Abstract
Urban reinvention is as old as cities themselves—it is not difficult to imagine the ruling classes of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro competing for labor and capital 4,000 years ago in the Indus Valley. More recently, as asserted by Peter Eisinger in “The Politics of Bread and Circuses” (Eisinger, 2000), many late 20th century urban reinvention efforts coalesced around publicly funded big-ticket developments aimed primarily at boosting tourism, while eliding local residential needs. And, while the 1950s and 1960s urban renewal projects were designed for local residents, they effectively replaced lower-class residential areas with higher-class residential areas and commercial districts. Nonetheless, America’s metropolitan areas that do not at least try to rebrand or reinvent themselves during economic decline run the risk of other cities and suburbs working unopposed to contribute to the decline.
J. Mark Souther’s Believing in Cleveland provides an in-depth examination of that city’s experiences with reinvention efforts throughout the mid-20th century. The main theme is how Cleveland’s elites dealt with the image of being America’s urban punching bag as a fast-declining city, and how this perhaps unfair designation led to a civic inferiority complex that informed local decision making accordingly. An urban-legendary fire on the river bisecting the city in the late 1960s did not help Cleveland’s fast-declining reputation among major cities.
Often vexed by stories or photos picked up by the Associated Press and sent around the world to negatively characterize my hometown of Detroit (see the 1984 World Series celebrations), I had long wondered what it would take to fill the ruts of well-worn, exploitative narratives shaping my city nationally and internationally. What civic and social improvements would best serve to countervail Detroit’s canon of zombie stories, or Cleveland’s for that matter? Believing in Cleveland offers an as-it-happened examination of attempts, successes, and failures to reverse negative narratives, while simultaneously trying to address very real economic and social decline.
Souther eschews characterizing Cleveland’s postwar, 20th century experience as teeter-totter decline and revival. Rather, Cleveland’s forces of change and corresponding adjustments, like any other large city, are more nuanced than hyperbolic journalism that often overstates successes or dampens perceived progress. As made clear in the title, Souther’s general thesis is that Cleveland’s succession of civic projects are more accurately characterized as steps in managing its decline, and less so as efforts to fully reverse its downward course.
Like Great Lakes neighbors Detroit, Buffalo, and Toledo, Cleveland’s experience is as a standard-issue legacy city, as a former 19th and early 20th century industrial powerhouse beset with postwar population loss and industrial disinvestment, compounded by entrenched issues of race, labor, and politics. Not surprisingly, Cleveland’s 20th century development history as told here involves growth coalitions, foundations, utilities, community groups, city councils at war with mayors, tsk-tsking city planners, and even some major projects that actually got built.
Believing in Cleveland substantively covers development efforts in response to decline from roughly 1940 to 1980. It offers a deep dive into the decidedly pluralistic political economy guiding local affairs in “The Forest City” during that time. It includes Cleveland’s efforts to plan and finance a downtown subway system loop as early as 1942, and its plan for Erieview, a downtown revitalization effort marketed as Cleveland’s own Rockefeller Center, which competed with the University Circle project for federal urban renewal dollars. Erieview was a multiacre project in the heart of the central business district, aimed at reviving a dreary downtown, and took priority over the University Circle project as ordered by the Celebrezze administration of the 1950s. The University Circle project was a combined expansion and integration of Cleveland’s eds and meds campus on the east end of the city with the neighboring Black Hough district. Both were built largely as planned, but with widely varying opinions on exactly who each project benefited.
As space limits discussion of all postwar projects discussed in Believing in Cleveland, Erieview and the University Circle Project serve as thematic templates for others that followed—namely, projects aimed at mitigating decline downtown. For example, a 1970s-era plan to transform the park on the Cuyahoga River where Moses Cleaveland landed in 1796 into a tourist destination was led by a local department store mogul, who feared declining business in his downtown flagship store. While Settler’s Landing was not built as originally envisioned, the park was saved from being sold to junkyard interests and peripheral development around the park began the tourist-destination development of Cleveland’s Flats.
A fascinating middle chapter serving as the fulcrum of the work discusses the administration of Carl Stokes, the first elected African American mayor of a major American city, who, according to Souther, “disrupted the smug, ossified leadership and heralded the rise of a politics of image that would make the coming decade” (p. 94). Stokes, elected as a uniter the year after deadly rioting in the largely Black Hough district in 1966, quickly lost favor among the electorate in 1968 when he reassigned White police officers away from another deadly uprising in neighboring Glenville. Nonetheless, Stokes’ ambitious agenda was administered by a stable of young appointees without political baggage, promoting a new campaign and slogan named “Cleveland: NOW!” In addition to brick and mortar projects, Stokes pursued, like no predecessor before him, social service and job training programs for city residents. Stokes also hired a then little-known urban planner named Norman Krumholz to assist him in making equity planning a guiding principle, after years of downtown-driven improvements to the city.
The book’s title is the name of one of many civic comeback campaigns mounted in the postwar era, and this one, tellingly, came about only 10 years after Cleveland was designated “America’s Comeback City” by civic booster narratives. Evidently, either urban comebacks are not what they used to be or, perhaps more accurately, were never based on actual metrics. Indeed, Detroit’s litany of civic slogans includes the 1960s’ “Model City” (a federal designation), the 1970s’ “The Renaissance City,” the 1980s’ “Say Nice Things About Detroit,” the 1990s’ “It’s a Great Time to Be in Detroit,” and, yes, this century’s “Detroit: America’s Greatest Comeback City.”
Believing in Cleveland’s main contribution is as a first-rate work of urban political and redevelopment history from World War II through the populist Kucinich administration in the 1970s, including an epilogue covering more recent events. Often, detailed histories such as these serve as tendentious Rorschach tests of the author’s biases. Souther avoids this by carefully integrating the responses of numerous stakeholders (community groups, elected officials and appointees, business, and labor) to major development initiatives, and letting their biases have the last word.
In hindsight, at least one partial remedy to Cleveland’s woes was regionalism. While it is difficult at best to explain a history of a nonevent, it seems remarkable that, given the depth of source material and ample mentions of the city/suburban divide, Souther was unable to turn up any formal discussions of it, or chose not to include those that he did. Indeed, there is only a single passing mention of Greater Cleveland’s Metropolitan Planning Organization, the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency, formed in 1968 under national metropolitan planning organization enabling legislation. Given that America’s golden age of regionalism was the 1960s and 1970s, a time central to the book, any in-depth history of considered policy responses to decline in a major American metro area is incomplete without it.
Despite this, Souther has most capably risen to his challenge of writing a book about a major city that “moved beyond the assumption of a periodization of urban growth, decline and renaissance to consider the tension between decline and renewal” (p. 4). Instead of allowing journalistic convention and chamber of commerce sloganeering to have the last word on Cleveland’s urban health, Souther offers a meticulously researched and integrated work of urban history, political economy, and economic development on what was once the fifth largest city in the United States, if not “The Best Location in the Nation.”
And yes, oil-slickened debris on the Cuyahoga River really did catch fire in 1969, for the 13th and last time (Ohio History Connection, n.d.). Previous fires on the Cuyahoga barely caused a (flaming) ripple in the public consciousness, but that year, the American press needed another fresh hell to hasten piling on to urban decline. To the extent that any good came of it, it seemed to be the last straw for an environmentally minded Nixon administration, which in 1970 consolidated enforcement of environmental laws under the newly created Environmental Protection Agency, followed by the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972.
Would that similar mainstream journalistic obloquy was applied to Southern California’s fast-sprawling cities during the now year-round wildfire season, or to Houston’s use of freeways as flood drainage channels, preventing evacuation orders in advance of hurricanes? With regard to sound urban redevelopment policy in the United States, this would give us something more to believe in.