On the campus district Up the street from the theater district Down the road from University Circle

I'm writing this from Mather's gardens, in what's left of a mansion built by iron ore money in 1910. Samuel Mather's fortune came from extracting resources—pulling minerals out of the ground, processing them, selling them, repeating until the wealth became incomprehensible. He was a steam locomotive running down the track. You didn't negotiate with him. You got out of the way or you got run over. He built this place to show it off. So did Rockefeller down the street. So did all of them, lined up along what was called Millionaires Row. You've never heard of it. That's fine. Nobody has. The mansions are mostly gone now. Torn down, repurposed, carved into administrative offices. Cleveland State University squats on the former estates. The churches the millionaires built to launder their guilt through stained glass are still here—I can see five of them from where I sit. The universities they endowed, the museums, the theaters, the whole cultural apparatus of Uni...