This monumental 34-by-88-inch horizontal panorama documents Ernie’s, an establishment in Cleveland’s Flats district—the historic industrial valley along the Cuyahoga River that defined the city’s identity as a manufacturing powerhouse before deindustrialization transformed this landscape from production center to post-industrial ruin. The seven-foot-plus width creates an immersive view of the Flats’ character during its transitional period.

Created in 1988, the work captures the Flats at a pivotal moment when decades of industrial activity had given way to abandonment and uncertain futures. The Cuyahoga River, which had famously caught fire in 1969 from industrial pollution, wound through a landscape of rusting infrastructure and fading enterprise. Businesses like Ernie’s persisted amid the decay, human presence surviving among industrial ghosts.

The extreme horizontal format emphasizes the Flats’ sprawling geography—the riverbanks lined with bridges, warehouses, and infrastructure that once sustained Cleveland’s steel and manufacturing economy. By the late 1980s, this landscape was transitioning: some areas beginning tentative redevelopment while others continued their decline into picturesque ruin.

Hayashi’s choice to document the Flats reflected her broader interest in landscapes shaped by industrial processes and their aftermath. The photo collage technique fragments and reassembles this transitional zone, the multiple perspectives capturing the complexity of a place caught between its productive past and uncertain future.

The Flats would later experience cycles of redevelopment and reinvention, becoming an entertainment district before further transformation. This panorama preserves the landscape during its liminal period—no longer fully industrial, not yet reimagined—documenting the texture of post-industrial America that Hayashi captured across her Cleveland work.