Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  “My fortune was a direct result of my city’s misfortune—of the same fear and loathing that had caused all my problems and Detroit’s problems in the first place,” Young wrote in his autobiography, Hard Stuff, which has to hold the record for use of the word “motherfucker” in a political memoir. “I was taking over the administration of Detroit because the white people didn’t want the damn thing anymore. They were getting the hell out, more than happy to turn over their troubles to some black sucker like me.”

  If you want to appreciate how differently Mayor Young was perceived on each side of 8 Mile, mention his name to any metro Detroiter old enough to remember his reign. Whites—who called him “Soulman”—scowl and grumble. Blacks beam. I once talked to a white political consultant who wondered, sighingly, how Detroit’s history might have been different if a modest black politician named Richard Austin had not narrowly lost the 1969 mayoral election. When I posed that question to a black college professor, he snorted.

  “Richard Austin was a Negro. Coleman knew how to talk to the people in the streets.”

  As the riot created a black nationalist mayor in Detroit, it would create another political creature in suburbia: the Reagan Democrat. In 1971, a federal judge ordered cross-district busing to integrate the Detroit area’s schools, meaning white suburban children would be bused into Detroit, and vice versa. Vigilantes, who had fled the city and were determined not to let it follow, broke into a municipal garage, torching several school buses. Five Democratic congressmen from the Detroit suburbs signed a resolution in favor of an antibusing amendment to the U.S. Constitution. George Wallace won the 1972 Michigan presidential primary by campaigning against busing. Wallace did especially well in Macomb County, the white-flight nesting grounds of Detroit’s Slavic and Italian autoworkers. In the 1960s, the blue-collar Catholic county was the most Democratic suburb in America, voting avidly for JFK and LBJ. The riot changed that. In the three decades after World War II, Macomb’s population increased from one hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand, most of them ex-Detroiters disgusted by how “the blacks” were destroying their native city, and just as disgusted with Democrats who seemed more concerned with giving money to shiftless minorities than helping factory workers losing their jobs to automation and the Japs. Pollster Stanley B. Greenberg discovered the Reagan Democrats in Macomb County, documenting them in the anthropological tone the D.C. intelligentsia often employs when encountering blue-collar voters.

  “These white defectors from the Democratic Party expressed profound distaste for black Americans,” Greenberg wrote in his book Middle Class Dreams. “Blacks constituted the explanation for their vulnerability and for almost everything that had gone wrong in their lives; not being black was what constituted being middle class; not living with blacks was what made a neighborhood a decent place to live … For these white suburban residents, the terms black and Detroit were interchangeable. The city was a place to be avoided—where the kids could not go, where the car got stolen, and where vacant lots and dissolution have replaced their old neighborhoods. The black politicians, like Coleman Young, were doing just fine, they believed, getting rich off special favors, special treatment and special deals. But Detroit was just a big pit into which the state and federal governments poured tax money, never to be heard from again.”

  Even when the suburbs were offered federal money, they turned it down if the price was welcoming blacks. In 1970, Macomb County’s largest city, Warren, had 132 blacks—.07 percent of its population. When Warren applied for a $2.8 million HUD grant, Secretary Romney demanded the city draw up an equal-housing plan. Warren voters responded by passing a referendum banning HUD money. The auto industry isn’t the only reason Detroit never built a light rail system: suburbanites didn’t want trains carrying blacks across 8 Mile Road.

  L. Brooks Patterson, the Oakland County politician who is the negative image of Coleman Young, told Chafets, “In no sense are we dependent on Detroit. They are dependent on us. The truth is, Detroit has had its day. I don’t give a damn about Detroit. It has no direct bearing on the quality of my life. If I never crossed 8 Mile again, I wouldn’t be bereft of anything.”

  Patterson, who has served as prosecutor and county executive, is fond of race-baiting initiatives such as trying to revive the death penalty, which Michigan abolished in 1846. It’s not hard to imagine Patterson and Young holding secret meetings at a suburban restaurant, such as the Machus Red Fox, where Jimmy Hoffa was last seen alive, and working out this deal over beefsteak and whiskey: “You use me to scare your people, and I’ll use you to scare my people.”

  On the Northeast Side, Chene Street’s decline continued with the closing of Dodge Main in the early 1970s. Marion Krzykowski’s family moved to the suburbs after his mother was mugged while walking home from the bakery. Krzykowski continued visiting Chene Street to buy Polish magazines at the People’s Book Store, which was kept open by an idealistic Socialist and freethinker named John Zukowski. (Despite his beliefs, he sold Mass cards, rosaries, and Marian statutes to the parishioners of St. Hyacinth and St. Stanislaus.) Zukowski was shot during a robbery. He never recovered from the wound, and closed his business. After that, Krzykowski had no reason to visit Chene. Instead, he had reason to stay away.

  “After a while, it was just really bad,” he said. “It was just really dangerous.”

  As the Poles moved out, three Catholic schools closed for lack of students. Which caused even more whites to move out, because they wanted to send their children to neighborhood schools—just not integrated ones.

  “The white people moved out, and welfare moved in,” said John Givans. As a boy, he’d been part of the only black family on his block. Eventually, his was the only family of any color left on the block.

  “The welfare people didn’t keep up their houses. You don’t take care of something you don’t own.”

  Givans was lucky enough to live in a brick house. Most of his neighbors lived in wooden houses. Thrown up by the hundreds of thousands in the industrial boom of the early twentieth century, they rotted in the snowy Northern winters and damp Great Lakes summers. When weather and poverty wore the houses out, the landlords abandoned them to the city’s bulldozers, or hired arsonists, who were cheaper than a demolition bill. Arson in Detroit was so common it went from money-saving slum-clearance tactic to unofficial civic festival. Beginning in the early 1970s, the evening before Halloween was known as Devil’s Night, when hundreds of houses—most empty, but some occupied—were burned to the ground. The night was so notorious that firebugs dined in the restaurant atop the seventy-three-story Renaissance Center just to see the flat, living map of Detroit embellished with flames. For decades after the riot, the Motor City continued burning.

  The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland burned two years after Detroit. Although the fire was extinguished in a few hours, its aftermath also lasted decades.

  4.

  Burn On, Big River

  Most Clevelanders believe the word “Cuyahoga” means “crooked river” in the Mohawk language. Philologically, this is incorrect. To the Mohawks, “Cuyahoga” means “big river,” the same title their Huron rivals gave to the Mississippi. (The Mohawks, whose idea of family entertainment was skinning prisoners alive, were neither the poets nor the cartographers the Clevelanders who replaced and romanticized them like to imagine.) Hydrologically, though, “crooked river” is a quite accurate description of the Cuyahoga, so it’s a sobriquet that Clevelanders have attached to a brewery (Crooked River Brewing Co.), a novel (Crooked River Burning), and the Crooked River Skate Park. The Cuyahoga begins its journey north of its mouth. After tracing a wet, hundred-mile-long V across the Western Reserve, it arrives in Cleveland crumpled into kinks and loops, as though a river with a much truer sense of direction had crashed headlong into Lake Erie. In its dilatory lower reaches, the river scribbles a cursive course through the flats of Cleveland, taking a week to flow through its last five miles.

  The Cuyahoga is one of the least
-ambitious bodies of water ever to find its way into a Great Lake, but it was in the right place at the right time to become one of the most influential rivers in American history.

  In 1844, iron ore was discovered in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a promontory of rocks and trees so far removed from the thoroughfares of American commerce that a Virginia congressman called it “beyond the most distant wilderness and remote as the moon.” Every attempt to run an iron furnace in the UP failed due to cold weather and lack of coal. Cleveland had access to coal because the Ohio and Erie Canal connected it to Portsmouth, on the Ohio River. Within a decade of the UP iron strike, the Soo Locks opened, allowing ships to pass between Lake Superior and Lake Huron. Boatloads of ore floated down the lakes to the docks of the Cleveland Iron Mining Company. There, coal met ore, and melted it into iron. Once John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie joined the shipbuilding race, the river was dredged deeper and deeper to accommodate bigger and bigger boats. By the early twentieth century, both banks were occupied by steel mills, preparing the Cuyahoga for the day that would make it world-famous.

  To midcentury Clevelanders, the Cuyahoga was not a river. It was not even a body of water. It was, as a staff writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote, “a liquid Mesabi range,” shaped like a lower intestine and performing the same function for Republic and for Jones and Laughlin, the two largest steel mills on its banks. Discharge pipes, as misshapen as gargoyle mouths, vomited sulfuric acid into the water. Iron scale and fleece dust tinted the surface a liverish hue that locals described as “terra cotta” or “a maroonish blush.” Upstream of the Sherwin-Williams plant, the color depended on which batch of paint had gone bad the night before. Every day, factories polluted the river with 550,000 gallons of wastewater. The pickling acids discharged by the steel mills contained ferrous sulfate, which absorbed so much oxygen that the shoals were open graveyards of fish, bleached of color, gasping to death. Dark oil slicks floated on the water, like whorls of black ink. The calcium sulfate excrescence from Harshaw Chemical topped the river with a cream of white soda. Slaughterhouses pumped blood, animal organs, and offal into the river.

  Dredged over twenty feet deep, the Cuyahoga could not work up enough current to flush itself.

  The Cuyahoga was not just a sewer. It was a dump, too. Broken pallets and living room chairs were abandoned under bridges. Industrial spools lifted their hips above the surface. The mills cooled themselves with river water, then returned it, steaming, so the Cuyahoga never froze. A city councilman dipped a white sheet into the water and lifted out a rag stained with oil.

  If the river looked bad, it smelled even worse.

  “It would have had a very distinctive odor,” said Wayne Bratton, who captained freighters that tied up in the Cuyahoga. “Back then, it wouldn’t have been unusual to have ten to twenty ships in the river. The river bubbled like a cauldron. The river was black, high in petroleum content. Recreational boats did not come in the river, no less canoes. You wouldn’t have been able to stand the smell. They used to say if you fell in the river, don’t spit it out, because you’ll be polluting.”

  The Cuyahoga first caught fire in 1936. As a welder removed bolts from a freighter’s stern, sparks dribbled from his blowtorch, igniting the petroleum cocktail below. The welder tumbled through the smoke, burning his hand and face before crewmen fished him out of the flaming water. The fire fed on the oily wooden piers of an Erie Railroad jack-knife bridge but was extinguished by the fire department before it could reach eighty thousand barrels of gasoline stored in riverside tanks. Those stray sparks taught Cleveland a lesson about the Cuyahoga: it needed a fire boat for the next time the river went up in flames.

  The next big fire, in 1952, destroyed three tugs and most of a boat-repair yard—a million dollars in damage. Downtown Cleveland looked like Pearl Harbor. An orange tide line of flame spread across the river as the fire expanded, heaping black smoke into the sky. Still without a boat, twenty-two fire companies sprayed water from bridges, beating back the inferno before it could blow up the Standard Oil Co.’s ship fuel tanks. Mayor Thomas A. Burke promised that his administration would clean up the Cuyahoga.

  “In the past we have not had the cooperation of industries,” Burke said. “Well, we’re going to get it in the future.”

  They didn’t. In 1968, Bratton and his maritime industry colleagues were so disgusted by the persistent filth they formed the Oil Study Group, to clean it up themselves. A little vessel known as Putzfrau—German for “cleaning woman”—trolled the river, equipped with a two-ton crane and a vacuum tank that allowed it to scoop up one hundred yards of debris and suck up twenty thousand gallons of oil in a single day. The study group experimented with chemicals and absorbent pads to clean up the goop.

  A year into the Oil Study Group’s existence, the Cuyahoga called attention to itself in a way a gang of conservationists never could have. On June 22, 1969, it caught fire again. A hot rain of sparks fell from a railcar carrying molten steel across a Norfolk and Western bridge, igniting an oil slick. Floating downriver, the burning slick scorched the bridge’s pillars and warped its rails. With damage estimated at fifty grand, the fire was no big deal in Cleveland, certainly not as big as the holocaust of ’52. And this time, the fire department had a boat to put it out. The Cleveland Press ran a photo of the crooked bridge on page 1, with a five-sentence caption. But this so-what-the-river-burned-again fire ignited the American environmental movement and burned a scar onto Cleveland’s self-image that has yet to heal.

  In response to the antipollution movement begun by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Time magazine had just initiated an “Environment” column. The August 1 column, “America’s Sewage System and the Price of Optimism,” recounted the fire and described Cleveland’s “archaic” sewer system: “Every day for the past month, 25 million gallons of raw sewage have cascaded from a ruptured pipe, spilling a gray-green torrent into the Cuyahoga and thence into Lake Erie.”

  Clevelanders consider that 1969 column—not the fire itself—the beginning of a decade-long curse on their city. The first stroke of bad luck: the cover of that issue was a photo of Senator Edward Kennedy leaving the funeral of Mary Jo Kopechne, the woman he’d driven off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island. Had it not been for Chappaquiddick, Clevelanders insist, no one would have read that week’s Time, thus sparing Cleveland forty years of burning-river jokes.

  “The issue of Time with Kennedy on the cover, wearing a neck brace, was among the best-selling issues in the formerly Cleveland-based magazine’s history,” wrote Cleveland novelist Mark Winegardner, both sounding the “Why us?!” cry and lamenting an influential institution’s abandonment and betrayal of Cleveland, two civic complexes rooted in the Cuyahoga fire.

  The Chappaquiddick excuse, by the way, is nonsense. The issue wasn’t one of Time’s bestsellers. The unlucky coincidence? The fire occurred as Time was responding to its readers’ growing ecological consciousness. Cleveland should feel fortunate the column didn’t debut the week before, when the moon landing was on the cover. The Cuyahoga, that timely river, burst into flames at just the right moment to become a symbol of the environmental movement. Water turning to fire was the era’s most dramatic, otherworldly pollution disaster. Over the next few years, the Cuyahoga inspired Earth Day, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Clean Water Act of 1972, which contributed half the funds to detoxify the river.

  Clevelanders, though, remain fixated on the jokes. After reading Time, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In awarded Cleveland its “Fickle Finger of Fate,” and sardonic pianist Randy Newman wrote “Burn On” (“The Lord can make you overflow / But the Lord can’t make you burn”). The song of course appeared on his most acclaimed album, Sail Away. Sports Illustrated proposed that Cleveland host the Olympics. The city wouldn’t need a torch. It could just light the river.

  The Cuyahoga was not the only conflagration that embarrassed Cleveland. Three years later, Mayor Ralph Perk opened the American Society of Metals con
vention by cutting a steel cable with a blowtorch. A spark ignited his hair. For a few seconds, until it was beaten to death by the show’s embarrassed organizers, a flame danced atop the mayor’s head like a sprite. Not only does our river catch fire, Clevelanders moaned, our mayor catches fire, too!

  Perk was elected in 1971, succeeding Carl Stokes, the first black mayor of a major American city. An ice peddler who had grown up during Cleveland’s robust industrial prime, Perk had the unfortunate task of presiding over its decrepitude. Since the 1950s, Cleveland had lost 20 percent of its people to the suburbs, and an equal proportion of its stores. Cleveland had more acres of officially designated urban blight than any American city. Most of it was on the East Side, where whites accommodated the growing black population not by yielding more territory but by subdividing rental houses into smaller and smaller habitations. As poet Langston Hughes recalled of his Cleveland boyhood, “We always lived during my high school years either in an attic or a basement and paid a lot for such inconvenient quarters.”

  As in Detroit, businesses were abandoning the East Side’s factories. National Screw and Manufacturing moved to a spacious one-story plant in the suburb of Mentor, leaving behind a seven-story target for window breakers and arsonists. Perk spent half a million dollars on demolition, but Clevelanders were abandoning their houses faster than he could tear them down. Cartoonist Harvey Pekar, whose American Splendor comic books comprise a graphic novel of life in three-quarter-century Cleveland, absorbed his city’s malaise.