Cleveland's Planners

CITIES .& STATES

Lawyer-Soldier Moses Cleaveland, a square-chinned Yaleman (class of 1777), and his associates in the Connecticut Land Company thought they had a good speculation. For $1,200,000 (mostly in notes) they bought about three million acres of post-Revolutionary Connecticut's Western Reserve lands, away out in the wilderness. Thanks to that Yankee gamble, the nation's sixth largest city celebrates its 150th anniversary next week.

On July 22, 1796, Moses Cleaveland and his band of a dozen nosed their little craft into a winding stream and decided that there, where a river met the lake, would be a good place for another town site. The Yankees built a couple of log cabins and left one family--Job Stiles and his wife--to hold the franchise.

Modern Clevelanders who grumble at their smoky, sprawling city's hot and humid summers, and its wet and windy winters, agree that Moses was smart; he returned to Connecticut and never came back to the town site named for him.*

But Clevelanders respect the memory of Founder Moses for something else: he was the first man with a Cleveland Plan--and Clevelanders dote on Cleveland plans.

This week Ohio's metropolis buzzed happily with plans for making its Founders' Day a memorable sesquicentennial event. Up the twisting, industry-fouled, rat-grey Cuyahoga (rhymes with buy a toga) River, now edged with iron and steel furnaces, oil refineries, factories, warehouses, docks and long ore, coal and grain ships, a small boat will bring Leading Citizens to re-enact the landing (complete to an Indian greeter). There will be the inevitable Civic Luncheon (Clevelanders love anything with the word Civic in front of it). That night in the spacious downtown Mall there will be carnival: floats, a four-stage circus, hours of entertainment.

Happy Days. Clevelanders had something more to celebrate than a mere milestone. Their town had developed massive productivity and prosperity in the war years. Now it was still booming along. It had had a tremendous expansion--at the wartime peak employment .was up 99% over 1939's. Unlike many a war-factory town, Cleveland had suffered no serious letdown. Employment had snapped back and was still climbing--it was well over 155% of the prewar rate. If there had been no national strikes, Greater Cleveland's industries by now would be employing many more than the 225,000 they did on V-J day.

Cleveland had even better news. More jobs were in the immediate making. In the last year 50 industrial companies had decided to locate new factories in the Cleveland area. The $100,000,000 they were spending would spill out into about 25,000 jobs. The prize catch was a whopper: two General Motors plants (to produce the new light Chevrolet) that would cost upwards of $50,000,000, make jobs for a minimum of 10,500 men.*Cleveland was working on more factory prospects, with about 25,000 more jobs as the prizes.

All this had not fallen into Cleveland's lap by happenstance. Before the U.S. was in the war a year, bushy-haired Mayor Frank Lausche (now Ohio's Governor) got industrialists, business leaders, bankers, Chamber of Commerce and city and county officials together for postwar planning. More than two years ago the town's smartly run electric utility (Cleveland Eectric Illuminating Co.) began its own campaign to sell Cleveland's strategic location (about half the U.S. population is within a radius of 500 miles), its skilled-labor supply, excellent rail and lake transport, abundant water and low power rates. It got plenty of help from civic boards and other Cleveland boosters.

Time & Space. In its 150th year, Cleveland does not wear its age and prosperity becomingly. It is not a tidy city; it is a hodgepodge of the handsome and modern, the ugly and downright shabby. Almost everything about it--except its many miles of parks and its fine residential suburbs*--is soot-grimed. Its bustling downtown area rubs shoulders with tumble-down slum shacks and tenements. Out Euclid and Prospect Avenues, beyond the teeming shopping and theater district, the once-proud mansions of last century's tycoons are now forlorn, neglected relics in a conglomeration of juke joints, rooming houses, gas stations, and quick-lunch shacks. Cleveland's looks--as if it were close to the rotting end of many years of decay--belie it; the city is in the middle of quick-changing growth, with space to do it in.

The city lacks a distinctive flavor; many a visitor complains that it has no flavor at all. It is neither Eastern nor Western. It is both Big City and Small Town. But it has one characteristic not peculiar to Cleveland but peculiarly fierce there: its citizens' burning, restless enthusiasm for community efforts toward improvement and getting along with each other.

Cleveland's civic spirit breaks out in a multiplicity of overlapping committees, advisory councils and dozens of luncheon meetings every working day. The town is the civic joiner's paradise. Clevelanders are not content to be just boosters; they bicker endlessly and constructively fight bitter battles over almost every facet of community life. Able, 47-year-old Democratic Mayor Thomas A. Burke has citizen committees to advise on almost every activity from racial problems to running the city's huge stadium (capacity 81,000) and its big convention-drawing Public Hall. Labor leaders sit on many committees.

Out of Cleveland citizens' alertness to listen to a Plan had come by this week the hope of a badly needed face lifting and general expansion of sources. Greater Cleveland had voted a series of bond issues--about $58,000,000 in all--for streets, sewers, hospitals, schools, etc.

There was even hope this week that something might get done soon with the town's long-neglected, rattletrap municipal trolley system. Cleveland's Council caught the citizens' fever, approved a $25,000,000 subway-rapid transit plan. It and other transit plans had been kicked around for more than 15 years.

In the town's atmosphere of rugged independence many a titan of industry had flourished: John D. and William Rockefeller, Henry Flagler, Stephen Harkness and others of the original Standard Oil Co.; Samuel and William Mather, President-Maker Marcus Alonzo Hanna and a score of other ironmasters and lake shipping tycoons. In its formative era men of such wealth had largely held the reins of power over Cleveland's development. In more recent years, up to depression, the town had been greatly shaped to the mould of the late Oris P. and Mantis J. Van Sweringen, whose Terminal Tower remains to dominate Cleveland's skyline (see cut).

Political bossism had also flourished in those devil-take-the-hindmost eras. Clevelanders, always politically alert, had always fought it off eventually. Now the average Clevelander was beginning to feel that there was no domination. Even the most inveterate civic-luncheon addicts could offer no guess as to which of a dozen men was most influential in his town's affairs. The man in Cleveland's streets did not even know who was the town's richest man. It did not seem to matter. The composite Clevelander was beginning, to get the idea that he and his civic-minded wife had a pretty fair share in decisions affecting his life. He was certain of one thing: vigor and imagination were at work again. But he still wished something could be done about the climate.

*There is no historical record of how & when Cleaveland became Cleveland. The legend: one of the town's earliest editors dropped the A because it made his journal's masthead too long; no one complained, so it was never used again. *Among other good catches: a Glenn L. Martin plastics plant; a Butler Brothers metallurgical plant; a Fruehauf Trailer Co. assembly factory. *Greater Cleveland (pop. 1,250,000) is Cuyahoga County. Cleveland has 13 suburbs ranked as cities (the largest is Lakewood with 65,900 population) and 41 suburbs ranked as villages.

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