Introduction

THE CRISIS IN THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT

Mayor Carl Stokes lived in a handsome Tudor house on Larchmere Boulevard on Cleveland’s far East Side. Out his window, across the wide street and its grassy, landscaped median, was Shaker Heights, the rapidly integrating suburb with stunning stone and brick homes set on pleasant, carefully planned streets shaded by towering trees. The police car parked in front of the mayor’s house may have seemed out of place in this tranquil neighborhood, but violence was not so far away, and a black politician could not be too cautious in the late 1960s. Although it was just four miles from the public housing project where he grew up, Stokes’s home was well removed from the city’s core, sitting up on the Allegheny Plateau beside the gracious eastern suburbs. Indeed, the location of Stokes’s home revealed a remarkable journey from impoverished childhood to political power.

Driven to work by his bodyguard, a Cleveland police officer, Stokes came down Woodland Avenue, a long, straight thoroughfare that descended from the heights. Before he headed down the hill, the mayor was greeted by a grand view of his city—all its promise and problems laid out before him. The vista centered on Terminal Tower, the city’s highest skyscraper, a slender beauty, the symbol of Cleveland’s early success and rapid rise. The terminal was built by the partnership that created Shaker Heights to serve the commuter rail line that connected the two, and at this great distance, up on the bluff, Terminal Tower’s role in the city was especially clear—for distance was surely the point. The terminal complex, completed in 1930, and the Shaker Heights Rapid Transit helped a burgeoning middle class to be of the city but not in it, to enjoy its great benefits and avoid its troubles, to bypass the neighborhoods traversed by Woodland and the other avenues that fanned across the East Side.

Coming down the hill, Stokes could catch a glimpse of the forty-story Erieview Tower, completed in 1964, rising from downtown’s expansive urban renewal project. Erieview’s dark glass edifice—and the long-stalled renewal of the acres around it—represented Cleveland’s great hope for a modern downtown. When the winds were right, Stokes might have been distracted by the streaks of coal smoke running from the tall stacks of Municipal Light, the large, city-owned power plant on the lake farther to the east. In the other direction, south of downtown, the stacks of the massive steel mills sent out a greater cloud of smoke and steam, a gray shroud that hung over the unseen Cuyahoga River, tucked in its valley, out of sight. Clevelanders knew how to find the river, should they need to do so: head for the smoke.

Much closer to Stokes as he commuted to work were the troubled neighborhoods through which Woodland passed, including Woodhill Homes, a public housing project near the base of the hill. On June 9, 1969, a young white man, Donald Waight, was murdered near Woodhill by a group of African Americans whom he had been harassing in a misguided and unsuccessful attempt to defend his neighborhood from racial transition. Waight was the fourth Clevelander to be killed in a twenty-four-hour period, and the 127th of the year. Violence had become a hallmark of Cleveland’s crisis, and of the urban crisis around the nation. Stokes didn’t need any physical reminders of this struggle, but he had them anyway, and not just here.

As Stokes traveled farther, Woodland Avenue took him through Central, the neighborhood in which he grew up and where he had ample opportunity to stop his car and chat with friends and strangers, to smile and connect, to play the politician, which he did so well. Central was a neighborhood degraded so long that on some streets vacant lots outnumbered the remaining buildings. In bursts of arson and demolition, Central was disappearing—its people and its structures. To reach City Hall, Stokes passed by the downtown campus of Cuyahoga Community College, opened in 1966, and then under the Innerbelt Freeway, part of Interstate 90, and into the southern section of downtown. Here his driver had options, including East 9th, a wide, two-way street that cut due north through the Erieview renewal area to City Hall, which sat on the northern edge of downtown, just above the harbor and the great, dying Lake Erie. Here Stokes had a daily reminder that the urban crisis didn’t end at the city’s edge; it flowed out into the lake. No barriers, man-made or natural, contained the polluted city.

Completed in 1916, City Hall is a beautiful beaux arts box, a near twin of the nearby Cuyahoga County Courthouse. Both were built as part of Daniel Burnham’s 1903 Group Plan for downtown Cleveland. Sitting in the mayoral office, Stokes could overlook the central feature of that plan, a grassy mall that stretched south toward the beaux arts federal building. Beyond, Stokes had a clear view of Terminal Tower, less obscured here by the city’s smog. It was a grand view, created as the city’s fortunes waxed fifty years earlier. From here, literally in his seat of power, Stokes could reflect on the trajectory of his city and perhaps think it more hopeful than his daily commute would suggest.

Cleveland’s industrial East Side and downtown may seem like an odd setting for a study of environmental policy and the growing influence of ecological thought in American culture, but the city’s struggles in the late 1960s help us think about the environmental movement in a new, more inclusive way. Beyond the burning river, which not every city had, Cleveland’s deepening urban crisis was typical of the nation’s deindustrializing, heavily polluted cities. In Cleveland, we find themes and struggles found in Detroit, Newark, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Chicago, and dozens of other cities. By the late 1960s, all these cities were facing concurrent environmental and urban crises, and they battled heightened problems with diminished resources. In Cleveland, the polluted and burning Cuyahoga put an exclamation point on these confluent crises, but what makes this city especially interesting is Carl Stokes, a black mayor in a white city, forced to consider issues related to race at every turn. His political skill was considerable, although that didn’t make him universally liked. His administration was active and its policies progressive, although that didn’t necessarily make them effective. What made the Stokes administration revolutionary was his perspective. Never had a black man raised in poverty grown up to run a major industrial city. When he talked of inadequate housing, rats, and poor city services, he did so with an authority that no other mayor had. Stokes’s background allowed him to see the city more completely than any of his predecessors; he perceived so clearly the boundaries that ran through his community, the barriers that held Cleveland back.

THE AMERICAN CITY IS OBSOLESCENT

In June 1968, a little more than half a year into his administration, Stokes, already a popular speaker at the national level, addressed the Capital Press Club at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1944 by a group of prominent African American journalists, the club worked to promote black participation in media. Stokes chose this forum to describe the plight of blacks in Cleveland. He opened: “I have been told that the approved way to talk about the city, any big city, these days is to speak solemnly, ominously, and fearfully about their problems. One cannot be expected to rate as an expert on the city unless one foresees its doom.” He listed problems that were by then a drumbeat: “spreading slums, increasing crime, declining tax duplicate, [rising] infant mortality and illiteracy rates, air and water pollution, and the mounting tensions between the races.” In sum these constituted, in Stokes’s phrase, “urban crises.”1

Despite all this, Stokes tried to keep a positive attitude, as a mayor and as a speaker. The problems, as diverse as they were serious, were solvable. “Permit me then to say,” he continued, “that as a Negro, and as the mayor of a metropolitan complex, no one knows better than I that there are no easy answers to the problems of the Negro or to the problems of our cities. Except that I am sure that one will not be solved without a solution to the other.” Perhaps most remarkable here is not Stokes’s understanding that the problem of race was connected to the problems of the city, but his description of his own post: “mayor of a metropolitan complex.” This he was not. He was mayor of Cleveland, a city embedded in that metropolitan complex. The distinction would become clearer to him as he struggled to solve problems that traversed the boundaries of his authority. Beyond the complexities of regional governance, Stokes understood that metropolitan Cleveland would need major federal investment to solve its problems. His big take-home message, reported in the New York Times the next day, was that proposed federal budget cuts would be devastating to cities in crisis. “Never before have our big cities needed so urgently the massive assistance of the federal government, assistance that only the federal government can provide.”

Later in the speech, Stokes revealed that his perspective on the city’s future derived in part from an understanding of its past. “In Cleveland, as in other cities, we have passed through three eras in the last 100 years: the agricultural era of pre-1900; the manufacturing era of the first half of this century; and the post-manufacturing era now coming to the fore,” he said, asserting that urban America had begun a fundamental transition. “Cleveland is still strongly involved and tied to the manufacturing era and is only just beginning to understand and grasp the potentials of the post-manufacturing period.” Stokes called the emerging postindustrial period “the Human Resources Era” to emphasize the importance of education and the development of marketable business skills. At the end of his speech, taking advantage of his lectern’s location in the nation’s capital, Stokes endorsed the candidacy of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, “the man I see as the next President of the United States.” In that instance, at least, Stokes’s vision of the future was not so clear.

Like all great industrial cities, Cleveland was built through a rapid accumulation of capital, the influx of profit converted into greater productive capacity, new buildings, infrastructure, and cultural institutions. Some of the nation’s great industrial firms arose in Cleveland, including Standard Oil, American Ship Building, the Sherwin-Williams Paint Company, and Republic Steel—innovative companies that helped shape the nation’s economy. The city grew quickly, and despite the wealth and employment, there were also many complaints about noise, smoke, and the chaos wrought of poor planning. Still, Cleveland’s boosters spent decades pointing to the city’s spectacular growth and its significant contributions to industrial America. Ironically, it was the city’s even more spectacular decline that finally attracted the nation’s gaze. Cleveland was built in a hurry but was dismantled even more quickly.

During the seventy years from the beginning of the Civil War to the onset of the Great Depression, Cleveland added more than 850,000 residents while it built a complex economy around oil refining, chemical manufacturing, and steel production. Factories, warehousing, and docks dominated the waterfront; railroads pushed through neighborhoods and gained access to the riverside and lakeshore; densely packed, poorly built housing clustered around industrial zones; wastes poured into waterways and the air overhead. The city and individual businesses reshaped the river, dredging, widening, straightening, and holding it back, all in the effort to make it more useful for industry by allowing the passage of ore boats upstream to the southern flats, where great steel mills produced the raw materials that attracted even more factories to the region. The federal government built an extensive breakwater in Lake Erie to protect Cleveland Harbor, and dredge spoils and urban waste, including garbage, provided the fill that gave the city more flat lakeside land. In other words, industrial capitalism didn’t just manufacture widgets in Cleveland; it manufactured Cleveland. The total environment was put to work for profit.

All this was permitted and encouraged by a policy environment that privileged economic growth over all else. Regulation was modest, ineffective, or unenforced. Industries simply passed along the cost of water and air pollution to their neighbors. Cleveland, like municipal governments throughout industrializing America, demanded little of employers, keeping taxes low while providing potable water, paved roads, and unfettered access to publicly owned waterways and waterfronts. Through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, housing was essentially unregulated and then poorly regulated, and therefore cheap and often dangerous and unhealthy. Since taxes were low, government services were meager. Public health suffered, and recreational opportunities were limited. In sum, through the boom decades, government provided little more than cheerleading for major industries. All this meant that Cleveland, like all industrial cities in this era, was a good place to find work but a poor place to live.

In the late 1940s, threats to the industrial regime began to accumulate. The Great Depression had caused a decade-long hiatus in the building of homes and businesses, and new wartime factories appeared disproportionately on the outskirts of the metropolis. After the war, state and local governments planned the construction of highways that would speed decentralization by enabling longer commutes. Prescient scholars and politicians began to express concern for the dense industrial city, for urban life as Americans had created it. One of these observers was Mabel Walker, an urban economist who had written the definitive study on blight in the 1930s with a special eye toward the tax consequences of decay in the central city. In the spring of 1947, Walker gave a speech in New York to the Municipal Finance Officers Association titled “The American City Is Obsolescent,” in which she used census numbers to describe shrinking central cities. “I think the simplest and briefest explanation of the population trend,” she said, “is that people did not come to the city in the first place because they liked living in the city, but because the city offered them a means of livelihood.” Now that residential and employment opportunities were decentralizing, she argued, planners and politicians should not work against the will of the people but instead “make way for the fluid city of tomorrow.” Although Walker did not imagine just how far the decentralization would proceed, at least not in this speech, she concluded that the “creaking old structure must be readjusted to modern needs.” The city would have to be rebuilt.2

Walker was most concerned about the effects of automobiles and trucks, and in her conception transportation drove change in the metamorphosing city. But automobility didn’t account for all of urban America’s new fluidity; capital, labor, sites of production—every aspect of the industrial city became unmoored, no longer beholden to the old economic geography. At the same time, white urbanites fled desegregating neighborhoods in central cities, preferring to move to white suburbs than to share their communities and schools with African Americans. In other words, broader changes were at work in industrial cities, as fundamental economic shifts compounded the consequences of the centrifugal forces pulling urbanites toward the edges. Still, Walker described perfectly the severity of the situation: “A new type of city adapted to present and future needs is struggling to evolve, but it is held back by the dead carcass of the past.”

This book describes Cleveland’s struggle to remake itself, the struggle against the carcass of its past. Encased in its industrial shell, Cleveland found the transformation into a fluid city more difficult than many places, but its story speaks to the urban crisis as it ran through many American cities. As manufacturing growth slowed and employment shrank, cities found themselves engaged in a new competition for capital investment. Service industries, including banking, insurance, education, and health care, took on greater importance; government services also became more important. An increasingly large group of people who had options in their lives, the middle class, demanded better recreational opportunities, better schools, safer streets, cleaner air, and cleaner water. They rejected the carcass of the industrial city and demanded a city that served them better. Cleveland’s halting, painful, and incomplete transition from industrial city to service city required massive investments in the urban landscape. Cleveland, like other industrial cities, slowly reclaimed its waterfront, reduced pollution, and improved housing. Citizens demanded these changes, forcing government—local, state, and national—to create policies that would aid the transition toward the service city.

The continued political power of industry impeded the development and enforcement of environmental policies that might have speeded the transition, but even with rapid changes in regulatory policy, the industrial city would not have easily or quickly morphed into a successful service city. Waterfronts, so long given over to industry and commerce, would need reworking, becoming parks or prime residential space. Empty warehouses and abandoned industrial plants would have to be repurposed or torn down. Cheaply built and underregulated housing would have to be replaced. Citizens would have to imagine new uses for rail lines, usually as recreational spaces—linear parks. New employers, in medicine, higher education, insurance, finance, and other service industries, would need new facilities and space to grow. The modernization of American cities required imagination and political will, but the actual renewal was largely physical. In the service city era, residents would not tolerate polluted waterways, perpetually foul air, and inadequate parks and playgrounds. Successful service cities would have to be good places to work and live.

CAN CLEVELAND ESCAPE BURNING?

The 1950 census found nearly 915,000 residents in Cleveland, its high-water mark. The city lost a modest number of residents in the 1950s, as new housing enticed Clevelanders into the suburbs. In the 1960s, Cleveland lost more than 125,000 residents, shrinking by 14 percent. In the next decade, the population loss accelerated; nearly 180,000 fewer people called Cleveland home by 1980, by which time the metropolitan region had stopped growing as well. In the course of twenty years, Cleveland lost roughly 35 percent of its population, falling below 575,000. Cleveland was not alone. Some small industrial cities, such as Gary, Indiana, hemorrhaged residents, and even large, economically complex cities such as Chicago saw declines. Since population loss served as a marker of urban decline, you didn’t need to walk through city neighborhoods to understand that Cleveland and other industrial cities were in trouble in the late 1960s. But if you did explore the city, the depths of the problems became clearer, especially on Cleveland’s East Side, where the Hough neighborhood, the site of the city’s first major race riot in 1966, was losing a staggering 50,000 residents over the course of twenty years, shrinking by two-thirds—a decline that represented an incredible disinvestment in and abandonment of the inner city.

In 1967, a year after the Hough riot and a year before the city’s second major riot, the Glenville Shootout, left seven people dead and caused extensive damage to the expanding East Side ghetto, a Saturday Evening Post headline asked, “Can Cleveland Escape Burning?” In the lengthy exposé that followed, John Skow described Cleveland’s ghetto and the city’s growing economic malaise. As the summer heated up, Skow talked to people in Hough and about Hough. He reported, “It is hard to find a city resident who believes Cleveland will go unburned through the summer.” Cleveland’s problems went well beyond Hough, of course. People were already calling it “the mistake on the lake,” Skow said, also noting that Lake Erie was fouled with pollution, a problem that many Clevelanders had also recognized as a mistake. In this way, Skow captured the connections between the urban and environmental crises: the urban environment had been devastated—both its natural features and its neighborhoods. And over the next two summers both would burn.3

Many of the nation’s largest cities found themselves confronting similar decline, even while embedded in the world’s most successful economy. The United States added nearly thirty million people to its population, expanding by nearly 20 percent in the 1960s. At the same time, gross national product nearly doubled and per capita income surged. The United States was in the midst of its longest economic expansion to date; it was far and away the world’s great economic power. This juxtaposition makes the American urban crisis a world-historical event. Never before had a nation thrived—grown in population and in wealth—while its major cities decayed. Even before the decline became precipitous, some scholars, journalists, and policy makers began to wonder what had gone wrong. What was causing the failure of urban America?

There was no shortage of possible culprits, but most observers blamed suburbanization in some way. Jobs moved to the periphery, attracted by cheap land, lower taxes, and access to highways. People moved out too, repulsed by dirty and increasingly dangerous neighborhoods and attracted by new housing set in spacious communities served by good schools. The city bore the burdens of racism and segregation, which combined to keep black residents poor and confined, powerless to improve their neighborhoods and subject to the brunt of urban violence, while whites fled to more prosperous communities. Despite the development of government programs designed to alleviate urban poverty, state and federal policies in critical areas such as transportation and taxation sped the decentralization of metropolitan areas by putting cities at a competitive disadvantage against their own suburbs.

By the 1960s, urban politicians understood that suburban growth came at the expense of central cities. Stokes was especially blunt about the problem in a speech to the City Club of Cleveland in the summer of 1970. “The cost of local government falls much more heavily on those who live in Cleveland proper than on suburbanites in this country,” he said, adding that because the city paid much more for police, fire protection, and recreation, “Cleveland subsidizes its much wealthier suburban neighbors.” The imbalance was compounded as falling populations and property values caused a decline in the municipal tax base. Federal aid programs could not compensate for shrinking resources in Cleveland, and as Stokes argued repeatedly, the state sent too little money to its cities. Noting the anti-urban bias of state legislators, Stokes claimed, “Ohio has practiced a rural and suburban philosophy that ignores big central city problems because those who run the state win their positions by soliciting the solid backing of farmers and small town residents.”4

In the standard accounts of the urban crisis, the physically deteriorating city serves largely as setting or symbol. But the urban environment was not just a setting for Cleveland’s decline; it was a central factor. As investment slowed, the rot, brought on by age, weather, pollution, and wear, greatly outpaced improvements. On street after street, clapboard houses slowly fell apart or were quickly engulfed in flames. Urban decay was real; it was physical, not metaphorical. Although Clevelanders had long pointed to the city’s flaws—the river was too crooked, transportation too limited, air too foul, water too murky, housing too shoddy—no one could have guessed how rapidly decay would set in once people started flowing out. In 1969, as he struggled with a litany of urban ills, Stokes appropriately labeled Cleveland’s predicament a “crisis in the urban environment.”5

EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED TO EVERYTHING ELSE

Hardened by four years in office and liberated by his decision not to seek reelection, Stokes became even more candid during his public appearances in the waning months of his administration. He was particularly blunt in a 1971 speech delivered to the Colorado Municipal League conference in Colorado Springs titled “Issues and Prospects in a Regional City.” Retaining his positive outlook on the future of American cities and emphasizing that the doomsayers were wrong, Stokes argued that cities could be rebuilt to out-compete suburbs. “I say this because I sincerely believe that life in the central cities’ inner neighborhoods, so much closer to the downtown center of excitement and activities and to its heritage of cultural, social and educational institutions, can be so superior to life in the generally lifeless, monotonous, sterile average suburb.” But, sounding very much like Mabel Walker twenty years earlier, Stokes added, “It is, I am certain, patently clear to everyone in this audience that the central cities of our metropolitan areas are physically and functionally obsolete.” This obsolescence necessitated substantial investments in cities—their schools, hospitals, and services; metropolitan regions needed more rational development of transportation, water supplies, and sewers. “The inescapable conclusion,” Stokes said, “must be that reconstruction of the central cities is essential and that such reconstruction must be undertaken on a scale which would permit them to be rebuilt for a rich variety of uses and for as economically and socially heterogeneous a population as possible.” Stokes recommended a new tax system, less reliant on property taxes, combined with state restrictions on suburban development as first steps toward a recalibration of metropolitan growth. These would be difficult steps, however, as Stokes well knew, because metropolitan governance was terribly fragmented. “The difficulty arises from the fact that the rich neighborhoods, entrenched behind their individual municipal boundaries, are thereby isolated from any responsibility for the support of those portions of the regional city which constitute the poor neighborhoods.”6

Stokes’s call for better governance of the “regional city” was part of a national conversation concerning how best to manage the sprawling metropolis. Postwar suburbanization led to an intensification of this conversation, but attempts to redefine the city dated to the early twentieth century. The phrase “Greater Cleveland” became popular in the 1920s, as Clevelanders recognized that the municipal boundary no longer contained the city. In 1949, the federal government defined the Cleveland Standard Metropolitan Area as Cuyahoga and Lake counties, suggesting that the city had sprawled to the east. In 1959, the federal definition became the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area and now included Geauga and Medina counties. But federal definitions of the metropolis excluded other, integral parts of Greater Cleveland, including heavily populated Lorain County to the west, and Summit County, which contains Akron, to the south. Regardless of how one defined metropolitan or Greater Cleveland, however, no one governed it, as such, since governmental power remained at the municipal or county level.

Even before Stokes called for better governance, Cleveland saw several attempts to overcome the problems of the fractured metropolis. Before the end of World War II, the city established the Metropolitan Cleveland Development Council in the hopes of solving regional problems, especially those related to transportation. Cuyahoga County replaced that short-lived, city-led organization with the Regional Planning Commission in 1947. Soon even the county boundary was too tight. In 1962, the state of Ohio created a seven-county region for cooperative transportation planning to meet a requirement for federal funding. Still, planning organizations held little power, and governmental authority remained diffuse. In 1970, Cuyahoga County alone contained 57 municipalities, some of them growing rapidly, including Beachwood and Brook Park, while others were declining, such as Cleveland, Shaker Heights, and Cleveland Heights. These places had different pasts and envisioned very different futures, ensuring conflicts of interest that made municipal-level governance inefficient. As Stokes well understood, municipal lines were not the only boundaries that held Cleveland back. Even within the city, boundaries divided residents, white from black, prosperous from impoverished. As Skow reported in 1967, “the city has degenerated into a loose and rancorous federation of walled villages,” as white ethnics, most notably Italian Americans, defended their neighborhoods from black encroachment.

Although largely inspired by shifting demographic and economic realities, the conversation about redefining the city also reflected the growing influence of ecological thought in American culture. Ecology taught that all boundaries are porous. Indeed, the first law of ecology, as described by Barry Commoner in 1971, is “Everything is connected to everything else.” Ecological thought had influenced thinking about cities since the 1920s, but mostly through metaphor, as urban scholars compared cities to organisms that had life cycles and were capable of catching diseases. Increasingly in the postwar era, observers argued that human systems weren’t like natural systems but were in fact part of them. This became especially clear as cities addressed fundamental environmental problems, such as treating sewage and supplying water. Solutions required consideration of the entire environment, not just streams, rivers, lakes, pipes, and treatment plants but also agricultural land and housing developments. Planners came to realize that watersheds marked the proper boundaries for water resource management, not municipal lines.

Ecological thinking, emphasizing connections rather than boundaries, only gradually influenced urban policy, and many of the actions taken to save Cleveland in the years around 1970 seem modest or misguided to us today. Many Americans held tight to their modern philosophy, which sorted and divided the world: man and nature; city and suburb; black and white. That these divisions continue to run through contemporary Cleveland, and contemporary America, reflects the lasting influence of modern thinking. Stokes struggled to break down barriers in Cleveland. He prioritized erasing those that separated citizens by race and class, but the movement for social equality, like the effort to solve the problems of the city, including those of the urban environment, affirmed the primary lesson of ecology: everything is connected to everything else.

THE POLLUTED STATES OF AMERICA

In April 1970, in the weeks surrounding the first Earth Day, thousands of Cleveland residents, many of them children, signed petitions demanding government action to curb pollution. Many of the petitions circulated through the blue-collar neighborhoods of South Broadway and Union Miles, densely packed with clapboard homes, interspersed with factories that lined the Erie, New York Central, and Pennsylvania railroad corridors, all of which passed through the industrial South Side. Most of the petitions circulated through neighborhood schools: Fullerton Elementary, South High, Holy Name Elementary, and many others. “We the future voters of the United States demand the enforcement of existing air and water pollution laws,” one petition read, “and the creation of new enforceable laws dealing with cleansing our air and water for the protection of the people’s health and welfare.” Another petition, carried street by street, sought the signatures of neighborhood adults. It read, “We the electorate of the polluted states of America, in order to form a more perfect country, demand clean air, clean water, and clean land. To secure the blessings of a pure environment for ourselves and our children we do present this petition.” Those who circulated the petitions, hundreds of mimeographed sheets altogether, presented them to Mayor Stokes.7

Although the size of this protest was unusual, there was nothing new in urban residents demanding a cleaner environment. In 1970, however, residents had good reason to expect action. Stokes had come to power at liberalism’s high tide. In the nation’s capital, Lyndon Johnson’s activist administration had passed civil rights legislation and declared war on poverty. A wide range of reforms addressed the urban crisis. From Model Cities to Head Start, federal programs poured money into troubled neighborhoods in the hope of improving job training, early childhood education, housing, and employment opportunities. Although these initiatives made a difference in the lives of individuals, nothing stemmed the crisis, which only deepened as government intervention increased. Still, Stokes maintained an activist stance, demanding federal aid at every opportunity and siding with citizens who insisted on improved air quality, a cleaner lake, and better housing.

Stokes hoped to do more while in office, but as long as jobs and capital continued to flow out of the city, all he could realistically expect was to shape the decline. He served for four years, having gained reelection once, and then decided to move on, to New York, where he became a newscaster. Even before he left office, Stokes received considerable blame for Cleveland’s continued decline, especially after the second of the city’s major race riots, the Glenville Shootout in July 1968. And like many transitioning cities, Cleveland couldn’t support as many residents as it had as an industrial city. The service economy couldn’t absorb the excess labor created as manufacturing receded. Great advances in the transition to a service city, during the Stokes administration and after, could not halt the population decline. Improved air quality, cleaner beaches, more plentiful open space, new office towers, and expanding college campuses all helped Cleveland become a better place to be, but fewer and fewer people chose to live there. In other words, successful physical transformations didn’t translate into demographic growth, and this lag suggested to critics that policies focused on physical improvements didn’t work. We argue otherwise. No doubt Stokes made missteps and his administration had its shortcomings, but the story that follows is not one of wasted opportunities and mismanagement. Rather, it is the story of a politician and his administration struggling to shape the future of a city in transition.

As Richard Nixon entered the White House in early 1969, and national politics began its long conservative drift, more than one observer noted that liberalism had been broken on the shoals of the urban crisis. But in one area of urban concern—the environment—liberal policies persisted and even expanded in the Nixon years and eventually proved effective. Tighter regulation of pollution, investments in sewage treatment plants, and the construction of new recreational spaces were all necessary steps in the creation of a new type of city. Although we often forget how much environmental policy is also urban policy, it should be clear that environmental regulation made American cities more livable. Johnson’s War on Poverty and Nixon’s War on Pollution were in many ways two campaigns in the same war—the liberal state’s attempt to refashion American urban life. Demanded by residents of metropolitan America, new government policies and programs worked to turn degraded industrial cities into livable service cities.

A variety of factors contributed to the development of the environmental movement, including the growing awareness of ecological science, even among average citizens. The rise of liberal politics, heightened women’s political activism, and the developing counterculture all contributed to environmentalism’s growing influence, too. Suburbanization helped drive some aspects of the environmental movement—concern for protecting open space particularly. As it evolved in the 1960s, environmental activism addressed a diverse agenda, including the preservation of wilderness, an aspect of the movement that achieved remarkable success. Scholars have tended to connect the growing demand for environmental quality to the nation’s growing wealth, but the stories in this book—of the burning river, the dying lake, the fouled air, and decaying neighborhoods—do not describe a wealthy society gradually improving its environment. This was a landscape in crisis, a crisis fed by decline more than growth, and as Cleveland’s story makes clear, in addition to working to preserve wilderness and protect suburbia’s natural amenities, the environmental movement worked to halt the decay of cities. The concern for urban places, including long-industrialized landscapes, explains why Cleveland’s burning river evolved into one of the founding myths of the environmental movement, and why the Cuyahoga still attracts so much attention today.

Now, as most American cities have turned the corner and begun to recover from the crisis in the urban environment, historical perspective allows a fuller analysis of what was happening in the 1960s and 1970s. It is clear that the long transition from industrial city to service city was more disruptive than anyone anticipated. By the 1980s, high unemployment, race riots, homelessness, drug-related violence, and blighted neighborhoods had all become markers of urban America, especially in the deindustrializing cities of the Midwest. But just as the decline began to feel permanent, cities began to recover—not all of them and not all at once, but Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and others stabilized and in some cases recovered economically and demographically. Today, explaining the recovery of American cities is the new scholarly focus. From our perspective, Chicago’s construction of Millennium Park, which replaced the intrusive Illinois Central rail yards, and Manhattan’s incredibly successful High Line Park, created from a long-abandoned elevated freight rail line, do not mark the beginning of a new middle-class urbanity but are the culmination of a long, concerted effort to remake the urban landscape.

Describing the transition between types of urban regimes is especially relevant today. We have entered a new era of transition, from the service city to the sustainable city, in which the community must attend to ecological health as well as environmental amenities. The reality of climate change has encouraged communities to diminish their ecological footprints, minimizing reliance on fossil fuels and carbon-intensive agriculture, a process that may become more urgent in the near future. The transition from livable service cities to lasting sustainable cities promises to be just as disruptive as the one described in Where the River Burned, and it will undoubtedly create a new urban crisis. Some cities will make good policy choices, preparing for a warmer climate, stronger storms, higher sea levels, and droughts. Surely those policies will matter. But some cities are simply better positioned for a warmer world, just as some cities were better positioned to become successful service cities. Cleveland, finally finding its legs in the service economy, is hard at work remaking itself again as a sustainable city.

The nonlinear narrative that follows pivots around two months: June 1969, the month the Cuyahoga caught fire, and April 1970, which included the first Earth Day. By reaching back periodically for historical context, Where the River Burned tells the longer story of how the city fell into crisis and how Clevelanders mapped a way out. The story opens on Earth Day, when letters and petitions sent to Mayor Stokes described two environmental crises—one suburban and one urban. This exploration of Earth Day introduces many of the pressing environmental issues and more fully introduces Stokes. The story then falls back to June of the previous year, following the mayor as he makes a series of public appearances. First, Stokes introduces a rat control program to be managed by Bailus Walker. Much of this story takes place in Hough, the rapidly deteriorating neighborhood that took on special meaning in the urban crisis. Here we see a city divided by the invisible wall of the ghetto, the most powerful and persistent boundary in Cleveland. The story then moves downtown, using the celebration of the new Central Bank tower to describe the great economic and symbolic importance of the central business district. Downtown redevelopment may seem rather removed from the urban crisis, especially as it played out in Hough just a few miles away, but urban planning and urban renewal were critical to both of these places, and vital to the broader story we tell. Four days after celebrating the development downtown, Stokes attended the opening of the 55th Street Marina, part of Cleveland’s effort to reconnect with Lake Erie, which was so polluted that the city had to take extraordinary measures to permit swimming. Even as the city attempted to solve its water pollution problem, it addressed air pollution, especially from the Municipal Light plant and the steel mills. In the summer of 1969, Cleveland struggled to write an effective air pollution code while working-class neighborhoods around the mills continued to empty out.

The pivotal event in June 1969 was the Cuyahoga fire, of course. The river had burned many times before, but newspaper coverage of these earlier fires had focused exclusively on their economic consequences. Only after the 1969 fire did Clevelanders, and others, begin to dwell on the broader ecological implications of the burning river. Then the narrative returns to Earth Day 1970, describing events in the city that week and looking into the 1970s, as the environmental crisis was eased through regulation but the urban crisis only deepened with continued flight of people and capital from the city. We bring the story into the present at the end, to describe Cleveland as it exists today in the midst of a new transition—the attempt to build a more sustainable city.