What Happened?
TOLEDO – What would it take to get Toledo moving again — and why has the city slowly declined for decades?
Believe it or not, Toledo, Ohio was once called the “future great city of the world.’ Jesup Scott, a Connecticut native who had moved to Toledo in 1831 and made a fortune in real estate, confidently made the prediction in a pamphlet published in 1868.
Scott, a shrewd lawyer who was anything but a fool, thought that Chicago might give Toledo a run for its money, but that in the end, Toledo, which had fewer than 30,000 people at the time, would win. He was far from the only one who thought that way.
Fourteen years later, in 1888, The Blade published a letter to the editor which confidently predicted that by 1999, Toledo would have six million people, be phenomenally wealthy, and be at worst the nation’s second biggest city, after New York.
Toledo then had about 80,000 people, but there was reason to be optimistic about its future. The natural gas industry seemed to be taking off; Edward Drummond Libbey was about to bring his glass factory to Toledo, where, in a few years, a glass blower named Michael Owens would transform the entire industry.
By the century’s end, Toledo had grown to 131,822 people, and was the 26th largest city in the country — considerably larger, in terms of rank, than Detroit is today. It more than doubled again by 1930.
Still to come was the auto industry and a rugged little vehicle called a Jeep. While an eventual six million people may have sounded crazy by the 1920s, it was perfectly reasonable to believe Toledo would continue as a steadily growing industrial powerhouse. Had people known that the St. Lawrence Seaway would someday connect Toledo with the Atlantic Ocean, they would have been sure of it.
Growth slowed considerably after the Great Depression ravaged the 1930s, but by the end of World War II, the city was again booming, and was the focus of national attention in the summer of 1945. That was when urban planner Norman Bel Geddes’ huge scale model of a vision for the city’s future, “Toledo Tomorrow” was exhibited inside an indoor theater at the Toledo Zoo.
Paul Block Jr., The Blade’s 34-year-old publisher, had sponsored it at a cost of $2.3 million in today’s dollars. He did it, he said, not so much as a blueprint but a “stunt” designed to get Toledo to reconstruct itself and get ready for a rapidly changing future.
There seemed to be many reasons to think Toledo, which by that time had nearly 300,000 people, could continue to grow and prosper, if not quite up to Jesup Scott standards.
By 1970, Toledo had 383,818 people, and was home to the headquarters of seven Fortune 500 companies. Two years later, the Toledo Regional Plan for Action predicted that while the population of inner-city Toledo would likely decline, the city itself would reach 400,000 people by 1990, even if it didn’t annex any territory.
That didn’t happen. Toledo’s population has steadily, if slowly, declined ever since. Last year’s census found only 270,871 people. Of the seven Fortune 500 companies that were in Toledo in 1973, only Owens-Corning remained headquartered in the city; two others, O-I Glass and Dana, had moved to the suburbs. The rest had gone out of business; been taken over, and/or moved elsewhere.
What happened to Toledo?
Why didn’t it keep growing, and fulfill the promise men like Norman Bel Geddes and Jesup Scott saw in it years ago?
Some say it was just another aging northern industrial city unable or unwilling to make the changes needed to keep pace with a changing economy and a changing world. Even as it was introducing Toledo Tomorrow in 1945, The Blade wrote that while the world had changed dramatically, “As a city, Toledo did not keep pace with that transition… fundamentally, it did not change.
Toledo, the publisher urged, must reconstruct itself in the years that lie ahead,” to take advantage of the new world made possible by “advances in science, engineering and culture.”
Plainly, it did not do that. Some experts like Ronald Randall, the founder of the Urban Affairs Center at the University of Toledo, think the city should have used water to push suburban areas to annex themselves to the city, thus creating a bigger tax base.
Other think Toledo depended too long on dying industries like glass and essentially low-growth ones like the auto industry. Some say unions and the welfare state wrecked Toledo. Others say Toledo would be better off had unions been stronger.
Some say the efforts of visionaries like Paul Block Jr. and the late Edwin Dodd of Owens-Illinois were two decades ahead of their time in pushing downtown redevelopment, and suggest that the now-defunct Portside Festival Marketplace might have made it had it included a department store and a grocery store.
These questions are intriguing, but even more intriguing are these two questions: Can Toledo reverse its decline – and what would it take to make that happen? I am planning to study those questions in greater depth for a possible book — and if any readers feel they have any insights, I’d welcome your sharing them with me.
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