Abstract

Near West Side resident Mark Pestak shares what it was like living on the Near West Side in the early 1990s. Pestak highlights his involvement in the Catholic Worker Community along with some of the goals of the Catholic Worker movement. Pestak discusses his involvement in housing justice in the neighborhood. Pestak also recollects the community's efforts to close down a hazardous waste recycling facility on Monroe and Fulton in the 1990s.

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Interviewee

Pestak, Mark (interviewee)

Interviewer

White, Bali (interviewer)

Project

Near West Side Housing Activism

Date

6-13-2024

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

49 minutes

Transcript

Mark Pestak [00:00:00] Okay, awesome.

Bali White [00:00:02] We are live. Hi, everybody. I am Bali White for the Cleveland Regional Oral History Project at Cleveland State. I’m here with Mark Pestak at Carnegie West Library in the bridge room. Hi, Mark. How are you?

Mark Pestak [00:00:20] Well, thanks. Yourself?

Bali White [00:00:22] Good, good, thank you. So could you introduce yourself, kind of when and where you were born and just some background on who you are?

Mark Pestak [00:00:32] Sure. My name is Mark Pestak. I was born in Euclid, which is a suburb east of Cleveland. Big Catholic family. I have eight siblings. There were nine kids in the family, all still very close. Keep in touch regularly. Most of us still in the Cleveland area. So now I’m living, been living on the Near West Side here with my wife and a family for 33 years. I had to think about that. I have two daughters. My youngest daughter is disabled. She lives with us. She’ll continue to live with us. My older daughter is married, lives close to us. She and her husband have identical twin girls who, in my totally unbiased opinion, are the two cutest kids on the planet. They’re three years old and they are gorgeous.

Bali White [00:01:35] So when did you move to the Near West Side? Did you have any prior connections to the area before moving here?

Mark Pestak [00:01:43] I moved to the neighborhood with my wife in 1991, but I had actually purchased the house that we’re living in before my wife and I were even engaged. So when we got engaged, she knew that sort of this house, this neighborhood was part of the deal with me. So we got married in April of ’91, and the house had been boarded up and abandoned. We worked with the local development corporation, Near West Housing Corporation, to have the house rehabbed, and it wasn’t quite done by our wedding day. So we got married in April and moved in May of ’91.

Bali White [00:02:31] Okay, awesome. Could you describe what this neighborhood was like when you first moved here in terms of conditions, demographics, et cetera?

Mark Pestak [00:02:40] Yeah. So I think I’d even like to back up a little bit from there, if I can,[crosstalk] as to sort of why I landed in this neighborhood. So I had been living after I got out of school, I moved back to Cleveland. I’d been living in on the east side in University Heights, close to where I was working and then I applied for a fellowship and I got that fellowship as the congressional science fellow for the American Physical Society. So I went to work on Capitol Hill for a congressman in 1989. And while I was there, a friend, through a friend of a friend, she showed me around the area and I ended up living in DC. I mean, a lot of people when they work on Capitol Hill, they live in either, you know, Virginia, northern Virginia, or Maryland or something like that. But I thought, well, I’m going to go for the DC experience and I’ll live in DC. So I rented an apartment in southeast Washington, which was really a transformative experience for me. Working on Capitol Hill was transformative, but the neighborhood I lived in was maybe even more important to me. So it was as a result of that experience that I knew when I moved back to Cleveland that I wanted to live in the city. So this is getting around to answer your question about the neighborhood, but I hadn’t found a place to live. So when I moved back to Cleveland, I was ready to move back to Cleveland. I didn’t have a place to live. So I called my sister, who at the time was single and living in a condo in Broadview Heights, which is a southern suburb. And she said, sure, you know, you can move in. It’s a two-bedroom place. She was a nurse working night shift, I was working day shift. We hardly saw each other. So it was a great relationship. I’m joking. I get along great with my sister. And I lived there for 13 months, and I met one person in that neighborhood. I’m not an introvert by any stretch of the imagination, so it was just odd to me that it wasn’t what I was looking for, to live in a neighborhood where people were just, you know, they pulled in their garage door. The garage door closed, and they never saw anybody else in their neighborhood. In fact, in this condo, there were. It was one of these buildings that had three condos sort of connected. So there was somebody living on the other side of my bedroom wall, and in 13 months, I never, never saw that person. But when I found the house that we’re in now on the Near West Side, I would frequently stop over to just kind of see how it was progressing, see what was going on. And before I even moved here, I had met probably half the people on our section of the street, which, you know, really tells you something about the nature of the neighborhood. Like, people just, I don’t know whether they were curious, like, is this another drug dealer moving into this house or what’s going on here? But it really felt like a community. Before I even moved here, I felt connected to the community. And of course, once we moved here, we met more people and have become pretty rooted here. So you asked what it was like. There was a sense of community sort of bubbling before we even moved here. But I also knew that it was at the time one of the poorest, if not the poorest neighborhood in Cleveland, almost about 50% Hispanic at the time. So it was very, very economically diverse, racially diverse, and that was kind of what I was looking for. I was happy, you know, moved here with eyes wide open, like, in terms of what the neighborhood was like. Certainly had its problems. A lot of noise, a lot of unruliness. Lived fairly close to Lorain Avenue, which is a loud street. It was then, it still is. But, yeah, that was a little bit about what the neighborhood was like when we first moved here.

Bali White [00:07:34] All right, thank you. Could you share with us your educational background and perhaps some of the religious involvement throughout school and then which led to some of your careers, perhaps after college?

Mark Pestak [00:07:47] Sure. So I don’t remember if I mentioned it, but growing up, very Catholic family. I went to Catholic grade school, Catholic high School, St. Joe’s High School, which is now Villa Angela St. Joe’s High School on the east side in Cleveland. Undergraduate, I went to Heidelberg College, which is a small college in Tiffin, Ohio. I majored in physics and math there. Then I got a master’s degree in physics at the University of Toledo in 1979. I’m sorry, ’77. I graduated in ’77 from Toledo. And then I went to Penn State in University Park, Pennsylvania, for a Ph.D. in physics. Finished there in 1981, and then moved back to Cleveland. Got a job with Sohio at their research center. Moved back to Cleveland then. And during that, you know, college career, I did stay connected with sort of Catholic groups in particular. When I was at Penn State, there was an organization called Pax Christi, which is Latin for the Peace of Christ, and that was pretty formidable for me to sort of understand issues, begin to really explore issues of peace and justice, largely from a Catholic perspective. Those were important things for me.

Bali White [00:09:29] So about what year did you join the Catholic Worker movement here in the Near West Side?

Mark Pestak [00:09:35] That’s a good question. I can’t give you an exact date. You know, when I moved here, I’m not even sure I knew about the Catholic Worker movement. Not even sure I knew anybody. Or I knew people that were connected to the Catholic Worker but didn’t know they were connected with the Catholic Worker. But over time, through neighbors that were either living at the Catholic Worker House or what we call the extended Catholic Worker Community, getting to know them and sort of drawn in, invited into that group, would have been really pretty shortly after I moved here, you know, would have been early nineties.

Bali White [00:10:19] Could you share with us what the overall goal or goals of the Catholic Worker movement is here in Cleveland?

Mark Pestak [00:10:26] Sure. Their focus is, I mean, to put it in the words of Dorothy Day, Catholic Worker movement, is about building a new society in the shell of the old. That’s in a sort of more local, concrete terms that’s meant for the Cleveland Catholic Worker maintaining a house of hospitality where there’s people who needed some support were able to live at the Catholic Worker House. I’ve never lived- My wife and I, neither of us have lived at the Catholic Worker House. We consider ourselves members of the, what we call the extended Catholic Worker Community. We live close by, very close by to the Catholic Worker House and involved in many of their activities. But the goals have been locally to provide housing and then been involved really very consistently in a witness at the annual air show to point out to anybody who walks by that it’s- The air show is largely a military recruiting activity. And just trying to raise people’s awareness about the planes that people are bringing their children to see are built really for one purpose. They’re not built for air shows. They’re built to drop bombs and make war, and so that’s one of the witnesses that I try to make a point to be a part of every year around Labor Day.

Bali White [00:12:13] So how or what would you define as the central issues at stake in the struggle for housing justice in the Near West Side? And how are you involved in housing justice?

Mark Pestak [00:12:28] In at least a couple of ways I’m involved. One is directly. I’m a landlord. I own some properties very close to my house, and I have owned rental properties for, well, since 1996. So a long time and always been willing to rent to people who might otherwise have difficulty finding housing. So, you know, I could go on and on and tell really some beautiful stories about people that I’ve met. You know, one woman immediately comes to mind that I literally went to the women’s shelter — she was living at the women’s shelter — I picked her up at the shelter with all her belongings, drove her to this apartment, and she was a tenant for at least a couple of years, and she was very clear that her goal was to get her life back together and move to Lakewood and get a bigger apartment so her son could move in with her, and she did that. And so that was what I consider a wonderful success story. A lot of other stories that were not so successful. But my involvement in housing has been very direct in that sense, to be able to provide housing to people that wouldn’t otherwise been able to or would have had difficulty finding a place. And then also kind of as a follower, I have some very good friends connected to the Catholic Worker Community that are brilliant, very knowledgeable and brilliant in terms of housing policy, housing activism, and I’ve always taken their lead, like when it was time to gather a group of people to go to a meeting at city hall or something like that, I was a follower in that sense. So some direct involvement, and then as a taking the lead from other people on policy and advocacy kind of things.

Bali White [00:14:48] What do you hope to see in change or experience? Or Excuse me, What do you hope to see change in terms of affordable housing in the area?

Mark Pestak [00:14:58] Well, I think the first thing that we should do is stop providing tax abatement. Tax abatement served its purpose. As I said, when my wife and I moved here thirty-some years ago, it needed- The neighborhood, needed a little bit of a boost, a little bit of a nudge. And things like tax abatement is one way you can give a nudge to developers to invest in a neighborhood that they might otherwise be disinclined to invest in. The need for tax abatement ended in this neighborhood at least 15 years ago, but the developers continued to get tax abatement, and as a result, the type of tax abatement seems to just encourage the construction of high-end housing. So vacant lots, older properties seem to always end up in the hand of developers and then seem to end up being upscale, high-end housing. So the availability of affordable units, lower-income units, just continues to decline. So the first thing I’d say is just stop giving tax abatement. Was there more to that question?

Bali White [00:16:38] No, you touched base on it.

Mark Pestak [00:16:40] Okay, [crosstalk]

Bali White [00:16:41] So we’re going to kind of switch the focus towards another issue that occurred from 1983 to 2000 with Northeast Chemical Corporation, which operated on Monroe and Fulton, kind of in the heart of a residential area not too far from where you live. So initially, NEC had told the community it was a recycling facility. When and how did you come to realize that it was something much more concerning than that?

Mark Pestak [00:17:11] Well, it was a recycling facility, and when I first saw the flyer about this recycling center in our neighborhood, I thought, oh, wonderful. A place that I could take my old newspapers, my empty aluminum cans, whatever. I thought that kind of recycling center. So when we saw this flyer that said they were having an open house, I went out of curiosity and found out that what they’re recycling was not newspapers and aluminum cans, it was hazardous waste, and hazardous waste has a pretty specific definition, but that generic term is pretty descriptive. And when I took the tour of that facility, it was shocking to me. First of all, what they were taking in, what they were collecting and how much of it was stored at that site. So what they were doing, their business model, was to take probably, I don’t know the finances really that well, but I suspect that people who generated hazardous waste, like, for example, a company that might strip paint off of, you know, you could take- And I’m giving a specific example because I used this service where I took old doors from my house that had been painted, and they would dip the doors- For a fee, they dip the doors in these giant vats of chemicals. It would lift the paint off, and then they would get my door back that was stripped clean down to the bare wood. Well, that generates- That solvent that they used to strip the wood or strip the paint off my old doors is now hazardous waste and needed to go somewhere. So I suspect that that company paid somebody like an NEC. I don’t know specifically in my case if it went to NEC, but that would be an example of a company that generated hazardous waste, in this case, a toxic solvent. They would pay somebody to take that waste. NEC would get paid to take it, then they would collect, do the same thing with other companies, and they would mix hazardous waste to generate a liquid of a desired BTU content, heat content, and then they would sell that material to cement kilns. So they were sort of the NEC and companies like it that processed this waste were intermediaries between the people who were generating the hazardous waste and the cement kilns, who would burn the hazardous waste as fuel. So they made money to pick the stuff up, and then I suspect they made money selling it to cement kilns. And, you know, I chose that specific example about my having the paint stripped off of my doors to beautify my house, that when I walked through this facility and I literally, there were 55 gallon drums of hazardous waste stacked higher than me. I’m pretty tall, so these were like stacked at least seven feet high. I felt some personal responsibility for this, [laughs] for this mess, for this, for the reality of all this hazardous waste that was generated, that somehow I was certainly complicit in this. And so they gave us this tour of this place. Very nice. You know, I met the owner, met, you know, some of the employees had a very nice, gave us a very nice tour of the facility. And I was just floored at the volume and the really danger associated with having so much of this stuff in one place in a residential neighborhood. My background in physics and chemistry gave me probably a little more understanding than most about what some of these materials were, what some of the hazards are with them, health hazards and risk of fire and explosion and that sort of thing. So it was quite an eye-opening experience to take their tour during their open house.

Bali White [00:22:23] Oh, yeah, definitely. Definitely concerning. Especially when you have, like, a family in the area and, you know, just seeing that is scary.

Mark Pestak [00:22:32] Yeah. Yeah.

Bali White [00:22:33] So, ROC-SOHW, or Residents of Ohio City Subcommittee on Hazardous Waste, was a community group that you were a part of in order to challenge NEC. Could you share when this subcommittee was formed, some of its goals and the story behind the name?

Mark Pestak [00:22:51] Sure. I can’t remember exactly when it was formed. So it was after that tour, which I can’t tell you exactly when the tour was, and I can’t find any. I can’t find that original flyer. I probably kept it somewhere, but it’s lost in my house. It would have been in the early nineties. I’m not even sure. It was probably before my kids were born in ’94, but right around that time. And I wasn’t the only one from the neighborhood, from my street in particular, that went, you know, through there. But there was a lot of concern, not just me personally, but other people were concerned about this. And so we really recognized the unfairness that this type of facility would be located in. It was no coincidence, in our view. It was no coincidence that a facility like this just happened to be located in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city of Cleveland. You know, you wouldn’t find a hazardous waste processing plant in Shaker Heights or Rocky River or Brecksville. So we just gathered, a group of us gathered out of concern and wondered what we could do specifically. Specifically what NEC was trying to do was to get a permit from the Ohio. HWFB is the acronym, the Hazardous Waste Facility Board, and so we educated ourselves about what they were doing, what the permitting process was, and decided that we would request standing to intervene to be party to the case so that we could make a claim. We could object to the permit application out of our concern for the neighborhood.

Bali White [00:25:19] Could you touch base on kind of the story behind the name of ROC-SOHW?

Mark Pestak [00:25:23] Oh, yeah, it’s a bit tongue in cheek. So I’ve always referred to my neighborhood as the Near West Side. Others people refer to the neighborhood as Ohio City, and I’m sort of overstating it, but I don’t want to draw too sharp a distinction here. But the people that refer to it as Ohio City, generally speaking, would have been people that lived- I’m going to back up one more step and say that Lorain Avenue was sort of a dividing line between the gentrification north of Lorain- The neighborhood was going through much more gentrification at that time. South of Lorain was considered a wasteland. In fact, I’d like to share one little story, if I can. At a neighborhood party called the Harvest Moon Party, which was held every year since I don’t know when, on Church Avenue, a bunch of neighbors got together and shared their backyards, got a permit to block off the street, and hosted what they called the Harvest Moon Party. Well, shortly after we moved here, Everybody’s invited right in the neighborhood. So we went to the Harvest Moon Party, and you meet a lot of people. I met a young woman and just chatted, oh, what’s your name? Where do you live? She said, oh, I don’t remember her name, but she said, I live on Bridge Avenue. And I think she was, like, 17 or 18 years old, said, I live on Bridge. I grew up on Bridge Avenue. I’ve lived there my whole life. Well, Bridge Avenue was north of Lorain, and she said to me, oh, where do you live? I said, oh, my wife and I live on south of Lorain. And she said, to my shock, she said, south of Lorain! And this is a woman that grew up, lived her entire life in the neighborhood, and lived on Bridge Avenue, just a few blocks away from where I live. She said, south of Lorain! I would never go south of Lorain! It’s too dangerous.[laughs] So that was just indicative of the divide, right. That even young people growing up in the neighborhood knew, north of Lorain. Okay, south of Lorain. Too dangerous. Don’t go there. And so I sort of lost my train of thought there.

Bali White [00:28:04] Yeah. On the topic of the naming of ROC-SOHW.

Mark Pestak [00:28:09] Oh, yes. Thank you. Thank you. So when we chose the name ROC-SOHW, which is Residents of Ohio City Subcommittee on Hazardous Waste, it was a little bit tongue in cheek in that we didn’t think of ourselves as residents of Ohio City, but we thought that residents of Ohio City, and again, this is, I’m, and don’t mean to draw too sharp of a line here, but that people that referred to the neighbor as Ohio City, we might want to draw them in and say, oh, do you know what’s happening just a few blocks from your house, south of Lorain? So we chose the name ROC-SOHW, Residents of Ohio City Subcommittee on Hazardous Waste, to give it a little bit, to try and draw in some others that might not otherwise be interested in something going on south of Lorain Avenue, and to give it a little bit of a connection to that notion of, well, this is Ohio City. I don’t know if anybody got that, but we did have some fun choosing the name. It’s a clumsy name that, in retrospect, probably could have come up with something much better than that. But, yeah, it was a little bit tongue in cheek.

Bali White [00:29:31] Awesome. Thank you. From my understanding, this committee you were a part of had met with people who were employed by NEC on multiple occasions in order to come up with a solution for this issue. Could you kind of describe what these meetings or hearings were like?

Mark Pestak [00:29:51] Yeah, they were meetings, not hearings. They were very informal and really friendly. I mean, we were not- We were very clear with them about that. We were opposing their permit application. They were very cordial with us, and they understood that, you know, nobody was demonizing anybody else. They had their agenda, and we understood that. We had our agenda and they understood that. And everybody was very civil and polite to each other. There were certainly things that they were working on that we didn’t know about, and there were things that we were working on that they didn’t know. Well, I guess that’s probably not true. Ultimately, they did know everything we were working on because we submitted all these filings, responses, requests to the HWFB, the Hazardous Waste Facility Board, as part of our opposition to their permit application.

Bali White [00:30:55] So the need for lawyers was expressed amongst the community working to oust NEC from a residential area. Could you describe the events that led to the arrival of lawyers in the fight against NEC?

Mark Pestak [00:31:09] Sure. One piece of that that I remember very clearly is initially, I mean, the process of trying to gain standing in this HWFB decision required submitting documents of some sort or another. And I would prepare those documents, you know, with the group. We’d draft them, review them, but I was putting my name on it. I was signing my name on these letters that were going to HWFB. And at one point, NEC had a law firm that was representing them. And at one point, I got a letter addressed to me at my home from their law firm pointing out that I was violating the law by representing myself as a lawyer when I was not a lawyer. I never claimed to be a lawyer, but apparently these documents were supposed to have been submitted by— You’re supposed to have legal representation to submit these things. I’m not sure if I got all that right, but I did get— I do remember clearly this letter that said I was practicing law without a license and that was in violation of some Supreme Court decision back in whatever year, and it really gave me pause that, Ooh, I don’t want, I don’t want to personally get— I didn’t know what the repercussions would be if I continued to do this, to sign these letters, which they were telling me, and I really didn’t know if it was true or not. I suspect it certainly was true, but I didn’t really know that for sure that I was practicing law without a license, and there would certainly be some bad repercussions to that. So I didn’t want to keep doing that. So we, as a group, recognized that we needed to get some legal representation, and we were stuck. We were trying. We were reaching out to people that we knew. And at one point, Kathleen McDonnell said, well, I think we should just pray. So we did. And, you know, you can call it dumb luck or you can call it the grace of God. Within a couple of days, we had, I think, four people said that they would, were willing to help us with their, with legal representation for our case in, in opposing this permit application. So, yeah, we- We needed lawyers, and they showed up.

Bali White [00:34:09] Thank you. Were there any figures in the community whose stances on the issue were pivotal in the fight against or for NEC?

Mark Pestak [00:34:19] Yes. Two people come to mind. One, Father Mark DiNardo, who’s now deceased, God rest his soul, a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful man. He was the pastor at St. Patrick’s Church on Bridge Avenue, not right next door, almost to where we’re sitting right now. Mark was a very humble man, a wonderful spiritual leader. He was never one to stick his, I don’t quite know how to put this, like, to step into a controversy. He wasn’t the kind of person that liked conflict or controversy. He was always. He just wasn’t that kind of person, I guess, is the way to put it. But when I talked to him about this issue, he became, much to my surprise, very animated, very supportive, spoke up to people, to other people that he knew in a very supportive way of our efforts to oppose this permit. And I believe he was doing that as a shepherd. Right. He’s the shepherd of the flock at St. Patrick’s Church, and I believe he did this looking out for the interests of his parishioners, which was. I’m sure it was difficult for him. It was certainly out of character. It was very much appreciated by ROC-SOHW, and I think it was ultimately very important in the outcome because he drew a lot of people in that we never. We, meaning ROC-SOHW, the few of us that organized the ROC-SOHW group would have ever been able to reach out to. Wouldn’t have. Wouldn’t have made contact with, but Mark spoke up and supported us and drew in people that we wouldn’t have otherwise reached out, been able to reach. Also, much to my surprise, I thought if we could get the big institutions, if you will, in our neighborhood, on board in opposing this permit application, that would greatly enhance our chances of success to stop this permit application and Father Mark DiNardo’s support was very important. The other big institution in the neighborhood is St. Ignatius High School, and I thought, surely St. Ignatius cares about this issue. If they knew that there was this risk of chemical exposure, fires, explosions, air pollution this close to their facility, this close to the school, that out of concern for the young men, they’d be on board. That was not the case. Through a very good friend of mine, arranged a meeting with the president of St. Ignatius High School, who was not receptive to our message at all, and told us that he was friends with one of the primary investors and he was not going to help us, and that was the end of the meeting. And I was really shocked, but it was where he was at, and so St. Ignatius was never- We were never able to draw them in as a supporter in our efforts.

Bali White [00:38:10] Did NEC ever get that permit, or were you guys successful in, like, denying that?

Mark Pestak [00:38:19] I don’t know if we were successful. NEC never got the permit. My memory is a little bit fuzzy about what actually transpired. Where NEC went bankrupt and was purchased by another company that was doing the same thing or trying to do the same thing. And I think when they went bankrupt, this other company just bought neck contracts. They had contracts to take waste from hazardous waste from various places. And I think what happened is this other company bought- When NEC went bankrupt, the other company bought those contracts and then just took all that hazardous waste to wherever they were processing, where this other company was processing it. And NEC just shut down. Before that, there were— Before that happened, while the permit application was still in play, the city- I’m jumping around a little bit, but the city actually got involved. Somehow we brought this to the attention of the mayor’s office, Mayor Mike White. Mike White was the mayor at the time. As I recall, we were coming up to election time, and Mike White saw this as an opportunity to show that he’s a man of the people representing our neighborhood, and he showed up at a press conference [laughs] that he arranged with his people, and he said, I want all of you to be there, to us, to ROC-SOHW folks. And so we had a fairly good-sized crowd, and Mike White got up in front of the cameras on Monroe Avenue, right in front of the, what was then NEC and said all the things that the neighbors wanted to hear, that we’re going to stop this, this isn’t right, and city’s going to oppose this permit application. So we had support from the mayor ultimately, and so that that may have been maybe the most important part of this, because certainly there was— Again, there was a lot going on. I’m sure that we at ROC-SOHW did not understand that there were power brokers behind the NEC business and certainly power brokers in the city that would have talked to each other. So I don’t know if some deal was worked out. I don’t know. But I’m quite certain that having Mayor White come out publicly in support of ROC-SOHW’s position to oppose the permit application certainly helped with the ultimate resolution of the issue. I don’t know if their permit application was ever denied, or if it was just dropped because Northeast Chemical went out of business. I suppose that’s knowable information, but once they were gone, I tried to move on with my life because this was— It really took a lot of personal time, time away from, you know, family, and it was a stressor for sure on me and others, just in terms of the amount of time that we were spending, which is another element of this type of activity that it seemed like every meeting we went to, the people on the ROC-SOHW side of the table were taking time off of work, using their paid time off or vacation time, and not getting paid, and everybody on the other side of the table was getting paid to be there. And so it was a- It always felt like an imbalance of power in that regard. But we pressed on and, again, I don’t know if it was our effort in the end, maybe our effort was a little factor in making this happen, but it was a lot of work on our part.

Bali White [00:42:57] So could you describe kind of that feeling when NEC went out of business, how you felt during that or after the fact?

Mark Pestak [00:43:06] Yeah, I think it was relief that I didn’t have to spend so much time on this anymore. By that point, I had two young, young children and one with some serious medical issues and working full time. I also, you know, it just was, it was relief to not have to continue sort of fighting that fight any longer.

Bali White [00:43:40] So outside of this subcommittee, are you a part of any other organizations in the area?

Mark Pestak [00:43:48] Yes, we’ve talked a little bit about the Catholic Worker. I consider myself part of the extended Catholic Worker Community. My wife is the block club chair. So there’s a lot of neighborhood activities that she works on. Very connected, although not personally involved with NEOCH, the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, you know, supporter, certainly supporter of NEOCH. So I consider myself involved with NEOCH. Outside it. Well, many of my other organizations are outside the neighborhood, so leave those. Yeah.

Bali White [00:44:35] Okay. So any last thoughts as we close up this interview?

Mark Pestak [00:44:47] No, I think I just want to say that I appreciate being interviewed for this, that I know there’s a lot of work on your part, and, you know, to capture the story may have some value. I think some of the sort of truths, if you will, about this are universal. Universal. I don’t mean to make it sound so grand, but have value beyond just this one particular issue. So, for example, I mentioned earlier about the imbalance of power when neighborhood people are organizing against corporate interests, tables, the playing field is never leveled, right? It’s organizers using their own time, with lawyers working pro bono, or people throwing in their own personal money to make things happen when everybody on the other side of the table is getting paid. The other is the injustice that, something like this, that somebody would think it’s okay to place a hazardous waste facility in a residential neighborhood. And it always seems— Isn’t it surprising? It always seems to happen. It’s a low-income neighborhood. It’s a minority neighborhood. And you can- There’s, you know, probably hundreds of examples of this around the country and around the world where of environmental racism that subject people, low-income people, or minority people, to environmental hazards that would not be allowed in sort of upper middle-class kind of neighborhoods.

Bali White [00:47:00] It’s definitely eye-opening to see the type of repercussions, perhaps down the line, that this may have had on the people living in the area.

Mark Pestak [00:47:10] So, you know, it’s interesting you say that, because a couple of years ago- So the NEC issue was resolved in, I couldn’t tell you what year, but it was the nineties, right? So it’s 2024. A couple of years ago, one of my sisters, through somebody she knew at work, somehow made the connection that her coworker had a sister that lived on Monroe Avenue, which is right across from NEC. And she was telling my sister. When she found out, when my sister’s friend found out that I lived close to that, she shared some things that were really surprising to me, that this woman who lived on Monroe Avenue, she and her family had some health issues that they attributed to Northeast Chemical, to exposure from, you know, the fumes that seemed to, in her words, seemed to always be present in the neighborhood when NEC was there. I don’t know if any of that’s true. But, you know, for that to come back around twenty-some years later was really, really quite surprising to me.

Bali White [00:48:28] Well, Mark, thank you very much for being a part of this. I really do appreciate your time and effort. We’re going to end this interview. Today is June 13, 2024, at the Carnegie West Library. I’m Bali White ending this interview with Mark Pestak. Thank you very much.

Mark Pestak [00:48:50] Thank you.

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