A half-dozen artists from the Buckeye neighborhood mill around the crowded storefront of Passport Project, at the intersection of Buckeye Road and East 128th Street.
They’ll be leading arts events here in August, as Sidewalks of Buckeye moves into its second phase. The exact dates are August 11 to August 29.
On our last night living in Buckeye, we throw a party in the Possibilitarian Garden. The occasion? To thank all our temporary neighbors for welcoming us into their lives, at least for a short time, and sharing their stories with us.
When Julia, Seth and I walk into Sue’s Wigs and Fashions, the elderly Korean owner -- the store’s namesake -- gives us a polite greeting.
But she doesn’t want to talk to us.
“You come back later and talk to my daughter,” she tells us, covering her mouth with one hand. “She’ll tell you about the store.”
In the front window of Larry Freeman’s house is a handwritten sign, fixed to the glass with dozens of pieces of yellowing tape.
“Smile, God loves you,” it says, in large block letters.
His wife made it, Larry tells me, before she died in 2003. “I’ll never take it down,” he says. “It’ll go with this house.”
A man with white hair and a matching mustache is the only person sitting in Calvary Evangelical United Brethren Church, a grand but faded red-brick building at Shaker Boulevard and Woodhill Avenue.
He doesn’t hear me and Seth enter, so we tap him on the shoulder and introduce ourselves. He smiles and tells us his name is Mr. Primm. He’s a block club leader from a nearby street in the Woodland Hills neighborhood - Buckeye’s immediate neighbor.
Reggie is snapping photos of the Possibilitarian Garden with a couple of friends when Seth, Julia and I step outside on a cool Tuesday morning.
“I’m sending pictures to Fox 8 News,” he says, with his familiar grin. “They’re always showing people’s gardens.”
Edward Wrobel’s earliest memories are of flowers, fruit, hard work - and more flowers.
He grew up in a small apartment above Orban’s Fruit and Flowers, the business his parents owned near the corner of E. 115th Street and Buckeye. It’s still here, and Edward still owns it - one of the last remaining white-ethnic businesses from a time a couple generations ago when Buckeye Road was reputedly home to the largest population of Hungarians outside Budapest.
It’s just a few days after my last visit to Landon at Club L&M when I hear that the shop has been burglarized. Nine motorbikes worth a total of about $5,000 were stolen during a torrential rain storm the night before.
I’m shopping for salad dressing in the Giant Eagle on Buckeye and E. 115th Street, just around the corner from our house, when I bump into a woman behind me who’s studying canned vegetables. We both laugh and apologize.
Today I meet resident and community activist D’Angelo Knuckles in an office at the St. Luke’s Foundation. We’d been planning to talk there for a while, but it’s a sunny day and we’ve both gotten an invitation to help plant sunflowers at the local library, so instead we head outside.
John Hopkins is executive director of the Buckeye Shaker Square Development Corporation, the neighborhood’s nonprofit development organization. He’s been helping me and Seth since before we moved in, assisting us in our search for space and providing invaluable information about Buckeye’s past and present.
Sanders Henderson calls himself a workaholic. In his case, the term seems inadequate. In addition to Nikki’s Music, a Buckeye Road music store that he owns and where he works six days a week, he also owns Carnegie Auto Wash & Detail on Carnegie Avenue downtown.
Under the Tree Fragrances is one of the more intriguing storefronts on Buckeye Road. Inside the front window you see row upon row of bottles, each filled with a different-colored liquid. It looks not unlike the science lab you wish you had as a kid.
