Cleveland Scene

About a dozen employees of the Northeast Ohio Neighborhood Health Services won wage theft suits against their current or former employer months after the healthcare company’s financial woes came to light. Cleveland judges sided with those who sued, agreeing NEON owed 11 workers payments from $1,400 to a bit over $5,000, Signal Cleveland reported. Workers originally claimed in February that they were owed back pay stretching to December.

Cleveland City Council voted this week to not renew the liquor license of TownHall in Ohio City in the wake of the owner’s felony conviction last year. The resolution was passed during Wednesday’s marathon legislative session. Councilman Austin Davis, whose ward includes TownHall, has been the most vocal opponent against allowing the business to keep selling liquor.

The only thing hotter than the weather was the sweet sound of Death Cab for Cutie. The band was on fire as they played to die hard fans at Jacobs Pavilion in the Flats. The two-hour set was full of classic songs and new bangers. Hot off the presses of its eleventh album I Built You a Tower, Death Cab was quick to add songs like “Riptides,” “Punching the Flowers,” and “Stone Over Water” to the set list. Jay Som opened the night up. Here is everything we saw:

After eight hours of total deliberation and a mass of public scrutiny, Cleveland City Council made the 11th hour decision to keep the city’s 100 Flock Safety license plate readers recording in a 9-6 vote on Wednesday night. That vote followed yet another marathon debate earlier that day, when the pros and cons of Flock—as a worthy police tool or tool of mass surveillance—were juggled against Public Safety’s own insistence Flock’s cameras were more of the former than the latter.

Ohio Light Opera’s schedule is intensifying. This weekend, The College of Wooster’s resident professional company presents The Merry Widow (Friday at 2 p.m.), My Fair Lady (Friday at 7:30 p.m.), The Boys from Syracuse (Saturday at 2 p.m.), Damn Yankees (Saturday at 7:30 p.m.), and The Yeomen of the Guard (Sunday at 2 p.m.) in Freedlander Theatre.

“I think we nailed it,” Brandon Chrostowski says of his new French-style oyster bar. The slim and trim seafood restaurant, which is located just east of Edwins in the Cedar-Fairmount district of Cleveland Heights, opens its doors on Wednesday, July 22. There are just two dozen stools split between two counters. Another 22 seats are available on a newly built patio carved out of a portion of a parking lot.

When CNBC last week announced it had rated Ohio this year’s “Top State for Business,” Republican leaders said it was proof that their economic policies were working for Ohioans. But that’s not what the rating was meant to assess, said a journalist who helped produce it. Nor was the ranking an evaluation of which state had attracted the most high-quality jobs. It was something less concrete: a measure of which states were best positioned according to the criteria on which states market themselves.

Jon Anderson & The Band Geeks came to Cleveland for the second time in as many years, with a dynamic and eclectic blend of music that has made the 81-year-old Anderson the greatest prog rock vocalist of all time. Here is all the action we caught last night at The Agora.

Widespread and lengthy power outages over the Fourth of July weekend forced many restaurants on the near west side to close, but that was only the beginning of the financial mess that the heat and storms ushered in. The restaurant owners that Scene spoke with reported losses of food, business, labor and time. For customers of Cleveland Public Power, it was déjà vu all over again.

Correctional staff failed to start CPR the moment they discovered Jennifer Wade lifeless in her Cuyahoga County jail cell last year, state inspectors concluded in a review of the 41-year-old mother’s death. It was the second such review. In the months after Wade’s death in February 2025, inspectors found that the jail staff acted appropriately. But they reopened their review after The Marshall Project – Cleveland reported on video evidence the county did not turn over to inspectors.