David Stradling

Among the worst of them all is the 80 mile-long Cuyahoga. Some River! Chocolatey-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gasses, it oozes rather than flows. ~ Time Magazine

Where the River Burned: Carl Stokes and the Struggle to Save Cleveland by David Stradling and Richard Stradling is a history of Cleveland in the late 1960s. David Stradling is a professor of urban and environmental history at Cincinnati University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Richard Stradling is an editor at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C.

I grew up in Cleveland in a Polish neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s. My neighborhood was very ethnic with many of the older residents still speaking the language of the home country. I enjoyed growing up there and although I have not been back in over twenty-five years, Cleveland is still my city. What was so great growing up there? I would be hard pressed to say anything more than sentimental reasons. We had the worst school system in the state. We had a marginal football team and baseball team that never seemed to break 500. We used to fish for jumbo perch near off the 72nd Street pier, but pollution killed the fish. The steel mills and Municipal Light and Power seemed to darken the skies with pollution. But as kids, we played football and baseball on the red brick streets and there seemed to be something magical about growing up on Vineyard Avenue on the southeast side of town.

Yes, the Cuyahoga River did catch on fire in 1969. It was a major news outside of the city. Those in Cleveland knew the river had caught fire several times in the past. Cleveland grew fast and with fast growing cities there is rapid development and little planning until there are problems. Problems caught up to Cleveland in the 1960s.

Cleveland is now, and was then too, very segregated. Even in white neighborhoods it was segregated ethnically. The main problem, however, was black and white. Blacks were located in several poor areas of the city including Hough which was the site of rioting. Hough was at a time a very nice neighborhood, but people moved out, the tax base was reduced, businesses followed and eventually it became a ghetto. Race issues and poverty became a major problem for the city. One program with some success was the rat eradication program. The poorer areas of the city were heavily infested with rats.

Pollution was another major problem. I have memories as very young child of swimming in Lake Erie's Edgewater Park, before the pollution closed the beaches. Imagine a city on a lake, but without any water recreation because of the pollution and algae blooms. Coliform bacteria make the water unsafe for swimming and recreation. 1000/ml was the coliform limit that closed beaches. Some areas along the shore reached 110,000/ml. Mayor Carl Stokes wanted to open beaches again he fought to clean up the Cuyahoga and Lake Erie. He had some success, but nowhere near enough. The city came up with a plan to open beaches. Essentially an area (White City Beach) was sectioned off by pontoons and weighted plastic curtains. The area was treated with chlorine nightly, 350lbs/night, to keep the bacteria count low enough to open the beaches. Stokes and his staff were there to swim along with the public. This approach was called "a pool in the lake" and was something the city was quite proud of. In hindsight, this sounds rather ridiculous. Essentially it is dumping poison into a lake to kill other poisons. On the positive side, it did open portions of the lake to the public and was much cheaper than the billion plus dollars of cleaning up the lake -- Money that no one had.

Earthday plays a large role in this book also. The air pollution and water pollution were major problems. On the first Earth Day in 1970, Cleveland school children wrote the mayor about pollution. I was in kindergarten at the time and we drew posters that were going to be sent to the mayor. I drew a rocket, billowing smoke as it was taking off. After drawing and coloring it, I was told rockets used hydrogen and oxygen as fuel so it wasn't really pollution, but rockets were cool.

Where the River Burned concentrates its history on Mayor Carl Stokes terms as mayor. It was a critical time in the city's history and Carl Stokes was energetic and determined to fix the city. He seemed to be that rare honest person who cared more for his city than he did for politics. He was from that poverty stricken east side and he rose to become the first black mayor of a major US city. He reminds me of President Ford who walked into so many problems when he assumed office and diligently worked to fix them. It was a superhuman task in both cases, but the men put their duty ahead of personal gain. These were not only men of integrity, but politicians with integrity. Not perfect but they did their best. Stokes turned down a request from LBJ to come to Washington for an MLK memorial, Stokes, chose to stay in Cleveland in potential hot spots personally working to stop any violence or rioting. Compare that to the next mayor of Cleveland, Perk, whose wife turned down a request First Lady Pat Nixon, because the event was on her bowling night.

Yes, the joke about the river catching fire did get old, and yes I still get asked if the river really did catch on fire. It does not bother me anymore. In Cleveland, they fully recovered from it and take it in stride with a Burning River Pale Ale from a local brewery. The book for me is full of memories, places, and names of Cleveland's movers and shakers. It is a virtual time machine to my much younger days. This is an absolute read for any Cleveland native or those interested in urban pollution and the history of race issues and poverty. Simply outstanding.… (more)

This book uses New York State as a microcosm to discuss the tends in environmental awareness and activity in the United States. New York is important for a number of reasons. It has many varied geological, geographical, sociologica and historical features which led to many diverse ways of connecting to the environment. It was at the forefront of many environmental movements both because of an appreciation of its natural beauty and also because the intensity of some of its environmental degradation.

As a long time resident who has worked on environmental issues and benefited from the conservation and restoration of our environment, I was familiar with a lot of the story Strandling had to tell, so I skipped around a bit. However, I think the book is written well enough and interesting enough to be read all the way through by anyone interested in the environmental history in the United States.… (more)

From my blog: http://gregshistoryblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/nature-of-new-york.html

In my "The Ides" posting I noted how good intentions can sometimes boomerang with devastating effects. One example is an 1879 New York State law that required all apartment rooms to have a window. The idea behind the law was to bring light and fresh air to the overcrowded city tenements. This good sounding law had the unintended consequence of inspiring landlords to construct the infamous "dumbbell" apartment design (see picture to right). This odious

construction only made the problem worse as the windows in the "air shafts" between the buildings filled with rotting garbage and refuse. Instead or bringing fresh air and light, this law ironically created dank apartments infused with noxious fumes. I learned about this law in David Stradling's The Nature of New York: An Environmental History of the Empire State (Cornell, 2010).

As Stradling demonstrates, New York state played a pivotal role in the history of the American environment. Just to name some of the most important events and ideas emanating from the Empire State that inspired the nation: the Erie Canal, Niagara Falls tourism, Central Park, Adirondack State Park, Levittown, and Love Canal. Important individuals such as James Fenimore Cooper, the Hudson River School, the Roosevelts, Robert Marshall, and Robert Moses, to name a few, came from New York but impacted attitudes and policies throughout the United States. Being so focused on William Hornaday, I would argue that Stradling could have emphasized the role of the New York Zoological Park (a.k.a Bronx Zoo) in revolutionizing the concept of the zoo much more than he did, but I admit this falls in the category of basing criticism on how I might have written the book which is not always fair.

There are many more common environmental issues in New York State that could be used to make comparisons to other localities, states, and systems. Examples include, How to supply cities with water? Where to build infrastructure? Who should be held responsible for misdeeds and damage that harms other people? How to adapt to changes in the environment? What is the difference between genuine natural space and managed space? Throw in NIMBY, polluters, and larger trends like the decline of agriculture or the rise of the urban population and this book speaks across the Empire State's borders.

I really enjoyed The Nature of New York, especially because Stradling gives a lot of attention to the urban environment. He successfully argues that use of urban space is as legitimate topic for environmental history as forests, mountains, prairies, and tidal lands. New York City's pioneering 1916 zoning law stood out for me. I was surprised it took so long for such a code, and thought it more than coincidental that it was implemented only 4 years before the census revealed that the population of the country was equally divided between urban and rural dwellers. It is almost as if cities only then earned some respect as more than a dumping ground. Second, I just about forgot how much I enjoyed place histories. Whether it is a discussion on the history of the environment or politics, I do so enjoy this type of study.… (more)