Abstract
Alan Rapoport, former Mayor of Cleveland Heights and active community member, discusses how Cleveland Heights and, more particularly, Coventry changed from the 1960s through to the present. From his tenure on City Council and heavy involvement in the local community organization Coventry Neighbors Inc., he describes key initiatives, events, and innovative improvements that helped ensure that the city remained a vibrant, tolerant part of Greater Cleveland.
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Interviewee
Rapoport, Alan (interviewee)
Interviewer
Nemeth, Sara (interviewer)
Project
Cleveland Heights
Date
8-14-2018
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
124 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Alan Rapoport interview, 14 August 2018" (2018). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 911092.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1171
Transcript
Sarah Nemeth [00:00:02] Hi, my name is Sarah Nemeth. I'm here today with Alan Rapoport. Today is August 14, 2018, and this recording is for the Cleveland Regional Oral History Project. Could you please state your name for the record?
Alan Rapoport [00:00:14] Alan Rapoport.
Sarah Nemeth [00:00:16] And where and when were you born?
Alan Rapoport [00:00:19] I was born March ... 1949. At the time, my parents lived in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
Sarah Nemeth [00:00:26] And what are your first memories of Cleveland Heights?
Alan Rapoport [00:00:32] Well, growing up in Cleveland Heights, I went to elementary school at Fairfax Elementary, which was about seven-tenths of a mile from my house. I was quite frequently walking to and from the school. I remember living on a fairly small street of two-family homes, which had a lot of kids. And we used to play in the street, and we could shoot out of the street from time to time. And I guess those are my earliest memories. My earliest thing I could remember trying to remember back to something was a flood on Meadowbrook Road. Meadowbrook turned into a meadow brook, literally, and people had to help us get kids get across this Meadowbrook to get from one side to the other. That was quite some time ago, but that situation was remedied by the creation of a rather sizable dam in Lake View Cemetery that now has a retention basin so the water doesn't back up the way it once did.
Sarah Nemeth [00:01:41] Is that the same project? Didn't the botanical gardens get flooded at one point in time from that scene?
Alan Rapoport [00:01:48] Well, a lot of things used to get flooded. I remember at one point there were pictures of Volkswagens floating in University Circle because it was that much water that had backed up and had nowhere to go. But the water came from the higher elevation, the Heights. I think that's one of the earlier things that I remember growing up in Cleveland Heights. But, of course, there were a lot of other things. It was a very interesting community.
Sarah Nemeth [00:02:18] By interesting, what would you mean? What were your neighbors like? I know that you were a kid at the time, so it's not like you were- I don't know if you were perceiving the differences, maybe between you and others?
Alan Rapoport [00:02:32] Not particularly. It was a pleasant neighborhood. People got along reasonably well. I knew a number of the other families that were there. I knew a number of the other kids who lived on the street. And it seemed to be a little closed society, after a fashion. Two-family houses with front porches. People used to sit out on their front porches at night, and so it was very sociable feeling to it.
Sarah Nemeth [00:03:02] What was the socioeconomic level, do you think, at that time?
Alan Rapoport [00:03:08] Oh, my. Well, Cleveland Heights occupied a little different position regionally than it does today. I grew up thinking that the known world ended at Green Road. That if you went too far past Green Road headed in an easterly direction, you'd fall off the end of the earth. There was nothing out there. Beachwood was just a big open area, not terribly well developed. Mostly famous for having no street lights. They liked it that way. But Cleveland Heights basically, I think, was middle class to upper middle class. And I think basically the housing stock actually is not that much different than it was then. But it doesn't occupy relative the same place in the market that other places now that are newer that have been developed over the years. And as a result of that, most of the people I grew up with don't live in Cleveland Heights anymore. A lot of them who are still living in the area moved further out east. They might live in Beachwood, they might live in pepper pike. They might live even further east than that. People began to outmigrate over time.
Sarah Nemeth [00:04:26] I think there's a natural trend to usually slowly migrate out.
Alan Rapoport [00:04:33] Well, it's kind of the history of the east side of Cleveland. My parents moved into Cleveland Heights out of the city of Cleveland. And a lot of people did that at the time. In fact, we didn't live in Cleveland Heights the whole time that I was growing up. My parents at one point moved to University Heights, where they were involved with building a brand-new house there at the time. And it's kind of ironic because we moved to- We lived about a block and a half from the high school. And just as I was about ready to start high school, we moved out to University Heights, and we're no longer a block and a half from the high school.
Sarah Nemeth [00:05:11] That's unfortunate.
Alan Rapoport [00:05:13] Yeah, it worked out.
Sarah Nemeth [00:05:14] But was it quick to me, I mean, was it, did you quickly make friends transferring to a different school?
Alan Rapoport [00:05:22] I didn't transfer. I was going to Roxboro Junior High School at the time, which was the junior high school for the district I lived in. I had one semester left to go, so I didn't really want to move into the Wiley Junior High School district and start from scratch. My father would drop me off at Roxboro every day on his way to work. And I would take the bus back out to University Heights to go home. And so I finished up at Roxboro. And I never did go to Wiley. I met a lot of the Wiley kids when I went to Heights, but I went directly after that to Heights High.
Sarah Nemeth [00:06:03] Okay. Was there a large Jewish population, do you remember?
Alan Rapoport [00:06:09] There was very substantial. My family belongs to what was called at the time Temple on the Heights, which subsequently moved, and I kind of privately referred to it as Temple off the Heights after that. But, yeah, it was- There was a very large Jewish population when I was at Heights High School, when the Jewish high holy days came out, they literally closed the school. They kept it open, and there were no classes of the kids who were not Jewish elected to go, and I don't know if they were required to, but the school was largely depopulated at that point the holidays came along.
Sarah Nemeth [00:06:58] When you weren't in your childhood parameters or boundaries, where did your family frequent, like maybe a store or a restaurant or delicatessen in the neighborhood?
Alan Rapoport [00:07:12] They really didn't go out much, to my recollection. They were home bodies, and that's what they seemed like to do.
Sarah Nemeth [00:07:20] Do you know of any stores that were around you maybe that you didn't go to, but maybe someone mentioned.
Alan Rapoport [00:07:30] Well, I don't recall any place, particularly as neighborhood hangouts. I lived at the time near Lee Road. It was about a block away, and it was nice in the summertime to be able to walk up the corner and get ice cream there. There or- They had a variety of different stores that we frequented over time, everything from a bakery to a shoemaker shop to a bank. There were a lot of operations. There was the Heights YMCA on Lee Road, which was also a place that I spent a lot of time at in earlier years, and- But no place I would describe, particularly as a hangout. I think the coffee shop culture is a much later phenomenon.
Sarah Nemeth [00:08:24] Right. So you were in high school in the late sixties?
Alan Rapoport [00:08:30] I was. Graduated in '67.
Sarah Nemeth [00:08:33] What was the atmosphere of high school and youth culture during that time?
Alan Rapoport [00:08:40] Well, I wasn't very active in what I'd call the youth culture at the time. Things, they were changing at the time. It was the sixties. There were people who were beginning to get active in social causes. I remember one woman coming to me with a petition she wanted me to sign against the Vietnam War that discussed the philosophy of Henry David Thoreau, misspelled Thoreau, and I thought that was amusing, but it wasn't anything I was terribly, personally involved in or terribly interested in. There were things going on. The music was fairly evident at the time. There was a place called- It was called La Cave. It was in the basement of a building, was on somewhere by Euclid 105th, somewhere in that neighborhood. I did go there once, and they heard of something called the Blues Project, which I thought was pretty good. There were occasional events. They used to have something at the art museum. I don't know how many times they did it. I only went to see it one time. They called it a be-in, in the area where they had the lagoon, and it was just totally full up with people, and they were just hanging out. I wouldn't say it was Woodstock. I would say it was probably in some ways a precursor of Woodstock, but it was still, it was the Summer of Love, and this was beginning to happen about the time I graduated. I graduated in the last midyear class from Cleveland Heights High. We graduated in January of '67. They used to have graduations in January and in June, and that was very odd at the time, but especially because I graduated in January and I wasn't going to college until September.
Sarah Nemeth [00:10:55] But what did you do to fill your time?
Alan Rapoport [00:11:00] I got a wonderful job by total accident. I ended up working for the United States Post Office. A friend of mine had talked me into going downtown to take a test to get what I thought was summer employment. Turned out we took the wrong test. It was a test for permanent employment, and they called me up and I arrived, and it was great because summer employees worked part time and they got lower rate of pay. Full-time employees worked full time, and they got a higher rate of pay and a uniform allowance. I thought this was great. But at the end of the summer, I told the superintendent I've got to quit now and go to school. And he said, no, you don't quit. I said, well, what do you mean? He said, you resigned for personal reasons. Why would I do that? He said, because then you could apply for reinstatement in June when your school session ends, and then you could do that over and over again. And I thought that was a great idea, too. So that's what I did for four consecutive summers all through college, as I worked for a post office. And part of the time I worked in Cleveland Heights, so I was walking. It was actually, the district was partly Cleveland Heights, partly University Heights, a little sliver of Shaker Heights, Zone 18. So I was walking as a substitute. So I was on different routes, and I was all over the city just walking and delivering mail.
Sarah Nemeth [00:12:41] Well, on your walks, did you ever observe any differences between, like, Cleveland Heights, Euclid Heights, I mean, University Heights, and Shaker Heights?
Alan Rapoport [00:12:51] Well, it's not so much the people is the neighborhoods are very obviously different. There's a tremendous amount of variety in this area. You can walk into one area and it's small, single-family homes. You could walk into another area, and it's all apartments, buildings. You walk into another area and it's all mansions, huge mansions, and then, obviously, commercial districts all over the place as well. So I think that's one thing that's very strikingly obvious when you're at a walking level, as you see a tremendous amount of diversity in the community in terms of the housing stock. And obviously, that somewhat reflects a diversity in the people and the social, economic standards of the people and their lifestyles.
Sarah Nemeth [00:13:43] Where did you go to college?
Alan Rapoport [00:13:45] Went to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, which is near Mount Vernon, which is near nowhere. [laughs] It was established by the first Episcopal Bishop of Ohio, man by the name of Philander Chase. He wanted to establish a school for young men that was in the middle of nowhere and away from the temptations of the world. And how I ended up there remains to me to this day a total surprise. I moved from a large co-educational high school of about 3200 to a small, all male college of 800. Scratching my head all the time. But it turned out to be a wonderful experience. And incidentally, the school went co-ed my junior year, so it went through interesting transformations of its own. But Kenyon was far enough away from Cleveland that I wasn't tempted to come home every 15 minutes and close enough that if I wanted to come home, I could. Small liberal arts school, very introspective, very tight-knit. You could very easily run into your professor at the laundromat, and a great place to sit around and drink coffee and have conversations, which is what got me kind of used to doing that.
Sarah Nemeth [00:15:18] Liberal arts. I went to one myself, so I think that that's one thing. It teaches you how to hold a conversation and to be-
Alan Rapoport [00:15:25] Well, I get to quiz you next.
Sarah Nemeth [00:15:29] I'll get prepared. So when did you- So when you finished college, what did you do?
Alan Rapoport [00:15:38] Well, after I finished college, I wasn't sure what to do. Had two thoughts in mind. I was always used to going to school and then going to school and then going to school, and I was sort of torn between whether I wanted to go to graduate school in history, which was my major, or go to law school. So I took the grad records and the law boards, hoping that I'd get some signal of which I was more ready to go to. And I got about equal results on both of them, so it was no help at all. My faculty advisor and others nominated me for something called a Watson Fellowship, which they said I would be eligible for only if I at least applied to a graduate school. So I did. I ended up not getting the fellowship, but I ended up getting accepted at Northwestern in the PhD program. And I got in the car, and I drove out to Evanston, Illinois. And I booked into the YMCA for the night, planning to get up the next day to get an apartment. And I had some kind of nightmare that night. I woke up in a cold sweat the next morning. And the only thing I could think of at the time was I got to take some time off, think about this. So I didn't enroll. They told me that I could reapply in a year if I really wanted to. I came back to Cleveland. I spent a miserable year living at home with my parents and working in a grocery store, after which I ended up going to law school.
Sarah Nemeth [00:17:28] And where did you go to law school?
Alan Rapoport [00:17:29] Case Western Reserve. Life seems to have dumped me in certain directions. I applied to four colleges, got accepted at one. I applied to several law schools. I got accepted at one. But I personally believe that sometimes life is like being a roulette ball. You fall into the slot you're supposed to fall into and things work out the way they're supposed to. And Kenyon worked out very well for me. So did Case Western reserve. That worked out fine, too.
Sarah Nemeth [00:18:02] While in law school, where did you live?
Alan Rapoport [00:18:05] That's a good question. I moved out of the family home. I moved into Coventry. I moved into an apartment on Euclid Heights Boulevard, which was just around the corner from Coventry. There was a one-bedroom apartment that had come available. A guy that I went to junior high school was living there with his wife and child, and she just got pregnant. She was about to have a second child, so they felt they'd outgrown the place. And I moved into his apartment, which was fairly unique. Peter was a very interesting artist. And he had painted the ceiling of the living room with a picture of Emiliano Zapata in depth in front of the mountains of Mexico in very vivid red and blue and yellow colors. It was extraordinary picture on the entire ceiling. And I was in the front of the building. And people walking up the sidewalk during the summertime when the windows were open could look up through the front windows and see my ceiling. So, interesting place. And over the head of the picture of Zapata ceiling was the Zapatista motto, Tierra y Libertad, Land and liberty. Because Peter was very fond of anarchist themes. And I thought that this was totally appropriate for somebody going to law school to be living under an anarchist ceiling. So I took up residence in that apartment and was literally a stone's throw away from the Heights Art Theater just around the corner on Euclid Heights Boulevard.
Sarah Nemeth [00:19:44] Was there a large student population that kind of lived around you near Coventry, or had they not migrated yet?
Alan Rapoport [00:19:53] I don't think there were a lot of students there that I knew of. There probably were, because there was a lot of rental housing there, and I really didn't know all the people that lived in all the places there. A lot of my classmates had chosen to live in dormitories on campus. Basically, the critical mass of people that I knew in Coventry, at least initially, were people that I grew up with. I grown up in the Roxboro Junior high School District, and Roxboro was composed of people who had come from different elementary school districts. I had come from the Fairfax district, but Roxboro was also the place where the Coventry school district went to. So a lot of the people that I knew from Roxboro and Heights were living in Coventry at the time, and I met a lot of other people through them over time. It was an easier place to meet people at the time because the interactions were very different than they are today. There were places where people actually could get to meet.
Sarah Nemeth [00:21:11] Was that your first experience in Coventry, or had you visited there previously?
Alan Rapoport [00:21:16] I'd been there on occasion before that, but it was kind of episodic and rare. I didn't really hang out there and really didn't have a long history with the place at all. I remember some years earlier going to a movie at the Heights Art Theater. It was well-known at the time as being an art theater, that they would show movies that the other theaters, and there were a lot more theaters than there are now, but the big budget movies were shown at the other places. And then I remember the movie that I saw at the Heights Art Theater. It was The Mouse That Roared, with Peter Sellers, and one would not think of that as an art movie today because you could see it on cable. It shows quite frequently. But at the time, this was the only movie theater in town where you could see a movie like that. And the Heights Art Theater was cultivating an image. If you went into the lobby of the Heights Art Theater, they had in the one corner there a coffee machine and free coffee. They were little cups of coffee. But this, I thought, was just very elegant. And I was just totally blown away by just the image of all of this. It was a great, great place at the time.
Sarah Nemeth [00:22:43] What was your first impression, other than it was a place that you could easily meet people when you first moved to Coventry?
Alan Rapoport [00:22:51] Well, it wasn't just easily meeting people. They were just frequent interactions. There were places where there were interactions. There were two, I thought, critical masses in particular. One was. One was Tommy's, and the original Tommy's was a very small place. And I know from your podcast with Tommy, he's described how people often had to share tables there. What he didn't mention is we bussed our own trays. And by virtue of sitting with people and other people sitting down next to you, you actually started up conversations, and you began to develop relationships. The other was Irv's Deli, which was open late, and you could sit there and nurse a cup of coffee with a bunch of people, and then friends of friends would stop over and sit down in the booth with you. And this is, once again a way that you began to network and develop more relationships. I also got to meet some people who were involved in a local neighborhood group, Coventry Neighbors, and that was another kind of intro to a network of people who lived in the area. And what these people basically all had in common was that they all were renters. There were very, very few homeowners in that general group. We were all relatively poor economically, and we shared a common experience. Some of my friends had spent a lot more time in Coventry. They were very familiar with it. They had much longer history than me. They had war stories of their own. Coventry at the time had a lot more retail activity going on. There was the Leather Shop. There was Record Revolution. There were a number of stores there that catered to specific needs of a neighborhood in terms of commercial activity. Not so much now. A friend of mine once observed that any business where you put food in your mouth does well in Coventry, but he might have added or alcohol, and it's retail is struggling all over this country, and Coventry is no great exception to that. But over time, there were a variety of businesses that came and went.
Sarah Nemeth [00:25:34] So you moved to Coventry, so I guess that would be like the early seventies or mid seventies?
Alan Rapoport [00:25:42] Yeah, it would have been about 1972, I think would be about right.
Sarah Nemeth [00:25:48] Do you know when the Coventry Neighbors started?
Alan Rapoport [00:25:51] Oh, Coventry Neighbors predated me. It had been around for a while. There was a group of people who were fairly active at that time. One or two who are still around, actually, who have a little longer history with the organization than I did. But one of them was Susanna Niermann O'Neill, who's at city hall. She's an assistant city manager now. She and her husband Dennis, were active well before me, and it wasn't a very active organization past a certain level. It was a social type of organization. The newsletter they had was more prone to publish recipes than anything else. And they had regular meetings, but I can't say I know a lot about what they did before I came along. The only project that I know of is that they had had somebody who I never met who had been involved in a tree project. He was trying to get the merchants to pay for having trees put in front of their individual businesses. Worked out some kind of deal with the city where if the merchant would pony up $50, they'd put a tree in front of their store. And when I came along, all the easy sales had been made, but the streets still look kind of bare. And I had been involved in a tree project at Kenyon. So I sort of picked it up and managed to get about another 15 to 20 trees planted on the street, which was really scraping the bottom of the barrel, because these were the people who had said no. And I had to seriously work on persuading them to say yes. But at any rate, I sort of got into the spirit of getting involved with Coventry Neighbors because I kind of liked the people. And I thought it was an interesting way to learn more about what was going on around me. Found that if I was active in Coventry Neighbors, I had an excuse to walk in to see some of these merchants and to say, hi, I'm from Coventry Neighbors. And the first thing they thought was, what is this, the Coventry Neighbors Benevolent Society or something? I said, no, no, no. This is a neighborhood group that just live around here. Most of the merchants didn't live around there, and so they were, in some ways, a foreign group to us. We coexisted in the same space during limited periods of time, but our objectives and attitudes were distinctly different. And there were a few exceptions. Tommy's family lived in the area, but most of the merchants are perfectly happy to get in their cars and leave at the end of the day.
Sarah Nemeth [00:28:53] Wow, that's really surprising. I didn't know that they didn't- I mean, a place where they're serving a local community and they don't even live in the community.
Alan Rapoport [00:29:05] Well, I don't think that's uncommon with merchants in general. A lot of people that open up stores that see an economic opportunity, but that's not home. That's not where they live during their free time. And I don't think Coventry was any different that way. I don't mean to suggest that these people didn't care at all about what was going on around them, but sometimes getting them to be community-minded was... difficult. [laughs] We found that out when we started running street fairs, but we reached an understanding of sorts about goals we had in common. And we got along. There were some that were very community-minded. Some that I think others would have been surprised at being how community minded they were. But, you know.
Sarah Nemeth [00:30:05] So I did read the Coventry Neighbors, Inc. Newsletter. And in January 1976, I found this really interesting and fascinating, but you broke this, that the area was slowly running out of cheap apartments. "When the hippie leaves Coventry because he cannot afford to live here anymore, there are some that will be glad to see him go. However, it should be remembered that is the hippie who made Coventry chic." Do you remember seeing that or writing that, rather?
Alan Rapoport [00:30:40] I don't specifically remember writing it, but I'll stand behind the sentiment there. When I first moved into Coventry, my one-bedroom apartment was $96 a month. Yeah, wow is right. And actually, it stayed at $96 a month for quite some time, even when rents all around me were rising because my absentee landlord didn't have a clue what rents were like in the area. He just owned property there. And in addition to that, the understanding was, you're paying low rent, but you're getting low services. [laughs] Furnace didn't always work, but it was obvious at a certain point that rents were rising, that there was more demand. And in terms of supply, supply was actually being reduced. There was a very sizable apartment building just down the block from me on Euclid Heights Boulevard. It was known in the neighborhood as Crazy Susie's building. Crazy Susie Karis. I never met the woman, but she was kind of famous or infamous. And her building was acquired or somehow taken over and the whole building was knocked down. And a parking lot was built over there. So there were residential areas that were being taken out of the supplies chain. There was Rock Court, which was ratty in the extreme and horrible condition housing, but still housing. And that was eventually all knocked down for an expansion of a parking lot, too. So, yeah, there was a definite sense that I had at various times that the demographics were changing. I wouldn't quite call it gentrification, but if you raise the rents, then you're obviously changing the nature of the people who can afford to be there. And there were a number of people who had lived in Coventry over the years who had lived in other places, like East Cleveland or Hessler Road or places where the housing stock was pretty marginal, but the rents were low. And this tended to have the effect of encouraging certain people to be able to live there. And a lot of these people did bring a certain attitude and sometimes talent to the community. They could quite often be very artistic. They certainly did provide local color. I always referred to Coventry in particular in Cleveland Heights in general as being kind of like the Cleveland Zoo. You could come from outside. You could see all of the different kinds of animals. You could ooh and ah, and then you could leave. So a lot of people thought that Coventry was a great place to hang out for that reason, especially kids, teenagers, young adults, because there weren't a lot of places to go and hang out. And it was also a place where you were less likely, if you were hanging out, to get shooed away by the police or complained on by the merchants or anything. There was a certain attitude about Coventry at the time that all these people are kind of crazy and wacko and politically extreme, and they're all probably at least smoking marijuana, probably shooting up heroin. God knows what they're doing, which was totally overblown. But there was this impression that people could be in Coventry who were sometimes really weird. And actually, that part is true, because there was a mental institution called Fairhill. And at the time, there were a lot of people who were basically incarcerated there because they were having bad mental problems and they'd be put on medications. Well, the social attitude began to change at some point, and Fairhill began releasing people. It became a revolving door. Well, if you walked out of Fairhill and you walked to Beachwood Place, they wouldn't tolerate that. But if somebody who walked out of Fairhill walked into Coventry, well, that was local color. So these people could go there and not get hassled or harassed, and they could sometimes be crazy. Like General Stanley Ware, first four-star Jewish general in the Air Force.
Sarah Nemeth [00:35:45] Was that a Coventry character?
Alan Rapoport [00:35:48] He was somebody who hung around Coventry. I was sitting at Irv's Deli one day with some friends, and Officer Mark Lovequist of the Cleveland Heights Police Department came bopping in, and he said, has anybody seen Stanley Ware? We said, no, he hadn't. And he said, well, he's off his meds. He's out of Fairhill, he's around somewhere. So, okay, fine. A little bit later, Stanley comes popping into Irv's, and he walks up to the table, and he says, I can't stay. I can't stay. Okay, Stanley, you can't stay. I can't stay. I have to go meet the Rat Pack. We're going to Vegas. [laughs] He said, Okay, Stanley, that's fine. And he marched out the door. Well, a little later, Officer Lovequist came back, and he said he had found Stanley. And we said, Well, how did you handle that? And he said, Well, I told him that I was his chauffeur, and I was taking him to Vegas. [laughs] And we said, well, what happened when you got to Fairhill? And he said, well, I told him that there was a helicopter waiting on the roof of the building to take him away. But we had people like that hanging out at Coventry from time to time. And like I said, they were kind of like local color and generally harmless. They didn't present a danger to anybody. I don't think they were terribly dangerous to themselves, which is why they got released from Fairhill from time to time, because they were not dangerous enough. But it all sort of contributed to the general reputation of the place as being a site where you could run into the unusual. And, of course, when you began to hear stories from other people about the things that they ran into. And I heard one of your podcasts about the chicken plucker on Coventry. These kind of stories, maybe they occurred in other parts of the community. I wouldn't know one way or the other, but they certainly did seem to be common enough stories in Coventry. We hear these kind of crazy stories all the time and it got to be kind of amusing.
Sarah Nemeth [00:38:13] Definitely. I mean, it's interesting how- Which will be a later question, but just how it evolves from, like, this place that I just don't understand why everyone was just attracted there. I mean, you have a good- You gave a good reason because there was Fairhill that was right there, and some people-
Alan Rapoport [00:38:31] Well, but there were different groups of people kind of coexisting. I think what defined Coventry in a lot of ways, for me, was the variety. And what it taught me personally was a lot about the nature of tolerance. Tolerance is a very, very difficult thing to develop. People do not instinctively feel comfortable with other people who are different from them. I don't care whether you're talking about political differences, cultural differences, racial differences. Anybody who's different than you challenges what you are in way, shape, or form. When you live in a neighborhood like Coventry, where you have such an incredible variety of people, you begin to develop a thick skin about it. You still begin to develop very strong feelings of what your preferences are for, but you begin to develop a lot of ability to defer to other people's opinions, to not get overly worked up about them, to en
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