XXVI. A New Face to the Future

Erieview has been the key word in Cleveland in the postwar renaissance that grew out of widespread public dissatisfaction with the city’s downtown appearance, turned seedy by a long, tough depression and the deleterious effects of wartime austerity. By 1945, Tom Johnson’s City on a Hill had slumped into a frowzy condition that aroused clamorous calls for action.

The answer, after a painfully long period of self-examination and debate, was the undertaking of the Erieview Project, said to be the most extensive, most ambitious urban renewal program in the United States; a program that gave the city a new downtown skyline by the mid-1960s and promised much more in the way of rehabilitation-in-depth of the central city.

Erieview was related, in its public nature and in its scope, to the earlier makeover of downtown by Mayor Johnson’s Group Plan in the opening decades of the modern century. The Group Plan had been a large-scale municipal attack against the civic deterioration that had established cankerous slums in a large section downtown north of Superior Avenue, along St. Clair and Lakeside avenues and reaching from Ontario Street eastward, beyond East 9th Street. Some of the oldest homes and building blocks in the city crowded those shabby neighborhoods, and the total effect was that of a vast rookery in which lawlessness and disease were free to flourish.

While the young city pondered several plans of action, there were developments that helped to solve the problem. The federal, county, and municipal governments simultaneously reached the point of requiring new buildings, and all three planned to construct monumental structures in the baroque style of the day. But Clevelanders who visited the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 were taken by the outstanding architecture and arrangement of a collection of white buildings which were the inspiration of the famous architect, Daniel H. Burnham. They showed the French influence in maintaining equal height and a related design of their cornices, and they were grouped around the greensward of an open mall.

Cleveland enthusiastically adopted the Burnham Group Plan as its own. Burnham was chosen to promote the plan and to adapt it to the site of the downtown slum area in Cleveland. He was assisted by Arnold W. Brunner and John M. Carrere, leading Cleveland architects. The resulting redevelopment program which was undertaken by the Johnson administration, beginning in 1905, was the largest-scale example of city planning the United States had seen since Pierre Charles L’Enfant designed Washington, D.C., in 1791. The Group Plan cleared 101.4 acres of its man-made ugliness, trucked away the rubble, and built in its place one of the finest collection of public buildings in any city in the nation. This stately group was arranged around a forty-acre park called the Mall-an impressive, open plaza extending from Rockwell Avenue on the south to the very edge of the bluff overlooking the lakefront. This northernmost section of the Mall originally was to have been the site of the Union Terminal, but the Van Sweringens took the matter into their own hands and placed it on Public Square. In so doing, they probably rendered a favor to the city, which now has an open, unimpeded view of Lake Erie, the slips for the ocean craft that now crowd into Cleveland’s harbor, the busy east-west shoreway, and the huge Municipal Stadium. All of these lakefront attractions, incidentally, were built on fill land which was created by the city to the north of the railroad tracks that grabbed the choice shoreline acreage during the nineteenth century.

The Mall was given a face-lifting and made more utilitarian at the same time in the early 1960s. The cavernous Public Auditorium, even with its great hall and underground exposition space, had been made semi-obsolete by large new halls in other cities; and in order to enlarge the city’s convention center, that section of the Mall from St. Clair Avenue to Lakeside Avenue was excavated for construction of a fourteen-million-dollar underground hall and garage. The addition made the Cleveland facility the largest municipal exposition hall in the United States. It also opened the way to the beautification of the Mall itself. The same Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., who had given the bulk of the family fortune to the Art Museum also left a large amount of money in the hands of a group of trustees headed by Harold T. Clark with orders to dispose of the money in the most beneficial civic direction they might choose to follow. Clark and his associates decided to invest two million dollars to top the Mall with a block-long pool and ten splashing fountains. The redesigned Mall, completed in 1964, gave Cleveland one of the loveliest public parks of any city in the world; a spectacle of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer dimensions by day or night, summer or winter. It is a setting especially appreciated by camera experts in search of a classic background, lunch-hour strollers, and the hundreds of thousands of persons who attend events in Public Hall. This is Tom L. Johnson’s Group Plan brought up to date; a magnificent mall provided at last with a jewel worthy of its setting.

Close by this outstanding achievement of planners of an earlier decade was a contrasting deterioration that embarrassed the city’s pride. The area adjacent to Public Hall, from East 6th Street eastward, remained a sorry slum. And the gateway avenue to the city from the lakefront, East 6th Street, a broad avenue which begins at the water’s edge and rises to the higher altitude of the triangular bluff on which the central city rests, was pocked with skid row saloons, empty storefronts, sagging buildings plastered with political signs, and doorways filled with empty bottles. Bleary-eyed castoffs moved tentatively and spraddle-legged through their wine-colored haze up and down the blighted street, and the air of defeat hung over everything. East 9th Street was a blemish that disfigured the most conspicuous part of downtown Cleveland; a strange lapse, considering the importance of the street in the city’s plan of movement. Inexplicably, the people who planned Cleveland and the people who developed Cleveland refused to believe that anybody in the town ever would be so neurotic as to want to travel in a north-south direction at any time. Their inability to reckon with the unpredictability of future generations is what made East 9th Street strategically important because it is a no-nonsense street, running south from the lake through the heart of downtown. It is made to order for the modern-day eccentrics who like north-south movement. On the other hand, downtown is laid out with a profusion of wide, straight avenues running from east to west and back again.

So many north-south travelers wound up crashing into solid stone walls and walking through plate glass windows of the storefronts that Cleveland developed a distinctive group of arcades to carry the north-south pedestrian traffic safely through buildings barring their way. The most famous of these arcades is the building known simply as the Arcade, which in reality is two ten-story buildings, one on Euclid Avenue and the other on Superior Avenue, joined by a four-hundred-foot esplanade under a glass-domed roof. The Arcade in 1961 was placed on the federal government’s list of historic American buildings.

Only two streets in the downtown area, East 9th and West 3rd, will take travelers to the waterfront, and of these two, only East 9th penetrates the southern part of downtown. West 3rd ends abruptly when it reaches Superior Avenue after a short, but gallant, uphill run of four city blocks.

One reason for the decayed condition of East 9th Street was the gradual decline over the years in the use of the downtown lakefront by shipping interests, prior to the rejuvenating effect of the St. Lawrence Seaway. The old paddle-wheel passenger boats that used to ply the Great Lakes, linking Cleveland with other inland ports, became obsolete and too costly to operate. They gradually were retired from service, and the pier at the foot of East 9th Street which once had accommodated such vessels as the Seeandbee, the City of Cleveland, the City of Detroit, the City of Buffalo, the City of Erie, and the Goodtime, became a lonely, little-used wharf. Except for fishermen and spooners, there was very little traffic on the lower part of East 9th and the street, not surprisingly, fell ill. Clevelanders winced whenever they looked its way, but there was no community urge to administer medication until the St. Lawrence Seaway in the 1950s restored the city to a position of importance once again as a port of general commerce, not just an iron ore receiving port.

Small ocean craft had been touching at Cleveland for close to a hundred years, thanks to the Welland Canal, but the Seaway opened the way to the larger ships and a more profitable maritime commerce. The picturesque long ore boats suddenly were joined by ships from all parts of the world. Their arrival in Cleveland not only provided an exciting new silhouette on Lake Erie’s waters, but they also presented an urgent need for development of the neglected waterfront. Only eight berths were available for use by the oceangoing ships when the Seaway opened in 1959. Eight years later, the downtown port could accommodate twenty-one ships at a time. The pre-Seaway average of fifty-eight thousand tons a year handled by the Cleveland port had risen in 1965 to 531,000 tons, and the city was still expanding its facilities to meet the requirements of ships that suddenly were converging on Cleveland from all parts of the world.

The St. Lawrence Seaway did something more than simply create a world port out of Cleveland. It restored the waterfront as an important part of the city and, as a side effect, it introduced a picturesque new element to the downtown scene-throngs of sailors from foreign ships who gave the downtown streets a badly needed touch of romance. The revival of the lakefront turned the city’s eyes to the dismaying sight of East 9th Street and all the other dilapidated neighborhoods along the eastern bluff of downtown, reaching all the way back to Superior Avenue and even deeper. This is the area that came to be identified as the target for urban renewal; the area that was called Erieview.

Erieview, launched in 1960 by Mayor Anthony J. Celebrezze, contemplated the rebuilding of some 163 acres-a task that involved the destruction of 237 substandard buildings, the erection of 4.7 million feet of new office space, and a boost in the number of downtown dwelling units from 1180 to 5500 or more. All this was to be done at an estimated cost of $280 million over a period of fifteen years. The designer of Erieview, Architect I. M. Pei of New York, presented his plans for the reconstruction project on November 22, 1960, and they were approved by the city’s planning commission three days later- breathtaking speed in a city that likes to move with painful deliberation, and a tipoff to the civic enthusiasm engendered by the proposals to return Cleveland to the ranks of progressive American cities.

The bulldozers moved to the attack early in 1961. The buildings they toppled in the early stages of the renewal effort fell to the ground with hardly a protest from the people of the city and without any regrets-except, perhaps, the venerable old Central Armory on Lakeside Avenue. This ancient building, lacking only a drawbridge and moat to qualify as a setting for King Arthur, stood across from City Hall, and some of the more conservative members of the city administration dabbed at misty eyes to see it go. The medieval conservatism that has characterized so many Cleveland governments moved some onlookers to suggest that most of the mayors who have held office since 1935 would have been more at home with quarters in the armory styled for the Middle Ages than the relatively modern City Hall. But the old redoubt fell under Erieview’s crunching forward movement without anybody stepping forward with an offer to man its walls and towers.

So many buildings had been toppled and cleared away by the middle 1960s that visitors to the city, lacking background information, invariably were startled by the scene of destruction. Some of them with a more humanitarian streak had to be restrained from summoning the Red Cross to the scene of obvious disaster. Even in its early stages, however, Erieview has given Cleveland a new skyline and a wholly new orientation toward the long-neglected lakefront. The first building in the urban renewal project was a forty-story dark-green skyscraper given the name of Erieview Tower. Even before the building, second tallest in the city, was completed at its East 9th Street and Lakeside Avenue site, it was a subject of controversy and heated discussion. Its
forty stories of dark-green glass and darker-green vertical siding are unrelieved by any glitter or sparkle of adornment. But where some saw only gloom in this rectangular giant, there were enthusiasts who hailed it as a thing of subdued beauty. In direct contrast, the new thirty-two-story Federal Building, also of glass wall construction, stands opposite the Erieview Tower, on the other side of East gth Street. This government skyscraper has stainless steel facing that gleams and flashes in the sunlight. A lot of pedestrian-taxpayers naturally wondered aloud what kind of metal was used, and federal spokesmen went to great pains to quash the story that it was solid silver.

At any rate, Cleveland is in upheaval in the 1960s and a new city gradually is emerging from the rubble of an exciting history. With sprawling educational institutions like Cleveland State University and Cuyahoga Community College becoming major installations in the downtown area, and urban renewal accelerating its pace, the familiar old outline of the city will grow dimmer by the month. Someday, experts predict, Cleveland will be the core of a megalopolis that is said to be building along the axis extending from Detroit to Pittsburgh. It even may turn out to be the Best Location in the Nation, who knows? But even if it doesn’t scale that lofty promotional peak, it still deserves to go into the books as one of the most interesting locations you’ll find anywhere-and that, in the minds of the real experts, is the greater distinction, by far.