Epilogue

WHAT BECAME OF CLEVELAND

In May 2012, we explored the ground floor of Cleveland’s Key Tower, the fifty-seven-story, granite-clad skyscraper designed by Cesar Pelli. Standing on the northeast corner of Public Square, the postmodern tower is adjoined to the Romanesque building designed by Burnham and Root for the Society for Savings in the late 1880s, part of the nation’s first wave of skyscrapers. Visitors can walk through the beautifully restored banking floor in the old building and wander into the Key Tower lobby, which contains little more than banks of high-speed elevators. When completed in 1991 for Society Bank, the skyscraper superseded Terminal Tower as Cleveland’s tallest building. Even as its home city continued to shed residents, dropping another 11 percent of its population in the 1980s, Society had been on a spending spree, acquiring smaller banks around the state, including Central National Bank in 1985. Society built the tower to house its new headquarters and to proclaim its growing prominence in the region. The tower gained its current name just three years after it opened, when Society merged with Key, in the ever-shifting world of banking.

The Key Tower and its lobby, with its large glass walls that allow the interior to connect visually with the green of Public Square to the south and the well-kept open mall to the east, serve as object lessons in the disconnect between downtown development and the broader health of American cities. Office space in central business districts expanded dramatically in the 1980s, even in cities that continued to fare poorly overall. But we didn’t come to the Key Tower merely for a reminder of the continued importance of the financial sector in the service city. Rather, we were on our way up to Squire Sanders, a global law firm with roots in Cleveland and offices on the forty-ninth floor. We had come to interview Louis Stokes, who had joined the firm after his thirty years in Congress serving Cleveland’s East Side and who was then nearing the end of his very successful career. He was gracious with his time and with his praise of his brother, about whom we spoke at length. “People come up to me and talk to me about Carl and what he meant to this city and let me know that their uncle played pool with Carl. But he’s still revered in this city. I hear from white and black people in this city, people respect what he stood for, what he did, and what he meant to the city forty-four years ago.” We talked, too, about Cleveland, as it was in 1969 and in 2012. “Well, of course, we’ve lost a lot of population. We’re down under four hundred thousand now. And that’s made a difference. And our school system reflects the fact that a lot of whites moved out of the city and left the schools like they are today, things of that sort,” he said, fully cognizant that Cleveland was still struggling with serious problems a half century after it began to decline. But he added hopefully, “In spots we see gentrification, people, young people, particularly whites, coming back into the city. Which is always good, I think, because it points to a vibrancy and people feeling good about the city and that type of thing. So yeah, I think we’re making progress. It’s still a major city in our country, though we’re far down from eighth now. But it’s still a major city in this country, and a powerful city.”1

As it happened, the Squire Sanders conference room in which we talked faced east, and that morning we had a clear view of many of the places about which we were writing. Closest was Erieview Tower and the attached two-story, glazed galleria mall that replaced the I. M. Pei–designed reflecting pool and plaza. Constructed in 1987, the mall has never worked well, except as home to a food court that serves lunch to office workers. Indeed, Pei’s vision isn’t much in evidence in the old Erieview urban renewal zone; little of what he planned came to fruition. Pei’s handiwork was still visible that morning, however, for we could see his pyramidal Rock and Roll Hall of Fame building on the lake, completed in 1995 as part of the tourist infrastructure the city has built around its major-league sports venues. Farther down the lakeshore, we could see the 55th Street Marina, still the amenity that Stokes said it would be when he celebrated its completion in 1969. But in 2012 the city no longer managed the marina. The state had been operating several city parks, including Edgewater and Gordon, since 1978, when the city was too broke to keep them maintained. The state hadn’t done a very good job either, and so Cleveland Metroparks, which has operated the suburban park system since 1917, took over management of what had been Lakefront State Park in 2013. To see the marina from the tower, we had to look over the site of the old Muny Light plant, which is no longer producing smoke (or power), and even its stacks have been removed. Although we couldn’t see it from our vantage point, part of the old plant features a giant mural of swimming whales, creatures not found in Lake Erie, of course, but nice scenery for commuters on Interstate 90.

That morning we could also see in the distance the cluster of buildings that constitute Cleveland’s other node of economic development: University Circle. Here Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, Case Western Reserve University, and several other affiliated and related institutions have made this area a center of employment and investment. As most of the city declined, this area grew because of its connection to two economic sectors critical to service city economies: health care and higher education. Case Western has a lovely urban campus that blends with cultural icons, such as the art museum and the orchestra’s Severance Hall. Improvements around Case have been matched by those around Cleveland State University on the edge of downtown, another area of development success. All these new structures—skyscrapers downtown, tourist attractions, expanded hospitals, and improved university campuses—speak to the transition that began in the 1960s: the rebuilding of Cleveland as a service city.

Altogether our view that morning was spectacular, but our easterly window prevented us from seeing many of Cleveland’s interesting sights. The steel mills to the south, for instance, were producing once again after decades of corporate transitions and sometimes lengthy shutdowns. Owned and operated by ArcelorMittal, a global company based in Luxembourg, Cleveland’s massive mills are an awesome sight, even in their current diminished capacity, and they are a reminder that the transition did not make this a truly “postindustrial” city. We also could not see the gleaming white, twenty-two-story Carl B. Stokes Federal Courthouse, completed in 2002, a much-delayed, over-budget, but attractive addition to the Cleveland skyline. The courthouse is just one of the many ways in which Stokes’s legacy has been built into the landscape.

We couldn’t see the West Side, which was still solidly middle class in the 1960s but today looks every bit as troubled as the East Side did fifty years ago. This conclusion, which we derived by making explorations in car and on foot, is a reminder of what you can’t see from the forty-ninth floor of a skyscraper no matter which way you face: poverty. Nearly 30 percent of Cleveland’s residents live below the poverty line, making it one of the poorest cities in America. As poverty spread through the city, so did the abandonment of housing and the demolition of unused buildings. Almost all the city’s neighborhoods contain empty lots, the starkest evidence of population decline. There are signs of hope in the neighborhoods, of course, even in the historically troubled Hough, which has seen some redevelopment, some clusters of infill construction, even some suburban-style homes. Still, empty lots abound. By 2010, Hough had fewer than 13,000 residents, down from its mid-1950s peak of more than 80,000. Just as significant, segregation persists here and around metropolitan Cleveland—one of the most segregated cities in America. Hough is nearly 95 percent black. The city is now majority African American. Many of its suburbs, especially distant suburbs like Chagrin Falls, Mentor, and Medina, are nearly all white. From the Key Tower we couldn’t see the streets where the Glenville Shootout took place, but we’ve walked them, and they are so pocked with empty lots that only a student of the event would notice that all the buildings involved in the shootout have disappeared. Ironically, nearby Murray Hill, the city’s Little Italy, the contested and violently defended neighborhood, is a rare bright spot inside the city limits. Its lively restaurants and residential development give little sense that this is a city that is still losing population.

Social problems are difficult to discern from seven hundred feet above the city. So too are ecological problems. We could see Lake Erie, which didn’t die, and is in fact healthier than it was fifty years ago. But pollution and algal blooms still threaten the lake. Combined sewer overflows remain a concern after all these years, while mercury pollution from coal burning has become a more acute problem. Although some fish populations have improved, there are zebra mussels and other invasive species to contend with; perhaps most ominously, the lake’s declining water level, which may be related to climate change, is a new cause for concern.

We also couldn’t see the river, snaking through its deep valley below downtown. The landscape of the valley remains largely industrial: gravel yards, old warehouses, and abandoned factory sites line the river. But there are signs of transformation. In 2007, a shopping center called Steelyard Commons opened on the site of a former steel finishing mill, with restaurants and big-box stores such as Target, Walmart, and Staples that residents used to go to the suburbs to find. Near the mouth of the river, below the bluff from downtown, the fortunes of the area popularly known as the Flats have waxed and waned since it became a hotspot in 1980s. More apartments and condos and renewed interest from developers are bringing new life to this area and the nearby warehouse district, making this one of the few neighborhoods in the city that has actually gained population in recent years, part of the national trend of growth in the urban core.

Despite the few bright spots in Cleveland, and many more bright spots in a resurgent urban America, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Carl Stokes was right forty-five years ago as he expressed skepticism on the eve of the first Earth Day. “I am fearful that the priorities on air and water pollution may be at the expense of what the priorities of the country ought to be: proper housing, adequate food and clothing,” he said while governing a city that he knew had intractable environmental and social problems.2 Then again, maybe it wasn’t the nation’s priorities that ensured the diminishment of pollution and the persistence of poverty. Perhaps the latter problem is simply more difficult to solve. Reflecting on the long battles to control air and water pollution, with their many technological hurdles and huge costs, we shouldn’t underestimate how difficult creating a cleaner urban America really was. But the most difficult hurdles were not technological or economic—they were political. This was true for social problems as much as environmental problems, but the latter obviously spanned political boundaries. Air pollution wafted into the suburbs; water pollution flowed out into Lake Erie. As the Earth Day letters remind us, industrial pollution, certainly more intense and harmful in some neighborhoods, mattered all across the metropolis. Although it was a slow and arduous process, municipalities and counties gradually gave up authority to regional and federal regulatory agencies, including the Cleveland Regional Sewer District (now called the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District) and the Environmental Protection Agency. Unfortunately, many Americans continued to think that urban blight, and the poverty that went with it, could and should be contained. The “little kingdoms” of the suburbs continued to resist policies that might ease metropolitan poverty, and so instead it persisted and even deepened.

All this is not to say that the Stokes administration, and those that followed, accomplished nothing for Cleveland. Investments in the service city mattered, though some of them not right away. Abandoned housing, brownfields, and factory shells still dot the landscape, but the carcass of the past is clearly less burdensome to Cleveland than it was at the beginning of the transition. Perhaps more onerous to those who are constantly at work creating a new Cleveland are the memories of the urban crisis. The race riots, the “mistake on the lake,” the city defaulting on its debts in 1978, even Mayor Ralph Perk’s hair catching fire at a ribbon-cutting ceremony in 1972—all this still weighs on the city and holds it back.

Of all the tales of decline and crisis, though, none holds as much power as the burning river. In 1980, Jim Toman and Dan Cook addressed the city’s collective funk in the preface to a book on the Terminal Tower and the city’s glory years, noting that as a result of the Cuyahoga fire and other incidents, “Clevelanders seem to suffer from a type of urban insecurity.”3 In 1989, city officials opted not to participate in an event marking the twentieth anniversary of the fire, a river cruise led by the Anthony J. Celebrezze, the fireboat that doused the fire. Even as some Clevelanders began to take ownership of the fire through remembrance, Dale R. Finley, president of the Convention and Visitors Bureau of Greater Cleveland, lamented the continued attention: “I just wonder how long do we have to go before we don’t have to continually bring up that there was a brief fire on a river 20 years ago?”4

We might ask a similar question. Of all the environmental, economic, and social problems facing Carl Stokes, why has the relatively modest fire become the most remembered? Ben Stefanski, reflecting back with some bemusement, recognized that “it was just a little fire. It was put out, didn’t do much damage, and that was it. But then it took on a life of its own. This fire is like folklore.”5 The story that people began to tell about the fire was simple, with a straightforward message: a river in the one of the country’s biggest cities gradually got more and more polluted, until one morning it caught fire and shocked the nation, waking everyone up to an environmental crisis. Lost in this and most other retellings of the Cuyahoga fire is the deeper history of the polluted river and the many previous fires. Lost too is the broader context of the fire—the crisis in the urban environment, with its smoke, rats, decay, and concentrated poverty.

Even if the growing Cuyahoga folklore ignored the larger story of polluted America, the 1969 fire represented a real transition—not concerning the river’s ability to burn but having to do with Americans’ understanding of ecology, their tolerance of pollution, and their attribution of deeper meaning to a burning river. Indeed, the growing awareness of the ecological connectedness of all places, especially bodies of water, gave the image of the burning river resonance. In October 1997, Adam Werbach, the then twenty-four-year-old president of the Sierra Club, was asked on CNN to explain why the 1969 fire was so important. “I mean a river lighting on fire was almost biblical,” said Werbach, who was not yet born when the fire occurred. “And it energized American action, because people understood that that should not be happening.” That understanding of the fire evolved quickly after June 1969.6

Despite the many delays in pollution abatement, the 1969 fire was the last on the Cuyahoga. This fact surely points to progress on the river—at least ecological progress. The closing of coking plants at the steel mills, the removal of the Sohio refinery, the decrease in chemical and paint manufacturing, and the general decrease in industry all contributed to the improvement in the river. As Cleveland’s economic crisis deepened, at least this aspect of its environmental crisis eased. By the early 1990s, fish had returned to the once-lifeless stretch of the Cuyahoga in Cleveland. Scullers sliced its waters, and bars and restaurants replaced the warehouses and freight docks along its shores near downtown, in the Flats. Just as the river had been a symbol of what was wrong with the environment in the late 1960s and early 1970s, now it represented how much things had improved. In 1998, President Bill Clinton even included the Cuyahoga in his new program to support “American Heritage” rivers, in recognition of the historical importance of rivers and their need for additional environmental attention. The press announcement introducing the first fourteen Heritage Rivers, including the Hudson, Mississippi, Potomac, and Rio Grande, summarized the importance of the comparatively small Cuyahoga: “Once so polluted it caught on fire, the 100-mile-long Cuyahoga became a stark symbol of the plight of America’s rivers and a rallying point for passage of the Clean Water Act, one of the nation’s landmark environmental laws.”7 If a river had to be known for its fire, then at least the fire could serve as a rallying point.

As time goes on, the people of Cleveland are less sensitive about the fire and the pollution that once made their river a fire hazard. Burning River Pale Ale, brewed just up the hill from the river on the West Side, has proved popular in the city and beyond, its bottles and cartons decorated with flames on the water that add a glow to a rose-tinted skyline. Key Tower and Terminal Tower are framed by two of the many drawbridges in the Flats. Adding to the romance of the scene, brilliant stars shine down on the seemingly fortunate city. Great Lakes Brewing Company co-owner Patrick Conway said the company chose the name because it was “cheeky and irreverent” and because the image has staying power. “Everyone who comes through the city, who passes through our doors, all want to know, ‘Is this the city where the river burned?’” Conway said in an interview in 2008. “Everybody knows about it universally. So it’s not going away, so we decided to make some lemonade out of that.”8

The brewery has made environmental stewardship a part of its brand, and in 2001 it held its first Burning River Festival, a chance to promote its beer and draw attention to the Cuyahoga and Lake Erie and their continued environmental problems. Proceeds from the annual festival go to the Burning River Foundation, which makes grants to local environmental organizations. The festival, held in recent years at the former U.S. Coast Guard station on Whisky Island at the river’s mouth, includes a ceremonial lighting of floating pyres to commemorate the efforts to clean up the region’s waterways since the Cuyahoga fire in 1969. At first a small event, drawing just a few hundred people, the Burning River Festival has grown into one of Cleveland’s favorite summer gatherings, with local food vendors, bands, and, of course, plenty of beer. The event has garnered corporate sponsors beyond the brewery, including PNC Bank and Squire Sanders, which are eager to attach their names to the environmental cause.

As it gathered momentum, the Burning River Festival also gained the support of David Beach’s EcoCity Cleveland, the organization dedicated to bioregionalism and sustainability. In 2007, EcoCity merged with the Natural History Museum, creating the Center for Regional Sustainability, which now goes by the name GreenCityBlueLake. Still guided by Beach’s vision of an eco-city, GreenCityBlueLake is a clearinghouse for all news environmental, a cheerleader for improved public policy, and an active participant in the city’s effort to follow through on the Sustainable Cleveland 2019 plan. Significantly, Cleveland set 2019 as a milestone in the drive toward sustainability because it will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the river fire, a year when, according to the plan, the city hopes to “inspire the world with its transformation to a bright green city on a blue lake.” Launched by a gathering of political, environmental, and business leaders in 2009, the Sustainable Cleveland program has mostly served to publicize the goals of sustainability, and some progress has been made, such as making the city more bike-friendly and building support for regional wind power generation. So, for these and many other reasons, including improved air and water quality, the anniversary of the fire may bring reflection on how far Cleveland has come from the depths of its crisis in the urban environment. And rightly so. But clearly Cleveland, like all of urban America, is only beginning its transformation to a sustainable city where the production and consumption of energy, food, and other resources puts less of a strain on the natural and social environment. As we work to accelerate the transition to sustainability, surely we can learn much from critical reflection on the events and structures that slowed progress during urban America’s last, long transition.9