.

You got some good ones in there :)

Very interesting...

 

Nice shots too!

Eleven thumbs up!

Beautiful shots, excellent scans :clap:

 

I'll PM you with some comments on film scanning. Right off the top of my head I don't have an answer, but maybe we can figure it out.

 

 

superb photos. i dk how you got some of those shots but wow.

 

i've heard it said the detroit-toledo-cleveland crescent (ahem) is the biggest home in the usa for america's pan-arabic community. certainly seems so.

 

your mafia stories remind me of my own. my spouse and i first lived in grandview in columbus in a brick quad apt building that area is loaded with. the other apts were reporters for the alternative weekly 'the other paper' in columbus so we all used to sit around outside at night and i heard wild ohio stories and dirt on evrything. one guy was your typical former clevelander/columbusite (born & raised on w25th street). when i told him i had also lived in lorain and went to hs there he bugged out. he had done this big series on the mafia in ohio. he said the chicago and new york mafia never had any luck in cleveland because the local mob there was so strong. then he said the cleveland mob could never crack lorain because the local mob there was too entrenched. therefore, he said lorain at least at one time had the toughest mobsters in the usa -- pretty funny!

 

 

 

Hi all,

 

Great pictures mrnyc, love that city. Toledo has one of the top art museums in the state. can't wait for the new glass museum to open. Their zoo is also a fun place to visit. Did you use Fuji film to take the pictures? I haven't seen anyhting that bright and clear, not to mention green, since I stop using Fuji year ago. Thanks again and bear hugz to all.

 

Jim S.

cleveland + columbus=toledo=detroit + ann arbor?

 

It shares the large Arab community with Detroit (two largest concentrations of Arabs outside the Middle East).

 

are you sure about that boast c-dawg?

 

as the cleveland area has such a high arabic population i was curious so i looked & the stats i found show ohio is only 8th in the nation for arabic population. it does not break it down very closely, but cuyahoga county has over a third of ohio's 185k arabic background reporting peoples. lucas is basically in a tie for 3rd place with summit and hamilton counties. cuyahoga and franklin are the current round of arabic immigration hotbeds respectively.

 

interesting as well was that the original arabic immigrants to ohio were lebs and syrians, but in today's round of immigration they are coming in from all over the middle east. also and imo best find of all, that 86 of 88 counties in ohio report people of arabic descent, which when you consider all the rural counties i'd bet is mighty respectable compared to other states.

 

the link:

http://www.aaiusa.org/demographics/OHdemographics.pdf

 

 

Yeah, I always thought Cuyahoga County was regarded to have the largest Arab population.

 

I generally think it feels most like a ghetto Columbus with water, or a bigger Ann Arbor with some Detroit flavor thrown in..

 

Eh.  To me, it's more like a smaller Buffalo, in the sense of Great Lakes, housing stock, culture, blue-collar roots, Lake Erie, and perhaps less bombed out.  Toledo does not remind me of Columbus (or Ann Arbor), except perhaps Summit Streets in both cities.  And hell, Columbus might be more ghetto than Toledo ;).

Seriouly fabulous photos but don't ruin it with none sense like this: "It is a liberal city and metro (very socially liberal, and liberal in voting patterns- it always votes for Democrats)."  Democrat working class doesn't equal liberal.  I enjoyed my hour in Toledo when I was there but it is laughable that you call it liberal. 

I'd have to go along with the idea that Toledo was pretty open sexually in an era when many midwestern cities were not.

 

In the mid-late sixties, Toledo had the nearest out-and-out gay bar to Fort Wayne, the Scenic Bar. I think it was at the corner of Monroe and Erie. Most cities had places that were known as gay hangouts, like Henry's and the bar at the Van Orman Hotel in Fort Wayne -- shadowy cocktail lounges frequented by gay men -- where discretion was mandatory and one could meet like-minded individuals for a tryst or two, hardly ever anything more lasting. At the scenic the music was lively, the cruising was overt, and men danced with men :-o. There was no pretense or "straight" appearance to any of it. It was one big gay party. On some Saturday nights, two- or three-car caravans made the pilgrimage from Fort Wayne.

 

A couple of blocks away, in the basement of the Milner Hotel, was a gay bathhouse affiliated with the Club Bath Chain, again the closest such venue to Fort Wayne. In the interests of decorum I won't say any more about my knowledge of that :-D.

 

As compared with places like Fort Wayne, where a lot of the cruising was on the streets near the bar and sometimes dominated by hustlers, in Toledo the police were quite tough on both :whip:. The intention was probably not to curb immorality, but to keep people in the bar where they spent money :drunk:. Mob influence was pretty strong in most places where gays congregated (not just in Toledo), and the police were probably on the payroll. There usually wasn't a lot of competition among gay bars, and places either signed up or didn't last long.

 

So I guess what I've come around to is that it probably wasn't progressiveness or liberality that led to sexual permissiveness in Toledo. It was an illicit business opportunity that the Mob capitalized on, and no one interfered with their enterprises.

c-dawg that is some interesting information thx.

 

i'd only take you to task on two points: lucas (600sqmi) is half the size of cuyahoga (1200sqmi) not a third. so i especially can't see the logic of your toledo/detroit lumping and raising those other cities & leaving cleveland hanging out there when cuyahoga has way more arabic than lucas and leads ohio in more recent arabic immigration (strange to find clev/cuy leads in anything in immigration these days). ditto franklin. also, i have no problem believing that there are 185k arabic people in ohio out of 12m, in fact i may be biased about it, but given my time in toledo and ne ohio that even seems like an undercount. as you said the true numbers are sketchy, which is a real shame.

 

still, this is the only stats we have at the moment & that was the only decent site i found, but i didn't look too hard, so i again appeciate what you had to say. to fully back whatever claims you'd care to make we would have to find out more about summit & hamilton counties, which lucas seems to be or may be in line with, not to mention franklin & cuyahoga. but as i say all we have is what we have for now. it's a shame the census leaves such a huge & varied group out, i was surprised about that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

cdawg i completely understand the difficulty of identifying and counting the pan-arabic population in ohio and evrywhere else. but i dont know where you get those pop stats. on the census i found lucas has 454,216 population and cuyahoga 1,363,888 (2003). since county estimates are all we have coupled with the other link this is all we can fairly use. unless you can get something better as far as numbers from the islamic institute or someplace else. not sure where you got your numbers for the arabic populations, but if true with my county pop adjustments it would show cuyahoga with a higher % of arabic population (unless i did the math wrong).

 

oh and as for my time spent in toledo and detroit, i think 8 years there was prob more than anyone else on this site outside of you! :-D

 

C-Dawg, I don't think you should assume a Census miscount of Arabs because many of them are counted as "white." "Arab" is reported as ancestry, having nothing to do with race--there is no reason one can't be both Arab and white in Censusland.  Certainly there are probably reasons why the Census count isn't accurate, but I don't think that's one of them.

 

Anyway, I was digging through Census numbers, and for what it's worth, the reported Arab ancestries in Lucas County go like this:

Arab(Total): 5,307

Egyptian: 185

Iraqi: 121

Jordanian: 203

Lebanese: 3,018

Moroccan: 24

Palestinian: 361

Syrian: 669

Arab/Arabic: 477

Other Arab: 249

 

I'll allow that the true number is higher for various reasons.  One thing I can point to is that 20% of the population has no reported ancestry.  And I'm sure there are other reasons I don't know about.  But looking at these numbers, it seems like Zogby is assuming an insanely huge undercount in that site you guys are discussing, and that's a little hard to swallow.  (The Census count of Arabs in Ohio is something like 54,000.)

 

By the way, to fuel the Toledo vs. Cleveland thing, the Census says Arabs are 1.1% of the population in Cuyahoga County compared to 1.2% in Lucas County.  The question, then, would be whether that count is less accurate in one county than in the other.  Otherwise they're pretty much equal.

Those are pretty good pix.  Toledo does remind me a bit of Dayton...except for that great river dividing the city...and I like those old buildings that are, I think, from that old neighborhood east of the river.

 

Good shot of the Willis Boyer, too...

 

For some reason this building intriges me.

Maybe its the colors, bright pink and lime green, yum.

 

No, but really, the simple, yet elegant brickwork like the arched windows and detail at the top of the walls is very appealing. Today, they would never build a factory like that, they'd use that corragated metal junk.

 

 

oh and as for my time spent in toledo and detroit, i think 8 years there was prob more than anyone else on this site outside of you! :-D

 

 

um........ahem

I am a native Buckeye, raised in Michigan. Toledo feels as much Ohio to me as Dayton. This issue was decided years ago in the bloody Toledo War, Ohio won. Michigan got the Upper Peninsula as a parting gift.

 

Rob, I wish I had your phone number when I broke down in Fort Wayne in June. I really enjoy your input on this forum.

 

The Census Bureau recognizes only three races, white is the same as Caucasian, which includes Arabs and Irish.

 

 

Cdawg ... more, please ,,,

Pope you lived in Toledo too?

From looking at census reports, it seems that the race categories are white, black, native American, Asian, native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, or "some other race."  A person can also choose multiple races.  Hispanic or Latino is a different question not related to race.  Arab, as I said before, only exists as an "ancestry," basically ethnicity, I guess.  I think ancestry numbers are derived from sample data, so only people who get the long form will report that at all.

 

Oh yeah, it's probably likely that the census bureau will add an Arab category in the future.

 

The question is whether it will be a negative thing because of what might be done with the information.

I don't think that many bad things would come from this kind of census information.  I suppose in theory such census information could be used to profile or target neighborhoods or towns, but I'd think the authorities would already have a sense of where Arabs are and wouldn't need census numbers to undertake that level of profiling.  Individual responses, as far as I know, are not available to anyone at all (including government agencies, besides the Census Bureau of course) for 70 years after the census is taken.  At the moment I'm not paranoid enough to suspect that those records wouldn't be safe.

 

The only bad thing I see that coming from such information would be possibly adding a bit more fuel to whatever bad things are already happening.

i looked at some of those links it's good but hard to get anything. i certainly understand that mosques/churches are the best places for ethnic information, esp in this case. however, again since we have no other online numbers here than what we have it forces the issue for now. let's say the foot must be put down somewhere at some point, the line in the sand drawn. so lucas is either tied for third with it's overall arabic population from a site that may be an overcount or it's neck and neck with cuyahoga if we go with the census -- which is confusing and for certain an undercount. (i dk a seperate category someday like hispanic/latino would make sense and help us now yet overall make the census even more scattered). either way but bottom line is what we do have just does not make lucas the frontrunner for the state in terms of arabic population numbers.

 

 

i fully understand why its difficult to find an accurate count. yet i can only go with the numbers we have been given. it's seems like you are grabbing numbers that back your opinion. the 10k you state in toledo is countered by the zogby and the census. when there are no definitive numbers it's pretty frustrating and we are just falling into the world of opinion and likely some regional biases. so imo it's time to shelve this great topic & i'd hope the next census would include arabic in the same manner as they do hispanic. even then it will likely be an undercount and we'll still go round and round, but at least we would have some offical numbers.

 

re your south african example: i prefer the teddy roosevelt and mark twain suggestions that people label themselves as 'americans of (your nationality here) descent.' that also includes people born elsewhere who choose to become citizens of this country. call yourself whatev you want i dont care, but i support the use ethnic terms that bring this country together not balkanize it --- save that pc nonsense for canada!

 

 

nice pics

nice pics

Quit trying to derail the debate! :-D

America for the most part is a melting pot, but today many people see that as a bad thing. A melting pot might actually hurt diversity as everyone tries to be the same. It is very common for immigrants to become hyper-Americanized. A country like Lebanon is more of a toss salad (it took a lot of wars, but there is peace there now between the groups). In Toledo's Arab community, it's almost split down the middle. One side drinks, smokes, and parties harder than the average American while only wearing big-label clothes, and then the other group adheres to many of the social norms of their homeland.

 

A melting pot may actually just be a facade for a society that's segregated at its roots but refuses admit it. It's almost like denying the differences between people. It's impossible for a society to be a true melting pot (hence why more people today support the toss salad). Nature loves diversity. A melting pot is nothing more than assimilation.

 

this sounds like the intro to a high school social studies paper

Harsh.

Nice shots!

 

It's not all bias or perspective. The census says Lucas County has the highest percentage of Arabs in Ohio and one of the highest percentages in the country.

 

Of course I will find sources that go against Zogby's study. I'm trying to show the fallacies in a study like Zogby's.

 

we have information that does not jib that lucas has the highest percentage of arabs in ohio. when given the census it seems to say lucas and the other zogby source has lucas second to cuyahoga. however, both numbers that we do have are well within any measurement error so its mud. so sorry cdawg, but aside from your pride and convictions, we just do not have the accuracy in the numbers to confirm this so outrightly. i find plenty of problems with all the numbers and see no reason to agree with either of them or anything else i've seen. i think you do too. bottom line is it will take some tinkering on the forms in the new census to bring up the accuracy. but we do not even know for sure if the census format will be changed so we may never know for sure with any accuracy. if uncle sam does not fix this situation it's a shame.

 

 

I didn't realize Toledo was such a nice city; those pics were awesome!  It's too bad the downtown isn't bustling.........there surely is the population for it!

Very cool thread....never heard of Toledo refered to as "Michigan's second largest city"....interested fact.  Toledo has great potential, but I always seem to yearn for more to the urban core.