Some say Ohio memorial to slain youths stands in the way of progress.

EAST CLEVELAND, Ohio (AP) – When she spoke of his bright smile, his career goals, their heart-to-heart talks pondering life, it was almost as if Nicolia Barbour’s 16-year-old son were still here. But Ke’Vaun had been buried for about two weeks.

“He was going to be a mechanic. He was my youngest so we were close. We were so close,” she said, beginning to tremble because of the cold northeast Ohio wind but also from the chill she got looking at the Wall of Sorrows.

The hulking brick wall, part of the shell of a former storefront in this struggling city, was covered with laminated photographs of about 1,000 people – all young, newborn to age 25 – who have died, most violently. Faded silk flowers and weathered yellow ribbons hung among the photos.

Tears streamed down Barbour’s face as a relative climbed a ladder and stapled on an 8-by-10 photograph of Ke’Vaun, killed by a random bullet in Columbus. Next to his image was a picture of a girl in a cap and gown, hands wrapped around a diploma.

“I feel like a part of me has been ripped away,” Barbour cried, vowing to use her son’s death as inspiration to fight crime. The wall, she said, will help.

Others in East Cleveland, even though they also want to target violence, unemployment and hopelessness, express doubt that the Wall of Sorrows is a helpful contribution.

Last year, City Council voted to tear down the memorial wall. A cleared lot, council members reasoned, would be more attractive to potential developers in a city where 15 percent of the 27,000 residents are unemployed.

“It’s an abandoned building. It’s a health hazard. The roof is falling in,” said Gladys Walcott, who was council president when the proposal passed. If anti-crime activists had shown they had the money to repair and maintain the building, Walcott said she would have voted to let the Wall of Sorrows stand.

No demolition date has been set. Supporters are trying to raise money to buy the building and the lot next door. They hope new Mayor Eric Brewer will help them convert the structure into a community center and build a park.

Brewer said he hasn’t fully studied the issue yet, but his goal is to totally overhaul the busy street where the memorial stands into a thoroughfare of upscale housing and businesses. He doesn’t think the wall fits in with his vision.

“I think these folks really have their hearts in the right place in terms of the problems that our community faces. They garner attention to the things that many people want to ignore,” he said. “What we have to do on the government side is implement the kind of policies that stimulate that kind of economic opportunity and educational opportunity that move kids away from lives of despair to lives of hope.”

Councilman Gary Norton Jr. said city leaders understand why supporters are so attached to the memorial wall, and he would like to see it moved so the building can be sold without demolishing the tributes.

But “my commitment has always been and still is to progress,” he said.

“The reality is that we’re short on revenue,” Norton said. “We’re really struggling to provide for our residents’ basic services. I mean police and fire.”

Incorporated in 1911, East Cleveland was once wealthy. In the early 20th century, the street where the wall now stands was known as “Millionaires Row.” It was lined with mansions, belonging to the likes of John D. Rockefeller who wanted to escape bustling Cleveland with its steel mills and factories. East Cleveland offered a tree-lined, lakeside getaway.

By extension, East Cleveland also saw plenty of opportunity: Besides mom-and-pop businesses that sprouted to support the rich, there was the East Cleveland Railway Co. and a division of General Electric Co.

As cars and suburban sprawl grew, East Cleveland’s wealthy began leaving; working-class blacks, migrating from Cleveland and the South, moved in. By the 1980s, with the region’s manufacturing jobs disappearing, East Cleveland spiraled into unemployment and poverty, its dilapidated mansions sharing space with boarded-up businesses, its tax base shriveled and crime rampant.

Until this month, East Cleveland had been in a fiscal emergency for nearly 20 years that required the state to oversee its finances. The city has laid off most of its paramedics, cut all but two police patrol cars and is so broke it can’t afford to keep street lights on.

The majority of the city’s residents – 93 percent of them black – live at the federal poverty level of $20,000 a year for a family of four.

In poor, crime-ridden cities across the nation, it’s not unusual to remember the dead with makeshift memorials. But few are as large, organized or permanent as the Wall of Sorrows, which began in 2002 when Judy Martin was searching for a replacement for the folded cardboard memorial that she lugged around to schools and prisons.

Her 23-year-old son was shot in 1994 carjacking, and for her, the memorial was a way to heal.

Community activist Art McKoy suggested the building across the street from his barber shop, an empty brick storefront on the city’s main street that was then a gathering place for drug dealers.

With the blessing of City Hall, Martin and others cleaned it up as best they could – pulling weeds, picking up trash, planting flowers and slopping white paint on large sheets of plywood they nailed to the graffiti-covered facade.

On the plywood, they put the names of everyone in Cuyahoga County under the age of 25 who had been murdered since 1990 – at that time, 766.

Today, there are more than 1,000 names.

And the abandoned building’s facade has become a love letter to the dead.

There are dozens of photographs, from school portraits to snapshots from family reunions. Inside a heart drawn with a black crayon someone wrote: “The love we shared was a love for all the ages.”

“It’s a monument,” said activist Theodore Guerry.

Supporters like the high-profile location of the wall because it’s a constant reminder of the battle to stop violence. It is a place where friends and family come daily – sometimes to grieve, sometimes to celebrate life, remembering their lost children as they were before tragedy struck.

“This way we can accept it that they’re gone,” said Guerry, adding that it helps to meet at the site with others who’ve lost loved ones. “You know you’re not alone.”

As rundown as the building may look, McKoy said it has defied predictions that the wall would be torn down or vandalized. “None of those things have happened in such a blighted community.”

Twenty-year-old Kevin Lane is quick to admit his neighborhood is rough, but he said the wall is sacred ground.

“Everybody respects the names, faces, pictures,” said Lane, whose cousin is among the dead.

Lane often hangs out across the street, where the crowd protects the wall. They move along loiterers and pick up trash.

Judy Martin, who’s 58 now, still hopes to make a difference but admits she’s growing tired. Then she sees the high school graduation photo of her son, with a close-shaven haircut, a red tie and a pressed white dress shirt.

Her mission will go on, she said. It has to.

“There’s too many. And it’s not just my son,” she said. “There’s too many sons up there.”

Martin regularly joins parents at the wall, clasping hands for prayers, hymns and to chant, “Stop the violence. Save our children.”

“I wish I had met everybody for a different reason,” said Gloria Norris, clutching a poster board covered with newspaper clippings detailing the 2000 death of her 17-year-old son, Stanley Jones. He was shot to death in a school parking lot.

To her, tearing down the wall would mean surrender. And she won’t let her son’s death be in vain.

“We just have to do something to stop this,” she said. “We are at war. Our kids are at war with each other.”

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On the Net:

East Cleveland: http://eastcleveland-org.bryght.net/

Wall of Sorrows: http://www.survivorsvictimsoftragedy.org/

AP-ES-02-17-06 1222EST