11. Decades of Crisis, 1940-1970

The 1940s and 1950s were years of creating new or renewed dreams for urban America to replace those of the 1920s that were shattered by the Great Depression. There were continuities of earlier trends, such as the urban migration of African-Americans and the suburban migration of whites, which yielded neither to war nor economic changes. However, the institutions and patrons of University Circle were as unaware as the elected officials of the city of Cleveland and most of America in recognizing the impending collision between those dreams and the underlying trends, and they faced a series of crises as a result.

One great renewed dream for Cleveland was the replanning of the city in order to provide well-defined growth and development, and to protect the presumed desirable qualities of residential neighborhoods. The City Plan Commission of 1912 had never produced a thoroughgoing city plan, and by the 1940s Cleveland was facing increasingly severe problems of housing deterioration, increasing automobile traffic, and hazardous industrial pollution. In 1942, following the recommendations of a special committee, Cleveland voters passed a charter amendment creating a new City Planning Commission. Under the leadership of Director John T. Howard, a comprehensive city plan was completed in 1949 that looked toward rationalizing the existing city rather than reforming it.^[1]

The identification of “slum” areas (concentrations of presumptive substandard housing) and their association with an increasing Black population was clearly a major factor in the city’s renewed concern with planning. The committee report which recommended the new commission spoke of “the slow insidious rot” radiating from the primary Black residential area (along Central Avenue), and in 1941 the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce issued a statement blaming the city’s recent population decline in part on the “proximity of races having a depreciatory effect on [housing] values.”^[2] The Cleveland City Planning Commission did not mince any words in describing why clearing slums was necessary:

They are unhealthy — and all of us pay the resulting public health bill. They breed crime and delinquency — and all of us pay the resulting police, court, and prison costs. They are fire traps — and all of us pay many times more for the fire department costs here than in better residential areas.^[3]

The creation of a comprehensive city plan which had in large part emerged out of a concern with the concentration of Blacks in slums (so-called by the planners) strongly encouraged Cleveland to embrace the federal Housing Act of 1949. The act provided funding for both new housing and slum clearance, and remained the basis of federal policy into the 1960s. Cleveland became one of the leading slum-clearance cities in the nation, often using the imperative of new highway construction (intended to reduce traffic congestion) as the rationale for demolishing structures in vast sections of the Central Avenue district, as well as other areas. Construction of new housing and public facilities seldom followed demolition as quickly as the new interstate highways, which were designed to serve business, industry, and suburban commuters. Displaced Blacks found the nearby Hough area to be the most accessible alternative residential area, and it quickly became overcrowded in the 1950s.^[4] John T. Howard argued in 1949, on the adoption of the comprehensive plan that

[We] can’t have any slum clearance, of course, unless we build some public housing first — to rehouse those low-income families that must be displaced. Their inability to pay a fair rent would surely result in creating another slum.^[5]

But Howard’s argument was almost completely ignored by the city.

Recognition that something was seriously wrong with a system which professed to be planning a better city, but seemed more successful at destroying much of the community life of some of the most needy residents, was one of the major forces energizing the civil rights movement in Cleveland. Although the city appeared to be a leader in promoting positive race relations when it established a Community Relations Board in 1945 “to promote amicable relations among the racial and cultural groups within the community,” the effective policy of city (and suburban) government was to promote segregation in housing and schools.^[6] During the 1960s, when the southern-born civil rights movement came north, Cleveland struggled with the consequences of its failure to treat African-Americans as full citizens.^[7] The Circle shared in both the failure and its consequences.

Middle-class white Clevelanders, on the other hand, generally had their dreams of the 1940s fulfilled. The housing shortage which followed World War II was relieved substantially by emigration to new housing in the suburbs, where Blacks were either explicitly excluded or unwelcome. Parma, south of Cleveland, grew from 20,000 to more than 110,000 in the three decades after 1950, and during the 1960s the suburban population of Cuyahoga County surpassed that of Cleveland for the first time in more than a hundred years, The Veteran’s Administration and Federal Housing Administration programs of guaranteed housing loans for qualified buyers and qualified homes (Black buyers in Black neighborhoods were usually not regarded as qualified) assisted the process of suburbanization considerably.^[8]

The federal government had a more direct impact on the Circle through another veterans’ program which fulfilled the dreams of many Clevelanders: full tuition and expenses for four years of college-level education. Veterans of World War II provided the first and largest wave of students, but there followed smaller waves of veterans of Korea and Vietnam, and college education was never the same.

A whole generation of Americans came to regard a college degree as standard preparation for employment, and their children began to take it for granted. College was no longer primarily the preserve of those who could afford it or whose status demanded it, and (for a time, at least) the student body no longer fully shared the attitudes and values of the trustees, administrators, and faculty. Therefore campuses, including those of Western Reserve University and Case Institute, became more volatile and less predictable intellectually, socially, and politically.^[9] The student activism of the 1960s was nurtured by this environment.

The other major factor in the growth of higher education was also the direct result of the largesse of the federal government: support for research. During World War II the government had delegated various weapons-development and other military programs to college and university campuses, allocating millions of dollars for salaries and supplies. With few exceptions, academia had never seen funding on such a scale. Some programs, such as those which created electronic computers and atomic bombs, consumed the research lives of professors and often launched the careers of graduate students.^[10]

When the war ended, some of these projects were considered vital to national defense and were continued: but in any case academia had tasted the powerful elixir of federal support and longed to continue it. Dreams of a National Science Foundation came out of the war experience, and after Congress established it In 1950 American universities grew more and more to depend upon federal research monies. What was happening on campus was a paradigm for America as a whole: from the end of World War II through the 1960s reformers and advocates of change generally looked to the federal government for initiatives. The Circle certainly experienced the effects of federal support and intervention. The culminating event of the era, the federation of Western Reserve University and Case Institute of Technology, was in large part the result of federal pressure. On the other hand, private philanthropy continued to provide significant leadership and direction in the Circle, so that its institutions to some extent resisted dependence on government solutions to its emerging problems.^[11]

The major figures mediating the forces of change in the Circle in the 1950s and 1960s were T. Keith Glennan and John S. Mills, presidents of Case (1947-1966) and Western Reserve (1950-1966). Both were capable administrators, with Millis possessing the personal charm and quiet intellect which helped unify a university containing several discordant units, and Glennan having a forceful and visionary style that was instrumental in pushing Case toward the rapidly advancing fronts of technology and science.

Glennan and Millis worked in harmony from the time of Millis’ arrival at Reserve, and quickly began discussions on the economies of sharing buildings and staff.^[12] Although those matters remained at the heart of their association, their interests soon began to deal with the larger problems of the Circle and of the city of Cleveland.

There were two major issues to be faced. One, inherited unsolved from the 1920s was the matter of planning future land purchases and institutional growth in the Circle. As one close observer of the early 1950s put it “Developments at University Circle … have been disturbing. They appear to be following no plan for the area as a whole and [are] not reconcilable with what the City Planning Commission has worked out as a rational plan for the future.”^[13]

A rapid increase in automobile traffic combined with the inadequacy of parking facilities was the most obvious pressure on land use. In 1951 a committee of Case Institute reported that “Access to and traffic flow on the campus are awkward and in some places dangerous,” and also noted that pedestrians were often on the streets because of inadequate walkways. Parking on the 19-acre Case campus was limited to 370 spaces, and there were double that number of requests for parking permits. Student parking overflowed onto the streets adjacent to the campus, contributing significantly to congestion in the Circle.^[14]

In part because of major expansions of existing institutions and in part because new institutions were moving in, the entire Circle faced similar problems throughout the 1950s. Mt. Zion Congregational Church, the Cleveland Meeting of the Religious Society of friends, Cleveland Heart Association and Cleveland Center on Alcoholism were new tenants in the Circle. Western Reserve University moved the entire Cleveland College from its original downtown site to campus, and in the 1950s built a new library on the East Boulevard site which it had acquired in the 1920s. The Cleveland Museum of Art erected a new wing, and the Cleveland Institute of Art constructed an entirely new building. The Cleveland Museum of Natural History completed the first of its series of buildings. In the 1960s the Garden Center. Cleveland Institute of Music, University Hospitals. Western Reserve Historical Society, and the Benjamin Rose Institute completed new buildings, and a number of dormitories were built by Reserve and Case.^[15]

The second major issue faced by Glennan and Millis was the rapid change of the Doan’s Corners business district and the Hough neighborhood adjacent to the Circle. At Doan’s Corners the defunct Elysium skating rink was torn down (1951). and the grand vaudeville and movie theaters at 105th and Euclid were deteriorating in the quality of their offerings although they still comprised an important entertainment center for Cleveland.^[16]

The Hough neighborhood was undergoing a dramatic demographic shift largely because Cleveland’s urban renewal projects — especially in the Central Avenue district of the city — were displacing thousands of Black families, who found that Hough was one of the few neighborhoods into which they could move. In 1950 Hough’s population was about 5% Black; in 1960 It was over 70% Black. (In contrast, the three census tracts that included the Circle and a few adjacent streets experienced an increase from 6% to 20% Black in the 1950s, a rate of change closer to that of Cleveland’s as a whole.) The population of the Hough neighborhood increased from 65,694 to 71,575, while the rate of overcrowding increased from 11% of the housing units to 21%. To accommodate this shift speculators bought single-family housing, often when white owners were scared into selling by “block-busting” realtors, and had it converted into apartments or rooming houses.^[17]

Thus, the prevailing view that Hough was “deteriorating” in the 1950s and 1960s could have been a recognition of poor housing conditions and overcrowding since the most detailed contemporary study of Hough in the 1950s affirmed that its citizens, Black and white, strongly identified with traditional American attitudes regarding neighborliness, education. government services, and community service.^[18] But the concerns which leaders of the Circle and of Cleveland expressed about the changes in Hough seem to have been more closely related to its change in racial composition than to the attitudes of the new and old residents.

The view that many Clevelanders had of Hough was articulated by Philip Porter, long-time reporter and editor with the Plain Dealer , the city’s leading newspaper. In 1976 he published a review of the city’s recent past which stated that by 1960

The Hough-Wade Park area, once a fashionable residential section full of big apartments and fine single homes had been deteriorating rapidly. Large numbers of uneducated blacks, whose jobs as cotton pickers in the South had been eliminated by automation, had moved into Hough-Wade Park, doubling up with relatives; and by the mid-fifties, this whole section was fast becoming a slum, and badly needed urban renewal.^[19]

The ignorance of African-American and urban history represented by this statement can hardly be exaggerated.

One route by which Glennan and Mills attempted to cope with these real and perceived changes in the Circle in the 1950s was the traditional one of engaging with the city’s business leaders as represented by the Growth Association (formerly the Chamber of Commerce). In 1955 the Midday Club (a private downtown club affiliated with the Greater Cleveland Growth Association) issued an invitation to various community leaders, including Glennan and Millis, to study the “various physical problems and deteriorating conditions which exist in the University Circle area.”^[20] The upshot of the meeting was that Millis agreed to chair an “action program committee” to study and develop a plan for Doan’s Corners, east Hough and Wade Park.^[21]

The Millis committee was a forerunner of the University-Euclid urban renewal project which was initiated by the city of Cleveland in 1960 as one of several districts in which the presumed substandard housing would be razed and replaced. The University-Euclid district included the Circle and went as far west as East 79th Street (all the way to 55th Street in the area between Chester and Euclid avenues), and was one of the largest urban-renewal districts not only in the city but the entire nation.

However, despite winning federal funds to carry out the University-Euclid project, little positive was done. Far more residential units were destroyed than created; and when the federal Commission on Civil Rights reviewed the early results in 1966 some members argued that the urban renewal program itself was one of the major causes of “the despondency and decay that exist in an acute form in Hough.”^[22] Neither the University-Euclid district nor Cleveland was alone in receiving such criticism, because by the latter 1960s it was widely recognized that much urban renewal in the United States was ill-conceived, and poorly instituted, and could be blamed for increasing the housing problem rather than solving it.^[23] The general failure of urban renewal in Cleveland is one of the factors which contributed to the persistence of strongly segregated housing patterns in Cleveland into the 1980s.^[24] But the sharing of a national failure was little solace to either the institutions in the Circle that had high expectation for the success of urban renewal or the residents of Hough whose neighborhood remained heir to many of the ills of modern America.

The frustrations of Hough boiled over in July 1966. On July 18 a brawl at Hough Avenue and East 79th Street erupted into a riot when police arrived. For the next several days sporadic arson, looting, vandalism and assaults occurred throughout Hough, and the National Guard was called in to quell the disturbance. By the time order was restored over 200 fires had burned out numerous commercial and residential buildings.

The Hough “riot” was one of several incidents of major racial violence in American cities during 1965-68. In Cleveland it probably strengthened the hand of those leaders who had been pressing for an effective political response to the needs of the city’s growing African-American population. Cleveland’s first Black mayor, Carl Stokes, was elected in 1967 with substantial support from the city’s businessmen.^[25]

At about the same time that they helped get the ball rolling on the University-Euclid project, Glennan and Millis were major figures in creating the University Circle Development Foundation, a more limited but ultimately far more successful attempt to cope with planning issues in the Circle. With Stanley Ferguson, director of University Hospitals, they had been discussing the possibility of developing a master plan for the Circle, a project last attempted in the 1920s.^[26] This time the catalyst was not the Growth Association, but another traditional actor in the Circle, a philanthropist of the Mather family, Mrs. Elizabeth Ring Mather.

Mrs. Mather’s husband, William G. Mather (l857-l951), was a leading figure in the Cleveland-Cliffs mining and shipping company. He had been one of the incorporators of the University Improvement Company; was a former chairman of the City Plan Committee of the Chamber of Commerce; was a trustee of the Regional [planning] Association of Cleveland; and had been president of the Cleveland Museum of Art (1933-49). Mr. Mather also built Gwinn (1908), an estate in Bratenahl (a residential community surrounded by Cleveland on the Lake Erie shoreline), which had some of the most exquisite landscaping in the Cleveland area.^[27]

In marrying William G. Mather in 1929 Mrs. Mather became heir to her husband’s interests in landscape and city planning, but she also had strong interests of her own. She was active with the elite women of the Garden Club of Cleveland who, having experience with formal gardens on their estates, raised money for and directed the construction of the Fine Arts Garden in front of the Museum of Art in the 1920s.^[28] Subsequently in 1930 she was a founder of the Garden Center of Greater Cleveland, and worked with a landscape architect in laying out the Center’s own gardens, located at the south end of the Wade Park lagoon.^[29]

Mrs. Mather’s interests in landscaping and planning continued over the years, and when her husband died in 1951 she used much of their wealth to create a foundation which directed some of its effort toward supporting Circle institutions and providing for their exterior maintenance. Typical of her endeavors was the “Ivy Project Committee” she headed, which a planted ivy along Western Reserve University property on Adelbert Road and Euclid Avenue.^[30]

Aware of the problems of congestion in the Circle and concerned with its appearance, Mrs. Mather had an inspiring meeting with the great urban planner Robert Moses when he and his wife visited Cleveland in the spring of 1955. After a tea party at which she expressed her concerns about haphazard planning in the Circle, Moses wrote to tell her she needed “impartial, expert, critical analysis.” He named some planners and architects which he thought could provide it, and stated that their services could cost $50,000-$100,000.^[31] Mrs. Mather passed Moses’ comments to President Millis, who told her that they were “almost the first specific suggestions as to the people and as to the cost that I have been able to get.”^[32]

After some consideration Mrs. Mather made a gift of $75,000 to Case Institute to finance the creation of a comprehensive plan of the Circle, “on the condition that Reserve would be a full partner in the project.”^[33] In 1956 Adams, Howard and Greeley, planners from Boston, were hired, and they reported eighteen months later with a document which recommended major changes in the traffic patterns of the Circle, substantial new construction, new parking facilities, and land acquisition to prepare for future developments. They also recommended the creation of a new institution to oversee the execution of the plan, to raise its own funds, to create and direct a private police force for the Circle, and to establish a bus service within the Circle. It was estimated that fulfilling the goals of the plan would cost $175 million and take 20 years.^[34]

The Circle institutions and their elite supporters responded positively to the Adams, Howard and Greeley plan and moved aggressively to implement it. The recommended umbrella organization was named the University Circle Development Foundation (UCDF), and was incorporated on October 15, 1957. It had a board of trustees of five men eminent in Circle institutions and Cleveland philanthropy, and the first members of UCDF were Western Reserve University, Case Institute of Technology, and University Hospitals.^[35] According to the recollections of President Millis, the small board was acceptable to the other Circle institutions, and even that small group deferred day-to-day decisions to the de facto power center of the Circle — the regular meetings of Millis, Glennan, and Ferguson.^[36]

The primary activity of UCDF as stated at its incorporation was to purchase, hold, and lease or resell land within the roughly triangular 488-acre area it defined as University Circle: bounded by Wade Park Avenue on the north, Fairhill Boulevard-E. 107th Street-Ansel Road on the west, and the New York Central and the Nickel Plate Railroad lines on the south and east. Secondarily UCDF was to engage in planning and development activities for its member organizations. Essentially the charter empowered UCDF to carry out the Adams, Howard and Greeley plan.^[37]

Other Circle institutions were brought into line with the UCDF fairly quickly, in large measure through the persuasive efforts of Harold T. Clark, an estate and probate lawyer who was then president of the Museum of Art. Clark also had served on the boards of several other Circle institutions. His interest in planning the Circle dated from the 1920s when he was a major figure in the work of the Cleveland Conference for Educational Cooperation, the earliest inter-institutional organization in the Circle.^[38] According to President Millis, Clark was able to influence otherwise intransigent figures, and got out the word that “this is the way to go, trust these people [in UCDF].”^[39]

Within a few months of UCDF’s founding nineteen boards of trustees of Circle institutions had voted to follow the master plan, and representatives of most of them became members of a UCDF advisory committee. Funding was mobilized to support administrative operations. In March 1958 the City Planning Commission reported favorably on the Adams, Howard and Greeley plan, and in June Neil Carothers, an engineer and administrator who had been active in Cleveland nonprofit activities, was appointed president of UCDF. The start-up phase was complete, and implementation began.^[40]

During the first five years of UCDF, Carothers was able to carry out significant pieces of the master plan. One of the earliest achievements was the creation of a private police force in 1959 (originally with twelve officers) which was deputized by the Cleveland Department of Public Safety. UCDF also encouraged institutions and the city to install better lighting at certain Circle sites such as the Fine Arts Garden, where dense shrubbery and a secluded location had provided the opportunity for crime. Parking problems were attacked by building a new parking garage under the auspices of UCDF adjacent to University Hospitals, as well as by creating several small parking lots.^[41]

UCDF was able to assert its authority through the master plan in instances of potential institutional conflict. One of the earliest examples was in 1957-1958 when the old Cleveland Institute of Art site at Juniper and Magnolia drives became available, a location that Case Institute coveted as a potential dormitory site. Although Case’s negotiations with the Institute predated the formation of UCDF, Case permitted UCDF to acquire it for eventual use by Reserve.^[42] Similarly, in 1962 Reserve gave up title to property (on which there was a women’s dormitory) which the Historical Society wanted, because, as president Millis put it “this property is designated as [a] site for museum purposes and therefore we are under obligation to consent to such a sale.”^[43]

It was to some degree because of the rationalizing of land use, and new provisions for parking and security, that $51 million of new buildings were constructed in the Circle during the first five years of UCDF’s existence. However, over half of the buildings were erected by Case and Reserve, and except for the new Cleveland Museum of Natural History, none represented a departure from the existing patterns of land use.^[44] Continuing and elaborating the existing relationships was clearly successful: UCDF’s difficulties began when Carothers attempted to implement innovative portions of the plan.

Although the Adams, Howard and Greeley master plan for the Circle generally ratified or extended existing patterns, it did suggest that radical changes were required in the heart of the Circle, the Euclid Avenue axis. The plan recognized the hazardous heavy traffic on Euclid and foresaw continual pedestrian movement across it because the Reserve campus had important elements on both sides. In fact, the plan called for substantially increasing the number of student dormitories on the north side of the avenue, while also providing for more classrooms on the south side.

In compensation the plan called for lowering Euclid Avenue (below the existing level of the adjacent sidewalks and lawns) between East Boulevard and Mayfield Road and crossing it with at least two pedestrian bridges. But the avenue would then essentially be divorced from serving the side streets of the Circle, so the planners laid out a loop road, to be called “Circle Drive,” which would connect with Euclid Avenue as the road started from and exited the lowered area. The loop road was not to go around the perimeter of the Circle like some modern urban beltway around a city, but was to weave through the existing built-up portions, only partly utilizing existing streets.^[45]

A major flood of Doan Brook on June 1, 1959 was the earliest sign that this aspect of the master plan would be difficult to carry out. A heavy downpour in its Shaker Heights watershed created a volume of water which could not be contained by the covered-over and culverted portions of the brook between Cedar Glen and Euclid Avenue. Major damage occurred at the Garden Center and other locations as the flood coursed along East Boulevard and cascaded over the avenue seeking its natural discharge through the lagoon. Carothers immediately recognized that floods of any similar proportion would flow into the future lowered portion of Euclid Avenue, turning it into an unintended and unwelcome flood-control basin. With the additional knowledge that twelve different utility lines would have to be relocated in any major reconstruction of the avenue, Carothers tactfully deferred attempting to begin work on lowering Euclid Avenue.^[46]

Nonetheless, Carothers decided to move ahead with the construction of a loop road, and late in 1962 issued a statement about UCDF’s plans for it. Noting that a section between Mayfield and Cornell roads had already been completed, Carothers confidently announced that in the spring of 1963 work would begin on the section north of Euclid along a corridor then occupied by parts of Magnolia Drive, Juniper Drive and East 115th Street.^[47]

In February 1963, however, a committee of Reserve students was formed to oppose the road, claiming that UCDF planned to widen Magnolia and Juniper from 66 to 110 feet, creating a 4-lane highway bisecting the north campus that would in the process destroy several elegant houses and many stately trees. With an eye for the dramatic, the students made the route of the loop road visible by putting numbered yellow placards on the 102 trees which they thought would be removed. The Reserve Tribune, the student newspaper, became filled with news of the loop road and opposition to it. The committee also circulated a petition opposing the road which in mid-March was presented to President Millis with over 1500 signatures. Concerns about the road spread to students’ parents and alumni.^[48]

At first both Neil Carothers and John Millis responded to these concerns by pointing out certain inaccuracies in the student newspaper’s description of plans for the road, and by appealing to the authority of the master plan. UCDF issued a press release which quoted from the original Adams, Howard and Greeley report and concluded that “we have seen nothing in the interim since 1957 to cause us to doubt the wisdom of this planning concept.”^[49] Carothers wrote to Millis that he expected the release “to quell this before it spreads further” because “all the wild statements that are being issued makes us look bad in the eyes of our supporters.”^[50] When meeting with the representatives of the student government of Reserve a few days later, Carothers reiterated that “we have seen nothing to cause us to want to make a change in the basic concept of the plan.”^[51]

Carothers misconstrued the cause of the students’ concern about the loop road. They were not the victims of misinformation: they diligently published relevant portions of the original Adams, Howard and Greeley report, interviewed various city planners, and called on Carothers and Millis for further explanations. Nor were the issues the precise location of the road or the number of trees which it would destroy. (Carothers gratuitously pointed out that most were elms dying of Dutch elm disease anyway.)

Instead the students were acting in the context of two fundamental values of American life, both of which were idealized at the traditional American college: a closeness to nature represented by a park-like campus, and an education emphasizing the gifts of American democracy, such as the submission of institutions to the will of the people. The students in the Circle, similar to American students on other campuses in the 1960s, reacted to what they perceived as unwarranted government intrusion — in this case an apparent plan to insert a heavily-used freeway into the idealized campus — and an institutionalized decision-making process that did not allow for involvement of, or response to, the people most directly affected by the decisions. A generation of students brought up hearing the Cold War rhetoric that their country represented the epitome of liberty and democracy was challenging in UCDF a manifestation of authority which to that generation seemed insulated from the processes of popular referendum.

As the spring of 1963 wore on the loop road controversy became the cause célèbre of the campus. By May even the Reserve faculty had joined the ranks of the concerned, sending a resolution to the university trustees asking for a restudy of the loop road. In June Millis announced that UCDF had suspended plans for the road, pending their reevaluation.^[52]

Officially the road remained part of the master plan and Carothers continued to make public pronouncements about the necessity of building it. As late as 1968 UCDF constructed about two hundred feet of the road under the guise of installing a parking lot on the Case campus south of Euclid Avenue. But continued student-faculty opposition made the loop road plan a dead letter.^[53]

The loop road controversy focused attention on UCDF’s method of implementing the master plan. One group of students and faculty, styling themselves “The Friends of the Circle,” formed in the spring of 1963 to extend the developing critique of UCDF. Their objections were not the need for planning, but to UCDF’s apparent capitulation to the needs of the automobile, and to the lack of architectural and environmental coherence in those elements of the master plan already carried out. The Friends saw the design for the new Garden Center, which would fill the scenic ravine at the north end of Wade Park, and of the Historical Society’s new Crawford Auto Aviation Museum, which would obliterate some of the architectural features of the adjacent Hanna House, as examples of thoughtless development.^[54]

The architectural critic of the New York Times, Ada Louise Huxtable, picked up the story of UCDF and its opponents, and characterized the conflict as about “the disruptive effects of growth and change plaguing most American cities. At issue are new buildings versus preservation and parks, the automobile versus the pedestrian and nature, and the elimination of communities to accommodate expanding requirements. In Cleveland everything has erupted simultaneously in one spot.”^[55]

Huxtable’s mention of “the elimination of communities” referred to the other major conflict engendered by the growth of the Circle in the early 1960s: the expansion of Case and Reserve into neighborhoods. From its beginning the UCDF master plan identified residential areas to the north and south as the only possible sources of new land for the Circle institutions. A map in the public report issued at the end of UCDF’s first five years clearly labeled the intended areas of expansion.^[56]

However, UCDF did not formally communicate its intentions to neighborhood groups, and preferred one-to-one negotiations with property owners instead of sponsoring public meetings or sharing decision-making with residents. In an internal report on neighborhood relations prepared in April 1962 Oliver Brooks, Vice-President of UCDF, acknowledged that his organization expected that the residents’ acceptance of the inevitability of Circle expansion would be the major reason why they would be willing to sell their land.^[57]

Difficulties with this strategy became apparent late in 1962 when Case Institute announced its plan to buy land along Murray Hill Road (south of the campus) for a dormitory complex. The owners of the parcels designated for purchase were alarmed and, as part of the tightly-knit, largely Italian-Heritage, neighborhood known as Murray Hill, they called upon their neighbors and political leaders to support an effort to resist the encroachment. Their anxiety was heightened when at a meeting with representatives of Case Institute, their community leaders could not obtain a promise that land for the proposed complex was the last Circle acquisition in Murray Hill. Many suspected that UCDF would ask the city to exercise eminent domain on its behalf.

Eventually the residents took their concerns to the state legislature, and supported passage of a bill which prohibited the use of city-granted eminent domain by UCDF, even though UCDF had already renounced that strategy. The residents on the site of the planned Murray Hill complex did sell their properties, and the dormitories were begun in 1964. But when Case needed more dormitories, it had to locate them on a site not contemplated in the master plan, further south of campus, on the edge of Cleveland Heights. It was an incident which Murray Hill never forgot.^[58]

Reserve had similar difficulties with a portion of the Wade Park Avenue neighborhood between East 115th Street and East 118th Street to the northeast of the Circle, where it planned to create a new athletic area, as designated in the master plan. An area with largely middle- and upper-class African-American families, this district had a strong sense of identity and a clear justification for preserving it. UCDF official Oliver Brooks noted that a typical question from an area resident was: “We have struggled to get out of the Negro ghetto. Is your main concern pushing the Negro as far away from University Circle as you can?”^[59]

Nonetheless, the residents of the Wade Park Avenue area could not mount an effective resistance to Reserve’s expansion, and at least 120 residents were displaced for the construction of Finnegan Fields in the late 1960s. In 1970 it was reported that some in the neighborhood still looked at the project as “a further step to isolate the community from the university.” The university’s concession to ill feeling was to open the athletic facilities for limited use by neighborhood youth.^[60]

The Circle’s expansion did not have a direct impact on the Hough neighborhood, though indirectly it was substantial. By drawing the boundaries of the University-Euclid urban renewal district to include all of the Circle, city authorities were able to claim new building in the Circle as part of the local investment which could be used to obtain matching federal funds. By 1970 the city had obtained over $13 million in federal credits which it applied to various projects in the University-Euclid urban renewal district, but UCDF itself had no influence in the Hough area and many people in Hough thought UCDF looked at their neighborhood as a problem to be contained.^[61]

The cumulative effect of poor neighborhood relationships and the ill-fated loop road episode was to diminish the image of UCDF among many of the students, faculty, and residents in the Circle. As early as April 1964 John T. Howard, the former Cleveland planner then with Adams, Howard, and Greeley, stated publicly that UCDF had misconstrued the role of the loop road, and that routing traffic off Euclid Avenue and through the Circle was counter to the interests of everyone.^[62] Later even well-established Circle institutions began to question UCDF’s methods. In 1966 the Institute of Music became uncomfortable with conforming to UCDF’s leadership when its plans for expansion were dealt with unsympathetically by Carothers and Millis, both of whom inflexibly asserted the primacy of the master plan.^[63]

Carothers’ favorite project, a faculty-staff club complex for Reserve and Case to be located just east of Severance Hall in the heart of the Circle, ran afoul of difficult financial times at Reserve and an unwillingness of private and corporate donors to continue to support UCDF’s projects.^[64] After Robert W. Morse became president of the federated Case Western Reserve University in 1967 he was pointedly critical of UCDF’s plans, writing to Carothers that “the Staff Club is misconceived, impractical, and does not meet priority needs for either the University or the other institutions.”^[65] Morse had already expressed dissatisfaction with the Circle’s relationships with adjacent neighborhoods; and he later asserted that he did not want the university represented by UCDF in any community relations activities.^[66]

Decreasing financial and institutional support gradually required curtailment of UCDF’s plans and activities. In the fall of 1968 Carothers announced that the faculty-staff center could not be started for several years, and that student and faculty concerns would help frame any future planning for future on-campus facilities built by UCDF.^[67] As financial constraints became more severe UCDF became saddled with mortgages on several tracts of land it had bought in hopes of erecting new buildings but was able neither to sell them nor derive income from them: it was effectively bankrupt.^[68] In May 1969 Carothers resigned, noting that UCDF would not soon again be the active organization he wanted it to be.^[69] A few months later acting UCDF president Murray Davidson stated that the organization was shifting its emphasis from expansion to a more efficient use of existing facilities in the Circle.^[70]

Thus, after twelve years the University Circle Development Foundation had come to the end of a phase of optimistic expansion and implementation of the master plan. Clearly there had been major achievements: UCDF had coordinated a major series of capital investments by the Circle institutions, and by the end of its first decade could claim completion of 91% of the new construction anticipated in the twenty-year master plan.^[71] Parking, one of the very practical concerns underlying the new era of planning in the Circle, had been attacked head-on: UCDF had built two parking garages and several new lots, keeping fees so low that it was in effect providing a subsidized parking service for the Circle institutions.

On the other hand, UCDF eventually was worn down by one quality which appeared originally to be a major strength: its attempt to speak for the Circle with one voice. UCDF was conceived of and carried on as a monolithic entity, representing all of the Circle institutions, but controlled by the most powerful of them: Reserve, Case, and University Hospitals. That power structure worked well enough to insure the smooth implementation of the master plan in relation to other institutions, but proved insular and inflexible when dealing with other constituencies such as students and neighborhood residents.

Neil J. Carothers, president of UCDF throughout nearly nine of its first twelve years, epitomized the virtues and weaknesses of the organization. He was a fine administrator, and his engineering background allowed him to achieve an excellent grasp of all the concrete issues in implementing the master plan. But his definition of problems in financial and technical terms inhibited his grasp of the important social-emotional aspects of projects, such as the loop road, and neighborhood relations.^[72]

Perhaps the most ironic result of Carothers’ and UCDF’s efforts was that it was not much more successful than the city of Cleveland in its avowed intention to create more and better housing in the Circle. Like the city, UCDF found that it was relatively easy to acquire land and demolish existing structures: it was extremely difficult to fund and construct housing for residential purposes, and until the better economic climate of the mid-1980s, virtually impossible to interest private developers in such a venture. UCDF was able to purchase and demolish the mixed commercial-residential buildings at the busy Mayfield-Euclid triangle in the latter 1960s, for example, but despite its intentions to construct apartments could do no better for over fifteen years than turn the site into a rubble-filled parking lot.^[73] It was apparent failures like that which, in spite of well-intentioned plans, cast doubt on UCDF’s ability to achieve to both the aesthetic and human-needs components of the master plan.

Coincident with the decline of UCDF the Circle witnessed another major struggle: the federation of Western Reserve University and Case Institute of Technology. The groundwork for the federation was laid throughout the 1950s and early 1960s by the continuous and growing cooperation of Millis and Glennan. In their minds federation followed naturally: in Millis’s colorful reminiscence, there was a crucial moment early in 1965 when he told Glennan that they “had been going steady for about ten years — we’d been sleeping together for about five years — and it was about time we got married,” and Glennan agreed to support federation.^[74]

However, the immediate motivation to begin the process actually came from the major private and public sources of funds to which Reserve and Case turned more and more in the expansionary 1950s and early 1960s. In March 1965, for example, Millis told the Reserve trustees that the National Science Foundation (NSF) was unhappy that Reserve and Case each had applied for a $5 million grant under NSF’s program to create new “centers of excellence” in the sciences. According to Millis, “we were told that both requests were favorably received, but inasmuch as thirty million dollars had been provided for the whole country, the National Science Foundation could not award ten million dollars to one city and we were asked, therefore, whether the two institutions through collaboration could reduce their requests.” In response Millis and Glennan were able to produce new requests for $3½ million each, based upon inter-institutional cooperation, especially in chemistry.^[75] NSF responded quickly, making the joint $7 million grant in May 1965.^[76]

A second prod to federation came from John W. Gardner, former federal Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, then president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He wrote to Glennan in September 1965 that he felt the time was ripe for federation, particularly as Glennan was to retire at the end of the academic year. After Millis and Glennan met with Gardner in October, they took to their trustees their idea for a blue-ribbon commission to study federation, and got the trustees’ approval.^[77]

The commission was headed by Henry T. Heald, former president of the Ford Foundation. It reported in May 1966 that not only was merger feasible but that merger offered the possibility of establishing an institution that would rank among the best of America’s private universities. The report called for substantial fundraising in order to improve the existing libraries, strengthen the humanities and social science programs, and create new programs in urban, environmental, and computer studies, among others.^[78]

The trustees of both institutions accepted the Heald commission’s vision, and consummated the official merger on July 1, 1967. Robert W. Morse, who had succeeded Glennan as president of Case the year before, became president of the new institution, styled Case Western Reserve University (CWRU). For two years, until his retirement, John S. Millis moved into the largely ceremonial position of Chancellor.

The initial years of federation were stormy. The financial problems which were found throughout American higher education in the latter 1960s hit the new university particularly hard, and the founding of two new institutions of higher learning in the city, Cleveland State University (1965) and Cuyahoga Community College (1963) narrowed CWRU’s appeal to local students and donors. Resistance by Case alumni to the fund-raising effort called for by the Heald commission also exacerbated the effect of the general decline in the availability of federal funds.^[79] Moreover, there were serious problems with faculty morale. Morse and Millis pressed for unified departments of physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics well before federation was official (joint departments of geology and astronomy had been created already), but had to overcome strong resistance.^[80]

After federation it was clear to everyone that whether or not unification with another department was required, few departments in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences could sustain the programs created in the boom years of the 1950s and early 1960s. Faculty struggled with personal decisions to leave or stay, and with departmental decisions to reduce the number of staff positions and consequently the range of courses offered. Coinciding with those reductions was the diminution of federal and university monies that had supported graduate education. In many areas of the university the decrease in faculty size and graduate support extended to the mid-1970s. It was an agonizing period for much of the university community.^[81]

The students suffered from the general belt-tightening, as well, but they often had other things on their minds, such as civil rights, student rights, the draft, and Vietnam. The Circle controversies of the early 1960s such as the loop road proposal were a training ground for more serious and nationally-connected expressions of discontent in the latter 1960s. They showed that students could mount sustained and effective criticism of elitist policies, and change the plans and policies they opposed. Tactics such as forming student-faculty committees, picketing, using the student newspaper to report on issues and events not covered by other media, and gathering names for petitions were well-developed in the Circle by the latter 1960s.

As campuses generally became the focal points of vocal resistance to the draft and the Vietnam war, CWRU students acted as responsibly (and on occasion as irresponsibly) as those in other major universities. A few formed a chapter of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society (1965), but one of its most visible activities, a demonstration of student power at Severance Hall following an address by Columbia University student leader Mark Rudd, was regarded by the CWRU administration as “non-destructive and non-disruptive.”^[82]

More moderate activists focused on what they thought was an ill-considered war in Vietnam. Many students participated in the first University Circle Teach-in (March 1965), one of the earliest attempts to provide the American public with a comprehensive historical and social understanding of Southeast Asia and the American role there. By mid-1967 the Cleveland Area Peace Action Coalition, led by CWRU professor Sidney Peck, took a national role in education and agitation against American involvement in what many perceived as an immoral and illegal military adventure.^[83]

Volatile issues at CWRU were student participation in the Air Force ROTC and the university’s relationship with industries that manufactured war materiel. Case’s historic connection with Dow Chemical, for example, was a source of irritation when its recruiters came to campus.^[84]

In the Circle the most memorable events of the era of student social-political activism occurred in May 1969 and May 1970. In the first instance, African-American radicalism in Cleveland spilled over onto the campus. The History Department had scheduled a lecture series on “Violence in American History” and the first speaker was Louis Masotti, professor of political science at CWRU, who was head of the Civil Violence Research Center on campus. At the announced time of the lecture a group of Black Panthers took over the microphone and demanded that Masotti release the report he had prepared on the so-called “Glenville Shootout” — a violent confrontation between police and Black militants which had occurred the previous summer in the Glenville neighborhood about a mile north of the Circle.

This disruption was publicly denounced by president Morse the next day, who said he would take legal action to preserve order on campus, while some students and faculty, as well as Black leaders, responded by joining in the demand for the release of the Masotti report. But the Civil Violence Research Center had conducted its research under a contract with the National Committee on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, which had retained the right to publish the results: no one on campus had the authority to release it.

The ensuing stalemate was highlighted by the protesters’ four-day occupation of Haydn Hall, where the Research Center was housed; a brief invasion of the administrative offices in Adelbert Hall, at which point Morse obtained an injunction against the trespassers; and a couple of minor confrontations between the protesters and those of different opinions. Ten days after the initial disruption president Morse called a general meeting of the university community to air differing points of view. As the university historian related:

The dissidents demanded an open and unstructured meeting in which anyone could speak; this was refused to avoid a babel of tongues. After an hour of backbiting, the forum was crippled when more than a third of those in attendance walked out to hold their own open meeting: subsequently most of the rest of the audience also disappeared, leaving the administration of the university speaking to itself.^[85]

At this point the crisis lost its drama, and students and faculty turned their attention to the beginning of final examinations the next week.

The spring of 1970 was the high point of campus activity opposing the Vietnam war. When President Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia on April 30 there were strong and often violent reactions nationally. On May 3 a group of about fifty (students and non-students) occupied CWRU’s Yost Hall, which housed the Air Force’s ROTC offices; the next day, May 4, the students vacated the building on a promise that the faculty senate would consider the propriety of ROTC on campus.

But that same day, at a mid-day rally of over a thousand students and faculty on the Case quadrangle, word came that soldiers of the Ohio National Guard had shot and killed four students at nearby Kent State University. In a spontaneous gesture of frustration, the rally moved to nearby Euclid Avenue where about 300 students blocked the street, and traffic was tied up for about two hours. A mass of police on foot and horseback finally cleared the street with little injury and only one arrest.^[86]

President Morse demonstrated sympathy for the views of the students that evening by joining about 4000 of them in a candlelight march. The next day the faculty senate recommended that ROTC classes be removed from the curriculum (subsequently they were), and made the popular decision to allow students, if they so wished, to go home without taking the spring semester’s final exams. These actions defused a volatile situation. A strike committee was established by a few students to try to draw on the energy of the moment to force other changes in a university perceived by them as hopelessly intertwined with the military system, but it found few adherents. When the fall of 1970 came the campus was quiet. The strident student activism of the Vietnam era was on the decline.^[87] The discussion of such matters as drugs, co-ed dormitories, and sex, already of great interest to the students, thereafter took precedence over potentially more volatile political matters — presumably to the relief of the faculty and administration.^[88]

The Circle’s various upheavals and uncertainties of the latter 1960s — the decline of UCDF, the loss of faculty and programs after the federation of Case and Reserve, and the occasionally volatile student activism — left it sapped of strength and a sense of purpose as it careened into the 1970s. Recovering its former vision, or perhaps finding a new one, seemed a daunting task, particularly as Cleveland’s serious financial and racial problems became more visible.