Bibliographic Essay

PRIMARY SOURCES

We were fortunate to have access to an embarrassment of primary resources concerning Cleveland in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We conducted a series of interviews with some of the key figures in this story, including Louis Stokes (Cleveland, May 25, 2012); Bailus Walker (Washington, D.C., December 12, 2011); Patrick Conway (Cleveland, May 26, 2008); Betty Klaric (Mayfield Heights, Ohio, May 27, 2008); Steve Tuckerman (Cleveland, April 12, 1999); Ben Stefanski (Cleveland, April 26, 1999); and David Zwick (telephone, March 11, 1999). These interviews provided access to issues not covered in the written record, but the written record is remarkably complete. The Western Reserve Historical Society holds the manuscript collections that made this work possible. Most important are the two collections concerning Carl Stokes (Carl B. Stokes Papers, MS 4370; Carl B. Stokes Papers Series II, MS 4800), which contain extensive records from his administration and political campaigns. Photographs from the Stokes administration can be found in Carl Stokes Photographs, 1968–1971, PG 429. We also accessed other useful collections at the Western Reserve Historical Society, including the Paul Alden Younger Papers, MS 3869; Republic Steel Corporation Records, 1895–2001, MS 4949; Society Corporation Records, MS 4319; Thomas A. Burke Papers, MS 4035; Ralph Sidney Locher Papers, MS 3337; Charles Beard Papers, MS 4802; Casimir Bielin Papers, MS 4074; William Ganson Rose Papers, MS 3365; and Greater Cleveland Growth Association Records, MS 3471. At Case Western Reserve’s Kelvin Smith Library Special Collections we consulted the Ernest J. Bohn Papers for documents related to planning, though mostly from an earlier period. The papers from the Ohio Water Pollution Control Board, series 1785 and series 2398, and the Ohio League of Women Voters, MS 354, held at the Ohio Historical Society in Columbus, also proved useful.

In addition to manuscript collections, we read the local newspapers. The Cleveland Public Library makes available the historical Plain Dealer, which is word-searchable and therefore extremely useful. We also made several visits to the massive Cleveland Press clippings files at Cleveland State University, and we consulted the Cleveland Public Library’s Betty Klaric clippings file, which is now on microfiche and offers a tight focus on environmental reporting. In addition, we had access to the electronic files of the Call and Post, Cleveland’s weekly African American newspaper, and ProQuest’s historical New York Times.

We have listed other, more narrowly useful primary sources by chapter below.

SECONDARY SOURCES

The details of this book have come almost exclusively from primary sources, but our interpretation and presentation are derived from the secondary literature in urban and environmental history. What follows is not a comprehensive list of secondary works in these expansive fields. Rather, it includes those works that have been most important to our thinking and to which we owe the greatest intellectual debts.

URBAN HISTORY

Dozens of important books have addressed the urban crisis. Among the most important is Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), which traces Detroit’s decline to the shrinking of industrial employment beginning in the 1950s and discrimination in employment and housing that adversely affected African Americans throughout the postwar period. In White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), Kevin M. Kruse offers a detailed and convincing portrait of how whites resisted integration by essentially ceding the city and its services to African Americans, retreating to racially exclusive suburbs and private services (including schools), and then developing an anti-government, anti-tax philosophy. Unsurprisingly, this set of actions contributed to the impoverishment of Atlanta. Our thinking has also been shaped by Amanda I. Seligman’s Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), which describes an urban crisis consisting of two conjoined threats—environmental decay and racial succession. Seligman emphasizes the latter, which whites struggled to resist in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but she also describes programs to stem physical deterioration in neighborhoods threatened by blight and desegregation. Nancy Kleniewski, writing from a different perspective and for a different purpose, makes a convincing argument that urban renewal sped the physical transformation of industrial cities into corporate cities, a process that heightened inequality in cities. See “From Industrial to Corporate City: The Role of Urban Renewal,” in Marxism and the Metropolis: New Perspectives in Urban Political Economy, edited by William K. Tabb and Larry Sawers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). For the longer story of the rise and fall of an American industrial city, see S. Paul O’Hara’s Gary: The Most American of All American Cities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), which describes that city’s fate as the consequence of neoliberal policies, automation, and the mobility of capital.

Students of the postwar period should consult John C. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940–1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), which offers a detailed account of how municipal governments responded to deterioration, providing evidence and examples from around the nation. For a readable survey of government’s longer effort to reduce poverty, see James T. Patterson’s America’s Struggle against Poverty in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). Robert A. Beauregard’s Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993) discusses the gathering urban crisis and subsequent recovery, focusing on the discourse concerning the fate of American cities. Elihu Rubin’s wonderful study of Boston, Insuring the City: The Prudential Center and the Postwar Urban Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), provides a useful treatment of the role of the insurance industry in the evolving service city, an analysis of postwar architecture, and a biography of Charles Luckman, all embedded in a broader discussion of urban redevelopment. See also the work of Wendell Pritchett, including “Which Urban Crisis? Regionalism, Race, and Urban Policy, 1960–1974,” Journal of Urban History, January 2008, 266–86.

For an analysis of demographic changes in postwar American cities, see Arnold R. Hirsch’s classic Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and also on Chicago, see Beryl Satter’s very moving Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), which describes in great detail how blacks overpaid for real estate and the consequences of this exploitation for entire neighborhoods. June Manning Thomas’s Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) focuses on the work of planners and concludes that the city didn’t have the tools or staff necessary to prevent deterioration. Students of urban renewal will want to read Christopher Klemek’s The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). For a fine case study of a very different kind of city negotiating the rapid changes brought on by the civil rights movement and the persistence of liberal policies in the late 1960s and early 1970s, see Kent B. Germany’s New Orleans after the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007).

We also learned from a variety of urban histories that are tangential to the story we’ve told. These include Douglas W. Rae, City: Urbanism and Its End (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), and Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), which concerns an earlier period but contains considerable insight on how downtowns grow and function. See also Alison Isenberg’s readable and insightful Downtown, America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), which emphasizes the role of retail in the history of “Main Street.” See also Fogelson’s brief and useful Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), which describes the evolution of middle-class fears of urban mixing of people and land use. All students of urban history will want to read Max Page’s wonderful work on the power of capitalism to reshape a city: The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900–1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). For an analysis of the role of automobiles in reshaping downtowns, see John Jakle and Keith Sculle, Lots of Parking: Land Use in a Car Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005). We have also been influenced by the work of two exceptional doctoral students working on postwar cities at the University of Cincinnati: Robert Gioielli, whose revised dissertation has been published as Environmental Activism and the Urban Crisis: Baltimore, St. Louis, and Chicago (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014); and Aaron Cowan, who completed his dissertation, “A Nice Place to Visit: Tourism, Urban Revitalization, and the Transformation of Postwar American Cities,” in 2007.

A number of works allowed us to understand how contemporary scholars defined and grappled with these problems. For the most complete contemporaneous study of ghettos, see Kenneth B. Clark’s classic Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), which became influential because Clark wonderfully balanced an insider’s perspective with scholarly remove—and did so in engaging prose. On the War on Poverty, see Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York: Free Press, 1969). Anyone studying urban growth should know the work of two important twentieth-century thinkers: Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs. Mumford wrote extensively about how cities grew, describing phases in urban development. In The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938), Mumford imagined more healthful, moral, and well-planned cities. He favored redevelopment, the remaking of cities through decentralization and mobility. Jane Jacobs wrote the classic response to the modernist attack on urban density and diversity: The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961). For a prescient—and brief—description of the urban metamorphosis, see Mabel Walker, “The American City Is Obsolescent,” Vital Speeches of the Day 13 (1946–47), 697–99.

One of the earliest and most complete critiques of urban renewal came from Martin Anderson. First published in 1964 and reissued in a mass market paperback three years later, The Federal Bulldozer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967) was an important part of the national discussion of urban renewal’s problems. Anderson argued that since urban renewal seemed unlikely to actually renew any cities it should be discontinued, which would save money and heartache. Engaging Anderson in this debate was the housing expert Charles Abrams, who answered with The City Is the Frontier (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). After a clear-headed treatment of urban decline, Abrams described the opportunities and responsibilities for government in reshaping American cities. Unlike Anderson, Abrams still found great potential in urban renewal, hoping it would lead to central cities that could compete with their suburbs. Among other things, Abrams argued that cities should reclaim their natural features, such as riverfronts, and enhance their walkability.

Political scientist John Mollenkopf wrote an important body of work on cities going through the “postindustrial revolution.” His most complete discussion of “progrowth coalitions” and postwar urban politics appears in The Contested City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), in which he describes the postindustrial physical transition as a rejection of the industrial city. Students of urban development will also learn much from John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Ironically, Molotch developed his Marxian theory, casting cities as “growth machines” fueled by production and rent, just when both of these factors were losing their power to organize urban space. We learned a great deal about the difficulty of municipal governance in this period from John V. Lindsay’s The City (New York: Norton, 1969), in which he describes managing New York in the late 1960s. (On New York, see also Vincent J. Cannato’s thorough The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York [New York: Basic Books, 2001].) We also learned a great deal from the political scientist Robert A. Dahl, whose description of pluralistic governance in cities still strikes us as useful. Both of us read Dahl’s case study of New Haven, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), as undergraduate students in the 1980s.

On perceptions of the urban environment, see Yi-Fu Tuan’s classic Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974). Kevin Lynch’s What Time Is This Place? (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972) is a stimulating rumination on the relationship between places and our sense of time which provides a useful way of thinking about rapid change in cities and the historic preservation impulse it inspired in the early 1970s. His earlier work, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass.: Technology Press and Harvard University Press, 1960), also provides useful tools for thinking about the city.

Readers might find some value in John A. Jakle and David Wilson’s Derelict Landscapes: The Wasting of America’s Built Environment (Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992), although we were troubled by the authors’ assumptions of the disunity between the built and natural environment and the unity of “Americans,” a group we find too disparate to draw many conclusions about. The economist Edward Glaeser, in Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), makes a confounding assertion: “The folly of building-centric urban renewal reminds us that cities aren’t structures; cities are people” (9). Our understanding is that cities are both people and structures, and both matter a great deal to urban success. Ironically, Glaeser spends much of his book describing urban structure—skyscrapers and sprawl—a reminder that cities actually are structures in which people live, work, and recreate.

ENVIRONMENTALISM AND ECOLOGY

A vast and rapidly growing literature describes the environmental movement. In Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), Christopher C. Sellers writes convincingly about the development of environmentalism on Long Island and in suburban Los Angeles, but we would argue for the polygenesis of environmental philosophies and the political movement in the 1960s. Surely the many urban residents fighting pollution and other environmental problems deserve attention from scholars trying to understand the growth of environmental activism. Adam Rome’s influential The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) also argues for the suburban origins of environmentalism, describing the many consequences of sprawling development as impetus for action. Rome and Sellers describe essential aspects of the movement, but a focus on the suburbs leaves out important parts of the complex story of environmental activism.

Three books on quite different topics describe the spread of ecological thinking in American culture, via the popularization of science by activist scientists and via the counterculture. Michael Egan’s Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007) is especially useful in detailing the connection between science and environmental activism. Frank Zelco’s Make It a Green Peace! The Rise of Countercultural Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) explores the international dimension of the movement and the cultural relevance of lay ecology. See also Andrew Kirk’s Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007) for a valuable discussion of the cultural contributions to the movement.

Other important books describe aspects of the environmental movement that are quite distant to what we’ve explored, but they offer valuable context for our story. Among the best are Thomas Robertson, The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012), and Chad Montrie, To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

Those interested in learning more about urban environmental history will want to seek out the work of Martin Melosi and Joel Tarr. Both have long lists of publications, but we suggest beginning with Melosi’s encyclopedic The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) and Tarr’s collection of essays, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1996). One of the best urban environmental histories is an early contribution: Andrew Hurley’s Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), which is a must-read for those interested in the role of race in determining exposure to pollution. See also Harold Platt’s important comparative study: Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Other scholars working on environmental issues in cities include Jeffrey Craig Sanders, whose book Seattle and the Roots of Urban Sustainability: Inventing Ecotopia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010) deserves more attention. Another book on Seattle, the influential Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), by Matthew Klingle, covers the broader sweep of the city.

Those seeking a succinct survey of environmentalism should consult Hal K. Rothman’s The Greening of a Nation? Environmentalism in the United States since 1945 (Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998). Readers might also find value in Frederick Buell’s From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), which is essentially an analysis of environmentalist literature in the relevant period.

On the history of ecology, see Sharon E. Kingsland, The Evolution of American Ecology, 1890–2000 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), a remarkably helpful guide to the development of the scientific field. Unfortunately, Kingsland is less interested in the popularization of ecological ideas, and so many of the most visible scientists (Barry Commoner, for instance) play little role here. See also Donald Worster’s seminal Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), which is concerned almost entirely with the development of ecology before World War II, but Worster was writing in “the Age of Ecology,” and he gives hints about the growing influences of ecological ideas in postwar American culture.

On the use of ecological metaphors to understand cities, start with the classic: Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925), reprinted in 1967 and still alive with ideas useful for those studying the urban crisis. See also Mabel L. Walker, Urban Blight and Slums: Economic and Legal Factors in Their Origin, Reclamation, and Prevention (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938)—a great big book that reveals how serious these issues had become during the Great Depression. Wendell E. Pritchett also tackled the issue of blight in “The ‘Public Menace’ of Blight: Urban Renewal and the Private Uses of Eminent Domain,” Yale Law and Policy Review, Winter 2003, 1–52. His wonderful article is packed with information about the role of blight in expanding the use of eminent domain in urban policy. For more on the power of ecological metaphors in American cities, see Jennifer S. Light, The Nature of Cities: Ecological Visions and the American Urban Professions, 1920–1960 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). For an early articulation of urban ecology, see Forest Stearns and Tom Montag, eds., The Urban Ecosystem: A Holistic Approach (Stroudsburg, Pa.: Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross, 1974), which provides a general and theoretical introduction to the topic.

CLEVELAND AND CARL B. STOKES

Cleveland has a rich history, but not an especially rich historiography. We regularly consulted two excellent online sources: Cleveland State University Libraries’ “Cleveland Memory” website (www.clevelandmemory.org), useful for most topics covered in this book, and “The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History” (http://ech.cwru.edu/), the product of a collaboration between Case Western Reserve University and the Western Reserve Historical Society. Those interested in a comprehensive history of Cleveland should see William Ganson Rose’s encyclopedic Cleveland: The Making of a City (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1950), which follows the city’s history through the late 1940s. (The final chronological chapter, “Greatness Achieved, 1940–,” gives no sense of the depths of the problems that were just around the bend.) For a more accessible narrative, see Carol Poh Miller and Robert A. Wheeler, Cleveland: A Concise History, 1796–1996 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

We made ample use of Carl B. Stokes’s own words, published in Promises of Power: A Political Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973). Stokes has also been the subject of several book-length treatments, most importantly Leonard N. Moore’s fine political biography: Carl B. Stokes and the Rise of Black Political Power (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). Charles H. Levine’s Racial Conflict and the American Mayor: Power, Polarization, and Performance (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1974) is a less useful account of Cleveland’s electoral politics and the inability of Stokes to build a lasting coalition during his two terms. For a contemporary summary of the Stokes era, see Estelle Zannes, Checkmate in Cleveland: The Rhetoric of Confrontation during the Stokes Years (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972), which is a rambling narrative based on news reports and interviews focused on issues of race (and sideshow politics) and more concerned with the campaigns than actual policy or governance. For a better contemporary book, see Kenneth G. Weinberg’s Black Victory: Carl Stokes and the Winning of Cleveland (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), which is a celebratory but useful political biography of Stokes through his 1967 election. For another, brief celebratory summary of the Stokes administration, see The Stokes Years (Cleveland, 1971), produced by Stokes’s staff to tout his accomplishments in office. For Norman Krumholz’s personal reflection on the development of “equity planning” in Cleveland, during the Stokes administration and beyond, see Krumholz and John Forester, Making Equity Planning Work: Leadership in the Public Sector (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), which includes a useful chapter on highway planning.

Given his important role in our story, we also consulted the doctoral work of Bailus Walker Jr. His “Environmental Management in Four Urban Centers of the United States” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1975) relies on a mix of public documents and personal experience to describe environmental health policy making and implementation in Cleveland and three other cities for which he worked: Dayton, Newark, and Washington, D.C. We found this work remarkably useful. The contemporary study of the Glenville Shootout, Louis H. Masotti and Jerome R. Corsi’s Shoot-Out in Cleveland: Black Militants and the Police: July 23, 1968 (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), is both riveting and indispensable in understanding Cleveland in the late 1960s.

Of the secondary literature less directly related to our work, we found most useful Andrew Wiese’s Places of Their Own: African-American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). It includes discussion of a distant Cleveland suburb, Chagrin Falls, which attracted African American residents, and East Cleveland, the first large suburb to turn majority black just outside the city. Students of Cleveland history will also want to read Cleveland: A Tradition of Reform, edited by David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1986), a collection of essays that describe areas of reform activism, largely in the pre–World War II era. On earlier periods, see Ronald R. Weiner, Lake Effects: A History of Urban Policy Making in Cleveland, 1825–1929 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005). Weiner describes a series of regimes—shifting coalitions—that led Cleveland, but he notes that the city was never entirely in control of its fate, regardless of who held influence. On deeper roots of housing concerns, see John Grabowski, “A Social Settlement in a Neighborhood in Transition: Hiram House, Cleveland, Ohio, 1896–1926” (Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1977). With Derelict Paradise: Homelessness and Urban Development in Cleveland, Ohio (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), Daniel Kerr offers a long history of planning and policy failures related to housing and homelessness. The book includes useful discussions of Cleveland’s ghettos and the Hough and Glenville rebellions. See also Jennifer Frost, “An Interracial Movement of the Poor”: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s (New York: New York University Press, 2001), which includes considerable discussion of Students for a Democratic Society activism in Cleveland, especially a project on the near West Side. On the influence of race on disinvestment, see Townsand Price-Spratlen and Avery M. Guest, “Race and Population Change: A Longitudinal Look at Cleveland Neighborhoods,” Sociological Forum 17 (March 2002), 105–36. Very interested readers might find of use Diana Tittle’s Rebuilding Cleveland: The Cleveland Foundation and Its Evolving Urban Strategy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992), although it presents a jumble of organizations and programs with little context or consequence.

1. WHAT WILL BECOME OF CLEVELAND?

Adam Rome’s The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013) argues convincingly that Earth Day played a critical role in creating a more powerful and organized environmental movement. Rome’s book provides excellent context for our narrower story of Earth Day. See also Garrett De Bell, ed., The Environmental Handbook (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), published in preparation for Earth Day, and Earth Day—the Beginning: A Guide for Survival Compiled and Edited by the National Staff of Environmental Action (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), which is a compendium of some of the materials produced for the first Earth Day. On the diversity of the African American response to Earth Day, see Sylvia Hood Washington, “Ball of Confusion: Public Health, African Americans, and Earth Day 1970,” in Natural Protest: Essays on the History of American Environmentalism, edited by Michael Egan and Jeff Crane (New York: Routledge, 2009).

2. HOUGH AND THE URBAN CRISIS

Government documents contain valuable information concerning federal study of ghettos and renewal efforts. Especially valuable is the Hearing before the United States Commission on Civil Rights: Hearing Held in Cleveland, Ohio, April 1–7, 1966 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1966), which includes all the testimony heard during the commission’s visit that spring and some additional supporting documents. Congressional hearings are also useful. See “Urban Renewal,” Hearings before the Subcommittee on Housing of the Committee on Banking and Currency, House of Representatives, 88th Congress, 1st session, October 22, 23, 24, 1963, and “Federal Role in Urban Affairs,” Hearings before the Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization of the Committee on Government Operations, U.S. Senate, 89th Congress, 2nd session, August 24, 25, 26, 1966.

For understanding Hough in particular, other contemporary studies proved useful, including the United States Bureau of the Census, Special Census of Cleveland, Ohio: April 1, 1965 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1966), which gives demographic details at mid-decade, and Marvin B. Sussman and R. Clyde White, Hough, Cleveland, Ohio: A Study of Social Life and Change (Cleveland: Press of the Western Reserve University, 1959), a fine sociological study of a neighborhood at the tipping point. For housing data, see also work published by the National Urban League: The National Survey of Housing Abandonment (New York: National Urban League, 1971), and Cleveland City Planning Commission, “Housing Abandonment in Cleveland” (October 1971).

For background on the rat problem, see David E. Lantz, The Brown Rat in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909), which is a surprisingly entertaining and informative pamphlet published by the Department of Agriculture’s Biological Survey. See also Malcolm McLaughlin, “The Pied Piper of the Ghetto: Lyndon Johnson, Environmental Justice, and the Politics of Rat Control,” Journal of Urban History, July 2011, 541–61, a scholarly study of urban rats in the 1960s. McLaughlin makes the important argument that we should be more concerned with the environmental sequelae of the processes that created the urban crisis.

We also made use of some national publications addressing urban disorder. The most valuable were two Saturday Evening Post essays by John Skow: “Can Cleveland Escape Burning?” (July 29, 1967) and “Cleveland: The Flicker of Fear” (September 7, 1968). See also Frederick Graves, “How Cities Can Avoid Another Long Hot Summer,” Jet, May 18, 1967, 14–21. For an insider’s perspective on one federal program, see Charles M. Haar, Between the Idea and the Reality: A Study in the Origin, Fate, and Legacy of the Model Cities Program (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975).

Useful secondary sources on Cleveland’s ghettos and renewal efforts include Todd M. Michney, “Race, Violence, and Urban Territoriality: Cleveland’s Little Italy and the 1966 Hough Uprising,” Journal of Urban History, March 2006, 404–28, and William D. Jenkins, “Before Downtown: Cleveland, Ohio, and Urban Renewal, 1949–1958,” Journal of Urban History, May 2001, 471–96, which argues that Cleveland, under the leadership of Ernest Bohn, used urban renewal in an attempt to revive failing neighborhoods before turning to downtown renewal. J. Mark Souther has published an excellent study of urban renewal on Cleveland’s East Side: “Acropolis of the Middle-West: Decay, Renewal, and Boosterism in Cleveland’s University Circle,” Journal of Planning History, February 2011, 30–58. Those interested in learning more about Hough should also read Karen Ferguson, “Organizing the Ghetto: The Ford Foundation, CORE, and White Power in the Black Power Era, 1967–1969,” Journal of Urban History, November 2007, 67–100. Daniel Kerr’s essay, “Who Burned Cleveland, Ohio? The Forgotten Fires of the 1970s,” found in Greg Bankoff, Uwe Lubken, and Jordan Sand’s collection, Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), tells the story backward, suggesting that neighborhood abandonment follows burning, an interpretation we don’t support.

3. DOWNTOWN AND THE LIMITS OF URBAN RENEWAL

Like all large cities, Cleveland has produced a string of planning documents. We used three from the Cleveland City Planning Commission: Cleveland Today… Tomorrow: The General Plan of Cleveland (1950); Downtown Cleveland 1975: The Downtown General Plan (1959); and The Urban Renewal Plan University-Euclid Urban Renewal Project No. 1, Ohio R-44 (1961). The Cleveland Advertising Club published an overview of Cleveland’s extensive renewal plans: Report on Urban Renewal in Cleveland (September 1955). Also of great interest is the plan created by I. M. Pei & Associates: Erieview, Cleveland, Ohio: An Urban Renewal Plan for Downtown Cleveland (New York: I. M. Pei, 1961). The critical perspective on Erieview can be found in the court records: Grisanti v. City of Cleveland 179 N.E.2d 798 (1962) and Grisanti v. City of Cleveland 181 N.E.2d 299 (1962). See also the informative “Premature Approval of Large-Scale Demolition for Erieview Urban Renewal Project 1, Cleveland, Ohio,” produced by the General Accounting Office and contained within “Urban Renewal in the District of Columbia,” Hearings before the Subcommittee on the District of Columbia, House of Representatives, 88th Congress, 1st session, June 21, July 26, August 14, 1963, Part 4.

Given our interest in the Central National Bank, we read Rose Marie Jollie’s On the Grow with Cleveland: A Brief History of Cleveland and the Central National Bank of Cleveland (Cleveland: Central National Bank, 1965). As one would expect from a corporate history, this isn’t terribly insightful, but it provides the basic narrative of the bank’s growth.

For secondary literature on planning in Cleveland, consult Walter C. Leedy Jr., “Cleveland’s Struggle for Self-Identity: Aesthetics, Economics, and Politics,” in Modern Architecture in America: Visions and Revisions, edited by Richard Guy Wilson and Sidney K. Robinson (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1991), a valuable piece on the Group Plan’s origins and evolution. Just as valuable: Thomas S. Hines, Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), which contains a chapter exploring Burnham’s engagement in the Group Plan. We also read Holly M. Rarick, Progressive Vision: The Planning of Downtown Cleveland, 1903–1930 (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1986), an informative and richly illustrated book that accompanied an exhibition at the museum. For a discussion of Terminal Tower, illustrated with wonderful images, see John J. Grabowski and Walter C. Leedy Jr., The Terminal Tower, Tower City Center: A Historical Perspective (Cleveland: Western Reserve Historical Society, 1990). For a more critical perspective on planning, see Kenneth Kolson, Big Plans: The Allure and Folly of Urban Design (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

For a valuable discussion of skyscraper development in the two most important cities, see Carol Willis, Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995). Willis argues that historians have overlooked the speculative nature of skyscrapers, that they grew not so much as an expression of corporate power but as money-making real estate investments. See also Oliver Zunz’s Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), which describes the development of skyscrapers in the context of the growth of corporate culture. Helen B. Lybarger, History of the Cleveland Restoration Society (Cleveland: Cleveland Restoration Society, 1982), is brief but helpful.

4. POLICY AND THE POLLUTED CITY

Government publications, and studies conducted at the behest of government, provide rich detail on pollution and pollution control. Of particular value are the studies of the engineering firm Havens and Emerson: Master Plan for Pollution Abatement, Cleveland, Ohio (June 1968) and Feasibility of a Stabilization-Retention Basin in Lake Erie at Cleveland, Ohio (May 1968). We also consulted the many conference proceedings published as the federal government attempted to get a handle on Great Lakes pollution. Most important: U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Proceedings, Conference in the Matter of Pollution of Lake Erie and Its Tributaries, Cleveland, August 3–6, 1965 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 1965). Official documents regarding air pollution are more scarce, but interested readers might find useful the Air Conservation Committee’s “Summary Report” published in 1970 and held at the Cleveland Public Library.

In the secondary literature, the Lake Erie story has been well told in a variety of ways. Dave Dempsey offers a very readable, broad context for the Great Lakes story. See On the Brink: The Great Lakes in the 21st Century (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004). In Lake Erie Rehabilitated: Controlling Cultural Eutrophication, 1960s–1990s (Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 2000), William McGucken offers a detailed history of the effort to improve water quality in Lake Erie, focusing primarily on the development of scientific knowledge and policy formation. Terence Kehoe offers a similarly detailed recitation of the politics surrounding pollution control, focusing on the shift to federal involvement. Kehoe’s Cleaning Up the Great Lakes: From Cooperation to Confrontation (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), relies heavily on the many conferences on water quality in the 1960s while setting the narrative in the context of the growing environmental movement. To read the story from the perspective of middle-class environmental activists, see Terrianne K. Schulte, “Grassroots at the Water’s Edge: The League of Women Voters and the Struggle to Save Lake Erie, 1956–1970” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 2006).

For an analysis of water pollution control more generally, told from the perspective of Washington, see Paul Charles Milazzo, Unlikely Environmentalists: Congress and Clean Water, 1945–1972 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), which argues that Congress deserves considerable credit for passing sweeping environmental legislation. For context on the air pollution problem, see especially Scott Hamilton Dewey’s Don’t Breathe the Air: Air Pollution and U.S. Environmental Politics, 1945–1970 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000), and for the earlier period, see David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881–1951 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

5. THE BURNING RIVER

We consulted several government documents that concerned the Cuyahoga. Most important are “Report of the Cleveland City Council Committee on Stream Pollution to the Council of the City of Cleveland, Ohio,” October 10, 1946, and “Water Pollution—1970,” Hearings before the Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution, United States Senate, 91st Congress, 2nd session, April 28, 29, 30, May 1, 6, 1970. The limnologist John H. Hartig’s Burning Rivers: Revival of Four Urban-Industrial Rivers That Caught on Fire (Burlington, Ontario: Ecovision World Monograph Series, 2010) provides some historical context concerning pollution on the Buffalo, Cuyahoga, Rouge, and Chicago rivers but is most useful in providing descriptions of recent recoveries.

For an introduction to the growing literature on the relationship between rivers and cities, see Stephane Castonguay and Matthew Evenden, eds., Urban Rivers: Remaking Rivers, Cities, and Space in Europe and North America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). For an introduction to the wonderful work being done on rivers more generally, see the essays in Christof Mauch and Thomas Zeller, eds., Rivers in History: Perspectives on Waterways in Europe and North America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008).

6. FROM EARTH DAY TO ECOCITY

Cleveland State University Libraries’ “Cleveland Memory” (www.clevelandmemory.org), useful for most topics covered in this book, is especially valuable on highways. It allows access to the series of route location studies issued in the 1960s by the engineering firm Howard, Needles, Tammen & Bergendoff, including the unbuilt Central, Bedford, Heights, Lee, and Clark freeways, all planned for East Side Cleveland and neighboring suburbs. For context on the anti-highway movement, see A. Q. Mowbray’s jeremiad Road to Ruin (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1969), which decries national highway policy and uses the Clark and Lee freeways in Cleveland as an example. For the national context of the freeway revolt, see Robert Gioielli, “‘We Must Destroy You to Save You’: Highway Construction and the City as a Modern Commons,” Radical History Review, Winter 2011, 62–82, and Mark Rose and Raymond Mohl, Interstate: Highway Policy and Politics since 1939 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012).

On watershed management and Three Rivers planning, see the good summary in Daniel A. Mazmanian and Jeanne Nienaber, Can Organizations Change? Environmental Protection, Citizen Participation, and the Corps of Engineers (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1979), which is a useful study of how the Army Corps altered its culture in response to public demands for environmental accountability. The corps’ planning documents are available and contain correspondence with citizens and organizations. See Wastewater Management Study for Cleveland-Akron Metropolitan and Three Rivers Watershed Areas Summary Report (August 1973), especially Appendixes II and VIII. Ohio Department of Natural Resources also published a massive study, Northeast Ohio Water Plan, Main Report, 1972, although only the most ardent student would find it useful. See also Daniel Schneider’s surprisingly interesting history of sewage treatment: Hybrid Nature: Sewage Treatment and the Contradictions of the Industrial Ecosystem (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011).

On the issue of regional or watershed governance, see the Ohio Constitutional Revision Commission Reports 1970–1977, Local Government Committee (available at www.lsc.state.oh.us/ocrc/); U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Report for Consultation on the Greater Metropolitan Cleveland Intrastate Air Quality Control Region, February 1969 (also available through www.epa.gov/nscep/index.html); and The Cuyahoga River Watershed: Proceedings of a Symposium held at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, 1 November 1968 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University, 1969). David C. Sweet, Kathryn Wertheim Hexter, and David Beach, eds., The New American City Faces Its Regional Future: A Cleveland Perspective (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), contains the substance of a conference held at Cleveland State in 1996 and includes several interesting pieces on the difficulty of regional thinking and action.

On urban sustainability, see EcoCity Cleveland: Ideas and Tools for a Sustainable Bioregion. Issues can be found at GreenCityBlueLake’s website: www.gcbl.org/research/ecocity-cleveland-journal-1993-2001. Cleveland’s sustainability document can be found at http://www.gcbl.org/projects/sustainable-cleveland-2019. Scholars from a variety of fields have created a large, mostly theoretical literature on sustainability. Readers may find useful Joan Fitzgerald, Emerald Cities: Urban Sustainability and Economic Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), and James S. Russell, The Agile City: Building Well-Being and Wealth in an Era of Climate Change (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2011).