By Emerson Batdorff; Cleveland Plain Dealer, 8/7/95

Yes, Leonard, there is a Chagrin Falls. It exists as surely as strawberry ice cream cones and chocolate chip cookies exist. No matter how much you doubt, how much all your friends deny it, Chagrin Falls is a real place.

It also is a state of mind.

This is in answer to a piece by Leonard Weisenberg of Lyndhurst the other day on this page in which he said he visited Chagrin Falls on a Sunday afternoon and found only other visitors. He was, for some reason, seeking natives.

There were none. After questioning scores of promenaders, he wrote, "I still couldn't find a single native."

Some people he talked to suggested that the entire village was actually a covert CIA Operation left over from those good old Cold War days and designed to fool the evil Russians.

This is not quite true. Chagrin Falls more resembles Brigadoon in the musical of the same name, only oftener. Brigadoon existed once a century.

The Chagrin Falls that Leonard Weisenberg and others of his ilk (we have no Ilks Club in Chagrin Falls, but we have an Iggles) are seeking comes into being regularly every weekend.

"Opps!" says the Chagrin churchgoer looking at his watch of a Sunday morning. "We must get home at once, or we will have to watch the flatlanders licking ice cream cones!" and they vanish into their quaint Victorian houses. Or else they go to a distant mall to get their groceries.

Partly because of Chagrin's popularity among the flatlanders, as Chagrin residents term their visitors from Cleveland and its more or less level suburbs, the shopping has been distorted.

Whereas you can buy splendid ice cream cones in three places near the falls, the village's old grocery starved to death a year and a half ago and only next Christmas is to be replaced.

We used to have three drug stores; now there is one. There are fine places to buy tasty cups of coffee and elegant crumpets or muffins and other there are dandy restaurants.

But no fast food places. Which is OK with a lot of us natives, although it poses a problem for tradesmen who come to fix the roof and forget to bring their lunch.

There is a fine new candle shop - it sells nothing but candles, although we in Chagrin long have had electricity- and there are two huge places to buy greeting cards and memorabilia that says "I ate an ice cream cone in Chagrin Falls" or words to that effect.

What visitors don't know enough about is our mind-expanding hardware store. Although it is not reserved for villagers, and will indeed sell happily to visitors, it is not open Sunday so most visitors miss it as they walk by and look in the windows licking their cones. A pity. It is staffed by actual people who usually know from vague gestures what you want and can also find it.

I have driven through the heart of downtown Chagrin Falls of a Sunday and marveled at the number of people there. Sundays in downtown Cleveland you could shoot a cannon and hit not even a mugger, for they too stay home from perceived lack of opportunity.

I have from time to time on Saturday afternoons by chance met friends from afar who had ventured into Chagrin Falls and was able to explain to them that the dam in the river they were gazing at was not the falls of legend.

"To see the falls," I say, "You look over the other side of the bridge. Or go down the steps next to the Popcorn Shop where you got your cone."

The natives go down there too to refresh themselves from time to time with a most pleasant splash of water. But never on the weekend. Too many elbows. And ice cream cones.

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