The Hard Way on Purpose by David Giffels

Fittingly for a city actively losing population, these aspects of the landscape often play a larger role in his essays than all but a few people.

The Bank, for example, dovetailed with the importance of music to Giffels’s identity, a nostalgia for which drove him to visit the structure years later, after it had again been abandoned, and was being razed for the construction of a minor league ballpark. His knowledge and appreciation of these locales are undoubtedly personal. Giffels’s stuff is not merely his personal possessions but the detritus of Akron’s decline: abandoned factories, vacant storefronts, once glamorous hotels now occupied by transients, a sluggish canal smelling of sewage, and a music venue named the Bank after the building’s original purpose. His response: “All my stuff is here” (226). At the same time, Giffels describes a powerful sense of possession that boils down to a tongue-in-cheek response to the all-too-common questions about why he stayed. From a sense of commitment to the consistently disappointing Cleveland Cavaliers and Browns to the modern fascination with photographing abandoned buildings-also known as “ruin porn”-to a music scene attempting to find its footing after having exported the “Akron Sound,” Giffels describes his appreciation for Akron in spite of itself. True to the title, the book highlights the almost masochistic way Giffels remains loyal to a community whose glory days he never experienced firsthand. Through a series of related essays, divided into four parts, The Hard Way on Purpose teases meaning out Akron’s decline as experienced by Giffels between the 1970s and the early 2010s.

His Akron is a city where the greatest claim to fame has become a growing list of celebrities from there: LeBron James, Chrissie Hynde, and the band Devo, to name a few.

For Giffels, Akron is a deindustrialized city of abandoned tire factories and storefronts yet also a place of endless fascination and a blue collar aesthetic appealing to his Gen X sensibilities. In this fun, breezy collection, writer David Giffels shares a lifetime of experiences from Akron, Ohio, while simultaneously coming to terms with his own willingness to stay in a piece of the Midwest far removed from its heyday.

The Hard Way on Purpose by David Giffels