3 Downtown and the Limits of Urban Renewal

On Friday, June 13, 1969, at the end of a long week of conflict and violence, Carl Stokes stood at a prominent corner in downtown Cleveland shoulder to shoulder with some of the city’s economic elite. Wearing a hard hat and his famous smile, Stokes joined Edward Carpenter, Central National Bank’s chairman of the board, and John Gelbach, its president, in a cornerstone ceremony at the bank’s nearly completed twenty-three-story tower. The small crowd included reporters and photographers from the Plain Dealer and the Cleveland Press, crews from local television news programs, and representatives from the Tishman Corporation, which was overseeing the construction. They stood along East 9th Street and watched as officials placed several items into a time capsule—including that morning’s Plain Dealer and the previous afternoon’s Press. Carpenter, Gelbach, and Stokes all made remarks destined for inclusion in the time capsule, with the mayor’s words captured on tape.

A keen politician, Stokes never missed a chance to celebrate the building of a new Cleveland, and his comments for the time capsule spoke not just to a future generation but to those who were listening that June. He began with a brief salutation to whoever might be mayor—in the same “hot seat,” as he put it—in 1990, when the time capsule would be opened, but then he leapt immediately to issues of substance. “In this year of 1969, Cleveland, like the other major cities of America, is confronted by a crisis of immense proportions—a crisis in the urban environment.” A curious opening for a message to the future, this passage suggests that Stokes understood that this crisis would matter not just in 1969 but in 1990 as well. And the phrasing indicates that he had found a new way to talk about what was happening to his city. Cleveland wasn’t just in the midst of an urban crisis. This was “a crisis in the urban environment.”1

Stokes then launched into a list of Cleveland’s problems. “The city which is a monument to man’s ingenuity and enterprise, the rich repository of great commercial, cultural and educational achievements, is also a monument to man’s neglect and failures in the areas of deteriorated housing, air and water pollution, race relations, inadequate health care, high unemployment rates, inadequate mass transportation, high crime rates and insufficient attention to the problems of our senior citizens.” He purposely mingled a variety of issues in this compendium, as he made clear when he turned his attention to his Cleveland: Now! program, which he touted as “a massive 10 to 12-year rebuilding and rehabilitation effort.” Cleveland: Now! would address the total environment, social and physical. In case the program had not been successful in creating “a much better Cleveland” by 1990, Stokes pleaded to posterity: “Let me say this: we were trying. We were trying hard to make Cleveland a great city, not only for ourselves but for all of you.”

Stokes’s letter to the future said nothing about Central National Bank, or about banking generally, but he was speaking to those who had assembled that morning. The mayor’s program to reinvest in a long-neglected landscape, Cleveland: Now!, had gained the support of the city’s economic elite since its creation in May 1968. Corporate officers from prominent Cleveland companies, including Republic Steel and Union Bank, led the fundraising, with the help of the Cleveland Development Foundation. Instantly successful, donations totaled over $5 million, not entirely from corporations, and Cleveland: Now! became a model private-public collaboration. The enthusiastic support for Cleveland: Now! reflected the commercial elite’s recognition that it needed the city and its mayor to help protect its investments, most of them clustered downtown in the several dozen blocks surrounding the new bank tower they were celebrating. And Stokes wanted them to know he was trying.

If Stokes’s remarks set the day’s events in the larger context of Cleveland’s problematic trajectory, bank president John Gelbach took a narrower view, placing Central’s new tower in the context of downtown, where a number of significant changes encouraged more optimistic visions of Cleveland’s future. Much of the change sprang from the adjacent Erieview urban renewal development, which encompassed 163 acres on the east side of the central business district. Based on a 1960 plan by I. M. Pei, Erieview would remove dozens of buildings, adjust the street grid, and create a modern neighborhood of office towers, apartment buildings, parking garages, and open plazas. Approved during the administration of Mayor Anthony Celebrezze and pressed by Mayor Ralph Locher, the plan was now bearing fruit, with Stokes more than happy to wear hard hats and turn ceremonial shovels. “Urban renewal is taking place rapidly all around us,” noted Gelbach. After nearly thirty years with little significant development, Cleveland’s skyline was now growing, most notably with the recent completion of the forty-story Erieview Tower and the ongoing construction of a thirty-two-story federal building, also on East 9th Street, two blocks north. Gelbach noted that development of Cleveland State University had also begun a few blocks to the east, where a cluster of modern buildings expanded the small campus of Fenn College, acquired by the state in 1964 to serve as the germ for the new university. “All Cleveland can be proud of such progress,” Gelbach concluded. “At Central, we have faith that these changes will meet the needs of a growing Cleveland for many years to come.”2

Who could fail to notice the contrasting visions of Stokes and Gelbach, one speaking of crisis and the other of progress? Even while standing on East 9th and Superior, Stokes could see the city’s ongoing deterioration out in the neighborhoods. Gelbach saw the booming service economy and downtown development, the creation of a new landscape with ample parking and easy highway access, office towers and inviting plazas. Although observers at the time might not have recognized it, both were talking about the crisis in the urban environment; it was working its way through downtown as surely as it was through Hough. Both places had entered a prolonged phase of radical physical change, one through decay and arson, the other through eminent domain and demolition. These places were linked by policy, too: urban renewal, designed to speed the process by which the physical city would be remade to meet the demands of the service city. That morning, Stokes and Gelbach stood in a landscape filled with meanings, some carried over from much earlier eras and some recently created. What was happening downtown—the bank tower before them and Erieview behind—was as much an attempt to control the meaning of the central business district as it was an attempt to shape physical space. But what was happening downtown could do little to stem deterioration in the neighborhoods beyond. In 1969, few observers believed that employment trends foretold permanent change, but prosperous industrial Cleveland was collapsing, to be replaced by a city that would serve far fewer people.

ON THE GROW WITH CLEVELAND

Four years before the cornerstone ceremony, Central National Bank marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of its founding with the publication of On the Grow with Cleveland, a richly illustrated history that linked the evolution of the city with that of the bank. Along with headshots of prominent businessmen, the book contained street scenes and aerial photos that revealed the transformation of downtown. Pictures of smoking industry along the Cuyahoga in the early pages gave way in the later chapters to the gleaming visions of “space age” Cleveland, the white concrete embrace of the Innerbelt Freeway and the clean lines of Pei’s Erieview plan. The accessible prose coupled Central’s growth with that of the city. In 1890, flourishing shipbuilding and steel industries helped Cleveland become the nation’s tenth-largest city. Burgeoning Great Lakes trade and rail commerce fed the growth of the banking sector, too, and that year the new Central joined eleven other national banks headquartered in Cleveland. The bank’s founder, Jeremiah Sullivan, rented space in the recently completed nine-story Perry-Payne Building on Superior Avenue, strategically located between the Cuyahoga’s industrial flats and the Public Square at the center of downtown. One of the earliest Cleveland skyscrapers built with an iron superstructure, Perry-Payne was clad in decorative stone and had oversized windows. It was the most impressive edifice in the warehouse district, and it attracted the offices of iron ore and coal dealers as well as Central National Bank.

Despite the difficult economy of the 1890s, Central persisted and Cleveland grew. In 1905, both marked their good fortune with the completion of the massive Rockefeller Building at West 6th and Superior, just a block east of the Perry-Payne, which it dwarfed. A real estate venture of John D. Rockefeller, who had retired from Standard Oil a decade earlier, the seventeen-story Rockefeller Building became Central’s new home. Designed by a local firm but inspired by the style of Louis Sullivan, the Rockefeller Building featured an ornate stone and iron facade that emphasized the steel superstructure. For many years, the skyscraper held aloft two large CENTRAL NAT’L BANK signs, one pointing east, the other west. Inside, a stunning Italian marble lobby greeted bank customers. In 1927, after a corporate merger greatly expanded Central’s capital holdings, the bank purchased a narrow seventeen-story building at 308 Euclid Avenue, built in 1916, and moved its headquarters into this neoclassical tower in the heart of Cleveland’s commercial district. After riding out the Great Depression, Central moved its headquarters yet again, this time to the colossal Midland Building, part of the Terminal Tower group south of Public Square. There Central conducted business in a cavernous banking room, its rich oak columns and walls contrasting with bright travertine floors. The epitome of urban grandeur, the room had been built for Midland Bank, which did not survive the financial crisis that set off the depression. After Central’s move was complete, the headquarters on Euclid were demolished.

All this moving about reflected the growth of both the Central National Bank and the central business district, but it also reveals how important it was for the bank to occupy just the right building in just the right spot. Central had moved four times in sixty years, never traveling more than five hundred yards with each move, and now it was less than half a mile from its initial location. The architecture and the interior design of the buildings it occupied spoke to the prominence of the locations—the iron and carved stone facades, the rich wood and marble interiors. Each building suggested strength and stability; each move reflected the constant need to adjust to the shifting real estate market and the changes in foot traffic downtown. Central needed to be where the action was, and the action kept moving—from the warehouses tied close to the river, toward Public Square and the growing business core, then to Euclid Avenue and the thriving retail corridor, then to Terminal Tower, where Central hoped tens of thousands of commuters would find its grand banking floor both impressive and convenient. The expanding and shifting economy drove continuous physical change to which Central and the rest of Cleveland continuously adjusted. Industrial growth altered the landscape throughout the region, but changes were most intense downtown, where real estate prices rose the fastest and where small distances had the greatest financial significance.

In June 1969, Stokes came to East 9th and Superior to celebrate what turned out to be Central’s fifth and final move. The bank had grown rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s, adding branch offices throughout the metropolitan area. New buildings in suburban communities featured drive-up windows—twenty-five of the thirty-nine branches had them by 1964. Central tried to keep up with the movement of its customers farther and farther from the urban core. The bank’s 1969 annual report highlighted the movement of the bank into downtown’s evolving financial district and expressed great pride in the new tower, but a map at the back of the report illustrated the other movement—to the periphery. The dark map, with Cleveland’s municipal boundary clearly marked, showed the constellation of branches across the metropolis. The central business district remained critical to the bank: six of the locations, including the new headquarters, were downtown. But twenty-six of the forty-eight branches were outside the city. Central was on the grow with the suburbs.

Central staged the cornerstone ceremony to provide what bank officer F. J. Blake described in an internal memo as “some good publicity at minimal cost,” and the newspapers and television stations obliged with stories and images of progress. Indeed, the building of the Central National Bank tower was big news in Cleveland. When Central first announced the coming tower, the Plain Dealer ran a front-page banner headline: “Bank to Build Skyscraper.” Four years later, with the building completed, Stokes returned to the tower for a dedication ceremony, held in the lobby due to poor weather. The event was photogenic enough to earn space in the next day’s papers, and to be certain that Cleveland noted the occasion, Central took out a full-page ad in the Plain Dealer declaring, “Central National Bank looks ahead with Greater Cleveland and Ohio.”3

A VIGOROUS, VIBRANT, PULSATING HEART

Two years before Stokes helped fill the time capsule, a similar group gathered on the site for a carefully orchestrated groundbreaking ceremony. After a hovering helicopter signaled the height of the tower to come by unfurling a Central National Bank sign, Mayor Locher joined Edward Carpenter and John Tishman in turning shovels while wearing personalized Tishman hard hats. The key figures said a few words of praise for the first major bank construction in Cleveland since the onset of the Great Depression thirty-five years earlier. Just five blocks from its previous headquarters, the new tower would put Central at the heart of what the bank called “the new financial district in downtown Cleveland.” Cleveland Trust, Union Commerce, National City, and the Federal Reserve all clustered along or around East 9th. At the groundbreaking, Carpenter emphasized location, noting, “This carefully selected site joins the well-established business hub of the city to the area of new commercial development in Erieview.”4 Central’s tower joined the city’s past with its future.

Erieview was one of the most ambitious downtown urban renewal plans in the nation. Created by I. M. Pei & Associates in 1960, the plan featured clusters of midrise buildings surrounding plazas and punctuated by several new towers. It called for a new federal building, just across the street from City Hall, and a hotel or motel on the lakefront, but most of the construction would create modern residential buildings and office space. All the new buildings would have access to parking facilities, either underground or in nearby garages. The plan removed some small streets and alleys so the buildings could gather around open pedestrian spaces. The plan also removed all surface parking, which had slowly crept into the area as owners demolished unprofitable buildings and secured income by charging commuters for spots near the business core. In addition, light industry, which occupied many of the existing buildings, had no place in Pei’s Erieview. Altogether, the plan envisioned the demolition of 224 of the existing 237 buildings and the displacement of more than five hundred businesses, including restaurants, taverns, retail stores, repair shops, and custom manufacturers. Federal renewal policy had emphasized the rehabilitation and conservation of existing buildings since 1954, but Erieview included no program for rehabilitation. Among the few buildings to survive were St. John’s Cathedral and the Cleveland Press building, although the latter did not long outlive the newspaper, which folded in the early 1980s.

The year after the city planning commission adopted the Erieview Plan, I. M. Pei & Associates printed a beautiful, oversized, twenty-six-page pamphlet with illustrations and explanations. Bright watercolor paintings of the buildings to come were augmented by a series of sharp maps contrasting the old cluttered city with the clean lines of modern Cleveland. Mayor Celebrezze provided an introduction in the form of a letter to the people of Cleveland. “Under this program,” Celebrezze wrote, “a large downtown area will be reclaimed and redeveloped to give the core of our city a vigorous, vibrant, pulsating heart.” Celebrezze praised the plan’s “bold vision” but also noted the “practical and realistic means” by which it would uplift the economy. “By redeveloping the central city,” he continued, “we revitalize all of Greater Cleveland.” Such was the assumption that a prosperous metropolitan region needed a prosperous downtown.5

With Erieview, Cleveland took a significant step toward a re-envisioned, service-centered city. Pei’s plan banished manufacturing from downtown’s eastern edge, largely replacing it with a residential community that, in Pei’s words, would provide “dwellings for families who wish to return to the advantages of city life.” Elegant apartments would be convenient to downtown’s services, retail, and jobs. Pei dedicated more than half the site to “open lawns, tree-lined malls and parks” that would “provide an orderly and attractive setting for the buildings and a pleasant environment for the people who occupy them.” An elementary school, also proposed in the plan, would make the new neighborhood even more attractive to families. Part of Erieview would be built on stilts over the lakefront railroad tracks. This terrace would hold a new public park, while beneath it two levels of parking would house an additional two thousand cars. Arising from and near the terrace would be four thirty-story residential towers with stunning views of the lake to the north and downtown to the south and west. Altogether it was a beautiful vision of a postindustrial city based on the predicted growth of service jobs downtown and the ability of an improved urban environment to lure middle-class residents back to the core.

The problem with the vision was that it contained the ideas of too few people. The top-down planning process encouraged little buy-in, and the emphasis on demolition and the creation of a completely new aesthetic for the area failed to elicit excitement within the city’s middle class. Indeed, real estate research suggesting latent demand for downtown living was badly off. Few of the residences envisioned by Pei were built, although the four-hundred-unit Chesterfield apartment building, planned before Pei’s involvement, overcame a decade of delays and filled one of the vacant lots in Erieview in 1967. Apparently “the advantages of city life” had yet to outweigh the many disadvantages, and most Clevelanders watched the slow progress of Erieview from their car windows or on their television sets, not from the windows of their “luxurious apartments.”

Pei’s conception of the future may have been mostly right, but the architecture was all wrong. Modernism’s rejection of the past, its purposeful removal of old meanings from urban spaces, left Clevelanders unmoved by Pei’s clean but sterile vision. As New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote of downtown Cleveland in 1973, “at night the area is empty: it is a surreal wasteland of deserted towers and echoing spaces from Public Square and the Beaux Arts mall overlooking Lake Erie to Erieview Plaza. It is as if catastrophe struck at sundown.” Huxtable cast some blame on Pei, whose plan was “long on desolate, overscaled spaces, destructive of cohesive urbanism and defiantly antihuman,” although she saw signs of hope in the continued construction of Cleveland State University’s campus, just a couple of blocks away, and at the adjacent Playhouse Square, where the city hoped to revive a more traditional urban landscape around beautiful but underused theaters.6

The Erieview plan was not responsible for the eerie quiet of downtown Cleveland, of course. It was merely a general guide for development. Implementation required that the city receive federal capital to buy properties and demolish existing buildings. The city would then sell development rights to companies through a bidding process. In essence, renewal funding allowed cities to purchase, assemble, and clear urban land for redevelopment at below-market prices. In theory, almost certain profits would attract developers and spark competitive bidding on the right to build in Erieview. That didn’t happen. The low demand allowed those who did bring their capital to the table to move away from the plan’s original design. This occurred right away, when the federal building morphed into a tower rather than the low-rise structure enclosing a plaza envisioned by Pei.

Central National Bank had been courted to build in Erieview, where developers would have altered the plan to allow a bank tower near Lakeside Avenue. But Central thought the site, just three blocks from where it actually built, too far from the banking hub, a reminder of the importance of even short distances in the central business district. Central’s lack of interest in Erieview might also have given pause to the developers, who needed to attract large tenants to the site. As Tishman put the finishing touches on the Central tower just outside the redevelopment area, Erieview was still mostly surface parking, with only two major buildings completed: the Erieview Tower in 1964 and the federal building in 1967.

As the years passed with so little construction, the entire urban renewal enterprise became suspect. And as the tenth anniversary of Erieview’s passage approached, Clevelanders expressed doubts about the plan’s ability to remake downtown as Pei had promised. To be certain, the old neighborhood was swept away, but mostly what Erieview provided was an object lesson in the failure of government to predict market desires and accelerate land-use transitions through the infusion of capital. Perhaps more important, Erieview, especially its first two towers, came to symbolize for many Clevelanders the failure of government to understand where renewal was truly needed—in the neighborhoods. While the towers rose, the expansive East Side renewal plan, University-Euclid, languished. The announcement of that plan, which City Council had approved in 1961, far predated actual renewal efforts, and the specter of eventual takings and demolition greatly impeded capital investment in Hough. Private investment essentially ceased in neighborhoods marked off for renewal. While meeting in Cleveland in April 1966, the Civil Rights Commission examined the city’s stalled urban renewal projects. Data gathered for the hearings revealed that over the preceding five years more housing had been destroyed than constructed, and the University-Euclid project had not built or remodeled a single dwelling unit. Data like these became fodder for Stokes’s mayoral campaign in 1967 and a source of frustration and embarrassment after he won that November.

In this context, building in downtown was dispiriting in Hough and other deteriorating residential areas. As the city prioritized its work, progress in one area meant delay—and decay—in another. In July 1966, as the Hough riots began to subside, the trustees of Community Action for Youth gathered to craft a message for Mayor Locher, which they titled “Statement and Recommendations by Hough Citizens.” Primarily concerned with the most obvious causes of the violence—unemployment and poverty—the statement also made clear the added frustration imparted by the contrast with downtown’s redevelopment. “The progressive physical deterioration of Hough has made the community a symbol of despair and degradation,” the statement read, “while new office towers rise around it and plans for greater structures are proclaimed. Hough sees progressive dilapidation and derelict buildings as reminders that only others count. Hough must have the opportunity to share in the amenities of the other America. The promise of urban renewal must be fulfilled for Hough.”7 Cleveland had created many urban renewal zones, covering six thousand acres—more than 10 percent of the city’s area and more than any other city in the nation—but the Locher administration had failed to keep its projects moving forward. Since all of them had fallen behind schedule, the office towers in Erieview, symbols of progress and transition for some, became symbols of continuing neglect for others.

Figure 5. The Erieview project swept away more than two hundred buildings in the hope that a modern neighborhood of office towers and apartment buildings would revive downtown, but for years Erieview Tower, seen here in front of the newer federal building, stood in a sea of parking. The city’s focus on downtown renewal raised concern in the neighborhoods, especially since it didn’t seem to be working. Photo by Bill Nehez. Cleveland Press Collection, Cleveland State University.

The residents of Hough had good reason to suspect that urban renewal worked in the best interests of people other than the city’s poor, for whom the program had ostensibly been created. From the start—1949, when the federal Housing Act initiated the program—Cleveland had been an eager participant in urban renewal. It had the backing of the city’s establishment, not just the politicians who expected to parlay federal dollars into visible local action but also the economic elite, both the old industrial corporations and the newer financial giants. In 1954, the economic powers came together to create the Cleveland Development Foundation to promote renewal projects, especially by facilitating the relationship between public action (such as planning, property acquisition, and demolition) and private developers, who were to build new housing, modern industrial plants, and eventually office towers. John C. Virden, chairman of the board of the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank, became the first president of the new foundation. Among the other participants were officers from the city’s largest and most visible corporations: Republic Steel, Cleveland Electric Illuminating, Standard Oil, Cleveland Trust, Central National Bank, National City Bank, Union Bank of Commerce, the May Company, and the Higbee Company. In all, eighty-three companies joined the Cleveland Development Foundation, and their subscriptions helped create a $2 million revolving fund used to expedite renewal planning.

It wasn’t just that the city’s most powerful economic and political forces backed renewal that made Hough residents suspicious. It was the way they talked about it. At the center of renewal was the concept of blight—disease that spreads and threatens the well-being of the entire city. Battling blight required serious intervention—some supporters called it surgery. The Cleveland Advertising Club published a brief, widely distributed report on the city’s urban renewal program in 1955. “Twenty-six square miles of cleared land,” the introduction began, “stripped of its unwanted burden of slums and squalor…are emerging in the central areas of Cleveland.”8 Before a congressional panel investigating urban renewal in 1963, Mayor Locher testified, “Erieview will rescue and beautify what has been a derelict neighborhood in the middle of the city.” “Unwanted,” “derelict,” “squalor”—powerful words used to justify the most severe government intervention in the landscape possible: purchase through eminent domain and subsequent demolition.9

Hough residents also knew that Erieview would not serve their interests. The new housing would be market rate and out of reach for the working poor. Indeed, as the city defended its decision to undertake such a large renewal project downtown, it became clear that Erieview’s primary purpose was to encourage corporate investment in the central business district and, just as important, to protect the investments that had already been made. At the 1963 congressional hearing, Locher argued that Erieview needed to be large so that new construction could secure Federal Housing Administration mortgage insurance, claiming that developers hoping to build apartment towers in the area could not win FHA backing because of the poor physical environment. Locher claimed that by clearing away the old, Erieview would “assure environmental protection of a large enough area” to obtain FHA financing. In other words, Erieview established what Locher called “investment security.” Edward W. Sloan Jr., president of a large Great Lakes shipping firm and chairman of the Cleveland Development Foundation, was even more blunt before the same panel: “the clearance of blighted and nonconforming buildings,” he said, “will permit private development,” and the size and attractiveness of Erieview would “assure the security of investment.”10 Originally a program designed to improve residential environments, in Cleveland urban renewal was now intended to create viable investment environments.

On June 18, 1969, five days after the ceremony at Central’s tower, Stokes announced that plans for Plaza 9, a seven-story office building just to the north of Erieview Tower, had been finalized. Four days later, Stokes attended the groundbreaking for another Erieview project, a new home for the Public Utilities Department on Lakeside Avenue. The five-story building would house the city’s engineering, water pollution control, light and power, and water divisions. In a very upbeat speech, Stokes listed all the construction then under way or recently completed in the area, including the Union Commerce Garage and the Central National Bank tower. Suddenly the long-stalled renewal program was moving again, and Stokes linked the good feelings of Erieview’s progress with the American moon landing, which had taken place just two days before, when Ohio native Neil Armstrong took his historic giant leap for mankind. “Anyone who cares to should feel free to collect rock samples, moon walk fashion, and take them back to City Hall for analysis by our department of community development to determine why life did not exist here to this extent under previous administrations.” Following Stokes’s lead, the press began asserting a new theme: Erieview, the urban renewal project that got off to a sluggish start, would soon be out of space.

A LOOK OF STRENGTH AND BEAUTY

In August 1967, Stokes kicked off the formal phase of his mayoral campaign at an open-air meeting on Woodland Avenue and East 75th Street, where an urban renewal site had been cleared for industrial development that had yet to materialize. Stokes had a well-crafted stump speech, which varied somewhat depending on the setting. It contained two key points. First, he would sell Municipal Light to an eager Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, the private corporation that supplied power to most of metropolitan Cleveland. The sale would bring in $60 million, which the city could invest in physical improvements: better street lighting, more playgrounds, swimming pools, recreation centers, and resurfaced streets. The Muny Light sale was Stokes’s positive message. He had a negative point, too: Locher had been an ineffective leader, most evident in his poor handling of urban renewal. “Only in Cleveland,” Stokes said, “would a city administration spend one and a half million dollars to buy a brand new Addressograph-Multigraph building on Lakeside Avenue because it would not conform to someone’s notion that the site on which it was located should be a green mall for a new hotel which has not been built and apparently will never be built.”11 The small modern building had been purchased as part of the Erieview project, and now it sat empty, paying no property taxes, as Stokes pointed out, all because the city was following Pei’s notion of what downtown should be.

A week later, Stokes gave another campaign speech on the thirty-eighth floor of Erieview Tower, near the emptied Addressograph building. The Top of the Town Restaurant gave members of the Cleveland Club who attended spectacular views of the lake and downtown. Stokes looked out and saw, he said, “a sleeping giant.”12 Approaching the tower that evening, he also saw a giant building standing in a sea of parking. The city was pocked by renewal’s scars, the vast empty lots that were evidence of the Locher administration’s flaws and perhaps of the failure of the entire urban renewal enterprise. But unlike the East Woodland urban renewal site where Stokes kicked off his campaign, the thirty-eighth floor of Erieview Tower was not an especially suitable location for making an argument about the failure of projects to move forward. The forty-story tower had reshaped the city’s skyline, pulling it dramatically to the east. Looming over the new reflecting pool that ran toward East 9th Street, the tower suggested that Erieview might actually take its proposed shape. The skyscraper was more than just the starting point for redevelopment: it was the linchpin of the plan. “No office building in any other U.S. city will attract attention so immediately and so unequivocally,” Pei claimed. “It stands at the hub of an entire downtown redevelopment project designed to complement it, service it and heighten its importance—a setting unequaled by any office building in the U.S. It will appeal particularly to tenants who require large areas of office space and a location of dominance and prestige in the heart of the city.” In this preeminence of the Erieview Tower, Pei had misplaced his hopes for the entire plan.13

Following modernist principles then in vogue, Erieview removed essentially all connections to place and history. The new buildings connected Cleveland to modernity but removed the associations Clevelanders had with this part of town. In the planning, design, and construction of Erieview, locals had little input. The tower’s design came from the New York office of architectural partners Wallace Harrison and Max Abramovitz, who specialized in the international style—sleek towers of glass and steel. Harrison and Abramovitz were in the midst of building similar towers around the United States, including the Marine National Exchange Bank in Milwaukee (1961), Bank One Tower in Columbus (1964), Erie Savings Bank in Buffalo (1969), and First National Tower in Louisville (1972). Although some of the towers, including the U.S. Steel building (1970) in Pittsburgh and the Fiberglas building (1969) in Toledo, held the headquarters of industrial firms, the partnership’s success was due in large part to the era’s explosion of bank skyscrapers. Harrison had also served as lead architect for the United Nations Headquarters and was engaged in the expansive Empire State Plaza, which remade downtown Albany with many of the same features as Erieview, including a rectangular reflecting pool. The proliferation of international-style towers, which varied in height and the tint of their glass but little else, made certain that Pei’s pronouncement that Erieview would attract attention like “no office building in any other U.S. city” simply could not come true.

Modernism’s intentional removal of connections to place and the past muted Erieview’s ability to revive Cleveland’s downtown. People would work in the offices and park their cars in the garages, but the thriving public spaces Pei envisioned did not develop. The tall, flat towers deflected and accelerated Lake Erie’s winds, making the plazas especially uncomfortable, and the buildings themselves, impressive from a distance, sparked little attraction up close. Older downtown buildings featured Americanized European styles—Italianate, Romanesque, beaux arts, and the like—but regional stone, local brick, and touches of ironwork made each structure unique and of the place it occupied. The buildings carried local names—Perry-Payne, Rockefeller—that connected architecture to local families. The principles of modernism prevented local touches in Erieview. Standing on the plaza, staring up at the tower, Clevelanders might think themselves in Albany, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, or, if the wind off the lake was especially sharp, Buffalo.

Erieview Tower was the tallest building constructed in Cleveland since Terminal Tower, which had dominated the skyline since its completion in 1927. The contrast between the two structures is stark. Built as the crowning feature of a union railroad terminal complex to the southwest of Public Square, Terminal Tower quickly became the pride of the city. Constructed by real estate developers Oris Paxton Van Sweringen and his brother Mantis James Van Sweringen, the new train station transformed downtown, and not just because the tower lorded over the skyline. All manner of rail lines came together at the site—passenger rail, commuter rail, and trollies all met there. Most important to the Van Sweringens was the rapid transit that linked their Shaker Heights development to downtown via the Kingsbury Run valley. Altogether the complex was an impressive, efficient machine where passengers and baggage transferred from one form of travel to another. Along the way, people could eat, shop, and get a haircut. Inspired by other city-within-a-city developments around the nation, including Grand Central Terminal in New York City, completed in 1913, the Cleveland complex contained all the major components of a modern downtown: a variety of retail shops, a department store, a massive bank building, and a luxury hotel. Grand Central and Terminal Tower were so successful that they encouraged the construction of other center-city, mixed-use developments, including Cincinnati’s Carew Tower, completed in 1931, and New York’s Rockefeller Center, constructed from 1930 to 1939.

At the center of the Cleveland complex, balancing the transit hub below and to the rear, was an office tower in the front that reached over seven hundred feet. It was the tallest American building outside New York City for more than three decades, and it served as a fitting symbol of Cleveland’s industrial might. Like skyscrapers around the country, the tower helped reshape the meaning of downtown. The historian Oliver Zunz calls skyscrapers “vertical expressions of corporate power,” a description that suits many early towers, including Woolworth and Singer in New York. But skyscrapers were much more than that: they were vertical expressions of downtown’s preeminence in city life and the urban economy. Even in the early 1900s, Americans began to judge cities by their skylines and individual towers. Successful cities had successful downtowns; successful downtowns had skyscrapers. In this way, Terminal Tower signaled the success of the entire Cleveland metropolis. The power of that tower ensured that skyscrapers that came later—including Erieview—would instantly gain significance.14

That is why Central National Bank’s 1969 tower held so much meaning for the city, why the newspapers gave it so much attention, why the news cameras came to capture the groundbreaking ceremony, returned for the enclosure of the time capsule, and then for the building’s dedication, and why the mayor attended all three events. Central’s tower was charged with meaning, even before Tishman broke ground, because all large skyscrapers had the potential to redefine the city, as Terminal Tower had forty years earlier. Given the importance of the building, Central hired the prominent architect Charles Luckman, the former president of Lever Brothers who had followed his passion into architecture and, among other things, designed the Prudential Tower in Boston, which when completed in 1964 became the first building outside New York taller than Terminal Tower.

Blending older forms and materials with the sleek style of modernism, the Central National Bank tower contrasted with the East Ohio building just across East 9th, which when it opened a decade earlier became the first of many large glass boxes to populate downtown Cleveland—a style that Central had no desire to replicate. Bank officials may have been drawn to Luckman because he had a reputation as a flexible designer, one less interested in making an artistic statement than serving the needs of the client. Luckman had also recently finished work on the Madison Square Garden complex, on which he had collaborated with the Tishman Corporation, the same developer leading the Central construction project. Following instructions, Luckman avoided steel and glass curtain walls in Cleveland, and instead the firm used Ohio bricks—lots of them—as the major exterior material. Rounded brick pilasters rose from the ground floor to the top of the building, lending a hint of tradition in an otherwise modern skyscraper and, as the bank’s annual report boasted, “giving it a look of strength and beauty.” Writing in the New York Times, Ada Louise Huxtable called it simply a “conventionally pleasant red brick” building.15

Inside, the open bank floor mixed contemporary styling with traditional materials, travertine marble and burled elm. Central’s new tower spoke mostly to the future, however, at least to the future its leaders imagined. A modern pneumatic tube system facilitated communication among workers on the bank’s twelve floors, easing the movement of the paperwork at the heart of the business. More important, although the building contained an expansive traditional banking floor, it also featured three “auto-tellers,” drive-through lanes that allowed customers to pull up to television monitors, speak through intercoms, and pass materials into the building using that same pneumatic technology. Customers pulling off Superior Avenue could make a choice: climb a ramp up into the adjoining six-story, 350-spot parking annex or drive straight, under the garage, and conduct their business from the convenience of their cars.

A DEPRESSING EFFECT ON REAL ESTATE

The week before Stokes spoke at Central’s cornerstone ceremony, he received a letter from George Salapa, executive vice president of the Cleveland Real Estate Board. Salapa described a recent meeting of the board, at which members “discussed the acts of hoodlumism that have occurred in the downtown area in the last few months.” The board was concerned that the approaching summer season, when more people would make the trip downtown, would bring further increases in crime and “the resultant publicity may keep people away.” Salapa noted that crime “had a depressing effect on real estate values and businesses, especially shopping, entertainment, restaurants, and the like.” He recommended an increased police presence, including overtime for some officers and more strategically placed beat policemen.16

The Cleveland Real Estate Board had good reason for concern. Image had grown increasingly important to downtown’s vitality. Metropolitan residents, many now living much farther from the core than before and most now moving about in automobiles, had choices about where they spent their time and money. Things that people had long tolerated about downtown—including dirt and disorder—had grown intolerable. People who worked downtown expressed concern, especially when they relied on the willingness of customers to make the trip. Sanford Frumker, a dentist with an office in the prominent Williamson Building, wrote Stokes after two of his patients had been accosted on the street at Public Square. “I love Cleveland,” he wrote. “I love downtown Cleveland. I most anxiously want you to succeed. That is why I am urging you as a first priority to get adequate police protection to downtown so it will be safe.”17 Like the Real Estate Board, Frumker had a vested interest in the viability of the central business district, but he also linked Stokes’s success to that of downtown, reflecting a common understanding of the singularity of this place. Downtown was critical to the property tax base and long a center of employment growth. As the urbanist Charles Abrams wrote in The City Is the Frontier, his 1965 plea for better planning and greater federal involvement in the urban landscape: “The cities with pulsating downtowns are the cities that thrive.” Central business districts are “part of the fuel that makes cities flicker.”18 If downtown’s flame went out, Cleveland would lose its way. As downtown goes, so goes the city. Or so the theory went.

All this intensifying concern was relatively new, and not just related to a spike in “hoodlumism.” For more than a hundred years, Cleveland’s downtown, like those in industrial cities around the nation, had grown because market forces identified this central place as especially valuable. Many sectors of the economy demanded central locations: businesses from manufacturing and warehousing to banking and insurance all jostled for their place in the core, near docks and railroad terminals. Retail followed. The largest department stores, the May Company and Higbee’s, had located on Public Square by the end of the 1920s, and smaller shops put themselves in the paths of pedestrians who filled the city’s sidewalks. Hotels and restaurants, theaters and taverns, so much of what makes a city a city, serving residents, commuters, conventioneers, and tourists, all clustered downtown, the closer to the center the better. Cleveland policy makers didn’t have much to do with this growth, this demand for downtown real estate, but after World War II, cars and trucks helped destabilize real estate demand by allowing greater decentralization. The “fluid city” Mabel Walker had predicted in 1947 was emerging in the 1950s, and the central urban question became, how do we keep downtown vibrant? And then, in short order, the question morphed into, how can we revitalize the core?

In the attempt to answer these questions, in 1959 the City Planning Commission developed a plan for the central business district: Downtown Cleveland 1975—the short, fifteen-year horizon revealing how rapidly conditions were evolving and the need to continuously update plans to match changing realities. The plan asserted that “the heart of Cleveland is exceedingly important to the health and well-being of the City of Cleveland and to the entire Cleveland Metropolitan Area.” One-sixth of those employed in the region—124,000 people—worked downtown, and thousands more came to shop, but increasing vacancies, especially in the retail corridor of Euclid Avenue, were a special cause for concern. At the same time, although office vacancies remained low, no large buildings had been constructed downtown between 1930 and 1957, an unprecedented hiatus in investment.19

The primary purpose of the City Planning Commission, which dated to 1915, was to prepare for and manage change, and although the 1959 plan was based on a clear-eyed understanding of the trends working against downtown, the authors recognized the limits of the changes the city could encourage. “Cleveland is a northern industrial giant—neither young nor old—fronting a great inland sea,” the plan acknowledged. “It cannot and should not assume the personality of some other type of city, but rather should magnify and celebrate those qualities which are native to it and which indeed make it ‘Cleveland.’” In other words, the planners would not attempt to change the character of the city—just modernize industrial Cleveland.20

The plan opened with a summary of “desirable measures,” some of which involved direct government action, including the improvement of public spaces, such as the mall and Public Square. Other measures required the city to encourage private action, such as marketing downtown to corporate employers. The plan recommended improvement to transportation systems, including making downtown more accessible by car through the redevelopment of surface streets and the establishment of parking near freeway exits. The convention center would have to be expanded to keep pace with other cities that were investing in their facilities. And Cleveland desperately required a modern “convention-type” hotel. First on the list of “desirable measures,” however, was “improving and maintaining the physical attractiveness of Downtown through the elimination of drab facades, inappropriate signs and other aspects which detract from the appearance of Downtown, in order to offset the competition offered in this respect by the newer suburban business and shopping centers.” Cleveland, like the rest of America, was entering an era in which building owners covered older, ornate ground floors with modern facades—using plain, often artificial materials—in the hopes of attracting or retaining customers. In retrospect, it obviously wasn’t the old-fashioned stone and brick facades of downtown that jeopardized retail; nevertheless, the effort to retrofit older buildings with bright new facades reveals an understanding that image mattered more than ever. To attract shoppers, conventioneers, and employers looking to build new office space, all of whom had choices, the city would have to be clean and attractive, with plenty of parking and safe streets and pedestrian areas.

The downtown plan envisioned extensive redevelopment along the lakefront. The city would expand port facilities so it could capture a greater share of the increasing lake traffic promised by the creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway, completed in 1959. The plan also envisioned improving the lakefront airport, which had opened just twelve years earlier, so that it could handle more and larger aircraft. The needs of commerce would be balanced with the recreational needs of residents through the addition of piers for excursion boats, a new aquarium, and a sports arena, all adjacent to the existing Municipal Stadium and linked to the mall by a “pedestrian way” that would soar over the Shoreway and the railroad tracks that separated the city from the lake. All this represented a gradual pushback against industrial dominance along the city’s waterfront.

The city’s general plan, published in 1950, stated the obvious: “both the lakefront and river valley were taken over by railroads and industry.” The New York Central traveled along the lakeshore, joined by the Pennsylvania near downtown, and part of the lakefront had been given over to dumps, where spoils from harbor dredging and burning trash would eventually add new land, much of it to be used by the expanding airport. The 1950 plan noted that “a growing number of citizens have long felt that the economic side of Cleveland could share the lakefront more fairly with Cleveland’s people as a whole.” The city had been acquiring land for the expansion of parks, as well as filling in the lake to increase recreational opportunities (and space for parking). “When the whole lakefront is given the development it deserves, we will prove to Clevelanders and visitors alike that our greatest natural asset can benefit everyone living here.” The general plan made no attempt to reclaim the Cuyahoga River from industry, however, and the entire valley remained classified as “General Industrial” or, around the steel mills, “Unrestricted Industrial,” where “blast furnaces, oil refineries, and stock yards” needed room and access to rail or water transport and “make noise, smoke, and odors, and frequently fire hazards.” Clearly the general plan, and the more focused downtown plan that followed nine years later, envisioned an industrial city that better accommodated its own citizens, but an industrial city nonetheless. Only in one large area—along the river from Harvard Road in the south nearly to the terminal complex in the north—would industry be “unrestricted.”21

The 1959 downtown plan contained typical modernist goals, the most important of which involved the “separation or removal of conflicting land uses” and “the strengthening of sound use areas.” This meant land uses would be clustered by type in the attempt to increase efficiency and reduce the troubling diversity that gave downtowns their chaotic feel. To emphasize the segregation of land by use, a beautiful color-coded map categorized every inch of downtown, placing buildings and blocks into “sound use areas.” Bold colors compartmentalized space: the Major Business Core in pink; Government Centers were dark green; public open spaces appeared light green. The plan included the creation of residential areas, indicated in yellow, one of which occupied a portion of what would become the Erieview urban renewal zone. But Downtown Cleveland 1975 also designated substantial acreage for “conveniently located Downtown warehousing and industrial activities” and the “encouragement of modern industrial park type development.” Indeed, much of the area that became Erieview fell into two land-use types, Industrial Research and Light Manufacturing, and nearly a third of the entire planned area was set aside for industry. That Pei would banish manufacturing from Erieview just a year later was an indication of his distinct vision for the Cleveland of the future and how rapidly expectations for downtown were evolving.22

In another sign of the modernist influence over the city’s planners, Downtown Cleveland 1975 reimagined Public Square as a transportation hub and performance space. The city’s most historic spot would be dramatically altered, with Ontario Street closed and the northern half of the square regraded. New sitting areas and plantings would be added, but, shockingly, “the traditional monuments” of Moses Cleaveland, the city’s founder, and Tom L. Johnson, its most famous mayor, would be “replaced in newly-designed spaces.” Even the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, Cuyahoga County’s impressive Civil War memorial, would be taken from the square, where it had been a fixture since 1894. Removing these monuments would have detached much of the history and meaning from this place, and purposefully so. In the modernist vision, Cleveland would have to leave its past behind.

TOM L. JOHNSON ENDURES

A month after attending Central’s cornerstone ceremony, Stokes went to Public Square to celebrate the birthday of Cleveland’s favorite politician, Tom L. Johnson. Cleveland State University urban studies professor Tom Campbell and members of the venerable City Club, an organization dedicated to providing forums for political debate, gathered with Stokes around the bronze statue of Johnson, which remained steadfast on the square despite the plan to remove it. Johnson sat facing southeast, smiling and holding a copy of Henry George’s famed treatise Poverty and Progress, which had inspired so many Progressive reformers, including Johnson. A four-term mayor in the first decade of the century, Johnson was a champion of municipal ownership and of the power of government generally. He battled to end the private operation of streetcars, initiated the creation of Municipal Light, the city-owned power company, and backed the development of Cleveland’s Group Plan, which had transformed downtown Cleveland. Johnson died in 1911, and the statue took its place on Public Square just five years later. The back of the monument explained that it had been “erected by popular subscription in memory of the man who gave his fortune and his life to make Cleveland as he often expressed it ‘A happier place to live in—a better place to die in’ and located on the spot he dedicated to the freedom of speech.”

Stokes linked himself with Johnson in both style and substance. Johnson was a great communicator who reached out to common Clevelanders. Stokes emulated this approach through his regular town hall meetings, held around the city. To show how similarly the two politicians envisioned the city and their mayoral roles, that afternoon on Public Square Stokes quoted Johnson at length: “Good sanitary conditions, public parks, pure water, playgrounds for children and well paved streets are the best kind of investments, while the absence of them entails not only heavy pecuniary loss, but operates to the moral and physical deterioration of the city’s inhabitants.” Clearly all those concerns remained alive. But Stokes also noted that much had changed in the city—and not all of it for the better. Despite decades of change, Stokes said, not everything had been swept away: “the Soldiers and Sailors Monument over there is the same and perhaps the pigeons, but styles and dress and architecture are different. Yet Tom L. Johnson endures. His heritage to us endures.”23

Figure 6. Stokes linked himself to the popular Progressive Era mayor Tom L. Johnson. At a celebration of Johnson’s birthday anniversary on Public Square, Stokes pressed his own progressive agenda, including a plan to construct public housing in the Lee-Seville neighborhood. Carl Stokes Photographs, 1968–1971, container 1C, folder 66, Western Reserve Historical Society. Used with permission.

Ever the opportunist, Stokes engaged in some political grandstanding, even beyond connecting himself to Johnson’s legacy of working for the people of Cleveland. “What peculiar tricks history plays,” he said. “Not only are the streetcar tracks paved over so that Tom L. Johnson wouldn’t recognize his town and not only are the diesel fumes of the people’s busline contributing to the pollution of the people’s environment, but the statue itself faces, not city hall or the lakefront which he sought to preserve for the people—no, indeed, the statue of Tom L. Johnson, you will notice, faces Lee-Seville.” The year before, Stokes had proposed building 274 single-family homes on vacant land already owned by the city’s housing authority in Lee-Seville, a middle-class black neighborhood nine miles south of downtown, and by the summer of 1969 the construction of public housing outside the city’s impoverished central neighborhoods had become a major issue. Stokes mentioned it at every turn. Standing on Public Square, he reached for a symbolic connection with Tom Johnson, who was facing south, but not actually toward Lee-Seville. Had those present followed Johnson’s gaze, they would have turned to see Terminal Tower. Stokes’s talent, of course, was seeing beyond downtown’s skyscrapers and into the city’s neighborhoods.

The Lee-Seville battle took on extraordinary significance, drawing attention away from the long crime wave, the rotting ghetto, Erieview redevelopment, and the death throes of Lake Erie. Most public housing conflicts around the country focused on the issue of race. In Cleveland, that issue was muted by the shared race of Stokes, most Lee-Seville residents, and those who would probably occupy the public housing. Stokes described the Lee-Seville development as an attempt to redraw the municipal map, moving poor residents to the city’s edge, a step toward ending the concentration of poverty at the city’s core. “We have to give the poor people a chance to have their own garage, their own piece of property,” the Call and Post, Cleveland’s African American newspaper, quoted him as saying in the early stages of the campaign for the development. “We have to give these people a chance to be part of the affluent society.” As many Lee-Seville residents saw it, however, the plan threatened to compromise their middle-class achievement by bringing the ghetto into their neighborhood. The conflict, expressed in these broad terms, moved into City Council, which was considering a series of bills that would fund the infrastructure—roads and sewers primarily—necessary to support the development. Much to Stokes’s chagrin, opponents found broad support in the council, and the bills stalled.24

The evening before the cornerstone ceremony at Central National Bank, Stokes had wrangled with angry Lee-Seville residents opposed to the mayor’s public housing plan. Held at the neighborhood’s elementary school and attended by six hundred people, several hundred of whom stood outside listening to the proceedings over a public-address system, the meeting had turned confrontational, as the Plain Dealer reported at length. Three days earlier, Stokes had organized a “housing rally” on the mall, at which he claimed “the Lee-Seville issue has become a test of whether public housing for the elderly and the poor must be confined to the core of the city.” Stokes condemned City Council, calling out individual members for their failure to move bills through the chamber. Much of the stalled legislation concerned environmental improvements, especially air and water pollution control efforts. Stokes blamed council president James Stanton, a fierce political rival, for forcing the delays in an effort to embarrass the mayor and prevent the construction of public housing in Lee-Seville.25

Stokes made his case for Lee-Seville wherever he went, but his use of Public Square and the mall reflected the importance of these spaces for political speech. Surrounded by public buildings, many of them grand and heavy beaux arts blocks, the rectangular mall had a remarkably serious quality. Conceived of in the late 1800s and backed by Tom Johnson in the early 1900s, the mall was at the center of the Group Plan created by Daniel Burnham, John Carrere, and Arnold Brunner in 1903. Burnham, the Chicago architect who had gained renown not just for his skyscrapers but also for his work on Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, was an obvious choice to work on the plan, which would follow his principles concerning the appropriate grouping of buildings and the creation of vistas using open spaces. Carrere and Brunner were both well-known New York architects steeped in the beaux arts style popular for public buildings, including the New York Public Library, designed by Carrere’s firm and then under construction.

Following the general principles of the City Beautiful Movement, the Group Plan placed civic institutions around an open, landscaped green that would enhance views of the facades. The plan emphasized symmetry and order, two qualities so evidently lacking in the jerry-built industrial city. Despite Mayor Johnson’s enthusiastic support for the Group Plan and its new vision for downtown, the buildings around the mall gathered slowly. The federal building came first, in 1910, then the Cuyahoga County Courthouse a year later, followed by City Hall in 1915. The public auditorium joined the mall in 1922, and the public library, paired with the federal building at the south end, in 1925. Music Hall was added to the auditorium in 1929, and finally the Board of Education building took its place between the library and Music Hall in 1930. In addition to these expected buildings, the mall gained another stately public building in 1923, when the Federal Reserve Bank, created in 1914, moved into its own building, a substantial Italian Renaissance structure on Superior Avenue between East 6th and 9th Streets. The Federal Reserve’s selection of Cleveland as one of the nation’s twelve regional locations served as both recognition and affirmation of the city’s status as a financial center. And the placement and architecture of the building made it seem like part of the plan.

Not all aspects of the Group Plan became reality. Burnham envisioned a new union passenger depot on the lake end of the mall, along the New York Central and Pennsylvania tracks. The depot’s location would ensure that crowds of pedestrians would move through and enjoy the mall. Passengers would disembark, leave the station, and see before them a grand and orderly space. Failure to reach agreement with the various railroad companies prevented the creation of the new station, which was eventually superseded by the Van Sweringens’ union terminal plan for Public Square, five blocks to the south. Still, Burnham’s unbuilt depot made centralization the most evident theme of the plan. The drawing together of government buildings, the placement of the station, even the planning process itself, which Burnham preferred not to be too democratic lest he have to alter his vision to meet the desires of the people, all spoke to centralization. The Group Plan helped Cleveland make the claim that even in profit-centered industrial America beautiful urban landscapes might be built, and, of course, government could make it happen. It was just the first wave of the transformations that would come later in the century, as expanding power allowed government to reshape the physical city to serve visual and cultural ends rather than merely facilitate economic growth. All this seemed so progressive, in the language of the day, but ironically Burnham’s modern city would be filled with neoclassical facades. The beaux arts public buildings, so common in American cities, affirm that this was a half-step in the remaking of cities. Burnham, Carrere, and Brunner were looking backward just as much as forward.

PERSPECTIVE CANNOT BE ATTAINED BY REMINISCENCES

At the close of 1966, Central National Bank finalized its purchase of the six-story Ellington Apartments, a stately building that had anchored the corner of East 9th and Superior since 1884. All the tenants would have to move by March 1967, and the building would have to come down to make way for the bank tower. In an editorial marking the beginning of the demolition that summer, the Plain Dealer praised the “Change for Better,” calling the Ellington “another Cleveland landmark which simply fell victim to age and deterioration.” This was an odd assertion, of course, since what it really fell victim to was Central’s interest in having that prime corner downtown. Central offered enough money for the land to persuade the owners of a down-at-the-heels apartment building to let it go, and the bank transformed the corner from its mid-rise past to its high-rise future. This was market-led urban renewal.26

There was nothing new about this kind of transaction. Industrial cities worked this way. Older buildings gave way to new. On rare occasions entire neighborhoods disappeared. City residents sometimes marked demolitions with nostalgia for bygone eras, sometimes pined for meaningful buildings as they disappeared or mourned the passing of favorite businesses, but the very idea of demolition to make way for the new elicited little protest, since everyone knew that the construction of cities was predicated on destruction. A century of demolition had given rise to larger and larger buildings, to housing with better plumbing and wiring, to inspiring architecture, physical displays of the city’s wealth. Demolition was most intense in and around downtown, where competition for valuable space drove the continuous recycling of real estate. Until the early 1930s, downtown—in Cleveland and in all large industrial cities—was in constant flux at its skyscraping core and its expanding edge, where commercial uses pressed into formerly residential neighborhoods and single-family homes fell by the dozens.

Market forces did not act alone. In the twentieth century, local governments combined new tools, such as planning and zoning, and old powers, especially eminent domain, to purposefully remake parts of the city. Driven by a new ideology that described some places as diseased or obsolete, Clevelanders began to see the value of government-led clearance. The city cleared more than one hundred acres—and dozens of buildings—to make room for Burnham’s Group Plan. Many of those buildings were replaced by lawn. Building the mall required the removal of the tenderloin district, full of saloons, brothels, and gambling joints; it was just the type of place Progressives hoped to eliminate from the city. Then in the late 1920s, using the indispensable government power of eminent domain, the Van Sweringen brothers cleared a thousand buildings in the very heart of downtown to make way for the union terminal complex. Stretching from the southwest corner of Public Square nearly to the river’s edge, the complex replaced hundreds of businesses—hotels, saloons, small factories, warehouses, and retail shops. The area had also been home to working-class residents of various ethnicities, some of them living in the temporary housing provided by hotels and almost all of them living in crowded, dirty conditions, hard up against the industry in the valley. This is the way slum clearance had worked for decades. The expanding downtown and expanding industrial plants forced the demolition of the city’s oldest and often its most poorly kept housing.

What was gained from all this demolition allowed Clevelanders to forget what was lost. Few Clevelanders walked the mall and lamented the disappearance of the tenderloin, which reappeared elsewhere anyway, just to the east, farther from the core. And Terminal Tower already dominated the skyline before the finest building in the old neighborhood—the seven-story, red-brick Romanesque Telephone Building on West 3rd Street—met its inevitable demise. Over decades, the creative destruction of city building inspired much praise and little protest.

The Great Depression changed everything. The transformative capitalist engine idled, and older buildings decayed—noticeably. Reformers, planners, and politicians aggressively asserted the need for government action. In early July 1933, Cleveland hosted a conference on slum clearance. Attended by planners from around the country, the meeting featured a variety of lectures from leading urban theorists. It also featured a welcoming talk by Cleveland mayor Ray T. Miller. Giving his sense of the problem at hand, Miller emphasized that cities had grown too fast, without planning—surely a problem in Cleveland. Now, with the deepening economic crisis, the consequences of chaotic development were becoming clear. “We have cities in which acres of land lie idle with other acres covered with congested slums, productive of unhealthy living,” Miller said. And municipalities’ number-one planning tool—zoning—hadn’t worked well in places where buildings already existed. “I speak of re-building our cities, because to me slum clearance is more than merely demolishing antiquated dwellings and replacing them with modern structures. We must consider this subject as one which involves, in the final analysis, a possible re-building of large sections of our cities.” What Miller and others at the conference desired was federal support for this rebuilding. In this, and in many other ways, Miller’s vision presaged the postwar urban renewal program, even down to the abandonment of building public housing as a primary goal. Indeed, Miller emphasized the need for more parks: “I believe the day is coming when cities generally will demolish large areas of unprofitable buildings and devote them to recreation and education,” he said presciently. “I believe that every city will eventually have its central park.” Miller’s vision, like Pei’s nearly thirty years later, featured a new kind of city, where order, beauty, and recreation joined economic growth as urban goals.27

With the struggles of urban renewal in the early 1960s, and the widespread demolition that came with the building of highways, the practice of clearing away the old to make way for the new began to raise questions, sometimes from powerful places. What changed wasn’t just the pace of the destruction, which indeed quickened thanks to the infusion of federal dollars, but also what was built. In the 1960s, the demolition of the Ellington Apartments paled in comparison to the destruction just a block north. With little or no protest, building after building fell in the Erieview section. One of those who did protest was Teresa Grisanti, who lived on St. Clair Avenue near East 12th Street, on property that Pei had designated for the construction of Erieview Tower. A long-time owner and resident of a mixed residential and commercial building, of the type that was so common of nineteenth-century cities, Grisanti had taken good care of her building, which inspectors determined was indeed structurally sound and not “detrimental to the public health, safety or welfare” of the city—the legal standard for the taking of blighted property. Still, Grisanti’s building was in a blighted district, which, by law, allowed the city to take her property through eminent domain, demolish her sound building, and sell the property to a developer. With the help of her son Alfred, a former downtown councilman, Grisanti sued the city, but the courts upheld the urban renewal plan, never fully considering the actual condition of Grisanti’s building or even those around it, which the building inspector had declared problematic. Grisanti appealed all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which dismissed the case in November 1962 for want of a federal issue. By then the city had garnered federal support for the project—$33 million in loans and a capital grant of nearly $10 million. And the city had already contracted with the Erieview Corporation to build the tower.

In upholding every aspect of the city’s urban renewal powers, Cuyahoga County’s Common Pleas Court placed Erieview in the broader sweep of the city’s history. In the decision, Judge Donald Lybarger wrote, “The engineers of the past did a good job of planning for the little city then of small consequence. But is a large part of the downtown area of the great metropolis of Cleveland to lie moribund in the cocoon which was woven for it when a village more than a century ago?” Trusting in planning and the vision of Pei, Lybarger fully supported the government’s right to remake the city, even when faced with unwilling property owners who found themselves in districts that municipal employees had deemed blighted. Further, the court determined that it should not substitute its own opinions about what property was blighted for the opinions of the experts. In other words, the Common Pleas Court found, and all higher courts affirmed, that under current law the city’s building inspectors had the authority to set in motion a process by which any property might be removed from the hands of its owner.28

Courts around the country were affirming the authority of cities to conduct urban renewal, and the forceful assertion of government power raised eyebrows and ire. Despite the fact that Erieview had broad local support—it passed City Council with a unanimous vote in 1960, for instance—the size of the takings area and the high quality of many of the buildings slated for demolition made it a favorite target for opponents of the federal program. In June 1963, the Comptroller General of the United States issued a lengthy report on Cleveland’s program titled “Premature Approval of Large-Scale Demolition for Erieview,” which argued that inspection of the buildings had been perfunctory and that, contrary to federal law, only 20 percent of the buildings in the area were actually substandard. Indeed, many of the buildings identified as problematic by the city had only minor defects, such as the absence of self-closing doors for fire safety, which could have been easily rectified. Instead of notifying property owners of building code violations, the city had counted the buildings as substandard. One such building was only twelve years old at the time of inspection and was found in need of chimney pointing and “venting of toilets.” This was enough to earn the substandard classification. What was worse, the federal inspectors apparently rubber-stamped the local determinations of blight. Outraged congressmen, led by William Widnall, a Republican from New Jersey, called on Mayor Locher to explain Cleveland’s action. Locher surrounded himself with the city’s business elite when he testified before Congress in the fall of 1963, and in a unified front Cleveland’s most powerful men explained Erieview’s demolition of blighted and nonconforming buildings as necessary to permit private development—an odd but ultimately successful argument in defense of growing government power.29

Despite the court challenge and the hubbub in Washington, Erieview proceeded. By Christmas 1963, forty-five buildings had been demolished. As Erieview Tower rose over the next year, workers cleared the remaining acreage of phase one. By the fall of 1966, demolition in Erieview II had begun, with cleared sites temporarily used for parking. Backed by federal grants and loans, the demolition greatly outpaced development, which required private-sector capital and the prospect of profitability. Soon Clevelanders began to wonder just what was going on, as surface parking occupied nearly the entire site. Even the Cleveland Development Foundation, created a decade earlier to speed urban renewal, began to challenge the Locher administration’s ability to oversee the process, going so far as to call the city’s staff incompetent. A series of articles by Plain Dealer reporter Donald Sabath revealed just how problematic urban renewal had become, how little progress had been made in Erieview and elsewhere in the city. In June 1966, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which then administered urban renewal, issued a “16 Point Immediate Action Program,” listing specific steps Cleveland needed to take in order to remain eligible for federal dollars. All these actions concerned the University-Euclid project—the focus of the Civil Rights Commission hearing that spring. Over the next six months, Locher’s administration was unable to complete the construction of new recreation areas, improve building inspection, or increase the frequency of garbage collection—each of which had been enumerated in the HUD list. In fact, in January 1967, HUD secretary Robert Weaver wrote that “few, if any of the objectives can properly be considered to have been fulfilled.” In light of this continued incompetence, Weaver took the extraordinary step of freezing federal urban renewal funds awarded to Cleveland. They were not released until after Stokes entered office later that year.30

The accumulating scars of urban renewal and highway construction helped spark a movement for historic preservation around the United States. In Cleveland, fittingly, protests became more vocal and organized as yet another downtown building—the Mechanics Block, a five-story Second Empire gem on the corner of Prospect and Ontario—was threatened with demolition in 1970. Among the most vocal citizens was Maxine Levin, who had taken up the preservation cause after the death of her husband, a prominent attorney and long-time supporter of downtown. Levin garnered the attention and support of the popular Plain Dealer columnist George Condon, who lamented that summer, “Before we begin planning again for the unpredictable future, perhaps we should salvage what we can from the past, such as the Mechanics Block, a valuable heritage representing the city that used to be.”31

Not everyone agreed with Levin and Condon, of course. The Greater Cleveland Growth Association reacted against the fledgling preservation sentiment in its summer 1970 issue of Clevelander magazine, which contained a new “perspective” feature that opened with the questions, “Remember the all-night Leader drug store at 9th and Superior? PJ’s? The Ellington Apts? The Hickory Grill?” The brief column was accompanied by two images, one a small sepia-toned horizontal photo of the Ellington, and the other a large vertical photo of Central National Bank’s new tower, which had replaced the drugstore, the grill, and the apartments. If the images themselves failed to convey the intended message, the prose made it clear: “True perspective cannot be attained by reminiscences and nostalgia, at the expense of what today means.” The purpose of this new “perspective” column would be to remind readers “that although yesterday may be interesting, it is only a base from which to move forward.”32

After years of sporadic protest, Cleveland’s preservation movement gained municipal support in 1971, when the city created a landmarks commission. The commission couldn’t prevent the demolition of buildings but could at least begin the process of surveying and marking the city’s historic assets. The movement gained an organizational center in 1972 with the creation of the Downtown Restoration Society. The very name of the organization spoke to the movement’s primary area of concern, where so much architectural heritage had already disappeared and more was threatened. The protests concerned not just what was lost but also what was coming, which sometimes was merely a parking garage or a nondescript modern building, as was the case with the Mechanics Block. The Downtown Restoration Society’s key figures included Maxine Levin and Tom Campbell, the Cleveland State historian who had stood with Stokes to remind Cleveland of its proud history and Tom L. Johnson, the embodiment of progressive government.

WE WERE TRYING

In May 1990, bank executives opened the time capsule at the corner of 9th and Superior. The date, set at the laying of the cornerstone just twenty-one years earlier, was intended to mark the one hundredth anniversary of Central National Bank’s creation, but the executives who opened the capsule worked for Society National Bank, which had purchased Central in 1985. Ironically, the disappearance of Central National Bank said more about the changes in the city than anything the capsule held, the contents of which the Plain Dealer listed in its coverage of the “event,” which itself was hardly a moment of celebration. Not only had Central National Bank disappeared through acquisition, but Cleveland too continued to disappear. Since the enclosing of the time capsule, the city had lost another 250,000 residents, shedding a third of its population. Although optimists could find reason for hope that the decline was slowing, clearly the growth promised by urban renewal had not materialized.

Among the items removed from the time capsule was the Greater Cleveland Growth Association’s “Outlook for Greater Cleveland in 1990.” As one might expect, the pro-growth business organization predicted great things for Cleveland, making no mention of the “crisis in the urban environment” at the core of Stokes’s note to the future. Instead, the Growth Association predicted that the Cleveland region would have 4.7 million citizens by 1990, or about 1.8 million more than the metropolitan area actually had. “Steelmaking and metal manufacturing, spurred by new, exotic and still undiscovered applications of research in space travel and other new knowledge, will continue to be the base for the region’s economy,” the association predicted, missing altogether the collapse of the American steel industry, especially as a major employer. And the association predicted that a new airport out in Lake Erie, which Locher had proposed in 1966, would “provide citizens of Greater Cleveland and nearby areas with the best air service in the nation to all parts of the world.” In sum, the outlook for 1990 asserted that Cleveland would be the focal point of a vast, thriving metropolis stretching from Toledo to Pittsburgh. This wildly optimistic forecast suggested that Cleveland’s business community assumed that the setbacks of the 1960s would be temporary, that they shouldn’t prevent fantastic visions of future success.33

The brief Plain Dealer article describing the opening of the time capsule did not dwell on the broader trajectory of Cleveland or even its downtown, and instead highlighted the comments left by the then mayor Carl Stokes. After spending several years as a news broadcaster in New York, Stokes was now back in Cleveland serving as a municipal judge, although he apparently did not return to the bank for the time capsule’s opening. The Plain Dealer offered no commentary on the capsule contents, no critique of the off-base predictions, and no assessment of the mayor’s speech. But the article ended with a final quote from Stokes that suggested its own critique: “We were trying.”34