About a month ago I wrote a blog post expressing my opinions regarding Graham Veysey and his branding of the neighborhood I live in. Since then, it’s received far more attention than I had expected it to, which is great. It’s honestly good to know that when you’re vocalizing something you perceive to be important regarding the neighborhood and community that you grew up in, that your voice is being heard. With the general public seeing this post, I’ve heard a lot of complaints regarding the aggressive language used, so here is a second attempt at the same expression of my opinions regarding Graham Veysey and his influence on the Near West Side of Cleveland; sort of a (hopefully) more widely accessible “radio edit” if you will. (note, you can still see the original blog post here at cringetown.blogspot.com).
Every time I’ve talked to Graham Veysey face to face he’s been kind. He’s been enthusiastic. He’s seemed welcoming. The longer he occupies the buildings at the end of my block, the more it becomes abundantly clear that his kindness lacks any sincerity and is simply a mask. This becomes noticeable when he and/or his associates candidly say things such as “there are some people who like to live in their own shit and they can do that.” regarding anyone and everyone who has lived in the neighborhood before they branded it “hingetown”.
Graham is so self congratulatory about how he’s fixed the neighborhood… how he’s made it a better place. While there isn’t nearly as much crime happening in the wee hours of the night, he has introduced much larger problems to the area, and with that, he hasn’t actually reduced crime in ohio city, if anything his efforts have made it worse… but not on his block… because he pushed it down the street. What a hero. If Graham had any real, thought-out intention of making the neighborhood safe, he could have, i dunno, put some of his money towards helping poverty stricken individuals reach a life space in which they don’t have to resort to selling their own bodies on the street to survive. Has he done that? No. He’s been too busy buying out the buildings on West 29th so he can evict the local businesses and replace them with newer, trendier businesses that better fit the yuppie community. (I should specify here that my issues are not with the local business owners themselves. Their only crime is renting space from someone who evicted the pre-existing local businesses and takes hand in a gentrification culture that, among other things, displaces low income residents in the area; my issue is not with the tenants, it’s with their landlord).
The issue goes beyond Graham. There are people like him infecting the entire community; for example The Guernsey Building, which in recent years largely housed families of refugees fleeing war-torn countries after their villages were burned to the ground, was purchased by Red Door Living, who evicted everyone living there so they could turn the place into luxury condos. The problem reaches far beyond his hands, but he and Marika are major contributors.
In a recent Plain Dealer article, Marika, Graham’s lover and business partner, is quoted saying “We knew when we went into it that it would be as much a community building project as a real-estate project” in regards to making “Hingetown” a thing. The Near West side of cleveland already had a remarkably strong sense of community. It’s a community of people who have devoted their lives to actually making the neighborhood a better place, as opposed to Graham and Marika’s ideals of making it richer and more segregated. People who have spent lifetimes buying properties that they rent out to low-income families as affordable housing, volunteering at soup kitchens and homeless shelters, helping former convicts establish lives for themselves so they don’t fall into the same patterns and routines that drove them to crime, ensuring (once again) that families fleeing war-torn countries have a place to live… these people; the people who work endlessly to make the world a better place (for no personal gain, I might add) are the people that are being displaced/kicked out of their homes as an effect of the gentrification that Graham continues to take hand in and support. So Graham Veysey, Marika Shiori-Clark, and company have no room to talk about building community and improving the neighborhood, when, in practice, they are burning it to the ground, whilst changing the narrative as loudly as they can (via national publications such as Vanity Fair) to make it sound as though none of these people exist, and that there was nothing good happening in this “no man’s land” before they came and developed it. I should also add that why you’re hearing this from me instead of the good people of the Near West Side of Cleveland who actually are endlessly fighting to change the neighborhood in lasting, positive ways, is because the good people of the neighborhood… even as Graham pushes them out of their homes and (metaphorically) spits in their faces, they still to this day welcome him with open arms. I want to make perfectly clear that these words reflect my opinions and not theirs. They are much better, much more selfless beings than I know how to be.
So, when, on top of all the damage that they’ve done and continue to do, Graham Veysey, Marika Shiori-Clark, and those they are associated with give interviews to local and national publications, slinging such insults towards the neighborhood as “desolate” “decrepit” and “a nowhere, toxic corner” in which “you could have tumbleweeds during the day and no one would want to walk here at night.”... when he insults my neighborhood and the people I love… I can’t remain silent. In my eyes, any lasting impact Graham Veysey has had on the Ohio City area is far more toxic than anything that was happening on w29th before he branded it "hingetown".
The self-serving nature of Graham and Marika is strategically hidden from the public’s view; they sell themselves as altruistic, whilst explicitly and exclusively doing it for profit. Everything they do is for financial benefit, which is exactly the opposite of the how they sell it.
Particularly in his Vanity Fair article, Graham is self-congratulatory about his creation of a thriving community that has existed on the near west side of cleveland long before he was born; he takes credit for something that he deserves none for. His ideals help no one outside of his elitist posse, and at worst are directly harmful towards the community in which he lives. Graham, in action, is building barriers and lengthening the divide between classes in a city that is far too segregated as is, and is shutting down anyone and everyone working to ensure people of all different backgrounds can live peacefully together. He has absolutely no room to gloat about making the neighborhood a better place.
Also, side note, Graham’s recently started Wine Business “ManCan” is quite explicitly founded on outdated sexist principles, and thus promotes misogynistic ideals, which is not only offensive but also societally harmful. The entire marketing campaign is built on a foundation of hypermasculinity. If you go to their website, www.mancanwine.com, and look at the “our story” section, the story of how he thought up ManCan is that Graham was at a bar with friends, wanted to order a glass of wine, but felt uncomfortable/emasculated drinking out of stemware whilst his friend drank a can of beer (the more masculine choice). His solution to the problem was to start a company that sells wine in a can, and make it as masculine as possible so he wouldn’t run into the same dilemma again (the dilemma, once again being that drinking wine in stemware felt too feminine for Graham Veysey’s comfort). This is why mancan exists, why it has a hypermasculine name (what’s more masculine than “MANcan”?), and why the ad campaign uses such catch-phrases and slogans as “shut up and drink” and “wine for the rest of us”. I include this in part, because whilst it is in regards to sexism as opposed to class divide, it is the clearest, plainest, most irrefutable example of the segregationist culture that he not only takes part in, but also benefits from, and shows that he is in no way above bigotry.
In short, the positive aspects of the neighborhood and community that Graham Veysey takes credit for creating existed long before him. Whilst taking credit for the thriving sense of community, he repeatedly disregards its existence before he moved onto W29th and branded it hingetown, and he repeatedly insults the neighborhood in which this community has thrived for decades; he lays an exclusive claim to a neighborhood that he does not own, and with that raises tension between the rich, the poor, people new to the neighborhood,and people who’ve lived here their entire lives; it’s elitism and segregation. It’s bigotry. and it’s being sold in local and national publications as altruism, which isn’t ok.
