna Theatre.

For years, it seemed the coffee shop on the ground floor was changing management every few months. MOKO has been there for five years. And all this change was well before the residences in the Hanna opened, and every day more and more signage and branding is being erected all over  Playhouse Square in anticipation of Dazzle the District on May 2, 2014. 

Playhouse Square, April 11, 2014

The "dead zone" between East 13th and East 9th Street continues to shrink, with pockets of new business and housing, and I hold out hope that one day we will once again have a vibrant Euclid Avenue which stretches from Cleveland State to Public Square without interruption.

For now, Cleveland's Playhouse Square theater district is a place I am very proud to say I work.