Cleveland

A Metropolitan Reader

W. Dennis Keating, Norman Krumholz, David C. Perry

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781612770864
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

After enjoying exceptional growth at the turn of the last century, Cleveland's fortunes, like that of many metropolitan centers, have sharply declined. How much of this change is due to characteristics of growth and development, the outmigration of population and investment' technological advances, and the changing racial composition of the population? On the eve of its bicentennial, Cleveland serves as a paradigm of American urbanization by providing lessons regarding urban America, our communities, and ourselves. Cleveland, A Metropolitan Reader emphasizes the political economy, social development, and history of Cleveland from 1796 to the present. One of the oldest communities in the United States, it is constantly remaking itself-serving as a model of innovative transformation for other industrial cities. The contributors to this volume, many of whom are contemporary urban scholars, address current issues through an interdisciplinary collection of essays. Also included are commentaries written by the leaders of Cleveland-those now actively working to transform the city. Although each has its own topic, all the essays examine ways in which technological restructuring and social relationships interact to generate a distinctively American set of urban problems. The authors of these essays do not necessarily agree on the nature of Cleveland's problems or on appropriate solutions, but together they provide a broad perspective on the reality of a great city's growth, decline, and reinvention. An ideal book for introductory urban studies courses, Cleveland, A Metropolitan Reader will be of interest to scholars of urban studies, urban planning, history, and politics as well as to those generally interested in Cleveland, the Midwest, and the broad range of challenges facing most American cities as we enter the 21st century.

Part 1

CLEVELAND

Composite American Urbanism

Introduction

FOR THE EDITORS of this book, Cleveland is not an object of temporal curiosity or a select or special urban phenomenon. Rather, we view Cleveland as more general than select, a community with a history so representative of urban life in America as to be a heuristic, teaching all of us not only about the city of Cleveland and its environs but also about ourselves and the particular city or community we come from. Historians Carol Poh Miller and Robert Wheeler suggest that Cleveland “is a composite of the issues and movements that generally constitute American urban history.”¹ This part of the book embraces the Miller and Wheeler thesis, providing an overview of the history and some of the key characteristics of urban social formation that serve as a signature of the American city in general and of Cleveland in particular.

Central among these characteristics are privatism, economic restructuring, and ethnicity and race. The following chapter traces the practices of privatism² in Cleveland from the arrival of Moses Cleaveland, who as an investor and representative of the Connecticut Land Company established the first settlement as part of a land speculation strategy, to the present-day practices of property speculation most dramatically portrayed in the array of new high-rise office buildings lining the streets of the downtown core. Cleveland was and remains a good example of the importance of property to the urban development process in America.

The chapter is also concerned with the long term patterns of economic restructuring found in Cleveland. The economic transformation of the region over the past two centuries is just as instructive as the city’s privatistic history of land speculation and entrepreneurship. Indeed, structural changes in Cleveland’s economy, as it moved from mercantile to industrial and, now, to struggling “post-industrial” economy, have served as bellwether conditions of American urbanism. Cleveland is a clear example of the ways in which American cities have been both beneficiaries and victims of global, as well as national, changes in capitalism.

The remainder of the chapter introduces the reader to the long and storied history of Cleveland’s ethnic and racial diversity: a city that quickly became an “ethnic mosaic” during the nineteenth century has turned into a place of racial segregation in the twentieth century. The notion that the American city can be a “melting pot” has been tried and challenged in Cleveland.

Notes

1. Carol Poh Miller and Robert Wheeler, Cleveland: A Concise History, 1796–1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 1.

2. For a more detailed introduction to the notion of privatism, see Stephen Elkin, City and Regime in the American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), chap. 1; Sam Bass Warner, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Growth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), chap. 1.

Cleveland: Journey to Maturity

David C. Perry

IN EARLY MARCH 1982, the staff in Mayor George Voinovich’s office was delighted: for the second time in recent years Cleveland had been declared an All America City. National recognition of this sort so soon after the city’s 1978 bankruptcy and the long-term economic decline that had prompted pundits to dub the city “the mistake by the lake” was welcome news to Voinovich—the hand-picked candidate of a reinvigorated civic elite. But what did the National League of Cities mean by declaring Cleveland an “All America City”? The proclamation cited the city for its “enactment of major government reform, streamlining City Council and implementation of a comprehensive fiscal recovery strategy, and restoration of a downtown performing arts and entertainment complex.”¹ The mayor interpreted this award as recognition of a process in which “public and private sectors continue to work together to solve [the city’s] problems.”² Other observers had long viewed Cleveland as a city representative of much, if not all, of America and the nation’s history of urban change. The purpose of this introduction is not to provide the city with another boosterish accolade—whether Cleveland is an All America City is not as interesting as the notion that the city is representative of the full panoply of experiences comprising American urban change. As one of the nation’s oldest middle-size cities, Cleveland’s early existence is rooted in its emergence as a postcolonial outpost of economic extraction and land investment—a new version of what historian Sam Bass Warner has called the “private city.”³ In the nineteenth century, Cleveland was at the forefront of national development, as break-bulk cities such as Cleveland exhibited structural entrepreneurship in the shift from a mercantile to an industrial economic base. This shift attracted legions of ethnic immigrants, as well as new migrants, both African American and Appalachian white, from the South. Twentieth-century Cleveland has been no less instructive as an example of urban change: the city has evidenced a long and storied period of racial and ethnic unrest and economic decline and restructuring.

Thus, although the notion of Cleveland as the All America City may be excessively hyperbolic, viewing Cleveland as a highly representative example of the dominant features of American urbanism is reasonable. A more general version of this thesis has been put forth by historians Carol Poh Miller and Robert Wheeler, who suggest that “Cleveland … is a composite of the issues and movements that generally constitute American urban history.”⁴ In joining Miller and Wheeler I do not want to leave the impression that “it all happened” in Cleveland, but I will try to show that certain salient features of American urbanism are key to the city’s development. Among them are, first, the American city as first and foremost a product of profit making⁵ or urbanism as the communal representative of the national ideology of privatism;⁶ second, the city as the spatial center of the structuring and restructuring of the national economy;⁷ and third, the city as contentious, not always a melting pot of races and ethnicities.⁸

The urban political economy of the United States, though not reducible to these characteristics of social formation—privatism, restructuring, ethnicity, and race—is certainly well represented by such features. The particular way each is found in the history of Cleveland tells us much about the development of cities in the nation, as well as about Cleveland.

The Propertied Roots of Privatism: The Case of the Western Reserve and Early Cleveland

THE PRIVATE CITY

After describing, with some emotional effect, the twentieth-century city as a “picture of endlessly repeated failures,” historian Sam Bass Warner, in his classic urban treatise The Private City, goes on to suggest: “The twentieth century failure of urban America to create a humane environment is the story of an enduring tradition of privatism in a changing world. The story is a complicated one. It doesn’t separate itself nicely into good and evil, times of victory and times of defeat; rather it is the story of ordinary men and commonplace events that have accumulated over time to produce the great wealth and great failure of twentieth-century American cities. Moreover the story is a long one, reaching back to the eighteenth century, when our tradition first was set in its modern form.”⁹

This tradition of privatism, ingrained in the American fabric of development from the beginning, encapsulates the ideology and experience of the earliest European immigrants. In the main, immigration to the New World was not a spiritual journey but a material one. The new lands of America represented a potential that Europe could not supply—access to property and material wealth. The journey to America was, from the beginning, a search for “streets paved with gold.” As Warner puts it, “The first purpose of the citizen is the private search for wealth; the goal of a city is to be a community of private money makers.”¹⁰

From the colonial beginnings, the streets of the American city and the property and buildings abutting them were commodified—placing property rights at the center of urban life and politics. Such a trend was so important that it moved historian Howard Chudacoff to observe: “Americans have always considered the management and disposal of land and buildings as sacred civil rights.”¹¹

Often the practices of privatism and its embodiment in the property exchanges created a politics of urban development that presaged the highly innovative speculative practices of urban development. The early frontier towns were an extension of the property-righteous development of the colonial era. They came into existence as an enterprise of the process leading to “the private ownership of property, but with a difference: Most of the new towns were not developed by settlers coming to untitled and previously unowned land (unowned, that is, by Europeans). They came, instead, to land that was owned by land-development companies. These land-development companies were, in effect, wholesalers of land. That the western lands should be settled was national policy, and Congress sold these lands in great blocks to privately owned land companies with an understanding that the companies, in turn, would re-sell to small buyers.”¹²

The “wholesaling” of land was a principal practice of early privatistic urban development, and it was extremely profitable.¹³ More particularly, this practice meant that Congress sold great tracts of the western wilderness to private land companies, which in turn platted the land, packaged it as “cities,” and resold it to individual buyers. As a result, both the government and the land companies made money off the “city land” often before a shovel had been turned or a full-time resident had arrived. From the very beginning, therefore, frontier development set in motion the politics of speculative urban development, characterized by boosterism, land transfers, and the psychology of risk and “quick profits.”¹⁴ As one newspaper advertisement put it: “Would you make money? (asked an advertisement luring settlers to Columbus, Nebraska).… Find then the site of a city and buy the farm that it is to be built on. How many regret the non-purchase of that lot in New York, that block in Buffalo, that quarter section in Omaha? Once these properties could be bought for a song … fortunes (are to be made) that way.”¹⁵

THE WESTERN RESERVE

There is perhaps no better example of the speculative practice of early urban development than the first frontier activity in the Western Reserve that resulted in the siting and early settlement of what was to become the city of Cleveland. The Western Reserve was a piece of land of over 2.5 million acres, stretching 120 miles west into the state of Ohio from the Pennsylvania border and 80 miles south from Lake Erie. The Reserve was originally part of the lands claimed as part of the colony of Connecticut. After the revolutionary war, Connecticut, in an agreement with Congress, joined other former colonies in giving up its claim to noncontiguous frontier properties, with the exception of the Western Reserve. For a long time the Reserve had been known as “New Connecticut,” but soon it was called the “Western Reserve” of Connecticut.

FRONTIER AS LAND SPECULATION

During the early 1790s Connecticut sought unsuccessfully to arrive at some plan for the Reserve. But by the middle of the decade the land remained unplanned, “untitled and (especially) unprofitable.”¹⁶ In 1795, the General Assembly of Connecticut joined most other states in a move to add quick monies to the state treasury by placing the millions of Reserve acres on the market. The land was purchased within weeks by a newly formed company called the Connecticut Land Company for the promised sum of $1.2 million. One of the members of the board organized to manage the company was Moses Cleaveland, a veteran of the revolutionary war who had continued to dabble in the state militia after the war, eventually rising to the rank...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Lessons from Cleveland
• Part 1. Cleveland: Composite American Urbanism
• Part 2. History: Growth to Decline
• Part 3. Economy: Roots to Restructuring
• Part 4. Politics: Conflict and Reform
• Part 5. Governance: Public and Private
• Part 6. Neighborhoods: City and Suburbs
• Part 7. Race and Discrimination
• Part 8. Urban Redevelopment: Policy, Planning, and Prospects
• Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index