Two weeks ago, I wrote a column (Toledo Was Once Seen as the ‘Next Great City of the World’) which looked at how the city has, in many ways, been in decline for many years, and invited readers to share their thoughts, and suggest how to make things better.
To my pleasant surprise, dozens did. The responses ranged from the deeply insightful to the knee-jerk ideological, and many of them helped inform me; I am doing research for a book on Toledo’s evolution over the last half-century or so.
So what did people say? The most common response was that expressed by Carol Darrah: It’s all the Democrats’ fault. “You don’t have to look far for a reason why. How about one-party rule? The Dems have run (into the ground) the city and county forever.”
Others, like Jeff Stephens, said “my guess is that the unions had a great deal to do with our demise.” Well, there may be grains of truth in both charges; having one party continually in power is usually not a good idea, and in some instances, unions have been plagued by corruption and an impediment to modernization.
Yet there’s reason to be skeptical of the claim that either unions or Democrats are the major reasons Toledo has declined.
Apart from the fact that unions helped propel many workers from poverty into the middle class, they now represent only a tiny minority of the private sector labor force. Toledo Democrats have always included unimaginative hacks in their ranks; I remember covering some of them 40 years ago.
But Toledo is not exclusively a one-party town; Republican Donna Owens served three terms as mayor in the 1980s, and there usually have been some Republicans on City Council.
Republicans, on the other hand, have elected Ohio governors and controlled the legislature for most of the last 60 years, during which time the state’s failure to keep pace with population growth has lost it a staggering nine seats in Congress. Is their party to blame for Ohio’s relative economic and demographic decline?
Some readers, who have fled to suburbs like Perrysburg or Sylvania, said crime drove them out of Toledo. “Seldom would a week go by when I didn’t hear gunshots in the night,” said one communications professional, who had planned on living out her life in East Toledo, but left when she couldn’t take it any longer. “It’s hard to remember how tense I was there because I’m mellow and happy here,” she said from her Perrysburg home.
A number of thoughtful and nuanced readers believed there were and are a number of factors, including a deep-seated insecurity and sense of inferiority among Toledoans, many of whom still wince when they think of John Denver’s song Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio
Inferiority, coupled with an unwillingness to change.
“The community is too insular,” wrote William McInerney, a retired University of Toledo special education professor. “Toledo would benefit from fresh or different perspectives,” he added suggesting incentives to promote “an infusion of people from other regions would improve the future of the city and the county.”
Bruce Campbell, who was trained as both a historian and a lawyer, isn’t optimistic. “Toledo has been both unable and unwilling to adjust to a changing economy and a changing world to prosper within them, and that will continue,” he said.
He believes that failure is deeply rooted in Toledo’s culture, by which he means “the enduring values and orientation of its people and institutions. To the extent there is thinking about the future, it seems to be rooted in nostalgia for the past, for a return to, say, 1955.”
Some felt that the attempt to revitalize downtown in the 1980s with Portside Festival Marketplace could have been successful had things been slightly different. Phil Podlish thinks free parking might have done it. Others felt that the lack of a single department or grocery store made it impossible to keep people downtown.
Some, including 88-year-old Tom Ottney, praised the late Blade Publisher Paul Block Jr. for attempting to revitalize downtown, and enlisting world-famous architect Minoru Yamasaki, who suggested widening Adams Street into a boulevard to make the waterfront a huge attraction, something that never happened because of “a lack of strong, growth-minded politicians with vision.”
Others felt The Blade’s editorials had hurt the city by “carving up anyone that attempted to be a leader in the city (or) community.”
I heard from some who felt there was still hope for the city, including Robin Stevens, who urged the city to reinvent itself by, among other things, “diversifying its economy by depending less on the auto industry and other blue-collar industries,” and working more closely with the University of Toledo to produce a better-educated workforce; the percentage of Toledoans with college decrees notably lags behind other urban centers in Ohio.
“The cities of Pittsburgh and Cleveland were once downtrodden cities. But these cities did some soul-searching, reinvented themselves, and are now booming cities. If Toledo can get out of the rut and embrace innovation and think outside the box, the City of Toledo too can become successful once more and become a major player in revitalizing Northwest Ohio,” she said.
Toledo’s past, present and future are still clearly capable of stirring controversy. If you have a different view about why Toledo has declined over the past half-century, I’d like to hear from you.
-30- (Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
