Chicken Paprikash on the Little Cuyahoga

Steam billows from Seusian stacks at an old red brick rubber factory, into a saturated January sky. Careening from huge soft billowy flakes to slicing icy pellets to springtime deluge, this is a winter sky that just can't make up its mind.

Built on the bank of a raging stream, pipes beneath the factory's foundation spill to an already rain-swelled urban channel. It could be a ditch, or maybe a spur of an old canal. My Google map eventually tells me, it's the Little Cuyahoga, straightened and harnessed into a more efficient route.

The waterway makes its way under a little bridge beneath East Market Street, then disappears behind a tire store.

Sometimes, if you come in search of the best chicken paprikash in town, you might find yourself, unwittingly, in your hometown's steamy industrial core. This little industrial valley, where waters flowed swiftly at Middlebury, before there was  an Akron. This place of rain swelled channels and truncated rail spurs, of red brick factories and disreputable saloons. This place of barbed wire and crumbling vestiges of Vulcanized industrial might, of graceful old Fire Station #11, red brick with Spanish arches and fallen roof tiles, now a dialysis center.

I thought I'd missed my chance for paprikash.

For years I'd passed the tiny red brick diner, dwarfed by behemoth factories. Its name, New Era, and specialties, paprikash and goulash, stenciled on its exterior walls. Twenty years ago it looked obsolete, a remnant of an old era, when factories ran three shifts a day and lunch pail workers walked to work from neighborhoods of closely set wood frame houses undulating in rows across Akron's seven hills.

Someday, I'll have to eat there, I always thought, until one day it was gone. Or maybe just newly clad in vinyl siding, its nondescript building now a used car shop or towing depot.

But GPS and navigational aids inform me, surprisingly, that the New Era hasn't vanished, only dawned in a spacious new locale, catty corner form the little streamside rubber factory that makes stair treads and floor mats.

Balkan travel posters decorate new walls. With accordion-walled banquet rooms and a spacious parking lot, the new New Era betrays little of its former self, except where it matters: the tender chicken paprikash, cooked to perfection, still falls off the bone if you even look at it sideways. It's served with dumplings and baskets of bread to sop it all up.

With a dying camera battery and digital screen averse to gelid conditions, fueled by dumplings and strudel, I take to the sidewalks, where they exist, in this old industrial valley, and marvel at how I have landed in something of the primordial center of the former metropolis that sprung from little stream side factories belching steam and supplying the world with gaskets, galoshes, and eventually, tires.

The campanile of a great company rises from a dismal canal, overhung with scrubby brush and weedy trees. Nearby, across from the porn theatre, Akron Steam Bath and Sauna sports a surprisingly full parking lot for a Friday afternoon.

An art deco municipal airport testifies to the excitement borne of the birth of aeronautics, with embellished weather vanes spinning importantly atop a squatly handsome yellow brick terminal. Vacant aviation strips spread forth across a plane of winter browned grass.

The Rubber Bowl, built in the side of a hill, sits forlorn now, its hulking concrete pleasing yet with streamlined proportion. Derby Downs uses that same hillside for kids to race kit cars of their own fabrication, mini engineers aping their fathers who in these surrounding red brick buildings forged their own automotive strides. It touches me somehow that the bowl was built in a real hillside hollow.

The Goodyear Airdock, where blimps were born, hunkers like an Egyptian monument in a desert of crumbling asphalt and chain link fence.

This is Akron, and as I make my way back to the restaurant parking lot, a faint smell of burning rubber wafts from the little brick factory. I pause at the bridge and watch the waters rush at an almost frightening torrent, and marvel at how we used to circumvent this old industrial valley, by way of the Expressway, to visit my grandmother just east of Akron. Once you crossed over that High Level Bridge, with its metal deck roadway singing under your car's Akron-made tires, you felt like you were entering another world. From the highway, General Tire and Goodyear and Goodrich and Firestone all belched importantly, and the whole city smelled like the faint waft now barely emanating from this sturdy little survivor, hugging a little stream bank, where swift flowing waters in little channels at Middlebury gave birth to a great city.

I guess you'd have to be an Akronite for the sulphurous aroma of burning rubber to spur something like this pride I feel swelling, on a windy January afternoon, when I went seeking paprikash, but found myself in the steamy center core of the place that grew up from these turgid waters, and spread itself out over the surrounding hills.