Cleveland, Ohio, is home to a football team that has had one winning season in 10 years. It’s bisected by a river so polluted it would sometimes catch fire. I defy you to name a single rock band from the town that hosts the quietly unimpressive Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Dennis Kucinich, the politician who never met a comb he didn’t like, was once mayor. If ever a place were historically worthy of its nickname—“the mistake on the lake”—Cleveland would seem to be it.
But then there’s Graham Veysey. Together with his wife, Marika Shioiri-Clark, the 40-year-old Cleveland native has spent the past decade or so revitalizing an area the couple calls “Hingetown,” a formerly decrepit slice of Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood.
