Agriculturalist Erich Hooper’s property on W. 11th Street boasts the oldest urban farm in Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood and serves as a community garden, STEM classroom and bastion of do-it-yourself volunteerism. By the end of 2025, the property will also host the city’s newest miniature golf course, as Hooper hopes to draw more people to his self-made backyard sanctuary.
Erich-Hooper, owner-opearator of Cleveland’s oldest Black-owned urban farm and the longest-standing urban garden in Tremont, gestures to indicate a length of fencing he intends to use to keep bar groundhogs from his vegetables. (All images courtesy of Collin Cunningham unless otherwise specified.)
Less than a quarter-mile from the upscale bars, restaurants and boutiques that draw citizens to Tremont’s Professor Avenue, rests a sloped garden that owner and operator Erich Hooper swears is Cleveland’s oldest urban farm. Hooper has spent the last 32 years keeping weeds at bay behind his property at 2835 W. 11th Street, while coaxing younger and older minds to learn more about natural and man-engineered science. Now, he’s preparing to open an 18-hole mini golf course on the property.
Hooper and his small cadre of volunteers – St. Ignatius High School rowing team members, acquaintances and any other sets of hands who visit the farm for anywhere from an hour to a day – intend to have dirt and turf laid across his 8,000-square-foot space before fall arrives. Once open, each hole will be themed and sponsored by various local organizations including Grumpy’s Cafe, the Flying Monkey Pub and the Cleveland Public Library.
The green AstroTurf pictured to the left of Hooper’s plastic greenhouse gives a general, work-in-progress idea of how large the average miniature-golf hole will be once the course opens. Hooper is still considering which obstacles should adorn each of his 18 tee offs. He will have to carefully arrange them around the perimeter of his back plot to leave a narrow catwalk between garden and golf greens.
A 12-by-13-foot carpeted green space with painted wooden horses saluting the Cleveland Mounted Police unit will sit adjacent to a hole referencing St. Ignatius in Ohio City, while a display incorporating crushed P.O.C. beer cans will rest downhill to signify Prosperity Social Club’s sponsorship. Hooper said the fabricated fairway, once complete, will be the biggest addition he’s made to the farm since incorporating it in 1994. He hopes other people take note.
“I’ve been to 39 states and all of them had RV parks with putt-putt courses,” Hooper said. He explained the origins of his idea from his front porch, which overlooks a wooded area between a series of new buildings on W. 12th Street to the west, and the recently renovated Clark Field to the east.
“After church or something, you can come down with your nieces or nephews and knock some balls around. And a STEM project is designing the course. Every kid can’t be Tiger Woods, but you can design a putt-putt golf course,” he said.
At the age of 66, Hooper still takes pleasure in improving the aesthetics of his farm while performing all the heavy lifting, weeding and other sweat-summoning work his property requires. The ream of business cards he keeps in his wallet all identify him as “one of Cleveland’s most interesting people,” a moniker Cleveland Magazine supplied him in 2019.
Some Tremont businesses, Hooper said, will offer free 18-hole coupons to his course, but the farmer-cum-caddy has yet to set prices for his reservation-only tee times. He also hasn’t set prices at the handbuilt wooden snack bar that will eventually sell grilled food, yard-grown snacks and drinks. The goal is to put a little extra money into Hooper’s self-funded operation while drawing new eyes to the nonprofit farm.
“I think the fundamental part of why (Hooper’s) been successful…. is continuing to exist and involve people, whether that’s one random person walking by or a young kid he works with or the St. Ignatius rowing team,” said Ian Suddarth, a junior in Case Western Reserve University’s materials engineering program. The 24-year-old is a solid case study in the type of volunteerism that allows Hooper to thrive: he recently started volunteering at the farm after noticing Hooper’s eclectic signage and intends to come back regularly.
Case Western student Ian Suddarth (left) hauls a piece of wood into place to help form a retaining wall during his first time volunteering at Hooper Farm in early July while farmer Erich Hooper clears brush in the background. The natural gradation of Hooper’s back yard works well for his produce plot, which will remain the centerpiece of the property with mini golf holes arranged around it in horseshoe formation, but some landscaping is necessary for the course.
“100 jobs on the farm”
Hooper’s words echo a self-actualizing mindset that he’s used to render every square inch of his property into a space for learning skills and subjects that, according to the 66-year-old, don’t get enough lip service in public schools.
“I tell the kids, there’s 100 jobs here,” Hooper stated. “You don’t have to be a farmer, you can be an engineer or a forensic scientist. I’m strictly an educational-based farm. I do STEM projects here all the time. Last year, I bought 100 kites and taught kids aerodynamics.”
Among others, poblano and lemon drop peppers, red norland potatoes, pumpkins and cilantro have found roots within Hooper’s six-foot-tall fence in 2024.
One day a student-volunteer might strain their back and shoulder muscles shoveling and hauling several hundred pounds of dirt down a backyard staircase. The next could involve taxing one’s hands and mind while touching up old paint or building retaining walls from the stone Hooper has lying around.
The toil is hard, yes, but Hooper keeps his unpaid workers coming back by offering them the leeway to make their own decisions, a factor often unfound in volunteer opportunities, according to St. Ignatius rowing team varsity coach Mike Hess.
“(The work) gets you to buy in in a way that’s not ‘Oh, there’s a pile of sand. We need you to move it over there.’ Somehow, the kids are going to move a pile of sand but now they’ll see why it’s important for that to be done,” Hess explained. The boating coach initially struck up a relationship with Hooper at the farmer’s side gig, cooking at Major Hoopples bar in the Flats. The collaboration eventually led to an 80-man work session in October 2023 involving the majority of the rowing team, freshmen through seniors.
“Basically, we have a bunch of laborers and he had a bunch of labor he needed done,” Hess added. “It worked out. One of the things about Ignatius is it’s one of the schools that didn’t pick up and move to the suburbs. It’s really ingrained in the community.”
Nearly all of the decorations scattered throughout Hooper’s yard bear some monikers of hand craftsmanship, from the wooden signage previewing the mini golf course and the Ohio-shaped historical marker pictured to the left to the custom vinegar bottle string lights that encircle his growing field.
For Hess, Hooper’s location along the Towpath Trail has also linked the agricultural operation to the team’s Irishtown Bend boathouse, allowing students lacking cars to jog directly from the rowing facility to the farm.
“I think it’s a unique opportunity for our program to put a stamp on the neighborhood,” Hess continued. “It’s something not a lot of people are doing. Not a lot of teams have this ongoing service project. That is one thing that Ignatius does exceptionally well. We’re going to put you into circumstances where you need to act like an adult. I see society going the opposite way, with people having tighter and tighter control over their kids. Having to be responsible for yourself, and more often than not rising to the occasion, it’s not something a lot of kids get at their age.”
Off site
A man with Erich Hooper’s domineering personality and worldliness isn’t content to operate from one place or in a single specialty. Clevelanders can find Hooper out in the wild at at least seven yearly festivals throughout Northeast Ohio including the Raccoon County Music Festival in Geauga County, Skunk Haven’s Skunk Fest in North Ridgeville and the Hessler Street Fair on Hessler Road and Hessler Court in University Circle.
And they’ll smell him before they see him, too, as Hooper sets up involved displays where he stir fries pea pods, carrots, Brussels sprouts and other farm-grown vegetables with ghost pepper honey that he mixes himself.
While Hooper often sells his product at festival food stands, he remains as philanthropic and educational at events as he does on his home turf, ready to regale any attendees who approach with humorous anecdotes, free plant starters and farming advice.
“I like the ones that are easy and inexpensive,” Hooper said of the event circuit. “I’d rather feed 20 people for $20 than three people for $20.”
A mix of costliness and healthiness fuels the farmer’s off-site work, driven by a desire to make his land self-sustainable; the idea was born, however, after Hooper said he witnessed a horror show inside a portable toilet at the Cuyahoga County Fair about a decade ago and attributed the mess to unhealthy food vendors.
Though the Hessler festival is currently on a five-year hiatus after last occurring prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019, festival operator and Hessler Road/Court advocate Laura Cyrocki said she intends to have the event return in some form, especially with the community set to celebrate its 50th anniversary as Cleveland’s first historic district in 2025.
A mustachioed Erich Hooper serves homegrown, healthful food at the 2009 iteration of the Hessler Street Fair. (Image courtesy of Laura Cyrocki)
“Last fall… we put on an event called Hessler Homecoming,” Cyrocki told The Land. “I invited Hooper to come out and be a food vendor; I don’t have that many lined up, only a couple of artists. He was funny; in the matter of a month he lined up a whole bunch of artists and food vendors to make Hessler Homecoming a hit. It was all him.”
In addition to the healthful food, Cyrocki said she appreciates Hooper’s presence at the annual festivals as both an insider, in the farming world, and an outsider, within Cleveland as a place. “People like Erich and events like Hessler, they don’t jive with how the powers that be (think things) should look,” she elaborated. “I believe they’re anchors but I believe the powers that be regard Hooper and Hessler as places that need to be removed. Eyesores without anything to offer.”
When the going gets Hough
“He’s a good gentleman, honest, trustworthy, willing to help you out. He’s worked in kitchens and… he knows the farm pretty good and his equipment there,” Richard Sosenko, a felow Tremont resident and 35-year acquaintance of Hooper’s, described the farmer’s mission. “It teaches these kids something new that they’ll probably never ever see in their life. It’s a chance to learn and experience; you never know where they’ll go from there.”
In his classic hand painted style, Hooper has adorned one of the side walls of his home as a “memory wall” bearing names of the people and institutions who have contributed to the farm in some form since its inception in 1994. While Hooper spent a solid three decades workingin various capacities for Cleveland, he said city departments have regularly excluded his operation from funding opportunities. The farmer also takes umbrage with the city’s summer gardening programs, which he said should be geared more towards feeding and supporting underserved populations throughout the entire year.
Sosenko, a former bricklayer for the city, encountered Hooper on the patio at Clark Bar just up the dip from the farm along Clark Avenue. A frequent midday watering retreat for Hooper, who foots meal and drink tabs for anyone kind enough to offer time and effort, the bar also serves as a solid proving ground for the farmer’s flypaper personality.
Anyone who’s visited Hooper’s space can tell you: the man has a tale, and he’s more than willing to share it, if not at least to help visitors appreciate a solid day’s work and an appreciation for the world.
Hooper’s palpable love for Tremont is on full display in the various neighborhood relics that dot the areas of his back yard left unreserved for planting. Here, a sign previously used to obscure the patio TV at the Flying Monkey Pub rests against the back side of a wooden box Hooper built to serve burgers, hot dogs, drinks and other snacks during tee time. Towards the street, Hooper has assembled a small pile of bricks he salvaged from the recent fire at the area’s historic St. Theodosius Orhodox Cathedral.
Born in the now-defunct Mt. Sinai Medical Center in 1958, Hooper was raised among grandparents and aunts at a former house around the Hough neighborhood intersection of E. 79th Street and Lexington Avenue near the Thurgood Marshall Recreation Center. He came of age just in time to watch his corner of the city burn.
The Hough Uprising of 1966 ultimately claimed the Hooper family home as one of the dozens of houses razed amid conflict between the neighborhood’s primarily Black longtime residents and the National Guard, who arrived following neighbors’ protests concerning poor, overcrowded housing conditions and general societal mistreatment. The Uprising ultimately scattered Hooper’s extended family to other states or more distant neighborhoods of Cleveland.
Hooper’s immediate relatives, meanwhile, followed a westward path, trading the Addison School for Tremont’s Lincoln West High School and the house on E. 79th for an apartment building at W. 7th Street and Jefferson Avenue. As a member of one of the first three Black families to call Tremont home, the ordeal helped jumpstart Hooper’s observant nature, a personality facet that endured as he watched three generations of Americans exchange jobs in agriculture and trades for technology or finance-focused work.
“When I was in junior high and elementary school, it was a different time in Tremont and in America,” Hooper said. “Friends were closer, you could go borrow a cup of sugar or eat over someone’s house. Not having family, not having a mother and father and seeing other races, it’s like ‘How come this guy’s got a mom and a dad and they have jobs, and this guy’s got a paper route? How come this shit’s not available to us on the East Side?’ So then I started looking at their food.”
Developing a gastronomic gaze helped bring Hooper to his current dual role as farmer and community activist. Watching the pots of soup stock boiling constantly on the stove tops of his white friends’ parents brought the reality of food scarcity into sharp relief for Hooper. The experience in Hough had already prompted the teenager to become a card-carrying Black Panther member in the ‘70s, but catching sight of that soup steered his radicalization in a new direction.
Now understanding the significance of both class and race, Hooper went from odd jobs to kitchen work, sweating intermittently in city-owned kitchens as well as the Stouffer family’s fine dining establishments. The savings he established there allowed him to purchase his W. 11th Street property in 1994, but to call that the entire story would be to gloss over the wealth of experience that makes Hooper the man he is today.
A 1977 graduate of Tremont’s former Lincoln West High School, Hooper was an accomplished athlete long before he started digging around in the dirt. In addition to cheerleading for the Cavaliers in 2003, Hooper holds at least one paycheck from working events for all of the professional sports entities that have existed in Cleveland, from the defunct Barons ice hockey team to the Cleveland Rockers, formerly of the Women’s National Basketball Association. His basement, a scattered cache of memorabilia, also boasts over 170 bobbleheads.
To hear the 66-year-old recount the first 20 years of his life is to open the pages of a dusty tome and find that the words inside have been perfectly preserved, still carrying the smell of binder’s glue as a patina of age creeps across the page. Still carrying the wiry but taut frame developed as a linebacker and fullback on Lincoln West’s varsity football team, the farmer’s measured speech begins resembling the rattle of machine gun fire when he gets started on the past.
“My grandmother’s beauty parlor was by the Black nationalist headquarters,” he began. “It was called Lu Ellen’s, Lu’s, above a bar called the Drumstick where my grandfather would come drink. It was an old bar. You’d go down and have sardines and pigs’ feet and watch the old girls and men drink and shine shoes and learn how to hustle. (You would) run errands to get some pocket change and once you got pocket change you could hop on a bus instead of walking to the old (Browns) stadium. If you got there before the game (started), you could got a job sweeping and selling peanuts.”
Work, leisure and history all seem to occupy equal portions of Erich Hooper’s brain and home at 2835 West 11th Street, probably the closest one can get to a farmhouse-style abode in Tremont. The entire place is a serviceable collection of snapshots from bygone eras as well as the many certifications and designations Hooper has received; no robot vacuums or small dogs here.
And that’s just Hooper scratching the surface of his impressive CV, a resume that lives inside of his head instead of upon a sheet of paper. Prior to the self-initiated project on West 11th Street, Hooper has also…
Helped found the Tremont Farmers Market along the W. 14th Street Side of Lincoln Park in 2006. Also, he helped initiate Taste of Tremont, the Tremont Arts & Cultural Festival and Wade Oval Wednesdays, besides other events.
Served as the head chef at the former Cleveland Workhouse, where he gained some of his initial exposure to and experience with gardening. Initiated and conducted a work release program with the Euclid Shore Center that later served as inspiration for Brandon Chrostowski’s EDWINS Leadership & Restaurant Institute in Shaker Square.
Helped install and open the Cleveland Public Theatre in its current W. 65th Street home along with IngenuityFest founder James Levin. Served as an actor with CPT.
Offered seeds and agricultural advice to many of Cleveland’s urban farmers who are growing today, several of whom now adorn the annual GardenWalk Cleveland.
Served as a clerk at Cleveland City Hall under former Mayor Dennis Kucinich.
Delivered a lecture on transmuting human feces into usable fertilizer at NASA Glenn Research Center..
Hooper’s life story is a shortlist of intrigue, a testament to the value of hard labor and the literal fruits that it brings to the table as well as a monument to the strange epochs of a shifting America. Having exceeded most national surveys’ median retirement age by at least two years, Hooper continues shifting large piles of sand, making donation deliveries to neighbors wanting produce and improving the look of his property with a drive and aplomb that mystify his peers.
“I sometimes wonder, does Erich have a fountain of youth on that farm?” Cyrocki said, half-jokingly, of Hooper’s enthusiasm. “He has more energy than just about anyone I know and he’s passionate about food, growing local. I think one of the things I really love and appreciate about Erich, he’s very much for the grassroots and he’s passionate about making sure children are involved in his project. He really understands the value of bringing up the next generation of farmers. Involving kids seems to be part of what he does.”
Maybe that’s what helps Hooper flourish, then: the youth around him. Despite a seemingly inexhaustible vitality, Hooper knows he can’t run his farm forever. By opening young minds to practical knowledge, same as how he exposes buds to the sun, Hooper has managed to provide an engine of renewal that keeps his mind and body intact while training a new generation of young minds to do the same.
Whoever next tends Hooper’s farm, and the 18 mini-golf holes he’s erecting, Tremont residents and Cleveland residents in general can rest assured that his space is in good and weathered hands. Hopefully, it will linger in that state, too, but it will be up to the youth and their enthusiasm to follow in Erich’s footsteps.
Readers looking to learn more about Hooper Farm can reach out to Erich Hooper on Facebook to inquire about future volunteering opportunities or simply drop by the farm during open visitation hours. Hooper is typically home and willing to offer tours, tasks and answers about any number of subjects between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. on Monday and Tuesday and from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Wednesday through Friday. “I’m here all day unless I’m out partying,” Hooper explained, half-jokingly.
