Harvey Pekar Park
Cleveland Heights, Ohio

By Joseph S. Pete

The modesty is the point at some landmarks such as Michael Jackson’s shoebox-sized childhood home in Gary, Indiana, or the small brick ranch home where Pope Leo XIV grew up in Dolton, Illinois. Harvey Pekar celebrated this modesty — he championed the average, the everyday, the quotidian. Known for the long-running American Splendor comic he wrote with the help of rotating guest artists, he was the bard of the banal, the elegist of the everyman, the master of Midwestern mundanity. It’s only fitting that the local landmarks where fans can pay homage to Pekar in his native Cleveland would be unassuming.

Pekar lived in the inner-ring suburb of Cleveland Heights, which posthumously honored him with Harvey Pekar Park at the corner of Euclid Heights Boulevard and Coventry Road, a drag he often frequented. The modest park, located at the end of a sidewalk, has some benches and painted beach chairs, a small plaza, concrete steps that double as amphitheater seats for outdoor performances, and a few banners featuring panels of his comics. It could easily be overlooked by a passerby.

Pekar’s old stomping grounds lie far from I.M. Pei’s glittering, glassy Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum on the Lake Erie lakefront or Frank Gehry’s splashy avant-garde building on the campus of Case Western Reserve University. Pekar’s native Cleveland is a humble Rust Belt burgh that inspired the Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video to joke “come and look at both of our buildings.”

The city has been so snake-bitten by misfortunes like the infamous Cuyahoga River fire that there’s an entire book called Cleveland’s Greatest Disasters. The “Mistake by the Lake” has produced some great comic artists, including Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and Derf, who penned the alt-weekly staple The City.

A Veterans Affairs clerk by day and graphic novelist by night, Pekar advanced the art form of comics like Superman had before him, even though he only did the writing and not the illustrations, penning scripts the cartoonists brought to life. Superman propelled flights of superhuman fancy to new heights of popularity while Pekar grounded comics in gritty novelistic autobiography that appealed to adult readers, helping pave the way for future generations of confessional zines and graphic novels often both written and set in coffee shops.

He was inspiring to fledgling writers like me, showing that it was possible to be ordinary in daily life and extraordinary on the page, that everyone’s story could make for compelling writing.

Pekar collaborated with accomplished artists like Robert Crumb, Gary Dumm, Alison Bechdel, and Ed Piskor to elevate the pedestrian into the epic, imbuing lofty meaning into stories of workplace drudgery, vinyl record hunting at garage sales, and trudging through the snow with a haul of library books. His work reached a wider audience with the American Splendor biopic that starred Paul Giamatti and featured a scene of haunting melancholy in which Pekar stood hunched over the rail on a pedestrian bridge, watching the river of headlights flow on the highway below.

I’ve visited many of the landmarks associated with Pekar over the years. As a lifelong Midwesterner, I usually visit Cleveland at least once a year and once swung by both Cleveland and Detroit in a weekend.

I’ve seen the Louis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center where he worked, the Lee Road branch of the Cleveland Heights–University Heights Public Library where he read and checked out books almost daily, and the grand Lake View Cemetery where he is buried near tombstones commemorating the likes of Elliott Ness and President Andrew Garfield.

But the best place to pay homage is Coventry Road, his old haunt where one Redditor described him as “just another guy you’d see around the neighborhood doing normal stuff.” It’s not only home to Harvey Pekar Park, but also to two of his favorite hangouts: Tommy’s Restaurant and Mac’s Backs–Books On Coventry.

The neighboring businesses are connected, so one can browse the stacks for books in the three-level bookstore while waiting for a table. The funky bohemian restaurant blends classic deli favorites with hippie-ish vegetarian fare. When I visited the restaurant, I could imagine Pekar grousing in his cantankerous, curmudgeonly way over a corned beef or tuna salad sandwich. Mac’s Backs has crowded floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves crammed with used books on every subject imaginable. Fliers, posters, and zines plastered on the stairwell down to the basement serve as a cultural history of concerts, plays, author appearances, and other bygone events.

One can envision Pekar hunting for new reading material or gathering material over coffee and conversation next door. One can picture the disheveled everyman striding stoop-shouldered down the sidewalk, absorbed in whatever mundane matter he would next alchemize into art. It’s almost like a living history museum for one of America’s most splendid graphic novelists.

The descendant of steelworkers, author and award-winning journalist Joseph S. Pete hails from the Calumet Region just outside Chicago, where the oil refinery flare stacks burn round the clock, and the mills make clouds. His literary work and photography have appeared in more than 100 journals, including Proximity Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, O-Dark-Thirty, Line of Advance, As You Were, Chicago Literati, Dogzplot, Proximity Magazine, Stoneboat, The High Window, Synesthesia Literary Journal, Steep Street Journal, Beautiful Losers, The First Line, New Pop Lit, The Grief Diaries, Gravel, Junto, The Offbeat, Oddball Magazine, The Perch Magazine, Bull Men’s Fiction, Rising Phoenix Review, Thoughtful Dog, shufPoetry, The Roaring Muse, Prairie Winds, Blue Collar Review, The Rat’s Ass Review, Euphemism, Jenny Magazine, and Vending Machine Press.

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