East 90th Street in Hough. West 28th Street in Ohio City. These streets are on opposite sides of Cleveland, and their stories, on the surface, may seem dissimilar, but at one time their respective neighborhoods weren’t so different from one another. However, by the time each neighborhood became an object of citywide interest, they were on their way down diverging paths. The houses shown on East 90th Street in this post were newly “rehabilitated” in 1964. The house pictured on West 28th Street was “restored” five years later. But in another ten years, the East 90th Street houses had been demolished, along with hundreds of others in Hough, while the West 28th Street house stood amid tree-lined streets and lovingly maintained century homes. The differing fates of these neighborhoods suggest much about how each neighborhood figured in the public imagination and in local planning and development practices in the years in which their fortunes parted ways. Both are subjects of close study in Believing in Cleveland, my newest book.
Believing in Cleveland takes a novel approach to telling the story of urban decline in older American cities. Rather than focus on the reasons for decline, which are by now well documented, the book explores how people imagined decline, how they acted in response to it, and how particular places in the city played key roles in broader (and growing) concerns about the city’s image. Along with close examinations of downtown decline and deindustrialization, my book also follows the stories of the city’s struggling neighborhoods. In conceptualizing how to tell these stories, I had to make difficult choices. I discovered well before I began writing that there was no hope of combining responses to downtown, neighborhood, and industrial decline without being highly selective in what I would cover. I wanted my new book to be shorter than my first book and to choose representative stories that would free me from the burden of comprehensiveness.
For my focus on neighborhoods, I learned rather quickly that it would be impossible to include more than a few for close treatment. But which ones? And how would I answer criticisms of my decision to leave out much of the city? My book project was evolving into a history of how concerns about urban image and desires to reframe the meta-narrative about the city shaping attitudes and actions in the context of Cleveland’s experience of wrenching metropolitan changes in the decades after World War II. Therefore, I decided I should think more carefully about which neighborhoods stood out in different times as posing the greatest problems and/or offering the most hope for restoring Cleveland to an imagined past greatness. One day it dawned on me that the concept of a bellwether described the traits I sought to highlight. I decided that what I was doing was studying bellwether neighborhoods, those parts of Cleveland whose futures were believed to herald the fate of the city writ large.
I had already determined that my work might be divided generally into two broad periods, one that ran from the mid 1940s through the mid 1960s, and another that treated the late 1960s forward until either the end of the 1970s or perhaps beyond. (Later I settled on three thematic chapters for the mid ’40s to the mid ’60s, a central chapter on the Stokes years—1967-71—that combined the themes, and three thematic chapters on the 1970s, leaving the subsequent years to an epilogue.) I decided that the two neighborhoods that most defined my focus on these two broad periods were Hough and Ohio City. My book offers much more on why these neighborhoods invited so much attention in these respective timeframes.
What are today’s bellwether neighborhoods in Cleveland (or in other cities)? At least in Cleveland, it is harder to find any single neighborhood that attracts the most civic energy. If more of Cleveland’s neighborhoods could now make arguments that they are the essence of the city’s revival, still more are mired in conditions that mid-20th-century planners and activists would recognize all too easily. Although Hough and Ohio City presented their own sets of challenges and opportunities a half century ago, Believing in Cleveland offers clues that help us understand why we continue to have bellwether neighborhoods, what outsize attention to their problems and prospects means for neighborhoods that do not share the spotlight, and why it matters how we approach their development or redevelopment.
Mark Souther 