4 Policy and the Polluted City

East 55th Street runs through some of Cleveland’s most troubled neighborhoods. A five-mile thoroughfare extending due north from the industrial South Side, it stretches along Outhwaite Homes in Central, under the Pennsylvania Railroad bridge and past the western end of Hough Avenue, before ducking under the New York Central’s tracks and rising over the Shoreway, just before ending at Lake Erie. Here, on June 17, 1969, Mayor Stokes joined Governor Rhodes for the dedication of the recently completed East 55th Street Marina. After the Coast Guard ceremoniously raised an American flag over the new facility, Kiely Cronin, the city’s director of port control, introduced a few local and state officials, the governor made some remarks, and then Stokes stepped forward to speak. “The greatest significance of this ceremony today is the recognition we are giving to cooperation between the State of Ohio and the City of Cleveland,” he said, only hinting at the increasingly important but strained relationship between the two. He continued, shifting to a happier theme: “The state and the city have combined to bring into being a facility which utilizes Lake Erie as the priceless recreational asset it can and must be, a source of delight, relaxation and fun—‘recreation’ in the true sense of the word—not only for Greater Clevelanders but for visitors from the whole northern part of the state.”1

Stokes was a careful speech maker, writing out in advance even short talks, like this one, wanting to be certain that he hit the right notes and took advantage of the opportunity to deliver a message. Having pressed two important themes—state and local cooperation and the need to make the most of natural assets—the mayor went further, pressing another theme that had come to dominate his thinking. “While we have the governor here—and this refreshing breeze in our faces—I cannot help but mention the urban crisis and Cleveland’s great need for help from Columbus.” He spoke directly to the governor: “When you get back to Columbus, we hope you remember that all kinds of problems remain here—housing, welfare, air and water pollution, education, law enforcement.” The city would need state help, not just in the form of state tax dollars but also through the creation and enforcement of better state laws, especially regarding pollution.

The East 55th Street Marina was a particularly appropriate place to make this argument. Stokes said, somewhat awkwardly, that the city’s problems were not “docked right here, except perhaps for water pollution, but they exist right behind that skyline.” This phrase, “behind that skyline,” was an odd choice, perhaps written the day before as he sat in City Hall nearly surrounded by skyscrapers. But this morning, Stokes and the others were three miles from downtown, and even Erieview Tower was quite small in the distance and partially obscured by the smokestacks of the Municipal Light power plant, which sat just to the west of the marina. And the largest structure near the dedication ceremony was the massive coal-fired Lake Shore Plant of the Illuminating Company, looming over the lake just a few hundred yards to the east. Perhaps Stokes was being as careful as ever when he said “skyline,” hoping that those gathered, including the governor, would take a moment to dwell on these two power plants, for their stacks took on considerable meaning in the polluted city, garnering outsized attention in the struggle for clean air.

And so here was Stokes, dedicating a new marina, praising the building of a new recreational city, looking out over a terribly polluted Lake Erie, while standing very nearly in the shadow of two notoriously smoky power plants, which themselves were inauspiciously nestled in a rapidly deteriorating industrial zone along the New York Central tracks and in close proximity to communities—Central and Hough—that constituted much of the city’s “crisis ghetto,” neighborhoods that had little use for slips to dock pricey sailboats and motor cruisers. The city planners who in 1949 had envisioned this facility, or something like it, and the planners who actually designed it in the 1960s, and Stokes, who oversaw its completion, all understood that the 274-berth marina had been built for people who lived some distance from 55th Street. With 270 parking spaces and easy access to the Shoreway, which engineers were busy upgrading to meet federal standards for interstate highways, the new marina would be convenient to boaters from around the region. On this day, a mayor so attuned to the needs of ghetto residents left unasked the increasingly obvious question: who would be served by the new service city?

Three days before the dedication, Stokes received a letter of support from Willie L. Morrow, a former city resident who had moved to East Cleveland, one of the earliest suburbs to admit large numbers of African American residents. He still worked downtown, at the Central National Bank branch on Public Square, and he followed with great interest press coverage of the mayor. After quoting Martin Luther King Jr. on the issue of judging people on the content of their character and not on the color of their skin, Morrow encouraged Stokes to carry on. “Mr. Mayor keep up the good works you are doing and don’t let no body turn you around. Keep on fighting for fair housing in the Lee Seville area and everywhere, keep on fighting for gun control laws, keep on fighting for air pollution control, but most of all keep on fighting for a fair and better government for the citizens of all races of Cleveland and this great nation of ours.” The range of issues Morrow referenced spoke to the breadth of the mayor’s agenda, but they all came down to one: fair and better government. Morrow knew that better policy and better enforcement would be critical to solving Cleveland’s problems. At the marina that morning, politicians gathered to celebrate a small step forward—government cooperation and the completion of a long-planned project. Still, many Clevelanders, even many nearby, could be forgiven if they saw little reason to celebrate.2

THE FISH WILL LEARN

A year before the marina ceremony, Mayor Stokes had taken part in another celebration at the lakefront, one that received more attention from the press. On the last day of July 1968, Stokes took off his shoes, rolled up his pants, and waded into Lake Erie, smiling and frolicking with neighborhood kids at White City Beach on the far East Side. Clearly in a playful mood, Stokes joked with the press for the first time since the Glenville riots began the week before. With his spirits up and his guard down, he saw a young woman in a bikini and commented to a Plain Dealer reporter, “That’s what we mean by Black is Beautiful.” Commanded by their mayor, nearly the entire cabinet attended this event, a celebration of the beach’s opening. Director of Public Utilities Ben Stefanski, whose department had charge of water pollution control, stripped down to a bathing suit and joined the kids in the lake, and at least one cabinet member was thrown in wearing his clothes. In keeping with the upbeat (and somewhat offbeat) events, Stokes cut a ceremonial fishnet and directed a student band for a couple of numbers. After a terrible week—seven people killed, three of them police officers, arson, National Guard patrols, and heightened racial tensions throughout the city—on this day the sense of relief was palpable. The violence had ended, and the city could cool itself in the lake, swimming at White City for the first time in more than a decade.

Months before, Stokes had sat with his cabinet brainstorming over how the mayor could keep his pledge that Clevelanders would once again safely swim in Lake Erie. Fouled by untreated sewage, city beaches had remained closed summer after summer because bacteria counts exceeded recommended levels. Stefanski decided that instead of cleaning the entire lake—a long-term and incredibly expensive proposition—the city could instead clean just a small part, keep it clean, and invite the public to swim. He hired Havens and Emerson, an engineering firm based in Cleveland and New York, to design what became known as “a swimming pool in the lake” at White City, a municipally owned beach that retained the name of a long-ago failed amusement park, which itself had taken its name from the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Using a $325,000 grant from the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration, the city hired a contractor to clear the beach of debris and soiled sand, build a protective crib, and hang weighted vinyl curtains from pontoons floating in a line out in the lake, separating the beach area from the rest of the lake. The city then doused the pool with chlorine to bring coliform levels down to the safe range. A week after the transformed beach officially opened, bacteria levels had dropped below the 1,000-count ceiling recommended for swimming, but just below. So Raymond Roth, the city employee overseeing the project, told the Cleveland Press that 4,000 gallons of liquid chlorine would be poured into the pool, supplementing the 350 pounds of powdered chlorine that had been added by hand each day. The liquid chlorine was donated by Dow Chemical, which hoped the White City experiment would allow it to measure the effects of this type of application. Meanwhile, outside the heavy vinyl curtains, discharges from polluted streams, sewer overflows, and the Easterly Sewage Treatment Plant—directly abutting the beach—kept lake waters filthy and unsafe.3

Lake Erie pollution had become a broad public concern by 1968. The Plain Dealer ran a weekly “Beach Bacteria” feature, a chart listing bacteria counts at the region’s popular swimming spots. Headlands State Park, twenty miles northeast of the city, scored well below the threshold for safety. Huntington Beach, twelve miles to the west, was also safe. Bacteria counts along the city’s shore were another story. Outside the pool at White City, the count could reach well above 5,000. In August, Edgewater Beach, just to the west of the Cuyahoga’s mouth, scored an astounding 110,000.4 Despite the fact that the lake remained terribly polluted along Cleveland’s shore, Stokes was pleased with the results of the pool-in-the-lake experiment. The administration estimated that a thousand people used the beach each day in the summer of 1968—many more than would have defied the Beach Closed signs that had greeted visitors in previous years. Indeed, the pool in the lake worked well enough that the administration decided to repeat it the following year and even open an additional pool at Edgewater Park, where bacteria counts were astronomical.

Stokes described the pool in the lake in his testimony before a U.S. House Appropriations Committee on June 5, 1969, as Congress debated spending millions of dollars to clean up the Great Lakes. He also relayed to Congress a list of Cleveland’s accomplishments in the effort to control its contribution to Lake Erie’s pollution, focusing on the passage of a $100 million clean-water bond issue in 1968 and the passage of another $120 million state-level bond. Still, Stokes said that the lake’s full recovery, a recovery that “will permit complete utilization of the water resources in our area for recreation, for commercial fishing and for all forms of light and heavy manufacturing and processing industries—will cost in excess of one billion.” Given this price tag, Stokes, like his predecessor Ralph Locher, recommended federal involvement in sewage treatment plant construction modeled on the funding formula used to build interstate highways, in which the federal government paid 90 percent of construction costs. “Utilization of water resources,” Stokes argued, “is as vital to our economy as a well-developed highway system.”5

Knowing that the budget the Appropriations Committee was considering would not contain this much support, Stokes brought with him a list of small, discrete “demonstration projects” that might be funded and completed in short order. The list included creating diked areas for the storage of materials dredged from shipping channels, materials that had traditionally been dumped in the lake, where they continued to ooze pollutants. There was a scheme to combat pollution from sewer overflows by creating an impoundment area in the lake where untreated wastes could be stored and gradually cleaned. The city might even attempt “in-stream treatment techniques,” such as adding chemicals to creeks and stream beds. Or perhaps the city could use federal dollars to install aerators in the lake, in the hopes of reducing blue-green algal blooms by improving oxygen levels. All these proposals shared a trait with the swimming pool at White City Beach: they projected engineering solutions out into the lake (or streams) instead of creating solutions closer to the actual sources of pollution—the city sewers and industries that let their untreated effluent run into waterways. If this list represented a failure of vision, it wasn’t Stokes’s. He knew how to solve the problem. Instead, the list of partial and temporary solutions represented a failure of funding. No one knew how the real solution would be paid for.6

At the congressional hearing, the mayor described the extraordinary swimming pool in the lake with pride, taking the time to praise the efforts of Stefanski, who sat next to him at the table. “None of us likes stop-gap or temporary measures when science and technology have provided us with the potential for solution of a problem,” his prepared statement read, but “let me tell you what we did last year in Cleveland to make a portion of Lake Erie available once again for bathing by children and families, as it was when I was a youth.” Stokes then joked for a moment before moving on. “That is a place where I have to apologize for because it is called White City. We are going to try to change that name, Mr. Chairman. It creates certain problems for me.” In the coverage of the swimming pool’s opening the year before, race had not been an issue, but clearly Stokes had not forgotten the desegregation battles earlier in the decade, when wade-ins forced communities to address discrimination at public beaches. Just days after the last fires of the Glenville riots had been doused, here was Stokes wading in the lake on the city’s white far East Side. Perhaps even more memorable, however, a month after he testified before Congress, Stokes actually went swimming in the pool in the lake at Edgewater Beach on the white West Side. At a combined celebration of the pool’s opening and the Fourth of July, the mayor overcame his modesty and joined Stefanski and dozens of children in the lake. That was one small step toward the creation of a recreational city, and a small step in the creation of an integrated city, too.

Unfortunately, that Independence Day would be remembered not because Stokes ensured that the beach would welcome both black and white swimmers, or because the beach welcomed swimmers at all after a long, polluted hiatus, but because a terrible storm rushed in from the northwest, catching thousands of people without shelter on the shore and hundreds of boaters unprotected out on the lake. The crowd at Edgewater, perhaps slow to give up prime seats for the evening’s fireworks, dispersed too late to avoid debris thrown by gusting winds. Seven people died as the storm passed over Cleveland, most of them crushed by falling trees, including two who were running for the picnic shelter at Edgewater Park. The power went out in much of the city—and much of the region—and downed trees blocked streets, impeding rescue efforts. “The West Side was completely devastated as far as trees were concerned,” Stefanski remembered two years later. He and his crews in the Public Utilities Department struggled with the cleanup, a long and arduous task, but Stefanski couldn’t stop thinking about his pool in the lake at Edgewater Beach. When the storm hit, boats had streamed to shore as fast as they could, many of them running over the city’s pontoons, sinking them. The vinyl curtain fell. The swimming pool in the lake had been breached.7

Figure 7. Crowds gathered at Edgewater Beach on July 4, 1969, to help Carl Stokes and Ben Stefanski celebrate the opening of the pool in the lake and the nation’s independence. Although the mayor was happy to talk to the press, his daughter Condi, clinging to his arm, was less comfortable with the crowd. Photo by John W. Mott. Cleveland Press Collection, Cleveland State University.

Two weeks later, another, smaller disaster struck the pool in the lake on the other end of town, when high winds and heavy chop continuously mixed the chlorinated and polluted waters over the pontoons and around the curtain wall. The city retaliated with more chlorine, which left beachgoers unhappy with the chemical smell and, the Plain Dealer reported, left fishermen even unhappier because the heavily chlorinated water had escaped the pool and caused a minor fish kill. Hundreds of perch, sheepshead, and carp floated on the surface. “White City Beach Fish Perish in Chlorine ‘Flood,’” read the headline above a column written by Outdoor Editor Lou Gale. He described “super-bleached fish” and suggested that White City had taken on a new name, though not one Stokes would have approved: “Chlorine Beach.” After the July 4th storm and now these high winds, one might begin to think that the lake didn’t want to be treated this way.8

Later that summer, East Side Cleveland resident Annette Koman visited the repaired pool at Edgewater Beach with some friends. She was so put off by what she found that she typed up a letter of complaint to Mayor Stokes. “I am telling you,” she wrote, “it was the worst beach I have ever went to! It was full of mud and a kind of mossy substance that was similar to quicksand.” She also complained about the number of dead fish that had washed up on the shore. “The polluted water probably killed them,” she concluded. The mayor’s office directed the letter to Stefanski, asking him to respond, but it wound up on the desk of Edward Martin, who had arrived earlier in the year to direct the city’s new Clean Water Task Force. Hired away from the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration, Martin was the city’s highest-paid employee, charged with solving one of Cleveland’s most pressing problems. As he mapped out a strategy for building new sewers and enlarging treatment plants, he took the time to respond to Koman, and not with a form letter acknowledging the threats posed by water pollution and reassuring her with a list of the city’s actions—the typical bureaucratic reply to citizen complaints. Instead, he addressed her concerns one by one. “With respect to Edgewater Beach,” he wrote, “we have taken steps to make the water safe for swimming. The water is treated with chlorine to kill the coliform bacteria that makes the water unsafe. The chlorine also kills the fish, unfortunately, which is why dead fish occasionally wash up on the beach.” With this explanation made, Martin then asserted, “Eventually, the fish will learn to avoid this area.”9

A PLEASANTER PLACE TO LIVE

Fish probably had trouble learning to avoid the chlorinated lakeshore, but Koman and her friends likely learned to stay away from Edgewater Beach. In a common trend in metropolitan America, natural amenities in and around cities suffered from abuse and neglect, and those who could afford to sought recreational opportunities beyond the core. In metropolitan Cleveland, this meant driving to cleaner suburban beaches, well away from the region’s major sewer outfalls. Poorer city residents, especially those who didn’t own cars, had a harder time avoiding polluted environments, of course. Inner-city residents, especially those in cash-strapped cities like Cleveland, learned not to expect much in the way of natural recreation. This was just one of the ways in which the environmental crisis and the urban crisis reinforced each other.

As Clevelanders learned to avoid polluted beaches, they also began to avoid other polluted areas of the city. In one of the most significant demographic trends of the late twentieth century, Americans increasingly moved away from polluted environments. This was particularly evident in the depopulation of industrial neighborhoods in the postwar decades. Although these neighborhoods had a variety of problems, such as poor housing quality, pollution—especially air pollution—was a significant contributor to discontent. Take for instance a June 1968 letter to Mayor Stokes from JoAnne Olszewski, a South Side resident, in which she expressed her support for the mayor but asked that he turn his energy toward air pollution. As a nursing student at St. Alexis Hospital on Broadway near East 55th Street, she attended “many patients (many are nonsmokers) needlessly suffering from chronic emphysema, carcinoma of the lungs and other respiratory problems.” She had recently opened a hospital window to let in the spring air but instead was greeted by horrible pollution from the steel mills, which were just a half mile away. “I know the steel industry is vital to Cleveland’s industrial wealth and power but certainly something should be done about this health hazard,” she wrote. “I find it difficult to comprehend how patients can get well breathing in this foul air. St. Alexis is unfortunate to be located so near the steel mills, but its location is ideal according to the great number of patients she serves including many industrial workers and their families.”10

Olszewski’s letter nicely summarized the problem in Cleveland’s most polluted neighborhoods, such as North and South Broadway, Central, Tremont, and Brooklyn. They were convenient to industrial employers and had filled with industrial workers, but they had never been especially desirable places to live. Despite strong ethnic neighborhood cultures, especially in North and South Broadway, the neighborhoods surrounding St. Alexis, families that could afford to move farther from the mills generally did. This was increasingly the case in the postwar era as the Jones & Laughlin and Republic steel companies made a series of investments in their riverside mills, some of which greatly increased the amount of pollution imposed on nearby neighborhoods.

Smoke from the mills was not a new problem, of course. Decades before Olszewski expressed her concerns to Stokes, Cleveland had participated in the Progressive Era smoke abatement movement, which gathered momentum after Charles F. Olney, an avid art collector, created the Society for the Promotion of Atmospheric Purity in 1892. Olney’s Tremont home was not far from the industry and rail lines along Walworth Run and, nearly as close, the Cuyahoga flats. Olney began his antismoke crusade while constructing an art gallery attached to his home, and so his efforts were dedicated to the protection of his paintings. After the turn of the century (and Olney’s death), the city took a number of steps to solve its smoke problems, from passing new laws to hiring prominent engineers as smoke inspectors, even hosting national air pollution control conferences and conducting major studies on the subject. All this effort had little effect on air quality, but it led to a major overhaul of the antismoke ordinance in 1947, when Cleveland created a Division of Air Pollution Control in the Department of Public Health and Welfare. The level of attention on the issue reflected the continuous public concern about smoke and the failure of the city and industry to effectively address it over these many decades. Even as technological advances led to periodic improvements, the city’s industrial growth—especially in steel manufacturing—ensured that the city would remain smoky.

The problem persisted for one significant reason: the widely held belief that the expansion of industry was essential to the city’s prosperity. In a typically tepid effort to limit smoke, the Regional Association of Cleveland formed a Smoke Abatement Committee in 1937. Using the letterhead of William Strong, chair of the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission, the committee sent out dozens of letters announcing its effort to draft a better ordinance. “We fully realize that in an industrial city all that can be hoped for is to minimize the amount of smoke in the air,” the letter read. “We, however, feel that a great deal can be done to make Cleveland a pleasanter place to live in without in any wise interfering with the national operation and expansion of its industrial activity.” Even this weak foray into antismoke activism elicited concern, however. Arch Klumph, a prominent businessman and Rotary Club leader, complained to Ernest J. Bohn, director of the Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority and a participant in the fledgling movement: “There is one thing we must not forget—that much of the smoke is due to factories providing work for men and women. I wish we had a lot more smoke in Cleveland today, if it meant more business.” This last sentiment was no doubt commonly held in the depression-wracked city. “Furthermore,” Klumph wrote, “I would rather see smoke than street walkers and cheap and unsightly hamburger stands such as you will find from one end to another along the street and allowed to be built right up to the sidewalk.” Clearly opinions varied on the topic of how to make Cleveland a pleasanter place to live.11

While not all Clevelanders would have agreed with Klumph’s concerns about hamburger stands, most would have agreed with his thoughts on smoke. Lax environmental regulation and heavily polluted air had become hallmarks of the industrial city—not just in Cleveland but around the nation. After the wartime boom and years of full employment, however, patience with industrial pollution grew thin. Beginning in 1946, Joseph Swatek, a Bohemian immigrant who sold and leased real estate from his office on Broadway near East 55th Street, took on the largest polluters of his neighborhood, Grasselli Chemical and Republic Steel, which sat side by side along the Cuyahoga. He wrote a series of articles complaining of smoke in the Neighborhood News, which served North and South Broadway. He also wrote a string of letters to Mayor Thomas Burke, in which he blamed “the two great plants” for “virtually destroying our neighborhood.” Swatek claimed the companies “haven’t hardly moved a finger to abate at least some of the smoke, dirt and acids, emanating daily from their plants in the Cuyahoga Valley.” Indeed, the situation had deteriorated at Republic, where according to Swatek newly opened facilities “have been belching out volumes of fine red powder, which covers everything in reach.” A month later, Swatek wrote to Burke again, noting that there had been no respite in the red dust. “I am trying to encourage the suffering people of the neighborhood to be patient as improvement is coming soon,” he wrote, “but there is rumbling going on and unless this dumping of the red dust is stopped soon, you will hear from the masses direct.” In another letter, sent in February 1947, Swatek reported to Burke that Republic had “sent forth tons and tons of that red ore dust, covering streets, roof tops and autos caught in the neighborhood.” Then Swatek revealed how important this was to his livelihood in real estate, not just to his physical comfort and health. “We cannot lay down and have our properties damaged and people dissatisfied to the extent that they are threatening to leave the neighborhood as soon as possible. We all have too much at stake here and should this air pollution continue here much longer the exodus will surely result.”12

Republic apparently took steps to reduce the pollution, which also periodically waned when production slowed. But that spring, Swatek reported more bad news to the mayor. “We, out here are fighting hard and doing everything possible and within the law, but this lawless smoke nuisance is getting the best of the neighborhood and is beginning to invite the kind of element that bespoiled other sections of our once fair town.” In the continuing pollution, Swatek saw the seeds of his entire community’s demise. Although he didn’t mention race, the meaning of “the kind of element” to which he referred is clear. If current residents—Czech and Polish families primarily—put their homes on the market, they might find African American buyers. Air pollution was a periodically vexing problem, one to be taken seriously, but for Swatek, demographic transition represented a more permanent threat. And now he understood how the two were related.13

Swatek’s campaign met with little success. The neighborhood’s protests persisted into the 1950s, but the exodus many had feared only gathered momentum. In 1952, Louis Mikol complained about the air quality around his Nursery Avenue home to his congressman, Robert Crosser, who in turn asked Mayor Burke to explain why living in North Broadway was so unpleasant. As would remain common among Cleveland politicians for another decade, Burke offered little more than a defense of industry, claiming, “We think that conditions are gradually being improved” and that the conditions that led to Mikol’s complaint had been corrected and “will not happen again.” Burke’s administration hadn’t ignored the pollution problem, but by 1952 the mayor must have understood how intractable it really was. Eight years earlier, in the summer of 1944, police officer Henry Schroeder had investigated complaints of “smoke, dust, noise, and fumes” from Republic Steel. He walked along Eggers and Stillson Avenues, talking with residents and getting a sense of the problem. Many complained of the heavy red smoke, but others seemed to tolerate it fine. Schroeder interviewed residents at sixteen homes, among them Rosie Port, who lived along Independence Road, from which Eggers and Stillson ran west out onto a finger of land that overlooked Republic’s Plant No. 5 before ending just above the company’s dump. “She is an old resident,” Schroeder reported, “and is trying to sell her place to get away from it all”14—just as Swatek feared.

Cleveland’s economic elite had long argued for lax regulation so that industrial employers would add jobs and build the city. Now persistent and invidious industrial pollution was helping tear Cleveland apart. Over time the residents left, and the buildings did, too. None of the homes Schroeder visited in 1944 still exists; Mikol’s home is gone, and so is St. Alexis Hospital, demolished in 2007. The neighborhoods of the industrial South Side have slowly disappeared—resident by resident and building by building—a process that has made clear how the environmental crisis and the urban crisis amplified each other.

SAVE LAKE ERIE NOW

Air pollution sparked a long, periodically intense public involvement in the politics of pollution control, while water pollution remained largely the concern of experts and officials charged with supplying potable water to a growing city. But in the mid-1960s, troubling signs in Lake Erie—polluted beaches and declining fish stocks—heightened public awareness and action in another pollution control battle. The broad movement that developed included some long-standing organizations, such as the League of Women Voters, which began studying Great Lakes pollution in the 1950s, and the Isaak Walton League, a club of sportsmen active in protecting waterways since its founding in 1922. Organized labor, especially the United Auto Workers, had also taken up the issue, largely as it concerned workers’ access to swimming, fishing, and boating. Olga Madar, of the UAW’s Recreation Department, had become an important voice in the growing movement. But in Cleveland, the effort to save Lake Erie was led by one indispensable and unexpected activist: David Blaushild, a well-known Shaker Heights Chevrolet dealer.

On April 8, 1965, Blaushild sent a formal demand to Mayor Locher and his director of law, Bronis Klementowicz, that they take action against a list of industrial polluters, including Republic Steel, U.S. Steel, Sherwin Williams, and Harshaw Chemical Company, each of which dumped industrial wastes into the Cuyahoga. The city’s laws required pollution control, Blaushild pointed out, and the administration had been derelict in its duty. Three weeks later, Klementowicz responded that the city had no basis for legal action and that all the companies on the list were complying with the law—this despite the fact that they were clearly dumping wastes into the river. Blaushild and his lawyers, Roemish and Wright, whose offices were in the National City Bank Building downtown, had anticipated this response, and they set to work on a lawsuit. Using a corporation he controlled, Bar Realty, Blaushild sued the city in the Cuyahoga Common Pleas Court, demanding a writ of mandamus, which, if the judge approved, would require the city to enforce the law. Blaushild’s lawsuit, filed May 26, included the relevant sections of the city’s sanitary code, which clearly outlawed the “discharge of offensive substances into public waterways” and even listed some of the offending substances: spent acid, spent alkali, petroleum, or “oily matter.” Not coincidentally, these were just the types of wastes steel mills and chemical manufacturers were likely to drain into the Cuyahoga.15

The lawsuit wasn’t the first volley in Blaushild’s war on water pollution. His concern for the Shaker Lakes, just around the corner from his Shaker Heights apartment, had grown into a broader concern about water pollution everywhere, but especially Lake Erie. In the spring of 1964, he had taken out advertisements in both the Cleveland Press and the Plain Dealer. “Lake Erie is dying,” one ad read. “Does anybody care?” That summer he bought a billboard along the Shoreway: “Let’s Stop Killing Lake Erie.” He even used his clout as a major advertiser to influence Louis Seltzer, publisher of the Press, demanding that he step up his coverage of pollution issues. Seltzer responded by creating a fulltime environment beat for one of his reporters: Betty Klaric, who had been with the Press since 1955. Klaric had reported for the women’s department and more recently served as a general assignment reporter, which had her occasionally filing stories on environmental issues. By the end of 1965, she reported exclusively on the environment, and her frequent water pollution stories appeared under a common logo that read “Save Lake Erie Now.”16

Figure 8. Harshaw Chemical made colorful contributions to the Cuyahoga, making it a target for the antipollution crusader David Blaushild. Here calcium sulfate pours from the plant into the river in September 1969. Photo by Bill Nehez. Cleveland Press Collection, Cleveland State University.

Blaushild coupled the selling of Chevrolets with saving Lake Erie. He led a campaign to get Cleveland-area communities to pass resolutions addressed to Governor Rhodes demanding action on water pollution. As Blaushild pressed his lawsuit, more than thirty communities sent this resolution to Columbus, including Cleveland, Shaker Heights, Bratenahl, Maple Heights, and Parma Heights. Blaushild also led a campaign to gather individual petitions and letters of concern, even using newspaper advertisements that asked readers to clip, fill out, and send to him little coupons that read: “I share your deep concern about pollution of Lake Erie. I believe we need immediate action to save Lake Erie from destruction.” More than two hundred thousand people signed his petition demanding that laws be enforced and that municipalities build proper treatment plants.

In August 1965, a few months after he had filed his lawsuit, Blaushild described his efforts at a downtown Cleveland conference sponsored by the federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare titled “In the Matter of Pollution of Lake Erie and Its Tributaries.” Part of a series of federally organized meetings on the Great Lakes held throughout the region, and chaired by Murray Stein, the chief enforcement officer at the federal Division of Water Supply and Pollution Control, the conference featured testimony from a wide range of witnesses, from scientists to activists, who addressed a panel composed of officials from the federal government as well as the lake’s watershed states—Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New York. Blaushild’s blunt testimony made his frustration clear. “I am voicing the sentiments of hundreds of thousands of cynical, disillusioned residents of Northern Ohio, weary of the banalities and lethargy of our public officials in their attitudes towards the crucial problem of water pollution, and weary too of the negative, snide, condescending attitude of some of our major industries who keep wantonly infecting our waters, at the complete expense of an ever-angering public,” he said. Calling for an end to surveying the problem and a start to solving it, he said, “For God’s sake, let’s get to work.” And he expressed the urgency common of the era: “Unless something is done now, it can come to pass that the lake that made Cleveland and Toledo the great cities they are, will, in its own death, destroy its destroyers.”17

A month after the Lake Erie conference, the city responded to Blaushild’s lawsuit. Law Director Klementowicz made two arguments. The least effective claimed that Bar Realty and Milly Blaushild, David’s wife, whose name also appeared on the suit, had “not suffered any irreparable injury or damage as a result of the acts complained of in the petition” and that they were “not the ‘parties beneficially interested’ in the relief sought.” In other words, Klementowicz argued that the Blaushilds had no standing to sue because they had no special relationship to Lake Erie or the Cuyahoga, or, at least, that they had not claimed such a relationship. Since the suit argued that uncontrolled pollution affected the supply of potable water and access to recreation, this wasn’t an especially strong argument. At a hearing on the issue, Judge Charles White asked the city’s lawyer, “Does a person have to swim in Lake Erie and come down with a disease to claim personal interest?” He then dismissed this argument outright. The other line of argument, however, eventually proved successful. The state of Ohio, through the Water Pollution Control Board, had issued permits to each of the companies listed in Blaushild’s suit. Those permits, included in the city’s response, literally permitted the discharge of wastes into the Cuyahoga and, in Klementowicz’s view, prevented the city from taking action against Republic, U.S. Steel, Sherwin Williams, or Harshaw Chemical.18

The pollution permits, certificates issued by the State Department of Health and bearing the Ohio seal and the explicit language “has been granted permission to discharge,” seemed like powerful evidence. But Judge Merle Hoddinott, who ultimately heard the case in 1970, after a series of delays, including one caused by the change of city administration, concluded that state law did not preclude local enforcement. “Confusion should not result to the polluter,” Hoddinott wrote. “The City should be more aware of local problems and possible economic dislocations than the State board.” Hoddinott ordered the city “to manage and supervise the elimination, control or regulation of any matter relating to the pollution of watercourses, rivers, streams or lakes bounding upon or within the City of Cleveland.” In other words, he ordered the city to enforce its laws.19

The city appealed, and Stokes found himself in the unenviable position of fighting a lawsuit filed because of the failings of the previous administration even while attempting to take on water pollution more vigorously. In the end, the city was more successful in fighting the pollution suit in court than fighting pollution in the Cuyahoga, appealing the case to the Ohio Supreme Court, which overturned Hoddinott’s ruling in May 1972, months after Stokes had left office. In essence, the court argued that city officials had “discretion” in performing their duties, and only in cases of “abuse of discretion” should the court substitute its authority for that of the officials. The discharge of wastes into the Cuyahoga, the actual water quality of the river, the broader concerns about Lake Erie—none of this appears in the court’s opinion. By the time it reached the Ohio Supreme Court, Blaushild’s demand that the city protect its residents from water pollution had devolved into a case about regulatory authority and the relationship between city and state. Ignoring the needs of the lake, the court decided that the city need not enforce its laws because of “the apparent necessity for cooperation between state and local government.”20

After seven years, almost to the day, Blaushild lost his suit, but he had made progress in the larger struggle. Forced to defend its own inaction, the city had made an issue of the state pollution permits, a system that made more and more Clevelanders scratch their heads. Among them was Charles Vanik, long-time congressman from Cleveland’s eastern suburbs, who sat before the House Committee on Public Works in February 1969 and described the peculiar relationship between the city and the state. The state distributed all federally allocated pollution-control dollars, and Vanik provided the numbers to show discrimination against the largest counties, such as Cuyahoga. On a per capita basis, Ohio was much more generous to sparsely populated counties. More troubling, the state had dedicated none of its own dollars to pollution control. What’s more, the federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1965 had granted states the authority to establish criteria for water quality in bodies of water inside their boundaries, even waters that flowed into other states or federally controlled waters, such as Lake Erie. Vanik complained that the Ohio Water Pollution Control Board had designated the Cuyahoga and other regional waters “industrial water supply,” which allowed considerable pollution to persist. And, Vanik pointed out, the state then issued permits to individual polluters, allowing them to discharge wastes above even these lax criteria. One might imagine these permits to be a temporary system designed to give companies time to install better equipment, but the number of permits had held steady in recent years. In 1968, the state issued 1,371 permits to pollute the waters of Ohio, just nine fewer than in 1965.21

A week after his own testimony before the House committee, Vanik reappeared with six students from private high schools in Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights. Each of them gave impassioned, urgent testimony about the crisis in Lake Erie. John Coventry, of the University School, said, “In my own lifetime I have seen the effects of the increasing pollution of Lake Erie. I have seen the fishing industry of Cleveland go out of business, and beaches where one could once swim closed.” The students brought with them thirteen thousand signatures collected in less than a week on a petition that read in part, “We want prompt and energetic action in this session of Congress to clean up the waters of our nation.” Like that day’s testimony, the petition expressed urgency, demanding “a crash attack on the pollution that is killing Lake Erie.” Several of the students also used the language of ecology, including Virginia Robinson of the Hathaway Brown School, who said, “Anyone can see and smell the flagrant abuse of the biosphere.” Like many children of her generation, she expressed concern about the condition of the planet she would inherit from the previous generation, saying that “the accumulated debt of neglect and abuse must be paid.”22

THE DIRT FACTORY

In the fall of 1966, in a not-so-veiled reference to Cleveland’s racial tensions, the Plain Dealer ran the headline “Air Pollution Color-Blind” between two large photos of smoking stacks. One was a nearly beautiful image of white plumes rising from the five stacks of the Cleveland Illuminating plant along the Shoreway; in the other, dark smoke issued from the six stacks of the Municipal Light plant about twenty blocks to the west.23 The two sets of stacks, both rising from coal-fired electrical plants, had become familiar symbols of the city’s air pollution problem, especially among East Side commuters who drove in and out of downtown. In the previous two decades, Cleveland’s first limited-access highway had gained a new name—Memorial Shoreway, in honor of Americans who had died in World War II—and a series of improvements that made it increasingly useful for suburban residents driving into the city. This was Cleveland’s early effort to create what in 1947 urban economist Mabel Walker called a “fluid city,” one less reliant on railroads and more accommodating to automobiles. As a result, the two plants, both right up against the highway, had gained special visibility. Just that summer the Plain Dealer had run a front-page photo of the Muny Light plant, showing a depressing row of five stacks, each one issuing dark smoke. Although the photo accompanied a short article about the city’s plans for equipment upgrades that would reduce the smoke, improvements, if they occurred, were short-lived. At the same time, officials in the Locher administration pointed out that the plant did not violate the antismoke ordinance, but most likely not with the intention of suggesting that perhaps the law—just four years old—was as out-of-date as the plant.24

Although somewhat smaller than the Illuminating Company’s facility, the Muny Plant became the greater magnet for attention. Some of this attention came because it was owned and operated by the city, and so by the mid-1960s the plant symbolized government hypocrisy and ineptitude. How could the city expect industry to reduce air pollution when the city couldn’t even clean up its own stacks? As early as 1961, as City Council considered an antismoke ordinance, Cleveland Air Pollution Commissioner Albert Locuoco joked that the new law might put the Muny Light plant “out of business.” Like other parts of the municipal bureaucracy, Muny Light didn’t always run effectively, and with a power plant inefficiencies are visible for all to see—in the form of smoke. In 1966, Mrs. Alan Loden of Shaker Heights wrote to the Plain Dealer that her four-year-old son called the Muny plant “the dirt factory,” a designation that might have sparked a chuckle among Clevelanders but also a knowing shake of the head.25

The smoke notwithstanding, Municipal Light itself had long been a source of pride among some Clevelanders. Created by Mayor Tom L. Johnson as part of his assertion that cities can and should provide basic services to residents, Muny Light had been expanded by Mayor Newton Baker, and in 1914 the city opened the largest municipally owned power plant in the nation on the lake at East 53rd Street. Since then, nearly continual improvements and expansions had allowed the plant to serve a growing customer base while Cleveland retained its reputation for inexpensive electricity. With this in mind, it is worth pausing to consider why the Muny plant gained so much negative attention in the 1960s. It was a nuisance, surely, but nothing compared to the major polluters—the steel mills and chemical factories to the south, where prevailing winds pushed smoke and fumes over North and South Broadway and other working-class neighborhoods, creating both chronic and acute threats to residents’ health. The focus on the relatively small contributions of the Muny plant might suggest a reluctance to take on the steel mills, but more likely it had to do with location. Fewer and fewer Clevelanders lived in and around the industrial Cuyahoga Valley—or traveled there for any reason—and middle-class residents, so important to the developing environmental movement, were more likely to see Muny’s smoky stacks than those of the mills.

And then too the Muny plant’s smoke symbolized municipal decline itself, in a way that factory smoke never could. In April 1969, the popular Plain Dealer columnist George Condon wrote a scathing piece that appeared under the headline “A City Goes Down the Hill,” in which he took aim at Cleveland’s “drab and dreary downtown.” Part of Condon’s object was to explain why bars in the flats—down the hill—had gained in popularity. There was something charming and attractive about old, industrial Cleveland and its residual working-class pubs. But Condon also claimed that the problems of downtown had driven Cleveland to drink along the Cuyahoga. “It will take nothing less than an angry city to rout the dirt and check the decay of downtown,” he wrote. Among the many problems of downtown was air pollution. And the one source of air pollution that gained Condon’s attention: Municipal Light. This despite the fact that the Muny plant was three miles from Public Square and downwind as well.26

The Stokes administration was well aware of the Muny plant’s special role in the air pollution debate. The difficulties in keeping it running efficiently and the chronic bad publicity were among the reasons Stokes had pledged to sell the plant to the private Illuminating Company, which had the capital to upgrade the facility and run it well. But by the summer of 1969, as City Council discussed yet another new air pollution ordinance, Stokes had made no progress toward the proposed sale. The Plain Dealer hoped the new law would finally force the city to purchase cleaner coal for the plant, an easy but expensive step that would have solved much of the problem. That summer’s attention to air pollution in turn heightened scrutiny in the mayor’s office. Bob Bauerlein, an assistant to Stokes, discussed Muny’s operations with relevant personnel throughout the city’s complicated bureaucracy. Tom Kinder, an engineer with the Division of Air Pollution Control, reported that a new boiler with a working precipitator was improperly run and in need of maintenance. Kim Wald, in purchasing, reported that the plant superintendent had consistently accepted deliveries of coal that did not meet contract specifications. Most troubling, John Fakult, who had charge of the city’s Light and Power Division, seemed to be unreceptive to making changes, nor did he appear concerned about air pollution.

Sensing that the problem at Municipal Light had as much to do with management as with dated technology, Bauerlein visited the plant himself in October 1969, just as City Council scheduled a vote on the air pollution ordinance. Bauerlein was so troubled by what he saw that he filed a letter with John Little, the mayor’s executive secretary. “I would like to go on record as stating that in my opinion, it is only a matter of time before someone at the plant is either killed or seriously injured,” he wrote. “The plant is generally filthy; graph papers on many gauges have not been changed for quite some time and thus are unreadable; in many areas the coal dust and sulfur gas is so heavy that breathing is difficult; and there is a water leak at the base of the new boiler pouring out gallons of hot water every minute.” No wonder the plant smoked. The staff managed the equipment poorly, and there had been no timely repair of existing problems, let alone a program of preventative maintenance. “To allow this situation to continue can only cause untold injury,” Bauerlein concluded, “not to mention our usual amount of political trouble.”27 The dirt factory was chugging along.

WE STAND ANKLE DEEP IN SEWAGE

Not surprisingly, many of the speakers at the August 1965 conference on Lake Erie were from Cleveland, including Vincent DeMelto, who was then the director of Public Utilities. DeMelto offered a succinct history of Cleveland’s attempts to control its sewage, beginning with the 1905 construction of a large intercepting sewer that diverted wastes from downtown and the length of the East Side to East 140th Street, where they drained into the lake. Not until 1922 did the city provide sewage treatment, when the Easterly plant opened at the end of the intercepting sewer and the Westerly plant opened near the mouth of the Cuyahoga. Meanwhile, most of the city had been built with combined sewers, meaning storm runoff and sanitary wastes mixed in the same pipes. During rains or snowmelts, volumes in the pipes quickly outran treatment plant capacity, and the excess passed over weirs into overflow pipes that led to the lake or its tributaries. Even though significant upgrades in 1938 increased the capacity of the two lakeside treatment plants and the Southerly plant on the Cuyahoga, the combined sewers ensured that the city could not always contain and treat its own sewage.

DeMelto’s report to the conference emphasized Cleveland’s long and evolving relationship with water pollution control. Over the decades, the city had made continuous investments using current technology—improvements that should not be overlooked. Still, DeMelto could not hide the fact that Cleveland remained a major contributor to Lake Erie’s pollution problem, even without considering the industrial effluents that didn’t enter the city’s system but instead flowed directly into waterways, especially the Cuyahoga. One notable failure was the design of Westerly to serve as only a primary treatment facility, meaning that the plant removed solid wastes but did not otherwise reduce the organic content of the effluent. “The plant is intended to relieve the load of pollution on the shore waters of Lake Erie,” DeMelto reported, “and at the same time prevent the discharge into the lake of floating solids which are offensive to the sight, and of settleable solids which may form sludge banks, and which due to putrefaction become offensive to both sight and smell.” As foul as this must have sounded to many observers, it was of even greater concern to those who used Edgewater Beach, directly adjacent to Westerly. To protect swimmers, the city treated the plant’s effluent with chlorine to reduce coliform counts, although this step clearly didn’t solve the problem.28 Although the Easterly plant provided more complete treatment, it still posed problems to the neighboring White City Beach, and the city had taken to treating effluent from that facility with greater amounts of chlorine. Given that a considerable amount of sewage bypassed the plant through large sewer overflows, the chlorine treatments had a limited effect.

The 1965 Lake Erie conference in Cleveland ended with the adoption of a series of recommendations. Among them: “Combined storm and sanitary sewers are to be prohibited in all newly developed urban areas, and eliminated in existing areas wherever feasible.” Although the recommendation carried no weight of law, it matched federal goals as described by the Public Health Service and echoed the state of Ohio’s policy prohibiting the construction of combined sewers in newly developed areas and in urban renewal zones. Despite the widespread recognition that combined sewers were a significant contributor to water pollution in Cleveland, the city proposed to build new combined sewers in the University-Euclid urban renewal project. In a classic case of federal bureaucratic stalemate, the Public Health Service demanded that the Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA), which distributed money for urban renewal projects, withhold funds for a project that clearly ignored water quality goals set at both the national and state level. The conflict inspired an investigation by Congress’s Committee on Government Operations and a lengthy report in June 1966 that revealed shocking disregard for pollution prevention in the HHFA and the Locher administration, which was willing to perpetuate the errors of the past simply to save money in the short term. The report called the local position on water pollution control “apathy.” The media wove the sewer affair into the general story about the Locher administration’s mismanagement of urban renewal. A scathing Press editorial in the fall of 1965 ran under the title “Hypocrisy in Sewer Plans.” With the bad press and congressional pressure, which forced both the Federal Urban Renewal Administration and the Ohio Department of Health to review the University-Euclid approval process, the city had no choice. It revised the project to include separate sewers, adding $425,000 to the projected costs.29

“Hypocrisy” wasn’t too strong a word to describe the city’s original position on renewal zone sewers. After all, Locher also addressed the Lake Erie conference, where he described at length the steps Cleveland had taken to reduce its contributions to the lake’s pollution. But he began with a familiar theme: his city would need federal dollars to solve this problem. “Everyone in this room knows how water pollution can be stopped, but, likewise, everyone in this room recognizes, I believe, that it will cost a great deal more to restore our waters to their original quality than any local government can afford.” In Cleveland’s initial University-Euclid plan, of course, federal dollars would do nothing to restore the waters. Still, Locher sounded genuine when he admitted, “We have been bad stewards of what God has provided for us.” And then, turning to the great technological promise of the moment, Locher pressed the irony: “This age could well be known as the one in which America is shooting rockets to the moon, while we stand ankle deep in sewage.”30

If Locher was a miserable administrator, he was surely a skilled politician. He talked passionately about the city’s problems and sounded sincere when describing progress. At the conference, he touted the city’s development of a master plan for pollution control, which would appear three years later, and the city’s ongoing $19 million investment in upgrades to the Easterly and Southerly sewage treatment plants. But real improvement would take hundreds of millions of dollars, and thus far Cleveland had received no external aid, not even from the state. This had to change, Locher argued, not just for the sake of the lake but also for Cleveland, which relied on the lake for its water supply and for recreation. Pollution threatened both of these uses. “The city of the future must be made livable, bright and appealing,” Locher said to the conference. And then, borrowing a phrase from the struggle to improve urban neighborhoods, in which he was simultaneously engaged, Locher noted, “Such negative factors as air pollution and water pollution are a blight upon our very lives.” To emphasize the growing importance of quality of life in cities, Locher described Cleveland’s effort to develop two new marinas on the lakefront, which had been projected by the 1950 city plan. “At my insistence,” Locher said, “fishing piers are to be provided, because more and more of the elderly, in their leisure hours, and the young people, desire fishing as one of their diversions.” Unfortunately, Locher reported, “it is common knowledge that the fishing is not good. I hear it from my neighbors and my friends.” Commercial fishing data confirmed that stocks in Lake Erie had plummeted. Blue pike, for instance, had until recently been caught in the millions of pounds per year, but it had largely disappeared from the lake. Also known as blue walleye, this fish has not been caught in the Great Lakes since the 1970s and is probably extinct.

Four years after Locher’s testimony, as Mayor Stokes stood with Governor Rhodes at the dedication of the East 55th Street Marina, his staff presented the press with a fact sheet describing the city and state investments in the project and the services the facility would provide. In addition to the berths, there were restrooms and showers in the marina headquarters building, retail space for boat-related items, and “a first class restaurant facility.” The marina did not include the fishing pier Locher had insisted on, but at Gordon Park, just to the east of the Illuminating Company’s plant, the city had added a long pier, which doubled as a protective breakwater for the smaller, older marina there, at East 72nd Street. Construction of the pier had begun with the scuttling of two massive ore vessels several hundred feet from shore. The city then bridged the gaps with crushed cars. For over two years, beginning in 1967, the city used the site as a landfill, dumping up to 230,000 pounds of rubbish a day, using only riprap to separate the waste from the lake. In October 1969, a federal inspection of the site found an abundance of rats (a sign that considerable organic wastes were present), as well as grease, paint, motor oil, and other wastes that would seep into the lake. Eventually the city covered the wreckage and the waste, and one would hardly guess the origins of the peninsula today. But the symbolism of the construction is evident, not just in the literal burying of the old ore-steel economy to make a more recreational city but also in the failure to account for the ecology of the lake. Even as Cleveland struggled to save the lake, as late as the fall of 1969 the city couldn’t stop thinking of it as an inexpensive dump.

WITHIN REASON, THE PRICE MUST BE PAID

On April 10, 1969, Stokes released a statement announcing “an important step in fighting the problem of air pollution.” Recognizing that current staffing would not allow effective regulation, the city would use a $222,000 federal grant from the National Air Pollution Control Administration, combined with $423,000 in local money, to create a larger Division of Air Pollution Control in the Department of Public Health and Welfare. The revamped division would have five new engineers, four additional technicians, two chemists, a full-time attorney, and a deputy commissioner. Stokes also announced that the Law Department was at work on a new air pollution ordinance, noting that since the current law had been passed in 1962 not a single violator had been brought to court. The statement ended, “Cleveland has taken the forefront nationally in the battle against water pollution and with this announcement today we are making significant steps to match that effort in our desire to control air pollution.”31

A month later, Stokes proposed the new, tougher air pollution code to City Council, which then held a series of hearings on the ordinance. In selling the proposed law, Director of Public Health Frank Ellis called it a modern code, modeled after others that had been adopted around the country. The code limited emissions of particulates and sulfur dioxide, setting standards for concentrations of both inside smokestacks. The standards would force industries to adopt the best control technologies available and in some cases switch to lower-sulfur fuels. The code set out a compliance date—the end of 1972—and set up a system for granting variances for businesses that had yet to meet their goals. Companies would have to get city approval for their control plans and allow city inspection of both smokestacks and abatement equipment. Companies out of compliance would be subject to fines. In its extensive coverage of air pollution that summer, the Plain Dealer used the terms set out by Ellis and federal air pollution control officials, continuously referring to the proposed law as a “modern” code, indicating on which side the newspaper would fight as the council considered the ordinance.32

On May 23, Bailus Walker Jr., deputy commissioner of health, spoke before the council’s Air and Water Pollution Committee in support of the proposed regulations. Standing in for his boss, Ellis, Walker said, “The overriding reason for controlling air pollution is because it is responsible, wholly or in substantial part, for unnecessary deaths and unnecessary illness, disability, and discomfort in this country.” To be certain that council members understood the gravity of the situation, Walker emphasized that evidence “demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt that air pollution is guilty of killing and disabling people.” He listed disasters in Belgium’s Meuse Valley in 1930; the Donora, Pennsylvania, smog of 1948; and episodes in London in 1952 and in New York City in 1966, all of which led to a significant number of deaths during acute pollution events. Less well known, of course, were the consequences of chronic exposure to air pollution, although studies had shown that residents with heart or lung conditions were at elevated risk of death when exposed to high levels of pollution.33

Walker’s testimony linking air pollution and health made the Press, published just hours later, but it appeared under the headline “Air Code Seen Closing Factories.” Several opponents of the proposed law testified during the hearing, perhaps most effectively Richard DeChant of the Greater Cleveland Growth Association, who reminded the council that Cleveland’s industrial plants employed three hundred thousand people, including eighty thousand in primary metal manufacturing. “All Cleveland citizens must be aware of the industrial nature of their city,” he said, “a pattern which was established many years ago and has provided the impetus for our economic growth and present enviable position among our nation’s industrial centers.” DeChant then warned, “In its present form the code would force some of our foundries and metal fabricators to close down permanently.” Echoing an argument that had been made repeatedly in the defense of the underregulated environment that had encouraged industrial development, DeChant, the son of a steelworker, said that should the ordinance pass, “there would be a temporary or permanent loss of employment for many Greater Clevelanders.” This was clearly the most powerful statement of the hearing.34

Supporters of the proposed code had a chance to rebut industry on June 6, when a variety of citizens—a union official, a doctor, a teacher, and a chemistry professor—testified before the council committee. They emphasized health and justice and decried industry’s attempt at economic blackmail, surely a reference to DeChant’s testimony two weeks earlier. But industry had interests to protect, and so a few days later their representatives came before the committee’s next hearing with a variety of concerns. On June 13, as Stokes stood with bankers celebrating the new Central National Bank tower and the building of the new service city, just three blocks away officials from the old economy testified against the proposed air pollution code at City Hall. That hearing was dominated by coal, railroad, and steel industry executives who cast the ordinance as severe and unrealistic. R. Thomas Schoonmaker, of Penn Central, the year-old corporate combination of the Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads, reminded council members that his company employed 2,500 people in Cleveland and paid approximately $3 million in taxes to the city. Reducing air pollution would be expensive, he said, allowing that “within reason, the price must be paid.” But he emphasized that “careful consideration must be given to the cost-benefit relationship”—an important theme in the go-slow mantra of industry’s battle against increased regulation. Because the coal economy was essential to Penn Central, Schoonmaker was there specifically to speak against a transition away from Ohio’s high-sulfur coal, nearly all of which would become unusable in the city under the code’s strict limits on sulfur dioxide concentrations in smokestacks.35

The next morning, the Plain Dealer ran a story on the Central National Bank’s time capsule ceremony next to an article recounting the air pollution hearings, a useful if unintentional juxtaposition of the consequences of the city’s shifting economy. The old economic powers demanded the maintenance of a policy structure that had benefited them greatly. For more than a century, manufacturers had passed on nearly all the costs of air pollution to citizens, and now they argued that ending that arrangement was simply unreasonable. At the same time, however, new economic powers were building a gleaming downtown. In a sign that the old regime was faltering, the ordinance, slightly amended, passed unanimously after eight months of consideration. It came into effect on October 27, 1969.

THE ULTIMATE METHOD OF POLLUTION CONTROL

In June 1968, Havens and Emerson sent Ben Stefanski the Master Plan for Pollution Abatement, Cleveland, Ohio, an impressive two-volume report that detailed the water pollution control system as it existed and recommended a series of upgrades to meet demands for improved water quality. The plan described shortcomings in the city’s three treatment plants, some of which the city had already begun to address, and it outlined steps that would be necessary to connect growing suburban areas to the sewer system, since most suburbs had not and would not build their own treatment facilities. But the largest problem facing the city stemmed from the 45,000 urban acres that were served by combined sewers—those that accepted both sanitary wastes and street runoff. Cleveland, like many older cities, had constructed these sewers under the guidance of an older engineering philosophy that prized the efficiency of running a single pipe through neighborhoods and tolerated the discharge of untreated sewage into waterways. Now a substantial reduction of waste discharge into Lake Erie and its tributaries would require separating sanitary sewers, an incredibly expensive proposition. The process was already under way, since large urban renewal sites, like Erieview, included the construction of new, separate sewers. The building of the region’s highways also provided the opportunity to create new drainage systems. The vast majority of the suburban areas, including Shaker Heights, Cleveland Heights, and Lyndhurst, were served by separate sewers, but most of the city, including all sixteen thousand acres served by the Easterly plant, was still drained by combined sewers.

Havens and Emerson assumed that the work of disentangling the sewers would continue, but it envisioned no broad or immediate steps to force this solution. Instead, the firm picked up a plan that had been proposed by John Wirts, superintendent of the Easterly plant, three years earlier, about the time Havens and Emerson began working on the master plan. Wirts imagined the construction of a huge basin in the lake, formed by sheet metal walls protected by fill. As Wirts described it, the basin would act as an expansive sewage treatment plant, collecting all the waste runoff from the city’s troubled streams and sewer overflows, along with the effluent from the Easterly plant. Once in the basin, the wastes would receive treatment, and solids would be allowed to settle out.

Although Wirts’s idea was very expensive, costing as much as $75 million, it was featured in the Locher administration’s grand plan for the lakefront, announced in June 1966. Locher’s fantastic vision, with a total cost of $385 million, included a seven-mile highway running through the lake via a combination of causeway, tunnel, and artificial island. For part of its length, the highway would top the breakwater that protected Cleveland Harbor and pass along a new jetport built entirely on landfill out in the lake, beyond the harbor wall and thus well beyond the existing airport built on landfill along the shore. On the other side of this new jetport, Locher’s plan envisioned Wirts’s “settling basin,” where storm runoff and sewer overflow could be held in a five-thousand-acre pond carved from the lake. As a bonus, the solids that settled in the basin could be pumped out to help form the landfill necessary to support the new jetport. All this, Wirts assured the Plain Dealer, would not smell. It would be the first storm water basin built in a body of water anywhere in the world, he said.36

Since none of the Locher lakefront plan came to fruition, it is easy to suggest that it had no hope of becoming reality. True, the highway on the lake must have been dreamed up by someone who had never spent a winter in Cleveland, where north winds regularly blow freezing mist off lake chop. Perhaps the vision of ice-covered traffic jams a half-mile from shore, or the bills from the near-constant salting that would have been necessary to keep the road passable, forced the city to rethink this aspect of the plan. Still, the settling basin and jetport concepts remained alive, the latter into the 1970s, when an engineering study found that an island airport would survive lake currents. The settling basin, in an altered form, became the central feature of the Master Plan for Pollution Abatement.

In 1967, the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration hired Havens and Emerson to conduct a feasibility study of a “stabilization-retention basin in Lake Erie.” The study concluded that the basin would provide “a higher degree of pollution abatement than would separation of sanitary and storm sewers, at about one-third the cost.” The report also said, “No major objections or obstacles which would prevent its construction have been found,” although the firm considered only engineering objections, ignoring potential aesthetic and ecological concerns. The report described at length how polluted waters would pass through three areas of the basin: the first would provide aeration; the second a long, still period for the settling of solids, which “would form a sludge blanket at the bottom”; and in the third stage, just before the water was to be released into the lake, the city could add more aeration and chlorine if necessary. To minimize cost, pontoons holding neoprene fabric curtains would separate the three areas of the basin.37

Using its own feasibility study for justification, Havens and Emerson’s Master Plan recommended that the basin “be adopted as the ultimate method of pollution control for the area east of Cleveland Harbor.” The firm determined that a nine-hundred-acre basin in the lake, with an average depth of thirty-four feet, would be large enough to take all the effluent from Easterly and the other troubled East Side sources. The plan even touted secondary benefits of the basin, which would stretch southwest from the Easterly plant toward the outlet of Dugway Brook in Bratenahl. As the feasibility study announced, “The project would create a sheltered bay about 1.2 miles long which would be an invaluable recreational asset, suitable for swimming, boating, fishing, and other water-based recreation. This bay would be protected physically, and water quality could be readily controlled to bathing water standards.”38

Figure 9. The stabilization basin imagined in 1968 by Havens and Emerson mixed sewage treatment in an expansive impoundment in the lake with recreation along the retention walls. Although never built, the basin was at the heart of Cleveland’s Master Plan for Pollution Abatement from the same year. Havens and Emerson, Feasibility of a Stabilization-Retention Basin in Lake Erie at Cleveland, Ohio (May 1968).

Unlike the swimming pools in the lake, also designed by Havens and Emerson, the stabilization basin was no temporary, stop-gap measure. It was by far the most expensive project proposed in the master plan—roughly a third of the entire cost of the program. The basin shared important traits with the pools, however, even beyond the use of heavy plastic curtains strung from pontoons. The engineering firm had taken a rather narrow view of its task. Harmful bacteria and suspended solids would be removed from waters draining into the lake, but the lake itself seems not to have won much attention, at least not beyond the idea that it provided inexpensive space for a new sewage treatment facility. Following typical modernist thinking, Havens and Emerson had compartmentalized space, even space in the lake, just as planners had separated land uses in downtown Cleveland a decade earlier. In essence the engineers treated the lake as fully malleable space, not as a valued ecosystem, where connections mattered most. For several years, activists had been demanding that the city “Save the Lake,” without describing the path to salvation. With its stabilization basin, “sludge blanket,” and “readily controlled” bay, the master plan represented a half-step toward a new kind of city, one that prized recreational spaces but held on to segregated thinking. Walls, even plastic ones, could not contain the fluid city, and they certainly couldn’t contain the lake.

Whether or not the particulars of the master plan came to pass, everyone knew that addressing the pollution problem would take lots of capital. The Stokes administration proposed a bold step—a $100 million bond issue, to be paid back through property tax, specified as just over two mills, or about $20 per year for a $10,000 home. The bond campaign in 1968 didn’t dwell on the specifics of sewer construction and treatment plant upgrades. Rather, the theme became “Don’t let a Great Lake die,” a phrase that appeared in a number of newspaper ads, including atop a full-page ad the afternoon before Election Day 1968. The phrase ran above a photo of two children playing on a beach. “Vote ‘yes’ for Clean Water,” it read below. On a different page the same words appeared in an ad paid for by Blaushild Chevrolet, accompanied by a photo of David Blaushild.39

Voters approved the bond by a two-to-one margin. Press reporter Betty Klaric, now writing articles accompanied by a new symbol—an oblong globe with the phrase “A Better World Around Us”—called the passage “something of a personal victory for Mayor Stokes’ youngest cabinet member,” Ben Stefanski. In a lengthy interview, the “jubilant” Stefanski thanked all those who worked on the clean water campaign, making certain to give special praise to the Press, by which he really meant Klaric, and Blaushild, who together did “the spade work” of making the public aware of the problem. He claimed the passage would allow the city to put pressure on the state and federal governments, asking them to ante up, to pay their fair share. He also said, “If the people in the neighborhoods are willing to spend money, then industry, too, should be willing to spend the money necessary to get rid of deleterious wastes going into the Cuyahoga.” In other words, the money wouldn’t just help build a cleaner Cleveland; it would help Cleveland pressure others to join in the investment. “The people have given a mandate and a challenge to the city government,” Stefanski said. “Now it is the responsibility of the city to do the job.”40

YOURS FOR A SAFER, CLEANER, PRACTICAL, MORE ECONOMICAL CITY

In early March 1969, East Side resident Laverne Amory wrote to Mayor Stokes with a list of serious complaints. “As a native Clevelander, I am appalled and quite disgusted and exasperated by what is happening to my town.” She was concerned about high taxes, which she mentioned early in the letter, and a proposed Cleveland Transit System fare hike was the impetus for her lengthy letter. The letter makes clear, however, that other aspects of the city troubled her more, especially dangerous streets. Her sense of danger was at least partly driven by the ongoing racial transition, as more and more whites fled to the suburbs, even from the comfortable Mount Pleasant neighborhood where Amory and her husband—a city employee—lived in a tidy duplex. She assumed the mayor’s Cleveland: Now! program would help only blacks and certainly wouldn’t “make a white person feel any safer on the city streets.” Amory told Stokes, “Schools, parks, and other institutions are being closed because of your inability to control the black community. The phrase ‘Concrete Jungle’ is most apropos for this city.” Despite the racist overtones, Amory didn’t simply blame blacks for Cleveland’s troubles. She asked, “Mr. Mayor, what is being done about other health hazards. We hear plenty of talk about studies of air and water pollution; but we continue to breathe and swallow poisonous chemical fumes, smoke, dust and waste matters. It makes one wonder if perhaps there is a payola bribery involved that the public is not aware of.” Amory worked downtown, where she had seen lots of construction in recent years—although she had seen even more demolition. “It is ironic to see skyscrapers, great educational institutions and cultural centers going up in a city that is slowly becoming a ghost town,” she wrote. Amory understood that Cleveland faced a crisis, and for whatever reason—racial divisions, corruption, misplaced policy priorities—the city simply couldn’t find solutions. She felt so strongly about the trajectory of her city that she sent copies of her letter to each of the city’s councilmen, the directors of several city departments, members of the Transit Board, the president of Case Western Reserve University, and fifteen corporate leaders from Cleveland’s largest companies, including Republic Steel, Standard Oil, and Central National Bank. For good measure, she also sent copies to Thomas Burke, who served as mayor in the late 1940s and early 1950s (perhaps what Amory considered Cleveland’s golden age), and Seth Taft, Republican candidate for mayor that year. She signed the letter, “Yours for a safer, cleaner, practical, more economical city with more sensitivity to the things that will keep Cleveland a great city.”41

In the summer of 1969, disagreements persisted about what policies might keep Cleveland great, but Clevelanders increasingly agreed that controlling water and air pollution would have to be part of the solution. People with options rarely choose to stay in polluted neighborhoods. As Amory wrote her letter to Stokes, the Clean Water Task Force was putting the finishing touches on its “action program.” Devised by Edward Martin, the action program used the master plan as a working base, but its main feature was completely new. Instead of a settling basin in the lake, the heart of the master plan, Martin envisioned the creation of a great water recycling system. All the water used by the city and its industry would go through advanced waste treatment and then be pumped up, away from the lake, and emptied into the Cuyahoga, from which it could be drawn out by industry and reused. In short, Martin envisioned a system “with ultimately no discharges to Lake Erie.” The fifty-seven-page plan, delivered to Stokes on May 13, promised to “restore maximum recreational activities to the Cleveland area” and bring about the improvement of the water supply through “the elimination of the taste and odor-bearing pollutants.” Lake Erie’s condition would improve through “the removal of nutrients which contribute to algal blooms.”42

Martin focused largely on personnel in the action program, listing new position titles and enumerating tasks and responsibilities. But the program also included a schedule of specific projects, with $33 million in immediate spending, mostly on sewer upgrades and improvements at the Southerly and Westerly treatment plants. In the months that followed, contract by contract the money flowed into these projects, but progress was very slow, especially when measured in water quality improvements. The state of Ohio continued to invest little of its own money in pollution control, but the Water Pollution Control Board increasingly expressed concern about how little Cleveland had accomplished. In April 1970, just a week before the first Earth Day, Stokes issued a statement about the growing conflict between city and state. Reacting to rumors that the state was about to issue a building ban in the city of Cleveland, using its power to block permits for sewerage connections, Stokes angrily defended his administration’s “meaningful effort” and “leadership, energy and dedication to the task of meeting the crisis in the environment.” The statement described how devastating a building ban would be to the city. “The impact on employment would be terrible. The impact on city income tax revenues…would be terrible. The setbacks to school building programs would be horrendous. The setback to Cleveland State University’s building program, the state of Ohio’s own program would be awful.” In 1968, the city had issued permits for $154 million in construction, a record, and then broke that record by $5 million the next year. Stokes feared that a halt in building permits would break the city’s movement toward the construction of a new city, with glass towers, educational institutions, and public housing. “I plead with the board,” he wrote, “to permit Cleveland to continue moving forward to meet our problems of housing, school construction, urban renewal, as well as water pollution control.” The service city would require progress in all these areas and more.43