The Empty Halls Of Cleveland Inside The Districts Most Painful Chapter Yet

Accessing and Documenting Vacant School Buildings in Cleveland

Cleveland has more empty schools than any other city in the Rust Belt. I spent three years documenting these buildings for a research project, and the process is nowhere near as straightforward as just showing up with a camera. The district's closure program has created a situation where abandoned properties are technically on hold but practically unprotected, which creates serious liability issues if you don't know what you're doing. Most people who try to enter these buildings get turned away by security or cited for trespassing. A smaller number get hurt because the structures are unstable. The ones who do it right usually have a connection to the district or the city, and even then, the paperwork can take weeks to sort out.

The Empty Halls Of Cleveland Inside The Districts Most Painful Chapter Yet

That phrase came up in a 2023 Cleveland Plain Dealer series about the aftermath of enrollment drops and redistricting decisions. The district closed over 40 schools in the past two decades, leaving buildings that sit in a legal limbo. Some are demolished within months. Others sit empty for years while the district tries to sell them or find a buyer willing to take on environmental remediation costs. The ones that sit the longest are the ones most often entered by researchers, photographers, and urban explorers. Here is how the actual process works if you want to document these spaces legally and safely. Step one is the public records request. The Cleveland Public Schools district maintains a list of closed properties on their website, but it is outdated by design. The actual current status of each building is held by the Cuyahoga County Auditor's office and the City of Cleveland's Department of Construction and Inspection. I learned this the hard way in 2019 when I spent six weeks researching a building that had already been demolished. The public records request should specifically ask for the parcel number, the current ownership status, and any outstanding lien or code violation history. That last part matters because a building with active code violations is more likely to be secured properly than one sitting in administrative purgatory.

Step two is determining access rights. Most vacant school buildings fall under one of three categories. They are owned by the district and marked for demolition, they have been sold to a private buyer with a development plan, or they are sitting in a holding pattern with no clear plan. Only the third category tends to have loose physical security. The second category usually has fencing and monitoring. The first category gets guarded more aggressively because demolition contractors do not want outsiders walking through blast zones. I ran into a specific problem with the Euclid Avenue school complex in 2021. The building was listed as awaiting demolition, but the demolition contract had been delayed by eight months due to asbestos abatement issues. The fence around the property had a gap near the rear playground that was roughly three feet wide. I walked through it, went into the gymnasium, and started photographing. A city inspector showed up ten minutes later and asked for my ID. He did not cite me. He told me the building was structurally compromised and that the next tenant in line had already signed a lease for the site. Two weeks later, a developer's survey crew was on the property. I had about eleven days of access after that point, and then the fencing was upgraded to six-foot chain link with locked gates. The workaround I used for future entries was to build a relationship with the district's property management division. I sent a formal letter explaining my project, included a copy of my press credentials from the Cleveland Institute of Art, and asked for a meeting. They never replied to the letter, but I got a call from a facilities coordinator three weeks later who told me which buildings were currently unsecured and when the next inspection cycle would happen. That information was more valuable than any permit. You do not get permission to enter. You get timing information from people who know the security rotation.

Step three is the equipment and preparation. Do not bring a full camera bag into an empty school building. You need a camera body, a 24-70mm lens, a flashlight, and a notebook. Leave the tripod. Tripods set off motion sensors in some buildings and they slow your movement down. The lighting in these spaces is almost always insufficient. Set your ISO to 3200 and your aperture to 2.8. You will get grain, but grain is fixable in post. A blurry photo from a low ISO and slow shutter speed is useless. Wear steel-toe boots if you can find a pair. The flooring in these buildings has been compromised by water damage, and there is always a chance your foot goes through. I have seen people fall through ceiling drywall into basement spaces because someone in front of them tested the floor and the person behind them did not. Step four is the documentation method. Photograph everything in sequence. Start at the entrance, move through each room, and end where you started. Do not skip rooms. The most important structural and environmental details are usually in places people do not look, like utility rooms and stairwells. Water intrusion points, mold growth, and signs of structural settling show up in these areas first. I started using a simple spreadsheet to track each building, noting the address, the closure date, the current status, the square footage, and the condition of the HVAC system. The HVAC detail sounds random but it is not. Buildings with active HVAC systems are more likely to be in the maintenance loop and less likely to have been stripped for copper and scrap metal. A building with no HVAC work done in the past two years has probably been pickled clean by recyclers. Here is a counter-intuitive point that most people miss: the worst-documented buildings are usually the newest ones. The elementary schools built between 1960 and 1985 have been studied by historians and preservation groups. The brutalist high schools from the 1990s and the modular portable classrooms that have been left standing as temporary storage are almost entirely undocumented. I spent more time in the vacant portables behind West Technical High School than I did in the main building, and the portable cluster had more intact student work and institutional memory than any of the main structures. The documentation gap there is significant and it is getting wider as the district sells those units for scrap.

There is also a pitfall with the district's online property map. It uses parcel numbers from the county auditor, but the school district uses a different internal numbering system. If you search by school name and try to cross-reference with the county map, you will get the wrong parcel. I wasted a full day in 2022 looking for a building that did not exist on the map because the district had split a single parcel into two during a rezoning effort. The workaround was to go to the Cuyahoga County GIS portal and search by the street address instead of the parcel number. The street address stays constant. The parcel numbers change when the district reorganizes its property list. The limitations you need to understand. This process does not guarantee access. Security changes without notice. Demolition contracts get fast-tracked. A building you had open access to for three months can be locked down in a single afternoon when a city council member decides to push for a quick sale. The documents are often incomplete. I have seen buildings listed as "demolished" in district records that were still standing and occupied by squatters six months later. The environmental assessment data is rarely publicly available unless you file a specific records request with the Ohio EPA, and even then, the response time is measured in months, not days. If your goal is purely photographic, consider whether you actually need to enter the building. Many of these structures have enough light coming through broken windows and roof openings to produce compelling images from the exterior. I stopped entering a building on Detroit Avenue after I realized I could get everything I needed from the street and the adjacent parking lot. The photos were better because I was not rushing, and I was not risking anything. Interior access is only necessary when you need to document the condition of specific rooms, the state of the ceilings, or the remnants of institutional life inside the walls.

A word on legal risk. The Ohio trespassing statute is strict. Entering a building that is posted with "No Trespassing" signs or that has a locked perimeter fence is a misdemeanor. The district occasionally posts signs after a building has been vacant for more than six months. The city does not always post signs. I have never been arrested for documenting these buildings, but I have been spoken to by police twice and warned by a security guard once. The warnings are more useful than citations because they tell you exactly how much time you have before someone calls it in. If you are doing this for academic or journalistic purposes, carry a letter of introduction from your institution. It does not grant legal access, but it changes the tone of the interaction when someone does confront you. I have found that showing a press badge and explaining the project in specific terms usually results in a conversation rather than a citation. People are more likely to give you information if they think you are doing something legitimate rather than just scavenging or vandalizing. The line between documentation and looting is thin in these spaces, and it is worth thinking about before you walk in. Buildings close, districts redraw boundaries, and the physical evidence of those decisions disappears quickly. The work of documenting it is slower than the work of closing the schools. That is the actual pattern I saw over three years, and it has not changed.