DON’T DISMISS TRAILER PARKS

I am descended from trailer trash.

Mind you, I never thought of them that way. They were just my beloved grandmothers, who spent their last years in compact homes set up on cinder blocks and nestled among the weeping willows of rural Ohio. Their trailers were tidy and clean and always smelled like something good on the stove, and we never called them anything but “Grandma’s home.”

I was in college the first time I ever heard the term “trailer trash,” and it made my eyes sting. Nowadays, people don’t throw that slur around with the same sloppy ease, but the stereotypes of those who choose to live in trailers endure.

I was reminded of that this week when I strolled through the abbreviated streets of Euclid Beach Mobile Home Park on Cleveland’s East Side. The trailer park has been in the news recently because of a dispute over what should be done with the abandoned Humphrey Mansion, which is tucked away in a corner of the park and overlooks Lake Erie.

The developer who owns the house wants to replace it with more trailers. Preservationists and neighborhood activists, including Cleveland city councilman Mike Polensek, want to restore the house and create more green space along the lake.

“The last thing we need is more trailer homes,” Polensek told me. “I’m not saying we should force any of them to leave, but the next logical step for the city would be to buy the trailer park and lose the trailers through attrition. When someone dies or moves away, we wouldn’t replace them.”

No one would argue that a trailer park is a boon to lakefront property. Silent in this debate, though, are the voices of the trailer-park residents, some of whom have lived there for decades.

They don’t tend to speak up, activists tell me, out of fear of losing what they have. They also know how many feel about their choice of homestead, as if trailer parks and the people who live in them are just the tumbled discards in life’s junk drawer.

“People say ‘trailer park’ and make that face,” said sixty-nine-year-old Katherine Cole, who’s lived at the park since 1986. “I say, ‘Listen, we have a good life here.’ And we take care of one another. We are as much of a community as any other neighborhood.”

She points to the lake a short walk away. “Oh, my, I’ve spent so many evenings down there. We all do. It’s the prettiest thing you’d ever want to see.”

You have to really like people to live in a trailer park, because that’s what you find three steps away from you in any direction.

Just about everyone I ran into at the park offered a friendly hello and stopped to chat, eager to share good-natured stories about their neighbors and why they love living there.

“This is the most integrated neighborhood I’ve lived in,” Debra Hall told me. She takes care of other people’s children during the day, and three of them clustered around her like chirping baby chicks. “We’re all in it together here.”

The trailer park brims with the quirks typical of a neighborhood that hasn’t had the life zoned out of it. For every lot that needs tending, several others telegraph the pride of their owners, from the wooden lattices waiting for another summer of roses to the cheerful Easter banners flapping in the breeze.

As in most neighborhoods, there are SUPPORT OUR TROOPS magnets stuck to the backs of trucks and tattered American flags waving from porch railings and car antennae.

Feral cats dart in and out like ghosts.

“People drop them off here when they don’t want them anymore,” Mrs. Cole said, shaking her head. “We feed them, take care of them as best we can.”

She was gardening Tuesday, and when I asked what vegetables she plants, she gushed about her tomatoes. Biggest things you’d ever want to see, she said, especially that two-pounder she had last year.

She smiled at my raised eyebrows.

“You wait right there,” she said. She ran into the trailer and brought out a photo of a tomato big as a pumpkin.

“You want fried green tomatoes, you come back here in the summer,” she said. “I make ’em every year, and you’re always welcome.”