UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Date:_November 2, 2007__

I, __Aaron Cowan______, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: Doctor of Philosophy in: History It is entitled: A Nice Place to Visit: Tourism, Urban______Revitalization, and the Transformation of Postwar American Cities

This work and its defense approved by:

David Stradling, Chair: ___David Stradling______

Wayne Durrill __ Wayne Durrill______

Tracy Teslow ___Tracy Teslow ______

Marguerite Shaffer Marguerite Shaffer Miami University Oxford, Ohio

A Nice Place To Visit: Tourism, Urban Revitalization, and the Transformation of Postwar American Cities

A Dissertation submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in the Department of History of the College of Arts and Sciences 2007

by

Aaron B. Cowan

M.A., University of Cincinnati, 2003 B.A., King College, 1999

Committee Chair: Dr. David Stradling Abstract

This dissertation examines the growth of tourism as a strategy for downtown renewal in the postwar American city. In the years after World War II, American cities declined precipitously as residents and businesses relocated to rapidly-expanding suburbs.

Governmental and corporate leaders, seeking to arrest this decline, embarked upon an ambitious program of physical renewal of downtowns. The postwar “urban crisis” was a boon for the urban tourist industry. Finding early renewal efforts ineffective in stemming the tide of deindustrialization and suburbanization, urban leaders subsidized, with billions of dollars in public finances, the construction of an infrastructure of tourism within American downtowns. By the latter decades of the period, tourist development had moved from a relatively minor strategy for urban renewal to a key measure of urban success.

This dissertation traces the development of postwar urban tourism in the cities of

Baltimore, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. Each city provides a case study for a different type of urban tourist development – hotels, convention centers, stadiums, and

“festival marketplaces.” Such tourist development fulfilled a multiplicity of desires and needs in the postwar city. First, tourism catered to the growing consumerist ethic of postwar

America, in which not only goods but experiences became consumer objects – thus cities were remade into easily “consumable” entities. Secondly, it offered opportunities for urban revitalization that required little in the way of sacrifice from middle-class Americans, an attribute that became especially attractive after the “conservative backlash” of the late 1960s.

Finally, tourist development allowed city leaders to project an image of urban vitality even while much of their cities remained in dire straits. While much of the scholarship on urban tourism has either celebrated its ability to renew cities or condemned its “inauthenticity” and

i delocalizing tendencies, this dissertation argues that tourism‟s often exploitative nature had little to do with its inherent characteristics but rather lay in the choices of leaders who saw a revitalized downtown as their highest goal, and were often willing to sacrifice the traditional measures of civic improvement to achieve that end.

ii

iii Acknowledgements

Scholars almost always open their works with an acknowledgement of the debt they owe others for the content that follows. Until I undertook this work, I always thought they were just being nice. I cannot imagine even getting off the ground without the contributions of so many people. David Stradling, my dissertation advisor, read each chapter several times over and sorted out my often scattered thoughts into a more cohesive narrative and argument.

Beyond the mechanics of the dissertation, he has provided a daily example of scholarship as a real profession, and shown limitless patience and wisdom. I thank him for his guidance, and the countless coffees and Chinese food. The committee members, Tracy Teslow, Wayne

Durrill, and Marguerite Shaffer of Miami University, provided helpful feedback and criticism that improved this project and shaped the way I will approach my research in the future.

Other scholars have also been generous with their time and advice. John K. Alexander whipped an earlier version of Chapter 4 into shape – as only he can – as part of his research and writing seminar. I thank Joseph Heathcott for a caffeine-fueled summer-morning tour of

St. Louis that forever changed how I conceived of that city. Mark Souther took time to share insights from his own excellent research, and Alison Isenberg provided very useful and influential criticism on an early draft of my dissertation prospectus. Comments by scholars at meetings of the Society of American City and Regional Planning History and the Urban

History Association also improved Chapters 2 and 4.

I was also fortunate to have an active and lively group of scholars in my fellow graduate students, who in our semi-regular meetings as ―Dissertations Anonymous‖ provided support, sympathetic ears, and critical eyes when I most needed them. I thank Dan Glenn,

iv Rob Gioielli, David Merkowitz, Krista Sigler, Feay Coleman, Jim Streckfuss and others for their camaraderie and intellectual stimulation.

Outside of the high-minded realm of scholarship, the practical realities of finances often dictate the quality of graduate student life, and I have been grateful for the continuous support of the University of Cincinnati in that regard. A generous scholarship and assistantship sustained practical needs throughout my time there. The University Research

Council provided support for summer research, and the Charles Phelps Taft Memorial Fund offered a full year in which to focus solely on research and writing. The History Department has kindly provided me with travel grants and teaching opportunities, as well as a lively and collegial work environment. Hope Earls, the department‘s secretary, kept everything running smoothly and proved a valuable guide for navigating the workings of graduate school.

Even with all the resources listed above, this project would have been impossible without the support of friends and family, who, from the outside looking in, tried as best they could to sympathize and encourage me in this endeavor. I thank Brandon Forbes for his willingness to comment on my work and skill in helping me forget about it when needed. My parents, Buddy and Sharon Cowan, have been a constant source of support and encouragement. It was they who instilled in me a love and respect for the past, and never discouraged me from the long and convoluted process of turning that interest into a profession. Finally and most importantly, I owe an immeasurable debt to my wife, Melissa, who has put up with the stress, late nights, and meager income of a doctoral student, and has shown remarkable grace and love to me throughout the whole process. Nolan Cowan was no help at all on this dissertation, but his love, humor, and unending enthusiasm always placed it in proper perspective.

v

Table of Contents

Abstract i

Acknowledgements iv

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Urban Decline and the Search for Solutions in Baltimore, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis after 1945 30

Chapter 2: From Social Center to Convention Center: The Changing Function of Downtown Hotels in Postwar Cincinnati 73

Chapter 3: ―FEAR and GREED‖: Race, the St. Louis Convention Center, and the Decline of Liberalism in the Postwar City 108

Chapter 4: City of Champions: Professional Sports, Stadiums, and Urban Revitalization in Pittsburgh 156

Chapter 5: Tourism, Image-making and the Festival Marketplace in Baltimore‘s Inner Harbor 196

Epilogue 234

Bibliography 238

vi

INTRODUCTION

Tourism and the Postwar American City

Two hours past midnight on April 7, 2001, a Cincinnati, Ohio police officer shot and killed an unarmed nineteen-year-old black man during pursuit following an attempted arrest.

The shooting was the fourth killing of an African-American male by Cincinnati police over the course of six months. As word spread of the latest death, simmering racial tensions boiled over into violent action, and hundreds of residents of Over-the-Rhine, the city‘s predominantly African-American inner-city neighborhood, vented their anger and frustration in several days of riots and looting. National media carried images of the riots and city‘s efforts to quell them, which eventually included the establishment of a city-wide curfew and more than 280 arrests.

Later that year, several different action groups formed in Cincinnati to continue protesting racial discrimination in the city and the city‘s failure to reform the police department. By July 2001, many were calling for an economic boycott of downtown

Cincinnati.1 On September 10, 2001, the Coalition for a Just Cincinnati proclaimed a

―Cincinnati Boycott Against Economic Apartheid.‖ In a public statement, the group declared,

―First and foremost, we call for a boycott of the Cincinnati metropolitan area by conventions, tourists, and other travelers.‖ The group went on to call for a boycott of all the city‘s downtown businesses, and closed with a call to potential tourists. ―Make things right in

Cincinnati!‖ the statement urged, ―Withhold your dollars from the city. Economic pressure

1 ―Groups Call For Boycott of City Until Demands Met: Lack of Progress Cited on Racial Issues,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 15 July 2001.

1 will force the city‘s leaders to find solutions. Our friends all over the country, all over the world can help us make Cincinnati a prosperous, safe and welcoming city for all its citizens.‖2

The boycott of tourism might have seemed an odd choice of protests given the tragic death, the violent riots that followed, and the central issue of police-community relations. But in the context of Cincinnati‘s postwar history of urban development, it made perfect sense.

The Coalition for a Just Cincinnati clearly understood that by attacking the city‘s downtown, and specifically its tourist industry, they were striking at the economic heart of the city.

Indeed, the city‘s economic development strategy in the postwar era had strongly tied its fortunes to that of the tourist industry, as city officials regularly elected to use precious municipal funds to subsidize the city‘s convention center, hotels, stadiums, and other tourist- oriented infrastructure in hopes of reviving its downtown. Perhaps fresh in the memories of many protestors in 2001 was the city‘s recent plan to grant a $50 million subsidy to the

Nordstrom‘s Corporation in a failed attempt to attract a flagship downtown department store.3

The city also remained embroiled in debates about taxpayer financing of two new sports stadiums on the city‘s riverfront, which had exceeded original budgeted costs by more than

$200 million.4 Tourism officials in the same year also appealed to Cincinnati City Council for public funding for an expansion of the Albert Sabin Convention Center. In the wake of the April riots, African-American community leader Damon Lynch III pointed to the city‘s emphasis on tourist and retail development – to the neglect of issues such as race relations,

2 Coalition for a Just Cincinnati, ―Cincinnati Boycott Against Economic Apartheid‖ 10 September 2001. Collection of the author. 3 ―Nordstrom Wins Unanimous Funding Ok: City To Invest $36m To Aid Downtown Store,‖ Cincinnati Post, 29 June 2000, ―Loan Terms For Nordstrom Stun Council,‖ Cincinnati Post, 26 June 2000; ―Nordstrom Drops Plan For Store Downtown,‖ Cincinnati Post, 23 November 2000. 4 ―Overruns Break Budget, Trust: Search On For Stadium Solutions,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 17 February 2000. For a narrative of the two recent stadiums in the context of downtown development, see Timothy Jon Curry, Kent Schwirian, and Rachael Woldoff, High Stakes: Big Time Sports and Downtown Redevelopment (Ohio State University Press, 2005), 114-134.

2 poverty, and unemployment - as part of the problem facing the city. ―We talk about the light rail, expanding the convention center, the 2012 Olympics, The Banks riverfront development.

Let‘s get real. We‘ve got racial problems. We can build stadiums. But can we deal with our human relations?‖5

The Cincinnati experience demonstrates both the central place that tourism had gained in the priorities of urban governance, and the problematic consequences of tourism development for the social health of the city as a whole. However, the events in Cincinnati in

2001 speak to changes far beyond the Queen City, changes that reshaped almost all American cities in the postwar era. Cincinnati was in no way unique in its pursuit of tourism as a strategy for economic development – the pattern of public investment in downtown tourism occurred in cities throughout the nation, beginning in the 1950s and accelerating rapidly by the 1970s. A number of questions arise from this phenomenon. Why did tourism gain such prominence over other possible methods of urban revitalization? What effect did the growth of tourism have on cities – politically, socially, and even culturally? Furthermore, what does the increasing popularity of central cities as tourist locations reveal about postwar American society, and specifically the broader understanding of the function and meaning of the

American city? Before addressing these issues, some context is necessary to understand the economic and political environment in which urban tourism prospered and the degree to which previous scholars have laid a foundation for addressing these questions.

5 ―Protestor Lynch Becomes Peacemaker Lynch,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 15 April 2001. Also quoted in Curry, et al., High Stakes, 120. ―The Banks‖ to which Lynch referred was a planned retail- entertainment-residential development on the city‘s riverfront between the two stadiums.

3 The post-World War II surge in urban tourism was not an entirely unprecedented occurrence. Visitors have long brought vitality and variety to urban centers, though American cities have generally lacked the romantic historical character and cultural authority of their

European counterparts. Rapid urbanization and industrialization in the nineteenth-century

United States rarely produced attractive tourist destinations. Instead, nature and wilderness tourism captured the imagination of the well-to-do American in the nineteenth century.

Visiting locations such as Niagara Falls, the Adirondack mountains, the spas and springs of

New Hampshire‘s White Mountains and later, western locations like the Grand Canyon and

Yellowstone National Park, provided Americans with an antidote to the growing pains of an urbanizing society and reinforced ideological convictions about the natural abundance and cultural legitimacy of the republic.6 The disorderly, smoke-filled, and crowded American city was the place to escape, not to see.

An important exception to this rule were the most popular mass tourist events in fin- de-siecle American cities: expositions and world‘s fairs. The 1851 London Exhibition, featuring the famed Crystal Palace, initiated a wave of expositions in the United States that sought to imitate that fair‘s grandeur and celebration of Western global hegemony. World‘s fairs were enormously successful; between the Philadelphia Centennial International

Exhibition of 1876 and World War I, world‘s fairs brought an estimated 100 million visitors to American cities.7 The most celebrated, such as the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition

6 John Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Marguerite Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001); Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995); John Jakle, The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth-Century North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985). 7 Robert W. Rydell, John E. Findling, and Kimberly D. Pelle, Fair America: World‟s Fairs in the United States (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), 3; Robert W Rydell, All the

4 and the 1904 St. Louis World‘s Fair, have become fabled moments in those cities‘ histories

(not to mention popular material for scholars). Besides the world‘s fairs, which drew an international audience, many cities held smaller-scale regional expositions that showcased the host city‘s industrial and commercial products, as well as the city itself. Cincinnati, for example, hosted annual expositions from 1870-1888 which showcased new industrial technologies and portrayed the city as a place of ―progress, economic growth, and civilization.‖8 Tourism in this form was a method of promoting the existing economic basis of the city rather than a significant industry in its own right.

World‘s fairs and expositions continued to be popular urban tourist attractions through the twentieth century, but cities without the good fortune to host international fairs also began to cater to significant numbers of tourists. By the early twentieth century, the efforts of

Progressive reformers and advocates of the City Beautiful movement added parks, monuments, and civic architecture that improved the appearance of cities and made them more acceptable to middle-class Americans as tourist destinations in their own right.9

Guidebooks, usually printed by local chambers of commerce, helped orient visitors to cities and boasted of the commercial achievements and cultural amenities of the metropolis, while private touring companies gave travelers a scripted and ―authoritative‖ understanding of the city.10 Postcards featuring cities‘ downtown skylines, streetscapes, popular hotels, and prominent landmarks became standard mementoes of middle-class travel, and also popular

World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 8 Tracy Teslow, ―Representing the Art and Industry of Progress: Cincinnati‘s Grand Exposition Posters,‖ Ohio Valley History 5, no. 1 (Spring 2005), 47-54. 9 The best discussion of the development of American urban tourism is Catherine Cocks, Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850-1915, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 10 Jakle, The Tourist, 248-251; Cocks, Doing the Town, 143-173, passim.

5 instruments for urban boosters.11 Other tourists sought less formal and more ―colorful‖ experiences in the various neighborhoods of immigrants and racial minorities found in large cities. Such excursions to the urban underside afforded middle-class white Americans a chance to experience ―exotic‖ cultures strikingly different from their own, while often also providing ethnic minorities with a new source of income.12

The advent of the automobile heightened interest in both urban and wilderness tourism. Henry Ford‘s refinement of assembly-line production and the automobile‘s increasing affordability led to an unprecedented level of ownership – by 1925 there were more than 20 million automobiles registered in the United States, up from less than 3 million a decade earlier and fewer than 10,000 in 1905. Emerging out of this trend was a craze for

―auto-camping‖ in which middle-class Americans took to the road to explore the nation‘s landscape.13 Even the hardiest of wilderness explorers needed fuel and food supplies, and cities, as well as smaller towns, quickly took advantage of this potential market by constructing municipally-owned ―autocamps‖ on their outskirts which provided campsites, water, and sometimes bath facilities to travelers. These camps served the dual purpose of encouraging visitors to patronize the town‘s businesses while also confining and controlling sometimes-unruly transients. A 1924 Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce newsletter praised the city government for erecting an auto camp in Schenley Park, noting it had been ―a complete success in every particular, bringing here for more or less extended visits a

11 On the use of images in urban tourism of the period, see Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images As History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York, N.Y.: Hill and Wang, 1989), esp. 180-187. 12 Jakle, The Tourist, 278-280; Cocks, Doing the Town, 174-203. 13 Warren Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910-1945 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979); John Jakle, Keith Sculle, and Jefferson Rogers, The Motel in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Shaffer, See America First, 133-137, 230-231.

6 multitude of tourists who would otherwise have passed Pittsburgh by.‖14 While municipal camps soon gave way to privately-owned motels, cities continued to welcome tourists as a way of boosting business.

Attempts to attract conventions represented American cities‘ earliest formal efforts to encourage tourist business, beginning in the decades after the Civil War and accelerating by the turn of the century. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an explosion of military and fraternal societies - these included groups such as the Civil War veterans‘ Grand

Army of the Republic, fraternal organizations such as the Shriners, and later the World War I veterans of the American Legion. In addition, the increasing professionalization of business and fields such as medicine and law led to organizations for the dissemination of profession- specific information and interpersonal connections. The expansion of national railroad networks during the period enabled the rapid growth of these societies, making travel to annual or semi-annual meetings more convenient and affordable.15 To capitalize on this potential business, hotels, restaurants and transportation companies in many larger cities formed convention and visitors‘ bureaus for the recruitment of national and regional meetings.

By the early decades of the twentieth century, the convention business was an increasingly sophisticated and organized industry. Still, in the pre-World War II period, convention and visitors‘ bureaus gained little support from municipal governments; they were almost always privately funded by members of the business community.16

14 ―Pittsburgh A Mecca For Auto Tourists,‖ Pittsburgh First, 20 September 1924. 15 Cocks, Doing the Town, 138-139; Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Random House, 1965), 143. 16 Cocks, Doing the Town, 139-141. Two scholars of tourism development in twentieth-century New Orleans argue that civic leaders also demonstrated a reluctance to support the city‘s tourist industry through the first decades of the century. J. Mark Souther, City on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 1-37, and

7 Indeed, few cities placed a special emphasis on encouraging the tourist industry during the first half of the century. While hospitality businessmen aggressively pursued more tourism business, a mayor‘s welcome speech to a large convention or the construction of a modest autocamp were usually the limits of municipal involvement in courting visitors. With the exception of the rare international exposition, urban tourism in first half of the century was largely incidental; it did not significantly influence the political machinations, public expenditures, or the spatial organization of most American cities.17 As historian John Jakle observes, during this period ―no city was deliberately designed either to attract or hold a tourist trade . . . cities in the early twentieth century made little effort to accommodate tourists as a special class beyond the provisionings of hotels and restaurants. Contrived attractions in cities were few. The city itself was the attraction.‖18

Tourism did become significantly more important to cities in the post-World War II era, but not only due to lobbying efforts by hospitality industry leaders. Rather, changing conditions in the American city, resulting from broader structural changes in the American economy, created the conditions that brought tourism to its place of prominence. First among these was postwar suburbanization. As detailed in Chapter 1, the mass middle-class exodus to

Anthony J. Stanonis, Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 28-69. 17 An important exception of course, would be world‘s fairs, which required significant political maneuvering, heavy financial expenditure, and the clearance and reshaping of large portions of urban landscape. Furthermore, the architecture of the fairgrounds, as in the case of ―White City‖ of the 1893 Chicago World‘s Fair, often inspired new conceptions of urban space and architecture. Similarly, the 1904 St. Louis Fair devoted a significant portion of display space to a ―Model Street‖ and ―Civic Pride Monument‖ which offered models for urban environmental improvement. A good overview of the impact of these fairs on Midwestern cities can be found in John Teaford, Cities of the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 136-146. 18 John Jakle, The Tourist, 284.

8 newly built suburbs drained cities of their residential tax bases and left large sections of cities sparsely occupied and in physical disrepair. Policies of racial discrimination in the mortgage industry, limited the ability of most African-Americans and other minorities to purchase homes in the rapidly-growing suburbs.

In addition, by the 1960s and 1970s, older cities in the Northeast and Midwest suffered from the trend of ―deindustrialization,‖ in which the manufacturing bases that had led to cities‘ meteoric rise either contracted sharply due to automation, or relocated to less expensive labor markets overseas or in the rapidly-emerging Sunbelt. Unemployment levels not seen since the Great Depression became the norm in many once-thriving industrial cities.

In sum, these trends left many older American cities occupied largely by racial minorities and the poor, places increasingly viewed as dangerous, unpleasant, and unnecessary by the largely white suburban middle class.

This departure weakened an already struggling central city economy. Downtown‘s traditional retail and service establishments, still attempting to recover from the Great

Depression, increasingly lost business to suburban competitors, leading to business closings, foreclosures, and a rapid depression in property values. This was an especially alarming trend for urban leaders, who had traditionally conceptualized downtown as the key economic, political and social engine of the entire metropolis.

Politicos and business leaders searched desperately for some means of revitalizing their central cities and reclaiming downtown‘s role as the hub of a larger metropolitan region.

The revival of downtowns to their central prewar role became the almost obsessive goal of volume upon volume of master plans, transportation policies, and reports of economic consultants. Hospitality industry executives, who had long campaigned for public subsidy for

9 their businesses, sensed in the desperation of political leaders an opportunity. Leveraging the postwar ―urban crisis‖ to their advantage, they promised cities that the expansion of the tourist industry would provide the road out of urban decline, supplying thousands of jobs, millions in tax dollars, and attractive new downtown spaces. While reality often fell short of these promises, cities across the country poured millions of dollars in public financing into tourist projects such as hotels, convention centers, sports arenas, and entertainment districts. In one celebrated ―renaissance‖ after another, urban leaders pointed to these flashy recreational developments as evidence that their city was reborn. By the latter decades of the postwar era, tourism development had not only become an important priority for American downtowns, in many cases it became essential as ―proof‖ that the city as a whole was vital, successful, and worthy of capital investment and media attention.

It is worth noting that when discussing ―urban‖ tourism, the focus of this dissertation is primarily on downtowns. This is more than a simple issue of semantics; as noted above, the distinction between downtown and the city as a whole is central to understanding the development of tourism in American cities. Cincinnati protestors in 2001 thus focused their protest geographically, specifically targeting downtown rather than the city as a whole. Many opponents of tourism development accused urban leaders of placing downtown growth ahead of other municipal priorities, while pro-tourist forces argued that downtown, as the ―heart‖ of the metropolis, had to be supported and that its success would ensure the health of the entire city.

Within this dissertation, tourism has two different meanings, differentiated by the participants and the physical space devoted to them. The first of these is leisure tourism,

10 made up of visitors who come to a city to ―see the sights,‖ attend cultural events such as plays or concerts, or perhaps follow their favorite sports teams. The second major component of urban tourism is the conventions and meeting industry, which, as noted above, has grown from its roots in the urban expositions of the nineteenth century into a well-organized, politically influential and highly competitive industry. Boosters and industry heads during the postwar period usually used the term ―tourism‖ to describe both types, and this is also the meaning I adopt.

Because suburbanization has triumphed as the dominant form of residential development in the postwar American city, it is also not stretching the term too far to speak of the suburban middle class as tourists in their relation to the central city around which they live. Like ―outside‖ tourists, most suburban residents have come to see their local downtowns as unfamiliar, novel, and primarily as centers of entertainment rather than industry or civic participation. Efforts at tourist development in American downtowns have often developed parallel to, or overlapped with, efforts to market the city as a ―visitor destination‖ to local suburbanites. Chambers of Commerce and tourist bureaus in cities such as Cincinnati, St.

Louis, and Lansing, Michigan, to name only a few examples, have in recent years initiated

―Be a Tourist in Your Own Town‖ campaigns, offering discounts on downtown hotels, shopping, and cultural and sporting events to locals.

Perhaps urban tourism is in some way a natural result of the suburbanization of

America. In the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, wilderness tourism boomed as middle-class Americans desired an escape from the strenuous life of the city. In the second half of the twentieth century, that impulse toward nature tourism remained strong, but cities also became places to escape the everyday routine of suburban life. St. Louis mayor A.J.

11 Cervantes spoke in the 1960s of the tourist industry as one business ―that cannot move to the suburbs.‖ While the more recent proliferation of suburban convention center and hotel complexes challenges that assertion, it does speak to a clear sense that cities offered experiences and cultural amenities that the suburbs could never replicate. Certainly the growth of the historic preservation movement in the past three decades has been closely linked with the middle-class desire for unique and culturally rich references to the urban past.

In a broad sense, the study of urban tourism gives particular insight into how most Americans understand and interact with the city – as tourists.

This dissertation assesses how tourism gained such a central role in the postwar

American city, and how tourism development reshaped cities and altered their meaning and function. Besides Cincinnati, I also examine the history of tourism in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. All four of these cities declined sharply in the second half of the twentieth century, and while their efforts at urban revitalization took a number of different paths, tourism gradually gained a vital position in their postindustrial economies. When thinking of the most popular American urban tourist destinations of the twentieth century, cities such as

Las Vegas, New York, or Orlando frequently come to mind, while the cities I have chosen here do not. That is at least part of the point. Tourism‘s reach has extended far beyond fantastical, booming meccas like Las Vegas to reshape cities across the spectrum of urban

America. Furthermore, this dissertation‘s focus is squarely on the relationship between the tourist industry and urban revitalization efforts in the postwar period. Baltimore, Cincinnati,

Pittsburgh, and St. Louis provide an opportunity not only to tell the story of tourism in often- overlooked cities, but also to explore the incongruities and tensions of tourism development in locations that can be considered paragons of the postwar ―urban crisis,‖ in which tourism

12 represented only one of several potential courses of renewal. In Chapter One I describe more fully tourism‘s place within the various strategies these cities adopted to address urban decline, arguing that tourism moved from a supplemental priority in early strategies to take center stage in the solutions developed by the 1960s and 1970s.

These four cities also share a number of significant traits that make them appropriate cases for comparison. Besides rough similarities in size and economic fortune, all four share a common pattern of tourist development. None of the four cities could claim widely- recognized cultural or historic attractions that would automatically attract tourists like Boston,

New York, or New Orleans. Thus, in courting tourism they became what some scholars have termed ―converted cities‖ – non-tourist cities that carved out a portion of their downtowns for tourist use while separating visitors from the rest of daily urban life.19 For the most part, the tourist attractions in Baltimore, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis had to be created from wholecloth. The attempt to transition from an industrial/commercial city in these locations is thus more typical of the American urban tourist experience; though almost every city of any significant size attempted to build a tourist infrastructure, few had pre-existing tourist amenities.

The rise of tourism in the United States has received significant attention in scholarly literature, though sensitivity and attention to the historical narrative of tourism is less developed than it might be.20 This dissertation addresses two specific bodies of literature: the

19 Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein, eds., The Tourist City (Yale University Press, 1999), 266- 267. 20 While this dissertation primarily engages the historical literature on tourism, it should be noted that the study of tourism has much of its roots in other disciplines, particularly sociology and cultural

13 history of tourism in the United States, and scholarship on the postwar American city.

Historians writing about tourism have said very little about cities; conversely, urban scholars have given at best cursory attention to how tourism has changed the American city over time.

Tourism is still an emerging field of scholarship for historians, and much of that literature has focused on wilderness tourism, particularly in the American West.21 Hal Rothman‘s work

Devil‟s Bargains: Tourism and the Twentieth Century American West, was a pioneering work in extending this field, exploring how tourist development shifted power relationships in western communities away from local constituents and toward imported capital, while also fundamentally altering local culture to suit tourists‘ taste. Rothman‘s work made a case for the study of tourism as more than the study of leisure or culture, demonstrating that the growth of tourism is inextricably linked with the political economy of place, with the use (and misuse) of land, and that tourism is ―both an industry and a cultural-experiential structure that has thoroughly permeated twentieth-century life.‖22 Both Rothman‘s thesis and his justification of tourism as a field of historical study have fundamentally shaped the field.

Other historians have built upon this foundation to explore the development of both national and regional tourism in the United States. Marguerite Shaffer, in See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940, demonstrates that tourism during the period ―was integrally

studies. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1976 is often viewed as the starting point for an academic discussion of tourism. His stance, which portrays tourists as consumers pursuing ―authentic‖ transforming experiences, has shaped many scholars‘ assumptions and arguments regarding tourism. 21Earl Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America. (New York: Knopf, 1957); Hal Rothman, Devil's Bargains : Tourism in the Twentieth-century American West (Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998). Outside the West, tourism in New England and the American South have been the subject of several excellent studies. Brown, Inventing New England; Starnes, ed., Southern Journeys: Tourism, History, and Culture in the Modern South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003). 22 Susan G. Davis, ―The Nation and Beyond – Book Review‖ Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999), 1309-1311.

14 involved in a larger cultural dialogue about shared national identity and an ideal of mobile citizenship that affirmed and legitimized the social, economic, and political relations of modern consumer culture.‖23 Wilderness tourism and cross-country road trips thus shaped not only the American landscape but the definition of modern American identity.

In the past decade, urban tourism has received greater attention from historians.

Catherine Cocks‘ Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1880-

1915, chronicles the emergence of middle-class tourism in the cities of Boston, Chicago, San

Francisco, and Washington, DC. By the early twentieth century, Cocks argues, increasing numbers of visitors to cities had created the basis for an urban tourist industry, but more significantly had ―contributed to a new and powerful set of ideas about urban space, commercial leisure, and social relations.‖24 Southern cities, which saw in tourism an opportunity for economic growth in the New South, have also drawn the attention of historians, with particularly important work on New Orleans and Atlanta.25

These studies have provided firm foundations for an emerging field, but there remains much work to be done in constructing a history of urban tourism. In particular, very little of the work on tourism, whether in cities or elsewhere, has explored the postwar period, a terribly important time for the American city. Historians writing more broadly about the postwar American city have frequently (and very reasonably) focused their narratives on racial segregation, ghettos, public housing, and suburbanization, while giving only cursory

23 Shaffer, See America First, 6. 24 Cocks, Doing the Town, 8. 25 New Orleans, with its unique blend of historical charm and taboo indulgences, has long been a tourist mecca and has received proportional attention from scholars J. Mark Souther, City on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City, Anthony J. Stanonis, Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945. For a study of the tourist industry in another Southern city, see Harvey K. Newman, Southern Hospitality: Tourism and the Growth of Atlanta (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999).

15 attention to tourism as an influential force within the city.26 We still know very little about tourism in the period of the ―urban crisis,‖ especially considering, as this dissertation demonstrates, its powerful influence on the postwar city

While historical scholarship on urban tourism is relatively underdeveloped, scholars of political science, sociology, architecture, or cultural theory have produced a number of studies of urban tourism.27 The new role of downtowns as places of entertainment has been alternately lamented and celebrated by these scholars. Much of the foundational scholarship on tourism worked from an assumption that such development was undesirable or inevitably damaging. Scholars (not all historians) have seen in postwar urban tourism the

―Disneyification‖ of cities, and decry the apparent privatization of urban space at the expense of the city‘s traditional role as a place of public discourse and civic engagement.28 Such critics describe a theme-parked city which ―presents its happy regulated vision of pleasure – all those artfully hoodwinked forms – as a substitute for the democratic public realm, and it does so appealingly by stripping troubled urbanity of its sting, of the presence of the poor, of

26 Notable works in the postwar history of urban decline and attempts at renewal include Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); Jon Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 27 Dennis Judd, ed., The Infrastructure of Play: Building the Tourist City (Armonk N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2003); Judd and Fainstein, eds., The Tourist City. These studies are instructive in understanding the political machinations of tourist cities, but are informed more by the methods and language of political science than history. 28 David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York, NY: BasicBooks, 1993); Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the Decline of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992); Other recent work examines contemporary tourist cities through the lens of theoretical models, most notably regulation theory. In particular see John Hannigan, Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis. (London: Routledge, 1998); Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

16 crime, of dirt, of work.‖29 On the other hand, some observers have credited tourism with spurring a rebirth of troubled American cities, providing cultural and entertainment amenities desired by the middle class and not necessarily available in the suburbs. Journalist Joel

Garreau, in his influential book Edge City, argues that the movement towards tourism has preserved the best of downtowns while relieving them of many of their traditional functions.

―It is as if our downtowns have become antiques,‖ writes Garreau, ―in the best sense of that word.‖ Here tourism is portrayed as the great hope for downtowns, bringing people and life back to the city, even if that city has been shorn of most of its traditional functions.30

Urban tourism has been neither as successful as its proponents claim nor as insidious as its critics have complained.31 Instead, the outcomes of tourist development have been more varied and complex than either side has acknowledged, changing the landscape of cities immeasurably and in the process changing their meanings for both residents and visitors.

Critics who charge that tourism development results in an ―inauthentic‖ central city in which corporate interests dominate over civic discourse overlook the broader historical context of

American downtowns, which have long been places of shifting power between private and public, and where private investment and profit have always been the raison d‟etre.32 It is certainly undeniable that tourism represented a changing function and experience of American cities. The process, however, should be viewed as one of transformation rather than declension from an idealized past.

29 Michael Sorkin, ―Variations on a Theme Park‖ in Sorkin, ed. Variations on a Theme Park, xv. 30 Bernard J. Frieden and Lynne B. Sagalyn, Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 60. 31Susan Fainstein and Dennis Gladstone highlight the complexity of urban tourist development in ―Evaluating Urban Tourism,‖ in Judd and Fainstein, eds. Tourist City, 21-34. 32 See Isenberg, Downtown America and Robert Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), both of which emphasize the history of the central city as the product of investment choices and constructed realities.

17 Those who have labeled tourism as the catalyst for urban rebirth also reach too far.

Tourism development succeeded in bringing millions of visitors to American cities, and encouraged the suburban middle class to continue to engage with their downtowns. However, the prophecies of urban rebirth that accompanied tourist development have rarely come true.

While an influx of visitors could make a cities appear to be thriving and ―alive,‖ tourists usually left as quickly as they came, with minimal impact on the problems of the central city.

The four cities in this dissertation all invested millions in tourist infrastructure, but their efforts at urban renewal have met with mixed results at best. Successful tourist projects have become as important for the image of vitality that they project as much as their hard economic returns.

Ultimately, while much of the academic debate around urban tourism has revolved around evaluating it as ―good‖ or ―bad‖ for cities, the perspective of history reveals both tourism proponents and their critics to be missing the mark about the role of tourism in postwar cities. Unfailingly, tourism promoters throughout the postwar period made promises involving the prefix ―re‖ – as in ―revitalize‖ ―renew‖ ―restore‖ and ―rebirth.‖ In other words, they promised that downtown would return to its past role as the heart of metropolitan life.

Subsequent critics engaged that rhetoric, blasting tourism for failing to deliver on these promises of restoration, and argued that tourism had changed cities, robbing them of their

―authenticity‖ and altering, rather than restoring, their traditional functions. A historical viewpoint offers a broader view. Tourism itself is neither good nor evil; rather, its specific value and shortcomings are determined by the terms upon which it is structured in a specific place and time.33 When examined in this light, tourism becomes not the inevitable savior or destroyer of cities, but one more in a long line of economic choices that has transformed it

33 Fainstein and Gladstone, ―Evaluating Urban Tourism,‖ 25.

18 based upon the needs and aspirations of urban leaders and residents. The rise of American cities in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was the product of a fixed and temporally bound set of events: industrialization, massive immigration, an influx of labor from rural areas, and the growth of railroad networks, to name only a few. As described above, all of these trends had changed considerably by the second half of the twentieth century. The rise of the automobile and decline of mass transit, residential suburbanization (with its accompanying policies of race and class segregation), the growth of consumerism, a decline in popular political participation, and a globalizing economy that rearranged investment capital all worked to refashion the postwar metropolis. Tourism certainly changed American cities, but change of some sort was inevitable. Cities were going to be different – an expectation that they would return to their former prosperity was not only overly optimistic but largely uninformed. Tourism could neither preserve the traditional city unchanged nor restore it to its former glory.

Bound by these economic, social, and political realities, postwar urban leaders worked with a set of limited and imperfect choices for improving cities. Given the predominance of consumerist ideology within postwar America, they may have chosen the least of the evils.

Certainly ―traditional‖ urban renewal, supported by federal funding and oriented toward the construction of public housing, office complexes, and highways, failed to stem the decline of cities and proved to be largely unpopular with both urban residents and middle-class suburban taxpayers. The obstacles and ambivalence toward the creation of any alternative federal urban policy since the 1970s further undercut that possibility for spurring revitalization.

Expanded educational programs, vocational training, and other social service initiatives could certainly have improved the condition of the urban poor, but such efforts also required

19 significant funding and promised little more than the possibility of improvement of a standard of living after a lengthy investment of resources – a proposition difficult to sell politically. Tourism projects, by contrast, offered more tangible physical developments - stadiums, convention centers, festival marketplaces - that provided seemingly instant results.

Scholars have recently convincingly argued that efforts to revitalize the central city are inextricable from both the larger metropolitan context as well as the historical context of white resentment over the funneling of government-funded social programs into American cities.34 Tourism is certainly no exception to that. While I argue that tourism industry representatives injected themselves into conversations about urban renewal very early in the planning process, tourism did not gain its prominence within American cities until the late

1960s, when growing resentment toward the ideals of the New Deal/Great Society liberal consensus reached political expression in the rise of conservatism in the late 1960s. This new conservatism ushered in the decline of socially-oriented visions of urban revitalization and their replacement with the more development-focused strategies that favored construction of hotels, stadiums, and entertainment districts as the keys to saving the American city.

The phenomenon of urban tourism thus lies at the nexus of two emerging trends in postwar American society: the growth of consumerism as a pervasive ideology, and the rejection of postwar liberalism by the white middle class. Both these trends wrought their influence on the spatial geography of the postwar city, and tourism fulfilled the desires of both. Historians have written about the gradual but emphatic denunciation of postwar

34 The literature on urban politics and the rise of the new right is growing rapidly. Key works include Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Robert O Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2003); Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis.

20 liberalism by the white middle class and its implications for the fate of the American city.

Such a rejection had a specific racial component, as white taxpayers vilified the programs of the Great Society, which they came to view as expensive handouts that benefited urban blacks almost exclusively. While tourism itself often required massive subsidy from public coffers, it did not experience, on the whole, the same level of outcry as did urban programs focused on housing, social services, and environmental improvements that seemingly benefited primarily

African-Americans neighborhoods. Tourist development was a method of ―selling‖ public subsidy of urban redevelopment in terms to which the key voting demographic responded enthusiastically.

Tourism development captured the attention of the key political and economic demographic – the middle-class suburban family – in a way no other strategy had. By recreating cities as places of entertainment and leisure, urban leaders tapped into the dominant ideology of the postwar period, linking middle-class Americans to their cities through the familiar language of recreation and consumption. Certainly it was a limited and indistinct urban vision, often challenged by those who held to broader traditional civic ideals. However, if we accept the assertion that postwar America came to be dominated by an ideology of consumerism, we can scarcely expect cities to be the exception to such an overarching rule.

Just as the growth of the late nineteenth-century city was the product of a particular set of economic and social trends, so the postindustrial tourist city also reflected larger economic and social trends of suburbanization, the reallocation of industrial capital to international locations, the rise of new conservative politics, and a consumer-driven economy. Urban tourism is thus a logical, if not necessarily preferable, product of the postwar “consumer‟s republic.”

21 Tourism, then, has been neither the sanitizer nor the savior of American cities.

Instead, tourism represents the new role of the city in the suburban postindustrial age, when some sort of new city was inevitable. This dissertation, however, is not an apologia for the rise of urban tourism but rather an attempt to understand both how tourism changed the

American city and how city leaders‘ choices shaped tourism‘s particular manifestation.

Tourism represented the path of least resistance in the road to a new urban form; it satisfied the ―power players‖ of downtown real estate development, enhanced the public image of struggling cities, and provided physical monuments for urban politicians, all while skirting the thornier and more tortuous issues of race relations, unemployment, housing, and public healthcare. Tourism remade downtowns to cater to key voting blocks (white middle-class

―tourists‖), thereby protecting central-city property values and sustaining downtowns as the economic engines of larger metropolitan regions.

The study of urban tourism is thus a lens to an understanding of broader trends in

American society which have shaped and reshaped both the physical city and Americans‘ understanding of its meaning and function. The increase in middle-class discretionary income and demand for new services and experiences drove cities to reshape their landscapes to meet the desires of consumers, who established their identity not only in purchased goods, but in experiences. A family vacation to St. Louis‘ Gateway Arch, seats at sporting events in gleaming new downtown stadiums, or experiencing ―urban life‖ in festival marketplaces signified the middle-class consumers‘ available leisure time, discretionary income, and even cultural sophistication.

This increase in leisure consumption signaled a new belief about the function of the

American city. When the cover of Time magazine in 1981 celebrated festival marketplace

22 pioneer James Rouse by trumpeting ―Cities Are Fun!,‖ it embodied the new American attitude towards the city. A city could be described as successful if it was fun, and ―fun‖ to the primary readers of Time magazine - that is, if it catered to the consumer tastes and recreational preferences of the suburban middle class. Increasingly through the postwar period, local and national media celebrated cities not because they established innovative job training programs or had low rates of substandard housing, but because they built exciting new sports stadiums, glittering hotels, and retail complexes that drew in visitors (while resulting in relatively little substantive change in the city‘s economic condition.) Despite the much celebrated ―return to the city‖ of the past decades, the majority of Americans do not live in central cities, nor is it likely they ever will again. Downtowns are places to have fun – to see a play, attend a professional sports event, or dine in a faux-historic entertainment district. While central cities obviously still maintain their role as places of work and government, perhaps more than ever before in the history of American cities, consumption and entertainment reign as the twin functions of downtowns in the suburban era.

A historical perspective on urban tourism also provides what it seems all of history should: an understanding of the past that speaks to our present condition. Urban leaders and tourist industry executives alike continue to promote tourism as the patent medicine for whatever ails the American city. For two prominent examples, we might look to the response to the two greatest urban disasters of this decade, the terrorist attacks on New York City of

September 11, 2001, and the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans in

September 2005. After the September 11th attacks, government officials urged Americans to

23 visit New York to boost the city‘s reeling economy. So engrained was the concept of the city as a tourist location that tourism – merely going to the city and spending money - became an expression of patriotism and solidarity with the city of New York. Now, in somewhat bizarre fashion, the site of ―Ground Zero‖ has become its own tourist attraction. Similarly, in the wake of the massive flooding and destruction of Katrina, New Orleans city officials and business leaders began talking almost immediately about reviving the city‘s convention business and celebrated the fact that the French Quarter, the city‘s largest tourist draw, was largely spared. One New Orleans business leader told the New York Times, "People . . . are looking at me funny, as if talking about bringing back music, or Mardi Gras, or the arts or football is frivolous when we're in the midst of this kind of human tragedy. But I think New

Yorkers can relate. Just as it was important that Broadway not remain in the dark after Sept.

11, it's important that we start thinking about the future despite all the very depressing news around us."35 In other words, if you don‘t go to Mardi Gras, the floodwaters win. That

February, national media celebrated the city‘s scaled-down Mardi Gras as evidence of New

Orleans‘ resilience, even as tens of thousands of former residents remained displaced and much of the city still lay in decaying ruin. Once the New Orleans of popular myth and vacation memories was restored, the details largely faded into the background.36 A historical perspective on the promises of urban tourism can help us better evaluate the dissonance between image and reality in the postindustrial American city.

35 ―New Orleans Executives Plan Revival,‖ New York Times, 10 September 2005. 36 ―Mardi Gras to the Rescue? Doubts Grow,‖ New York Times, 26 November, 2005; See also Souther, New Orleans on Parade, 230-234.

24 Today, tourism is a central component of American cities‟ economy and culture. It was not always so, and this dissertation is an effort to understand how tourism became so important, and how that now-central role has changed cities. Ultimately, though urban tourism development benefited one sector of postwar urban economies, creating a successful tourist-oriented downtown has had little or no correlation with creating a successful city.

Tourism did bring federal aid, private investment, and a new kind of vitality to American cities. It created a new meaning and function for downtowns that appealed to the suburban middle class, which without it might have had little reason to care about the central city at all.

Tourism also fell far short of its promises to deliver a renewed city. As the Cincinnati riots in

2001 made clear, the problems of the urban crisis have not abated – troubled race relations, crime, and declining urban populations still plague most postindustrial tourist cities. Outside of the relatively small boundaries of the central business district, urban neighborhoods continued to struggle, even in cities portrayed as the archetypes of tourist-driven revitalization. Tourist development created and amplified tensions of class and race within

American cities, remade large portions of downtown to serve outsiders rather than residents, and established a perpetual pattern of public subsidy for the hospitality industry at a time when urban budgets were stretched beyond their limits. Tourism did not create the problems of the postwar urban crisis, and, despite all the hopes placed on its back, neither could it cure them. Tourism as an urban revitalization strategy encouraged a consumerist view of the city, promulgated a limited and market-based understanding of the responsibilities of citizenship, and prioritized the interests of downtown property development over the larger social needs of the American city. In other words, while many cities became “nice places to visit,” people might still add, “but I wouldn‟t want to live there.”

25

This dissertation is the story of the growing importance of tourism to postwar

American cities, the consequences of that development, and tourism‘s increasing centrality to discourse about what makes the American city successful. ―A Nice Place to Visit‖ is by no means a comprehensive history of postwar tourism in my four cities; indeed, each city‘s story merits its own dissertation-length study. Rather, this dissertation tells the stories of four cities at different moments in the expansion of their tourist industries. The following chapters are structured around four different types of urban tourist land use: hotels, convention centers, stadiums, and festival marketplaces. In each case, I focus on the story in one city and draw broader conclusions about the consequences of tourist development in these four cities, and urban America generally. Such an approach is less disparate than it might seem, since a central contention of this work is that tourism development follows remarkably similar patterns in all these cities. In both the text and footnotes I have made explicit points of comparison between the experience of the particular city and its counterparts.

The rise of tourism transformed American cities, both spatially and socially, in a variety of ways. Any discussion of the tourist industry must begin with the hotel, which by its very nature depends on outside visitors for survival. The urban hotel is a defining icon in

American downtowns, and the experience of these landmarks in postwar Cincinnati reveals some of the changes which the expansion of tourism brought to cities. In Cincinnati, as in most cities, downtown hotels for many years served both as lodging for visitors as well as social centers for many residents; hotels hosted political rallies, charity events, and provided informal gathering places for Cincinnatians. In the postwar era, the growing importance of

26 the convention industry led to the decline of ―traditional‖ downtown hotels and the rise of convention hotels, which failed to provide the same social function for local residents. The construction - and perpetual expansion - of the city‘s convention center and ancillary convention hotels devoted a large portion of the city‘s downtown to spaces that had little meaning for Cincinnatians.

The convention industry continued to grow throughout the postwar period, and this growth led to an increasing commitment of both urban space and fiscal resources on the part of cities. This prioritization of tourist development in the midst of urban decline was controversial, and the St. Louis experience reveals the social costs of this decision. While the obvious tourist attraction in St. Louis is the nationally-known Gateway Arch, the city also consistently ranks in the top twenty U.S. cities for the hosting of conventions. St. Louis, like hundreds of other American cities, courted conventioneers by constructing a massive, publicly-financed convention center which opened in 1977. The construction of the center was opposed by residents of the city‘s largely African-American neighborhood known as

Northside, who were angered by the city‘s apparent neglect of inner-city neighborhoods while the city‘s convention industry received public subsidy. The opposition to the convention center, however, was blunted by clear class divides within the city‘s African-American population. Many in the city‘s black middle class supported the center, and convention industry heads adroitly exploited this class division within the city‘s African-American community to win popular support for passage of the center financing. The St. Louis convention center battle represented the clash of two visions of the city, and ultimately the decline of postwar liberalism and the triumph of a vision which endorsed downtown tourist development as the key to urban success.

27 The experiences of Cincinnati and St. Louis seem to align with the arguments of those critics of tourist development who argue that it remakes locations for outsiders at the expense of residents and local culture. The story of postwar Pittsburgh, however, reveals the ways in which tourism complicates the narrative of the ―devil‘s bargain.‖ The 1970s was a period of economic transition for the city of Pittsburgh, as its steel industry declined and corporate headquarters began to leave the city. The same period was also the heyday for professional sports in the city, as the Pirates baseball World Series championships of 1971 and 1979 bookended the decade, while the Steelers established a professional football dynasty with four

Super Bowl championships in the same period. Both teams played in Three Rivers Stadium, opened in 1970 as a capstone of the city‘s postwar renewal initiative. While the stadium was never an economic success, I argue that the success of the city‘s sports teams in the turbulent decade preserved suburban middle-class ties to the city and shaped both a personal identity for residents and a positive image of the city to national audiences. In the period of deindustrialization, urban tourist and entertainment infrastructure were essential elements of successful downtowns.

Perhaps nowhere has that equation of tourism with urban success been more directly correlated than in Baltimore. For a variety of reasons, the city of Baltimore was slow to embrace tourism as a redevelopment strategy, but in many ways it has come to embody the postindustrial tourist city. The Rouse Company festival marketplace in the city‘s Inner

Harbor, dubbed ―Harborplace,‖ reportedly attracted more people in its first year than

Disneyland and drew widespread praise for the city. In the 1980s, national media hailed

Baltimore as the ―Renaissance City.‖ Soon Harborplace was joined by the National

Aquarium, the city‘s convention center, and a mix of hotels, themed restaurants, and retail

28 developments on the Inner Harbor. Even as observers praised the Harborplace development, however, many expressed ambivalence about the ―inauthenticity‖ of the festival marketplace and feared the loss of traditional working-class culture in Baltimore. The success of tourist projects on the Inner Harbor also drew harsh criticism from both public activists and urban scholars, who pointed to the dissonance between the media celebration and the continued economic decline of the city outside the small tourist district. Still, it is difficult to argue that the image created by the remade Inner Harbor did not create enormous positive publicity for the city. In the years since Harborplace‘s opening, Baltimore has become a rhetorical battleground, with critics decrying the ―rot beneath the glitter‖ while city officials work aggressively to maintain the image of urban success against attacks from scholars, political opponents, and even popular television programs. Baltimore thus provides a fascinating case study for understanding the role of tourist development in shaping both the local culture and the national media image of the postindustrial city. But to understand that turn to tourism, we must first understand its precipitating cause: the postwar urban crisis.

29

Chapter I

Urban Decline and the Search for Solutions in Baltimore, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis After 1945

The front-page headlines of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in March 1950 blared out in bold letters, as if to announce a declaration of war. And, in a sense, they were doing just that.

―Progress or Decay? -- St. Louis Must Choose,‖ declared the paper. In a thirteen-week series under that title, the Post-Dispatch sounded the alarm about the deficiencies of the Gateway

City in everything from transportation to education to housing, and urged swift action on the part of its citizens to arrest the central city‘s impending decline through demolition and rebuilding of large swaths of the central city.1 St. Louis was hardly unique. The themes sounded in the city‘s newspaper were echoed in older cities throughout the country, especially in the industrial and commercial centers of the Northeast and Midwest. ―Cincinnati Suffering

From Blight Which Can‘t Be Cured,‖ read a 1947 Cincinnati Enquirer headline, while another urged city leaders to take action to combat the ―rut and decay‖ that seemed to plague the city.2 The litany of problems was remarkably similar from city to city: declining downtown property values, growing inner-city slums, traffic congestion, a shortage of adequate housing, and a loss of population and industry to suburban hinterlands. The consensus was clear: American cities were in trouble, and action should be taken immediately to reverse this trend, and put cities back on the track to prosperity and growth.

1 ―Progress or Decay? - St. Louis Must Choose,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 19 March 1950. 2 ―Cincinnati Suffering From Blight Which Can‘t Be Cured,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer 15 February 1947; ―City Told To Follow ... In Digging Out Of Rut And Decay,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 23 February 1955.

30 The decline of the postwar years did not come as a complete shock to attentive residents of Baltimore, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis; signs of economic decline were there as early as the 1920s for those who looked carefully. Still, nothing predetermined that they would fall; growth had been the perpetual trend throughout their histories. The cities are among the nation‘s oldest urban centers, and they grew in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into powerful economic engines. Indeed, before the 1950s, the problems of growth, rather than decline, occupied these cities‘ leaders.3

Baltimore, founded in 1729, became a principle seaport in the early national period and saw an explosion in population and commercial activity upon construction of the National

Road in the 1820s, which linked the city to agricultural markets in the interior and made it a major port for both agricultural exports and imported manufactured goods, sugar, cocoa, and spices.4 The completion of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad in the early 1850s furthered the port‘s dominance. The city expanded geographically as it prospered – annexation of portions of Baltimore County in 1888 provided ample room for large neighborhoods of the city‘s

3 Distinct historiographies of the four cities follow below, but two authoritative surveys of the cities, especially Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis can be found in Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959) which remains a remarkably rich and valuable antebellum history, and Jon Teaford, Cities of the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) which gives most of its attention to the late nineteenth and twentieth century. For discussion of early indicators of these cities‘ decline, see Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, 174-210. Good examinations of each cities‘ (excepting St. Louis) postwar politics can also be found in Richard M Bernard, ed., Snowbelt Cities: Metropolitan Politics in the Northeast and Midwest Since World War II (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 4 Sherry Olson, Baltimore (Cambridge, Mass: Ballinger Pub. Co, 1976); Sherry Olson, Baltimore, the Building of an American City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Robert Vexler, ed., Baltimore: A Chronological and Documentary History, 1632-1970 (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana, 1975); Kenneth D. Durr, Behind the Backlash: White Working-class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Elizabeth Fee and Linda Shopes, eds., The Baltimore Book : New Views of Local History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Eleanor Bruchey, The Business Elite in Baltimore, 1880-1914 (New York: Arno Press, 1976); Mamie Warren and Marion Warren, Baltimore--When She Was What She Used to Be, 1850-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), though the last is primarily anecdotal.

31 signature brick row houses accommodating the city‘s working and middle classes.5 By the late nineteenth century, Baltimore remained a major commercial city; the city‘s rail yards and harbor employed large numbers of working-class Baltimoreans. Increasingly, however, business leaders moved to shift the city‘s economy away from declining commercial enterprises and toward industrial manufacturing. They had some success in this effort. In

1881, there were only thirty-nine manufacturers in the city, but by 1900 there were two hundred.6 At the beginning of the twentieth century, the city was home to a large laboring class employed in textile manufacturing, food canning, metalworking, and shipbuilding industries. Much of the city‘s industry, especially its extensive clothing manufacturing enterprise, was located in the central city, near the railroad lines and the still-active commercial port in its Inner Harbor.7

A massive fire in February of 1904 devastated Baltimore‘s central business district and inner harbor. The densely-built central city, filled with garment factories, shipping warehouses, and aged wooden structures provided ample fuel for the flames. The fire covered more than 70 city blocks, destroying more than 1500 buildings. No deaths and few injuries occurred, a testament to the fact that downtown had become by the 1900s predominantly a commercial district and no longer a residential area.8 The fire enabled an extensive rebuilding of the city‘s infrastructure, including widening streets and building a comprehensive sewer system, which the city had sorely needed. The fire spurred central business district redevelopment as well. In place of the city‘s many aged pre-Civil War wooden structures

5 Olson, Baltimore, 3. 6 Durr, Behind the Backlash, 7. 7 Bruchey, The Business Elite in Baltimore, 33-38. 8 Olson, Baltimore, the Building of an American City, 246-247.

32 rose an abundance of new steel-framed ―fire-proof‖ buildings.9 Industrial growth kept the economy of the Baltimore region strong through the mid-twentieth century. The Bethlehem

Steel and Shipbuilding works, opened in 1890 in Sparrows Point (just east of the city) was a prime example. At its height in the 1950s, the mill was purportedly the world‘s largest steelworks, employing some 30,000 Baltimoreans.10

The city‘s population continued to grow through the first half of the century. In 1950, the population of Baltimore reached a new record high of nearly 950,000. Most of the residents of Baltimore were native-born whites, as the large numbers of German and Irish immigrants that flowed into the city in the nineteenth century had largely assimilated. Later immigrant groups, such as Italians and Polish, maintained some ethnic identification within the city, though this was waning. Compared to other Northeastern cities, Baltimore at 1950 had fewer immigrants but a larger percentage of African-Americans. Blacks made up approximately a quarter of the city‘s population in 1950, though they were largely isolated by one of the nation‘s most stringent and formalized systems of residential segregation.11

The city of Pittsburgh was originally founded as a French frontier military garrison in

1754.12 Its advantageous location at the nexus of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio

9 Ibid., 298. 10 Mark Reutter, Sparrows Point: Making Steel - The Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 10. 11 U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1950 Census of the Population, Characteristics of the Population: United States Summary (Washington, DC: GPO, 1953). For discussion of the ethnic makeup and change over time, see Durr, Behind the Backlash, 63-66, 84-86; Joseph L. Arnold, ―Southern Culture and a Northern Economy,‖ in Bernard, ed., Snowbelt Cities, 27-28. 12 Roy Lubove, Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh: Government, Business, and Environmental Change (New York: Wiley, 1969) remains the best history of the city in the twentieth century; Lubove, Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh: The Post-Steel Era (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996) focuses on the period after the 1960s. See also Samuel P Hays, ed., City at the Point: Essays on the Social History of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, Pa: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989); Roy Lubove, ed., Pittsburgh (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976); Francis G. Couvares, The Remaking of Pittsburgh: Class and Culture in an Industrializing City 1877-1919 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984); John H. Hinshaw, Steel and Steelworkers: Race and Class Struggle in Twentieth-Century

33 rivers made it strategically important as a location for trade. Its proximity to the Appalachian mountains, and the natural resources therein, also made it an early center of the coal, iron, and glass industries. The advent in the 1850s of the Bessemer process, which made steel production faster and less labor intensive, combined with readily available coke and iron ore from the Great Lakes region, fueled a booming steel industry in the city. In the decades after the Civil War, industrial production in the city grew by as much as 10 percent per year, twice the national average.13

The location of the city center at the point of the rivers‘ confluence, so advantageous for early river commerce, made for a compact downtown bounded by the rivers on the north and west and steep hills to the east and south. Rail lines and industrial properties filled the flatlands at the rivers‘ banks. As the city grew, office towers and commercial structures came to dominate the ―point‖ of its original location, while residences, especially those of the well- to-do and middle class, spread into the hills east of the central city. Industrial and residential districts also spread on the north and west banks of the river, requiring dozens of bridges spanning the city‘s rivers. By 1910 Pittsburgh had grown to a population of 534,000 - the eighth largest city in the country, and the metropolitan area topped 1 million. Much of this population increase came from immigrants, especially from eastern and southern Europe – in

1910, approximately 70% of Allegheny County‘s population consisted of first or second- generation immigrants.14 Blacks made up a relatively small percentage of the city‘s population until World War I, when the decrease in immigration and demand for wartime

Pittsburgh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002) provides a rich social history of the city‘s steelworkers. 13 Glen E. McLaughlin and Ralph J. Watkins, ―The Economics of Maturity,‖ in Lubove, ed., Pittsburgh, 114. 14 Bertram J. Black and Aubrey Mallach, ―Population Trends in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, 1840-1940,‖ in Lubove, ed., Pittsburgh, 265-278.

34 production began to draw increasing numbers of black laborers from the South. This migration continued long after the war, and by mid-century African-Americans made up approximately fifteen percent of the city‘s population.15

The city‘s mills at the turn of the century produced almost half of the nation‘s steel and it remained, through the majority of the twentieth century, one of the nation‘s preeminent industrial cities. While steel dominated the city, by the early twentieth century Pittsburgh was also the corporate headquarters of Gulf Oil, Westinghouse Electric, the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), Pittsburgh Plate Glass, and the John Heinz food company. Despite – or because of – its tremendous industrial wealth, Pittsburgh by the twentieth century epitomized many of the problems of the American city. Smoke from mills clouded the air, the waters of the city‘s rivers bore the brunt of industrial waste, and the city‘s housing stock was among the poorest in the country. As the city‘s best historian has quipped, ―Few communities were so frequently compared to hell.‖16 A 1930 Harper‟s Magazine editorial reasonably asked ―Is

Pittsburgh Civilized?‖ Looking over the city at ―the once lovely conjunction of the Allegheny and Monongahela,‖ lamented the journalist, ―the devastation of progress is apparent.‖17 In spite of these significant shortcomings, Pittsburgh in the first half of the twentieth century remained a symbol of American industrial might.

Cincinnati was founded in 1788 as the capital of the newly-formed Northwest

Territory.18 The city rose on the fortunes of the nineteenth century riverboat trade, becoming

15 U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1950 Census, (Washington, DC: GPO, 1953). 16 Lubove, Twentieth Century Pittsburgh, 1. 17 R.L. Duffus, ―Is Pittsburgh Civilized?‖ Harper‟s Monthly Magazine, 161 (October 1930), 537-545. Reprinted in Lubove, ed. Pittsburgh, 158. 18 David Stradling, Cincinnati: From River City to Highway Metropolis (Charleston S.C.: Arcadia, 2003) provides a good accessible survey of the city‘s history; Zane Miller, Boss Cox's Cincinnati: Urban Politics in the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968) explores efforts to reform both the politics and the planning of the city. Three excellent histories of planning and

35 by the 1830s a prominent center of shipping, as well as a market for agricultural products from the flourishing Ohio River Valley. By the mid-nineteenth century, its prodigious slaughterhouses earned it the moniker ―Porkopolis,‖ though boosters, pointing to the city‘s cultural amenities and booming population, preferred the title ―Queen City of the West.‖ In addition to meatpacking, major nineteenth-century industries included breweries and distilleries, shoemaking, printmaking, and carriage building. Along with St. Louis and

Milwaukee, Cincinnati formed the ―German Triangle‖ of cities that welcomed large numbers of German immigrants in the nineteenth century. Geographically, Cincinnati‘s downtown was (and remains) relatively small, bordered by the Mill Creek to its west and a circle of hills in all directions around the riverfront basin. Upon its opening in 1828, the Miami-Erie canal formed the northern border of downtown and separated it from the German immigrant neighborhood known as ―Over-the-Rhine.‖ The combination of limited land and booming economic growth created a congested and bustling central city filled with a mix of races, ethnicities, and classes. This ―crisis of spatial congestion‖ was alleviated in the 1870s with the advent of steam-powered inclines, which allowed streetcars to carry well-to-do residents to growing suburban neighborhoods on the city‘s surrounding hills.19 Despite this exodus, the central city remained crowded, particularly after the advent of automobiles which clogged its

redevelopment in twentieth-century Cincinnati are Zane Miller and Bruce Tucker, Changing Plans for America's Inner Cities: Cincinnati's Over-The-Rhine and Twentieth-Century Urbanism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998); John Emmeus Davis, Contested Ground: Collective Action and the Urban Neighborhood (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1991); Robert B Fairbanks, Making Better Citizens: Housing Reform and the Community Development Strategy in Cincinnati, 1890-1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 19 The ―crisis‖ phrase is from Davis, Contested Ground, 104. On the growth of late-nineteenth century hilltop suburbs, see Miller, Boss Cox‟s Cincinnati, 5-6.

36 narrow streets. In 1928, Cincinnati was judged to be the nation‘s third most congested city, in large part because of its prosperous but still exceedingly dense central basin.20

Though its national standing among cities peaked in 1850, when it was the sixth largest in the United States, Cincinnati continued to experience steady growth through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Unlike many similar cities, Cincinnati developed a relatively diversified manufacturing sector, with large numbers of workers employed in clothing and shoe manufacturing, machine tool production, and auto manufacturing. The city‘s metalworking and printing industries, making use of skilled labor from Britain and

Germany, continued to thrive into the twentieth century.21 Consumer products manufacturing giant Procter and Gamble, founded in Cincinnati in 1837, grew rapidly after 1900 and helped to keep the city‘s economic growth strong, if not spectacular.

St. Louis, much like Cincinnati, expanded rapidly in the nineteenth century as a shipping center for steamboats, and later, railroads. As the ―Gateway to the West,‖ the centrally-located city became an important commercial hub for Western agricultural bounty shipping eastward and manufactured goods in the opposite direction. Also like Cincinnati, the city‘s nineteenth-century manufacturing enterprises drew from and served the farming hinterlands - shoemakers, breweries, and producers of farm supplies dominated. By the turn of the century, the city was among the largest rail centers in the country, second only to

Chicago. St. Louis reached its pinnacle in 1904, when it hosted the Louisiana Purchase

20 ―Cincinnati the Nation‘s Third Most Congested City,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 18 October 1928. 21 Philip Scranton, ―Diversified Industrialization and Economic Success: Understanding Cincinnati's Manufacturing Development, 1850-1925,‖ Ohio Valley History 5, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 5-22.

37 Exposition, which rivaled its famous predecessor, the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, as an American urban spectacle.22

St. Louis‘s downtown developed along the banks of the Mississippi. Compared to the river cities of Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, however, downtown St. Louis was relatively unconfined by topography and spread west away from the river as well as north and south along its banks. The city‘s relative prosperity made it a destination for European immigrants into the twentieth century. Irish and German immigrants predominated through the mid- nineteenth century, but the city‘s economic strength in the late 1800s also brought increasing numbers of eastern and southern Europeans. Immigrants settled throughout the city, but became especially well-established in the city‘s south side neighborhoods. The neighborhood known as ―The Hill‖ on the southwest edge of the city became a center of Italian-American life. This wave of immigration slowed in the twentieth century, but white ethnics remained a significant cultural and political force in the city. African-Americans also migrated to the city in substantial numbers, especially during and after World War I. While the city developed a well-established and prosperous black community, the influx of new black migrants heightened racial tensions, most evidently in the tragic East St. Louis race riot of 1917, in which several days of white violence resulted in dozens of black deaths. At mid-century, eighteen percent of the population was classified as ―non-white‘ – the vast majority of this category being African-Americans.23

22 The best general history of St. Louis is James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley, St. Louis, Missouri (Boulder, CO: Pruett Publishing, 1981) Somewhat more journalistic and anecdotal in style but still useful is Ernest Kirschten, Catfish and Crystal (Garden City N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960). Selwyn K Troen and Glen E Holt, eds., St. Louis (New York: New Viewpoints, 1977) provides a rich collection of primary documents and good general historical narrative. Eric Sandweiss, St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001) surveys the pre- World War II planning of the city. 23 U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1950 Census, (Washington, DC: GPO, 1953).

38 St. Louis remained a seat of corporate power and wealth at mid-century. Companies like Anheuser-Busch brewing, Monsanto Chemical, Ralston-Purina, and the McDonnell

Aircraft corporation made their headquarters in St. Louis. In 1950 the city also still possessed 166, 301 manufacturing jobs, more than eight times that of the surrounding suburban county.24 The city‘s population reached a new all-time high in 1950 of nearly

857,000, and while rumblings of concern about the central city‘s future were clear, economically the city still possessed real strength.

The social, political, and economic heart of all these cities were their downtowns.

Though by the early twentieth century many middle-class residents lived in suburban neighborhoods, the city center still held prominence– it was the locale of corporate office buildings, governmental offices, railway stations, most major retail, theaters, hotels, and other places of socialization and entertainment. During the mid 1920s, more than 270,000 people went downtown in St. Louis every day, more than 355,000 in downtown Pittsburgh, and

375,000 in Baltimore. The skyscraper office buildings that rose in the central business district in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries became the universally recognized symbol of

American urban life. For both residents and city leaders, the success of downtown indicated the overall health and well-being of the metropolis.25 It was therefore especially alarming when, beginning in the 1930s, that central barometer of urban vitality began to falter.

24Joseph Heathcott and Maire Murphy, ―Corridors of Flight, Zones of Renewal: Industry, Planning, and Policy in the Making of Metropolitan St. Louis, 1940-1980,‖ Journal of Urban History 31, no. 2 (January 2005), 165. 25 Robert Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 186-190.

39 The Great Depression planted many of the seeds of urban decline that would increase in later years. Cities as a whole felt the impact of the Depression, but downtowns were hit especially hard. Coming off the prolonged building boom of the 1920s, American downtowns experienced the shock of high vacancy rates in barely-finished skyscrapers, and the alarming trend of some property owners demolishing office buildings to replace them with pay parking lots.26 During the 1930s, the assessed value of the St. Louis central business district fell by

$46 million. Downtown Baltimore‘s figures dropped 34 per cent from 1931 to 1945.27

Downtown institutions like department stores and hotels also experienced severe losses – both operated on thin profit margins even in the best of times.28 Declines in downtown were particularly alarming, as these areas not only were the psychological ―center‖ of urban life but also the city‘s biggest moneymakers in terms of tax revenue.29

The Depression affected nearly every major sector of the economy negatively, of course, and most came roaring back during World War II and the postwar period. For

American downtowns, however, the economic crisis of the Depression was compounded by structural changes in patterns of living that threatened to undermine the central city‘s dominance. Suburban dispersal from the central city had been a consistent trend since the mid-nineteenth century, as new technologies – first the streetcar, then the automobile – allowed more convenient transportation between suburban neighborhoods and downtown.

The post-World War II manifestation was, however, drastically different than earlier trends, in

26 Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 135-143. 27 Jon Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance : Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 19. 28 Fogelson, Downtown, 218-219. 29 Teaford, Rough Road, 19; Fogelson, Downtown, 354.

40 both scale and distance from the central city.30 The federal government, in response to an acute housing shortage and in hopes of maintaining the economic prosperity of wartime, took specific actions to encourage home ownership, and especially new home construction. The

Federal Housing Administration (FHA), created in 1934 to stabilize the Depression-ravaged housing market, insured private mortgages against default. This insurance made banks more willing to issue long-term mortgages with relatively low down payments, where previously banks had required down payments as high as 40 percent with repayment terms of ten or fifteen years. Furthermore, the 1944 Serviceman‘s Readjustment Act (or GI Bill) made home loans available to war veterans with no down payment at all. Home ownership thus became a new possibility for millions of middle- and even working-class families. Given this opportunity, city residents with the means jumped at the chance to own a home in new suburban developments, often with a lower mortgage payment than their previous rents. The

Interstate Highway Act of 1956 insured suburban commuters easy and seemingly inexpensive access to jobs in the central city. From 1934 to 1972, the national percentage of families in owner-occupied housing rose from 44 to 63 percent; the overwhelming majority of this growth was in new suburban residential developments.31

The guarantees of the Federal Housing Administration, however, came with specific requirements that had a drastic effect on the spatial organization of the postwar city. First, the

FHA typically encouraged loans for detached, single-family new construction, meaning that older homes in cities were largely ignored because of the comparatively unfavorable loan

30 The two best general discussions of suburbanization remain Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987). For more recent interpretations, see Kevin Michael Kruse and Thomas J Sugrue, eds., The New Suburban History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 31 Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 205.

41 terms. The FHA also refused to insure mortgages in at-risk urban neighborhoods, where ―at- risk‖ was typically defined as those areas having high numbers of racial and ethnic minorities.

In a process known as ―redlining,‖ the FHA designated such neighborhoods – usually closest to the central city - as unacceptable financial risks. Furthermore, the FHA declared racially integrated neighborhoods – even if newly constructed - to be undesirable lending risks, thus essentially requiring that postwar suburbs be racially segregated. Private lenders closely followed the FHA guidelines. Between 1946 and 1959, less that two percent of all housing insured by the federal agency was purchased by blacks.32 This system of classification insured that new suburbs attracted large numbers of middle-class white homebuyers, while urban neighborhoods received little new investment and became enclaves of poor minorities.

Despite some critics who charged that the FHA provisions doomed the city to disinvestment and decay, strong influence from homebuilders and the banking industry encouraged the federal government to maintain this course. Restrictive covenants also explicitly prevented

African-Americans and other non-whites from movement into established suburban neighborhoods. The 1948 Supreme Court decision Shelley v. Kraemer declared racially restrictive covenants to be unenforceable; while this opened suburban neighborhoods to minorities in word, in practice white suburban residents faced unwritten pressures to sell only to white homebuyers, and nonwhites often faced discrimination and violent harassment upon moving into homogeneous suburbs.33 Thus, minorities remained underrepresented in the postwar settlement of the ―crabgrass frontier.‖

32 Dennis Judd and Todd Swanstrom, City Politics: Private Power and Public Policy (New York: Longman, 2002), 200. 33 Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 208; Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 44-46, 221-222.

42 Postwar residential suburbanization was accompanied by a commercial outward migration as well. In the immediate postwar years, when economic growth might have encouraged new investment in downtown, capital was rapidly flowing away from the central business district and into outlying suburbs. Particularly hard hit were department stores, those giants of urban retailing that defined so many Americans‘ experiences downtown. While middle-class shoppers still frequented downtown stores in the 1940s and 1950s, they increasingly viewed them as inconvenient. The proliferation of the automobile played a significant role in creating this dissatisfaction – by 1941, 40 to 50 percent of downtown

Pittsburgh‘s patrons were forgoing public transit and arriving by automobile; in St. Louis the number was already more than half.34 Narrow streets, traffic congestion, and limited parking were high on shoppers‘ complaint lists. New suburban shopping centers catered to the middle-class consumers of the automobile age, and downtown retailers feared a future of obsolescence and a changing customer base composed of fewer middle-class housewives and more lower-income African-Americans and other minorities.35 The problem of maintaining downtown‘s central commercial role became something of an obsession; concerns over the stagnation of downtown department stores dominated much of the discourse and policymaking about central cities in the 1950s and 1960s. A study commissioned by downtown St. Louis businesses in the 1960s to assess the reasons for decline in downtown

34 Fogelson, Downtown, 251. 35 For more on the suburbanization of retail and concerns about downtown decline, see Isenberg, Downtown America, especially 166-202; Lizabeth Cohen, ―From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration of Community Marketplaces in Postwar America,‖ American Historical Review 101, no. 4 (October 1996): 1050-1081.

43 retailing stated the matter plainly. ―The ‗city‘ is not part of the new suburbanite‘s world . . .

[the response] ‗Downtown? I just don‘t even think about it‘ seems to typify this attitude.‖36

For many suburban Americans who did think about it, the postwar central city was more than simply inconvenient; it was increasingly associated with racial minorities, poverty, and violent crime. Increasing segregation, by both race and class, became a hallmark characteristic of all four cities in the postwar era. Like many older industrial cities,

Baltimore, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis experienced an influx of African-Americans from the South in postwar years, expanding on a trend that had begun during World War I.

The black population in St. Louis increased by 60,000 during the 1950s to 214, 539, or almost thirty percent of the city population.37 During the same decade, the percentage of nonwhite population in Baltimore increased by half, and Cincinnati and Pittsburgh saw similar trends.38

Due to their relative proximity to the South, these cities also absorbed significant numbers of

Appalachian migrants; more than one million people left Appalachia during the 1950s alone, as the coal mining industry cut jobs and agriculture faltered. These ―Okies of the ‗60s‖ as

Time magazine dubbed them, added population to the cities but often struggled to escape the poverty which had driven them there in the first place. Some managed to carve out a successful living as industrial laborers, but many had minimal technical skills and came to cities at just the time that such employment was in decline. They usually settled in low-cost inner-city neighborhoods and often faced discrimination and stereotyping as uneducated, lazy

36 Batz, Hodgson, Neuhower, Inc., ―Public Attitudes Towards the City: A Preliminary Report,‖ Box 2, Folder 26, Downtown St. Louis Inc Papers (Addendum), Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, University of Missouri-St. Louis. 37 Primm, Lion of the Valley, 507. 38 U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1950 Census, (Washington, DC: GPO, 1953); 1960 Census, (Washington, DC: GPO, 1963).

44 ―hillbillies.‖39 While stable urban neighborhoods, integrated by both race and class, did exist, these four cities (and many like them) were rapidly dichotomizing into a central city of poor minorities surrounded by a largely white, prosperous suburban region.

Older declining cities also experienced a real increase in violent crime during the late

1950s and 1960s. The Federal Bureau of Investigation‘s 1970 Uniform Crime Report enumerated increases of 142 percent in burglaries nationwide during the 1960s, and, despite a brief decline in the early 1960s, a 76 percent increase in murders during the same period.

Rising crime in larger cities was responsible for much of this trend.40 In St. Louis, overall crime increased 206% from 1952-1968, and in 1969 the city ranked fourth in the nation in auto thefts per capita.41 Cincinnati‘s crime rate increased by double-digit percentages in every year from 1966 to 1972.42 Legitimate concern about this phenomenon was, however, fueled to unreasonable heights by sensational media coverage, opportunistic politicians, and existing racial prejudices among some suburbanites. Fears about urban crime went hand-in- hand with an understanding of the central city as a largely black district. Although statistics regularly showed high arrest rates for whites in many categories of urban street crime, by the

1960s, as historian Michael Flamm notes, ―black men displaced white ethnics as the new face of urban violence.‖43 Liberal scholars and political leaders challenged federal crime data as

39 ―Okies of the ‗60s‖ Time, 20 April 1962; Durr, Behind the Backlash, 67; Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, 193-96, 230-233. 40 United States and International Association of Chiefs of Police, Uniform Crime Reports for the United States (Washington, D.C: U.S. Dept. of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1970). 41 Alfonso Cervantes, Mr. Mayor (Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1974), 78, 81. 42 ―Crime Rate Skyrocketing: Here‘s Report,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 30 September 1966; ―Cinti Crime Rate Up 54 Per Cent,‖ Cincinnati Post Times-Star, 25 June 1968; ―Cinti Tops Nation in Crime Rate Increases,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 20 December 1972. 43The 1967 Uniform Crime Report, for instance, revealed significantly more whites than blacks arrested for crimes such as auto theft, burglary, larceny, and vandalism. Blacks were arrested in slightly higher numbers for forcible rape, and at nearly double that of whites for murder and robbery. United States and International Association of Chiefs of Police, Uniform Crime Reports for the United States (Washington, D.C: U.S. Dept. of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1967). Michael W.

45 unreliable and subject to drastic variances in local reporting, but such nuanced qualifiers rarely penetrated into suburban conversations about the danger of the central city.44 The St.

Louis business study assessing public attitudes towards the city noted that among those surveyed, ―fear of being robbed or otherwise molested by Negro youths was often expressed‖ as a reason for avoiding downtown.45

Ethnic and racial tensions, poverty, and crime were nothing new to American cities; many of the same concerns dominated Victorian morality tales and motivated turn-of-the century urban Progressive reformers. Compounding these problems in the postwar era, however, was the simultaneous decline of these city‘s economic bases. While downtowns had been in decline since the 1930s, for the most part these cities‘ overall manufacturing and economic base remained strong in the immediate postwar years.46 But this prosperity was not to last. All four cities in this study were by the late 1960s suffering mightily due to large- scale changes occurring in the national and global economies.

Baltimore‘s Inner Harbor had long been a central node of the city‘s economy, supporting an active shipping business as well as giving birth to various components of the shipbuilding industry, including steel and oil refining. By the 1950s, modern cargo ships had grown too large for the relatively shallow and narrow Inner Harbor, requiring the port to move further out and beyond the city‘s borders.47 Furthermore, a shift to containerization and

Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 5. 44 Ibid., 125-129. 45 Batz, Hodgson, Neuhower, Inc., ―Public Attitudes Towards the City: A Preliminary Report‖ 46 Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, 216-217. 47 Olson, Baltimore: The Building of an American City, 352-353. Hopes for rehabilitating the Inner Harbor for use as a cargo port persisted into the early 1960s – members of the city‘s Greater Baltimore Committee discussed the financial cost of dredging the harbor and widening its docks to accommodate larger ships, but this was soon abandoned. Meeting Minutes, Inner Harbor Municipal Center Steering

46 the increasing mechanization of labor revolutionized the entire freight shipping industry but also made the labor-intensive ―break-bulk‖ method of handling goods – in which dock workers unloaded cargo from ships or railcars piecemeal – far less common.48 These changes left large numbers of dock workers, often African-Americans and ethnic minorities, competing for a shrinking number of jobs in the region‘s ports. The growth of the trucking industry (expanding rapidly along with the interstate highway system) also led to a decline in both rail and harbor freight.49

Baltimore‘s manufacturing also sharply declined. The city‘s garment industry, a fixture of the local economy that employed tens of thousands of workers (including many women) suffered a wave of shop closings during the Great Depression, and further declined after World War II when clothing corporations, in response to the city‘s highly organized textile workers union, began closing operations or relocating to nonunion international locations.50 Other industries similarly migrated out of the city. In 1950, more than 34% of the city‘s workforce was employed in manufacturing and over 75% of jobs in the region were located in the city. Between 1950 and 1995, however, Baltimore lost 75% of its industrial employment.51 Even the mighty steelworks at Sparrows Point began to contract by the 1960s

Committee, 7 October 1963, Series III, Group D, Box 1, Greater Baltimore Committee Papers, University of Baltimore Special Collections, Baltimore MD [hereafter GBC Papers]. 48 For a detailed discussion of containerization and its economic ripple effects, see Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006). 49 David Harvey, ―A View from Federal Hill,‖ in Fee and Shopes, eds., The Baltimore Book : New Views of Local History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). 50 Jo Ann E. Argersinger, ―The City That Tries to Suit Everybody: Baltimore‘s Clothing Industry,‖ in Ibid., 81-101. 51 Marc Levine, ―A Third World City in the First World: Social Exclusion, Racial Inequality and Sustainable Development in Baltimore, U.S.A.‖ in , ed. The Social Sustainability of Cities: Diversity and the Management of Change (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 126.

47 to increase its efficiency and cut costs in response to increased overseas competition. By the early 1980s its workforce was approximately half that of thirty years earlier.52

Manufacturing-heavy cities like St. Louis and Pittsburgh, were especially hard-hit by the complex postwar economic restructuring often labeled ―deindustrialization.‖ American manufacturers, responding to increased competition from Japan and Germany, began by the

1960s to reduce their labor forces, replace workers with new automation technologies, and relocate plants to more profitable locations in the suburbs, the cities of the Sunbelt, or less expensive labor markets overseas. While Pittsburgh‘s steel industry had made it a giant among American cities, the lack of diversity in its manufacturing base left it especially susceptible to a potential economic downturn. The American steel industry as a whole began to lose its dominance on domestic and foreign markets by the 1960s, as imports from Asian and European markets began to offer less expensive, and in some cases better quality, alternatives. By 1968, foreign imports made up 17 percent of the U.S. market and were rising quickly.53 The relative monopoly that firms like U.S. Steel had held on the domestic market until the 1950s had discouraged innovation and modernization in its production facilities.

Modernization that did take place in the 1960s and 1970s was directed toward mills in other regions of the country, like Chicago, which had better access to metal markets. While the massive layoffs of the early 1980s garnered the most national attention, the diversification and reorganization of the steel industry caused constant layoffs and labor conflicts in the

Pittsburgh region well before then. U.S. Steel had already closed a number of its mills in the

Monongahela Valley in the late 1960s.54

52 ―Baltimore Turns Away from Steel,‖ New York Times, 20 June 1982, F15; Reutter, Sparrows Point, 10-11 53 Hinshaw, Steel and Steelworkers, 176. 54 Ibid., 173-229.

48 The problem of industrial exodus from the urban core had begun in St. Louis even before World War II, as several of the city‘s firms retained their St. Louis headquarters but moved their manufacturing divisions to rural areas with inexpensive labor bases.55 This trend would accelerate in the postwar era, in St. Louis and dozens of cities like it. A 1957 report by the Metropolitan St. Louis Survey found that the city suffered a net loss of more than 11,000 manufacturing jobs in the last decade.56 A protracted battle developed between the city and surrounding suburbs for industrial development, and the suburban districts won overwhelmingly. St. Louis, like many other cities, could not compete with suburbia‘s relatively lower taxes, ample land for industrial parks, nonunionized labor, and easy access to major highway routes. More than half of new business starts in St. Louis County from 1955-

1965 had relocated from St. Louis City.57

Deindustrialization left cities with large swaths of land no longer producing tax revenues, as well as large numbers of unemployed residents who did not have the means to follow the jobs. Despite the specific differences outlined above, the overall trend in all four cities was remarkably similar. Between 1967 and 1977, manufacturing employment decreased by more than 35 percent in Pittsburgh, almost 32 percent in Baltimore, and nearly

30 percent in St. Louis. Cincinnati had a relatively good retention rate for manufacturing employment among major cities during the period: it lost only 24 percent.58

Business and political leadership in these cities were thus faced with two separate – though interrelated - problems. First, downtowns were clearly in a period of transition.

Forced into competition with newer and more convenient suburban developments, they were

55 Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, 179-180. 56Heathcott and Murphy, ―Corridors of Flight, Zones of Renewal,‖ 157. 57 Ibid., 164-165. 58 Teaford, Rough Road, 213.

49 no longer the automatic choice for middle-class shopping, business, and entertainment.

Compounding the problem of retail decentralization was an increasing postwar trend of corporate office suburbanization as well.59 Second, declining employment, populations and tax revenues combined with rising poverty and crime indicated cities were losing viability as the economic powerhouses they once had been. The problem of maintaining downtown‘s role as the economic center of the wider metropolis, especially in light of the overall decline of the city, drove plans for postwar urban renewal.

Solutions for turning around the central city‘s fortunes overwhelmingly focused on physical redevelopment. The primary objective of most postwar renewal leaders was the containment of urban ―blight‖ – by which they typically meant an aging ring of commercial and residential slums on the borders of nearly every downtown. These were typically nineteenth-century urban neighborhoods that had long been abandoned by the middle class and were now filled with cities‘ poorer residents. Such dilapidated areas returned little in tax revenue to the city and threatened downtown property values. Postwar planners spoke about

―creeping blight‖ or ―diseased‖ slums that threatened to ―infect‖ downtown. City planners and business leaders thus focused on propping up downtown real estate by eliminating this threat and converting the land to more productive uses.

State and federal authorities played a key role in enabling and aiding cities in their efforts at stabilization and renewal. Many state governments gave cities broad clearance powers in the immediate postwar years, enabling municipalities to exercise eminent domain to raze dilapidated neighborhoods and industrial districts that urban power brokers feared were creeping into central business districts and more successful areas of the city.60 The State of

59 Fogelson, Downtown, 387. 60 Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, 214.

50 Missouri in 1943, for example, passed legislation that gave its cities powers to grant twenty- five year tax abatements to potential developers on property deemed ―blighted‖ by the city, and allowed private redevelopment corporations to borrow eminent domain powers from the city to acquire such land. City leaders in St. Louis often applied the new statute liberally; in

1971 the city, building on earlier precedents, declared almost its entire downtown as

―blighted‖ and thus eligible for the generous redevelopment incentives. Originally drafted to encourage new housing development, the state legislation instead enabled a downtown building boom that included hotels, office towers, and the city‘s new sports stadium.61

Federal renewal programs were equally generous, and also interpreted broadly.

Indeed, there is significant evidence that state and local renewal legislation provided the model for later federal housing acts.62 Title I of the 1949 Wagner-Ellender-Taft Housing Act authorized the federal government to pay two-thirds of the net cost of purchase and clearance of degraded residential neighborhoods, and for the construction of new public housing. Like the earlier state legislation, the seemingly residentially-focused provisions of the 1949

Housing Act were again quickly steered toward efforts to revitalize the central business district. Title I of the act did not require the construction of new public housing in the same location as cleared slums; cities could allocate the cleared land to other privately developed projects and construct public housing in a less valuable area of the city. Local redevelopment agencies often used the clearance authority to spur new investment in downtown.

Furthermore, while Title I specified that displaced families had to be relocated, this directive

61 Primm, Lion of the Valley, 502-504. Ohio‘s Redevelopment Act, passed in 1949, gave similar broad powers to its cities and enabled Cincinnati leaders to declare most of that city‘s West End ―blighted‖ and eligible for clearance. See Davis, Contested Ground, 129. 62 Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 269-272.

51 was loosely enforced by local administrators and usually under funded.63 Subsequent federal legislation in 1954 and 1960 placed even fewer restrictions on funds, allowing broader use of federal grants for nonresidential projects. Local leaders, in the words of one historian,

―became especially skilled at bending the broad designations attached to federal urban renewal money so that it could be used for downtown redevelopment.‖64

Whatever the stated intention of federal and state legislation, then, the actual strategies for urban revitalization were determined largely by the local ―power players‖ in each city, who typically had downtown redevelopment as their first priority. This group included not only mayors and city government officials, but also prominent corporate executives, financiers, and anyone with a substantial economic investment in downtown real estate.

Historian John Teaford has noted that in almost every aging American city during the 1950s, corporate leaders served as ―one of the principal engines of the renewal crusade.‖ 65 This effort moved beyond the traditional roles of philanthropy and boosterism and involved direct participation in city planning and government. Such public-private partnerships assured the cooperation of the business community with governmental leaders and promoted private development of federal urban renewal sites.66

The model for this sort of renewal originated in Pittsburgh. Richard King Mellon, commanding the fortune of Mellon National Bank – and its extensive holdings in most of the city‘s other major corporations – organized a committee of corporate executives to plan and direct the city of Pittsburgh‘s postwar renewal and economic growth. The Allegheny

63 Fogelson, Downtown, 378; Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 111, 119-125. 64 Isenberg, Downtown America, 171. 65 Teaford, Rough Road, 45-46. 66 A critical view of these alliances can be found in Gregory Squires, Unequal Partnerships: The Political Economy of Urban Redevelopment in Postwar America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989).

52 Conference on Community Development (ACCD) came together in 1943 with the goals of environmental cleanup, physical renewal of the city, and restructuring the Pittsburgh economy to compete in the post-World War II era.67 Such ideas were not new, but the ACCD found a powerful ally in Pittsburgh mayor David L. Lawrence, first elected in 1945. Lawrence, a

Democratic machine veteran, exhibited a willingness to use his political power to enable the goals of the ACCD. Among the most successful of what came to be called the Pittsburgh

―Renaissance‖ was a program of smoke and flood control, two environmental issues that had plagued the central city for generations.

The ACCD also undertook an aggressive program of demolishing and rebuilding large sections of the central city, with particular focus on the narrow point of land in downtown that formed at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. Empowered by the newly-drafted federal urban renewal legislation, the city used its power of eminent domain to clear dilapidated commercial property, obsolete industrial facilities, warehouses, and rail lines from the point and replaced them with Gateway Center, a complex of three cruciform office buildings that provided the seed for numerous other high-rise developments, and a large state park. While the city provided the municipal authority for land clearance, the corporate members of the Allegheny Conference insured that development capital would flow to the newly-cleared land. The new ―Point‖ became a centerpiece of the ACCD‘s Renaissance project and a well-known image of the city.68

Far more controversial and less successful was the city‘s clearance of the Lower Hill district to the east of downtown, beginning in 1953. While the neighborhood was as a center of African-American cultural and social life in the mid-twentieth century, dilapidated

67 Lubove, Twentieth Century Pittsburgh,108-109. 68 Ibid., 111-125.

53 conditions in some areas closest to downtown made the area a target for renewal to protect the central business district. Large-scale clearance of the land began in 1956, and the centerpiece of the renewal project, the $22 million Mellon Civic Arena, opened in 1961. While the arena was celebrated by city elites as a centerpiece project of the city‘s renewal, to many former residents of the Hill (among the more than 1500 families displaced) the Civic Arena became a symbol of the evils of ―bulldozer‖ renewal of the immediate postwar decades.69

By forming a coalition of corporate power, technical expertise, and governmental authority, the ACCD was able to exert enormous influence over the geographic shape and economic contours of Pittsburgh‘s future. The Allegheny Conference‘s remarkable efficiency made it not only the primary force behind Pittsburgh redevelopment but also the model for public-private partnerships in urban renewal efforts nationwide. Corporate and political leaders from other distressed cities were soon paying visits to Pittsburgh and studying the

ACCD‘s programs as a model for their own cities.

Postwar redevelopment in St. Louis was similarly guided by corporate elites. The remaking of St. Louis‟s downtown began during the Great Depression, when the National

Park Service announced plans to build a national park and memorial to westward expansion on the riverfront. The question of what to do with the city‟s declining waterfront had occupied city leaders since at least 1907, when the city‟s Civic League had described it as

“abandoned by business... [and] becoming a resort of the vicious and depraved.”70 New Deal federal dollars and city funding enabled the clearance of thirty-seven blocks of the city‟s historic riverfront commercial district by 1940, though the riverfront remained barren until the construction of the city‟s Gateway Arch, approved in 1948 and completed in 1965. This

69 Ibid., 131. 70 Civic League for St. Louis, ―City Plan for St. Louis,‖ (1907) as reprinted in Troen and Holt, eds., St. Louis, 178-181.

54 example of central city renewal through land clearance would shape most of St. Louis‟ postwar renewal efforts.

In 1953, corporate leaders within the city collaborated to found Civic Progress, Inc., which became the driving force behind the city‟s subsequent urban renewal for decades to come. Modeled after Pittsburgh‟s ACCD, the group was headed by a board of directors made up of eight of the city‟s most prominent corporate executives including Anheuser-Busch,

Monsanto Chemical, and McDonnell Aircraft. As with the ACCD, Civic Progress provided the financial capital to catalyze urban renewal, in conjunction with the political clout of

Mayors Joseph Darst (1949-1953) and Raymond Tucker (1953-1965). Their actions were supplemented by a more specialized group of downtown retailers and property owners who organized themselves as Downtown St. Louis Incorporated, and sought to encourage downtown development and increase retail traffic for struggling downtown businesses. Both

Civic Progress and Downtown St. Louis exerted heavy influence over the city‟s postwar renewal plans.

Much of the early focus of renewal in postwar St. Louis concerned public housing and an effort to ―reindustrialize‖ the urban core. In 1953, the city unveiled its plans for postwar reconstruction, which proposed to combine federal urban renewal funds and city financing to clear several of the central city‘s declining neighborhoods for industrial development, construct massive public housing projects to accommodate the displaced residents, and build several major expressways to route traffic through the congested city. Bolstered by the extensive ―Progress or Decay‖ series in the city‘s Post-Dispatch newspaper, the program won official approval in 1955 when voters approved a $110 million bond issue to finance its

55 ambitious goals.71 The clearance of the central Mill Creek Valley, a 450-acre district occupied by large numbers of working-class and poor blacks, was the most notable of these projects. After clearance was completed in 1960, the land was rezoned for industrial use, and plans drawn up to route the city‘s major east-west expressway through the cleared route. The wholesale clearance of the Mill Creek Valley and other areas of the city drastically reconfigured the city‘s landscape. ―The visitor‘s first impression,‖ wrote Ada Louise

Huxtable in the New York Times, ―is that St. Louis has been bombed.‖72 Indeed, the relatively slow redevelopment of the bulldozed land led locals to dub the Mill Creek district ―Hiroshima

Flats.‖

Public housing projects quickly sprang up both north and south of downtown St. Louis in the 1950s; many were occupied by the estimated 20,000 blacks displaced from the Mill

Creek Valley site. The massive Pruitt-Igoe complex, consisting of thirty three 11-story apartment buildings on the city‘s north side, opened in 1954. Pruitt-Igoe and other high-rise housing projects verticalized the city‘s poor, opening more land for highways and industrial and commercial development. Major arterial expressways came to form boundaries on the southern border of downtown and along the eastern side, cutting downtown St. Louis off from the river that had once been its lifeblood. The city‘s central core was now isolated from the creeping ―blight‖ that so threatened downtown business interests, but the continual flow of street-level business and small office tenants out of the CBD, unstaunched by the ambitious public initiatives, left some wondering if there was anything left to protect.73

The Greater Baltimore Committee formed in 1955, composed of fifty of the city‘s top corporate executives under the leadership of Baltimore mortgage lender and real estate

71 Primm, Lion of the Valley, 493-496. 72 ―St. Louis and the Crisis of American Cities,‖ New York Times, 29 June 1964, X13. 73 Sandweiss, St. Louis, 234.

56 developer James Rouse. Rouse had already played a central role on President Dwight D.

Eisenhower‘s National Housing Task Force in 1953. Indeed, it was Rouse who, while serving on the president‘s committee, popularized the term ―urban renewal‖ to describe the federal government‘s efforts to revitalize American cities. 74 As with groups in St. Louis and

Pittsburgh, the GBC focused squarely on the propping up of the sagging downtown, and saw large-scale development projects as the obvious answer. Charles Center, the committee‘s first ambitious foray, was unveiled in 1959. The 33-acre development combined a grouping of office towers and residential development with pedestrian plazas and small-scale retail establishments; it was to be a literal ―center‖ for the city, around which new investment and development would theoretically coalesce. The project required nearly $40 million in public expenditures, but won wide acclaim for its design. Even Jane Jacobs, the most influential critic of postwar urban renewal, expressed her approval.

The second major project for the GBC was a remaking of the city‘s inner harbor, which due to its declining use was rapidly becoming an eyesore that depressed adjacent downtown properties. In 1965, the city created the quasi-public agency known as the Charles

Center-Inner Harbor Management (CCIHM) to coordinate development in the two areas. The

CCIHM was the first of several quasi-public agencies in postwar Baltimore that had public financing (and the city‘s power of eminent domain) but very little in the way of public accountability.75 After determining that the harbor‘s usefulness as a port had expired, by the mid-60s the city secured more than $22 million in HUD funding for land purchase, clearance,

74 On Rouse and his involvement in urban planning in Baltimore and nationally, see Joshua Olsen, Better Places, Better Lives : A Biography of James Rouse (Washington D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 2003) and Nicholas Bloom, Merchant of Illusion : James Rouse, American's Salesman of the Businessman's Utopia (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004). 75 See Harvey, ―The View from Federal Hill,‖ 233; Marc V. Levine, ―Downtown Redevelopment as an Urban Growth Strategy: A Critical Appraisal of the Baltimore Renaissance,‖ Journal of Urban Affairs 9, no. 2 (1987), 107.

57 and redevelopment of the 240-acre Inner Harbor area.76 The initial goal, as with Charles

Center, was to create a mix of office, retail, and residential development on the waterfront.

The specific manifestation of that plan would come to epitomize tourist development in the postwar city.

Coming out of World War II, the political leadership of Cincinnati seemed somewhat hesitant to rise to meet the challenges of urban decline. Traditionally a conservative

Republican stronghold, the city had a low tax rate and low bond indebtedness, both of which would be threatened by ambitious renewal projects. Many in the city‘s business community urged action, pointing to trends such as the 40% decrease in downtown properties‘ tax value in the previous two decades, and the rapid migration of industry to the suburbs.77 The city‘s corporate leadership, organized as the Citizens Planning Association, pushed for a redevelopment plan, and in 1944 city council approved funding for an ambitious master plan for shaping the postwar city.

The CPA, later to re-form as the Citizens Development Commission, was neither as powerful nor as focused on downtown as its counterparts in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and St.

Louis. The 1948 Metropolitan Master Plan focused largely on transforming the city‘s transportation infrastructure, calling for multi-lane expressways to allow better automobile access to downtown. The plan envisioned a remade riverfront that called for a new sports stadium, a civic center, and a public park. Slum clearance was also a central concern; the master plan focused on the city‘s West End, a largely African-American neighborhood on downtown‘s western border which had become a symbol for Cincinnati leaders of the ―blight‖ that threatened to drag down property values in the central business district. Major bond

76 Vexler, ed., Baltimore, 84. 77 Cincinnati City Planning Commission, Cincinnati Metropolitan Master Plan (Cincinnati, 1948), 9.

58 issues in 1950, 1954, and 1956 provided municipal funding for the renewal projects. The city initiated the Kenyon-Barr urban renewal project in 1956, clearing most of the 3,100 structures in the West End. Much of the cleared land was replaced by the Millcreek Expressway (later

Interstate 75), which began construction in 1958 with federal funds from the 1956 Interstate

Highway Act.78 The expressway, built on the edge of the central business district, offered improved automobile access into downtown, and also formed a massive protective barrier between downtown and what remained of the West End. Land east of the north-south expressway was allocated to public housing for some displaced West End residents, while to the west of the highway the plan called for a new industrial park.79 Intertwined in all of these concerns, however, was a focus on reinvigorating the central business district, and, as the

1948 Master Plan expressed it, making downtown and the riverfront the ―front yard‖ of

Cincinnati.80 Redevelopment of the central business district would begin in earnest in the

1960s when the ambitious remaking of Cincinnati‘s downtown Fountain Square and construction of Riverfront Stadium dominated the city‘s renewal efforts.

The Cincinnati example notwithstanding, local planners and corporate executives saw the buttressing of downtown business and property values as their top priority, often to the neglect of many other pressing needs in struggling inner-city neighborhoods. Cooperation to protect downtown and encourage central-city investment was nothing new to these leaders – even in the ―golden age‖ of downtowns in the early twentieth century, those with interests in

78 Davis, Contested Ground, 135-138. 79 Ibid., 123-125. 80 Cincinnati City Planning Commission, Cincinnati Metropolitan Master Plan. (Cincinnati, 1948); Robert Fairbanks has argued that Cincinnati planners only turned to downtown after an earlier period of the 1950s when they worked from a broader model that pursued neighborhood revitalization and improved housing. However, as other scholars discussed here have demonstrated well, such initiatives frequently complemented primary efforts to maintain the viability of downtowns. See Fairbanks, Making Better Citizens: Housing Reform and the Community Development Strategy in Cincinnati, 1890-1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 148, 159.

59 the central business district had actively worked to influence capital investment and government regulation to benefit downtown development and improvement. City officials and business leaders in the postwar period framed downtown as the essential engine of the larger metropolis. A report used by the St. Louis Civic Center Redevelopment Corporation (CCRC) to attract investors to the Busch Stadium project in the mid-1960s expressed this idea perfectly. ―Downtown St. Louis is not simply another section or district,‖ argued the authors,

―It is the heart and the nerve center for most of the economic activity carried on throughout this entire metropolitan area.‖ Renewal leaders in nearly all cities shared this philosophy; downtown‘s revitalization was absolutely essential to the larger health of their cities. This belief, of course, was driven in large part by the fact that the corporate leaders of postwar renewal were themselves already heavy investors in downtown real estate. Paraphrasing the philosopher Voltaire‘s famous dictum on the existence of God, the CCRC concluded, ―If there were no downtown St. Louis, the suburbs and the rest of the City would be forced to build one.‖81

The development of the tourist industry in postwar American cities must be understood in this larger context of the physical and economic rearrangement of the city in the period, designed to protect and revitalize downtowns. Most early renewal plans called for new highway routes, office and retail complexes, upscale residential apartment towers, and some limited public housing as the solutions for the ills of the central city. Above all, as

81 Civic Center Redevelopment Corporation, ―The Downtown Stadium Project: Why This Is an Essential Investment for Business and Industry Throughout the Metropolitan St. Louis Area.‖ St. Louis, MO, n.d. Series 3, Box 18, Raymond Tucker Papers, Special Collections, Washington University Library, St. Louis, MO.

60 Robert Fogelson emphasizes, the hope and goal of immediate postwar renewal was to reverse the trend of suburbanization, to lure middle and upper-income residents back to the city to live.82 Pittsburgh‘s Gateway Center redevelopment, for example, featured Gateway Towers, a 27-story luxury apartment development completed in 1964.83 Baltimore‘s Charles Center included two high-rise apartment buildings in its cluster of corporate and retail space. All four cities placed emphasis on luxury or market-rate high-rises as key components of central city renewal, though far fewer projects actually materialized than were imagined in early redevelopment plans.

During this early period of urban renewal efforts, leaders did not seriously consider tourism as a primary strategy for economic revival. While early plans usually called for some sort of recreational structure or tourist-oriented land use (such as a stadium or civic center), these were usually ancillary to the more substantial issues of constructing highways, public housing, and downtown office and retail space. These men were bankers, industrialists, and real estate developers who thought of themselves as the pillars of cities built on their businesses. Despite their ambitious plans, they were essentially traditionalists, not innovators. The failure of many of these early strategies of revitalization, however, would create a sense of desperation among urban leaders that made cities ripe for exploitation by the rapidly growing tourist industry.

The efforts to attract middle-income and wealthy residents back to the central city ultimately proved a weak bulwark against the tidal wave of postwar suburbanization.

Certainly some market-rate residential development sprung up in postwar downtowns, but the task of convincing large numbers of these targeted groups to move from their suburban

82 Fogelson, Downtown, 317-380. 83 Lubove, Twentieth Century Pittsburgh, 124.

61 single-family homes to apartments or condominiums in the city was a daunting one. Efforts to revive downtown retail – at least in its traditional sense - proved equally futile. Adapting downtown for suburban automobile traffic by building multi-lane expressways and massive parking garages proved controversial, expensive, and ultimately ineffective.84 Imitation of the suburban shopping center produced sterile and commercially unsuccessful downtowns that offered neither the convenience of suburban centers nor the nostalgic excitement of downtown shopping. Between 1967 and 1977, a period after which downtowns had experienced the bulk of renewal infrastructure improvements supposedly designed to boost their retail fortunes, CBD retail sales dropped 48 percent in Baltimore and 44 percent in St.

Louis.85 The precipitous drop continued into the 1980s, a period in which Cincinnati lost two of its major downtown department stores, Elder Beerman and L.S. Ayres. By the 1970s and

1980s, those few downtown department stores that had not shuttered their doors usually remained in the central city only because of substantial tax abatement or public subsidy that preserved them as financially viable - and largely symbolic - enterprises.

Reindustrialization of the central city also failed to gain much traction. St. Louis‘ dream of filling the Mill Creek Valley with new industrial plants failed to materialize, at least to the level of planners‘ original goals. Where industrial districts did develop in city borders, it paled in comparison to the vast amounts of capital flowing to the suburbs, and cities often had to give such generous tax abatements and other economic incentives (in order to compete with suburban industrial parks) that the benefits of such development were relatively minor.

Furthermore, by the 1960s cities like Pittsburgh and St. Louis began to shift their attention

84 On attempts to adapt downtowns for automobiles, especially parking, see John A. Jakle and Keith Sculle, Lots of Parking: Land Use in a Car Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 93-156. 85 Teaford, Rough Road, 208.

62 away from attracting more industrial manufacturing, seeking instead to make their cities competitive in the emerging technology and research fields.

The limitations of the Eisenhower-era federal urban aid programs became increasingly apparent. The urban revitalization programs of the immediate postwar years did not lack for funding, political clout, or sheer force of will. Indeed, from a distance, all of the demolition and rebuilding of the central city seemed to indicate success. ―Beyond a doubt,‖ trumpeted a

1964 Time magazine article, ―St. Louis is back from the brink.‖86 However, a closer look revealed cities that still staggered under the weight of endemic racial segregation, failing schools, crime, and poor job opportunities. Slum clearance, highway construction, and shoddy public housing only displaced the problems of the city, rather than correcting them.

The solutions of the first decades of postwar renewal had not succeeded in maintaining downtown‘s economic centrality, nor had it substantially improved the quality of life within the city.

In the 1960 presidential election, Senator John F. Kennedy vigorously attacked

Republican federal urban policies as short-sighted and insufficient.87 Recognizing the role newly-enfranchised urban blacks in the North played in his 1960 election, Kennedy committed his administration to a program of comprehensive civil rights and social improvement legislation. It was Lyndon Johnson, of course, who as President oversaw the implementation and expansion of this initial proposal into the wide array of programs known as the Great Society. The 1964 Civil Rights Act banned racial discrimination in public accommodations and job hiring, while 1965 Voting Rights Act protected blacks‘ voting

86 ―To the Brink & Back,‖ Time, 17 July 1964. 87 For one notable example in which Kennedy labeled federal urban policy ―the 8-year Republican record of neglect,‖ see ―Speech by Senator John F. Kennedy Delivered Before the Urban Affairs Conference, Pittsburgh, PA - October 10th, 1960‖ at the American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu, Accessed 10 August 2007.

63 rights. Johnson‘s 1964 declaration of ―unconditional war on poverty in America,‖ however, came to have the most immediate impact on efforts to revitalize declining American cities.

The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 implemented a number of community-based antipoverty programs, including the Job Corps and Project Head Start that focused on so- called ―human renewal‖ – as opposed to property renewal - as the solutions for faltering urban neighborhoods. Federal funding typically came in categorical grants designated for specific social programs, as opposed to broad grants of funding for land clearance. Later Great

Society programs emphasized mobilizing citizens of poor neighborhoods to lead community development themselves. The Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act of

1966 (commonly known as the ―Model Cities‖ program), for example, required the formation and support of community action councils in its designated cities; urban residents and the poor were thus supposed to be politically mobilized and instrumental in the implementation of federally-funded alleviation of poverty and urban decay.88 While the Great Society also focused on rural poverty, the extent of urban programs was significant enough that in 1966

Congress created the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to manage the plethora of urban aid initiatives.

While the programs of the Great Society made a significant impact on issues such as poverty and healthcare, the grass-roots community programs fell far short of their promises to renew the American city. Most of the federal programs lacked sufficient funding to fully deliver on their ambitious promises, and by the late 1960s the sheer number and complexity of federal initiatives, administered by a tangle of local agencies and offices, blunted their effectiveness.

88 The Model Cities program achieved only mixed results, in part due to limited funding but also to apathy and resistance on the part of many urban poor to become politically active. See Teaford, Rough Road, 181-183; Judd and Swanstrom, City Politics, 218-222.

64 The continuing rise of street crime during the 1960s also undermined the Great

Society, casting doubts on the liberal mantra that crime was a mere symptom of poverty and a lack of education. Particularly polarizing were the urban riots that plagued many cities after

1965. Allegations of police brutality against two blacks in the Los Angeles neighborhood of

Watts in August 1965 quickly escalated into violence and rioting by that community‘s black population. Other urban riots followed in subsequent years, most infamously in Newark and

Detroit in the summer of 1967. More than 100 American inner cities, occupied by large numbers of African Americans experiencing the brunt of racial segregation, intensive poverty, and police hostility, suffered riots between 1965 and 1967. The assassination of Martin

Luther King in 1968 also sparked widespread rioting. Baltimore suffered the worst of the

1968 riots; four days of unrest left six dead, 700 injured, 1,000 businesses damaged, and total damage in excess of $14 million. On a smaller scale, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh also experienced riots in April of 1968, primarily in the African-American neighborhoods of

Avondale and the ―Hill,‖ respectively. While the causes and motivations of the ―long hot summers‖ of the late 1960s are myriad and debatable, few would argue that the unrest helped the plight of the inner city. The violence, while fleeting and usually contained to small sections of cities, exacerbated white middle-class fears and encouraged the continued ―white flight‖ exodus from the city. The Presidential Commission appointed to assess the causes of the riots famously concluded in 1968, ―our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.‖89 Those whites with the means worked to make sure this prophecy became a reality in what seemed an increasingly violent urban landscape.

89 United States, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Dutton, 1968), 1.

65 The so-called ―long-hot summers‖ of the late 1960s also had important implications for strategic plans to renew the American city. The urban unrest – combined with already- extant fears about rising urban crime - played upon both racial and geographic stereotypes long held by many white conservatives, and seemed to signify the failure of Lyndon

Johnson‘s Great Society programs and the liberal coalition that supported them. One

Cincinnatian wrote to the mayor after that city‘s April 1968 riots: ―I wished [sic] you were as concerned for the protection of life and property of the white people of Cincinnati as you are to increase welfare checks to the hate mongers!‖ Another urged, ―I think it‘s about time this town stopped ‗babying‘ the Negros.‖90 Demands for ―law and order‖ propelled a new wave of conservative candidates into political office, sometimes at the local but especially at the national level. In Baltimore, Maryland governor Spiro Agnew‘s sharp rebuke of local

African-American leaders for a perceived failure to curb that city‘s 1968 riot drew national attention. Though widely condemned by the local NAACP and Baltimore mayor Thomas

D‘Alesandro, Agnew‘s ―law and order‖ stance drew the attention of the Richard Nixon campaign, and he became the Vice Presidential candidate in Nixon‘s successful 1968 election bid.

In recent years historians have complicated the narrative, shaped almost coincident with the events, of the ―white backlash‖ against the liberalism of the Great Society. Scholars have demonstrated that the ascendance of conservatism among white middle and working- class voters had deep roots in long-standing racial tensions and that the rejection of the

90 Peter L. Suddeth to Mayor Eugene Ruehlmann, 6 April 1968; Mrs. George Wells to Mayor Eugene Ruehlmann, 10 April 1968. Box MM, Folder 2, Eugene Ruehlmann Papers, Urban Studies Collection, University of Cincinnati Libraries, Cincinnati, OH.

66 ―liberal consensus‖ by these voters started many years earlier.91 Still, the resurgence of the right in the late 1960s clearly marked a turning point in federal urban policy, a shift strengthened by ―the widespread loss of popular faith in liberalism‘s ability to ensure personal security.‖92

Richard Nixon‘s ascendance to the presidency in 1968 marked the beginning of the end of federal urban aid as it had been conceived over the past two decades. Contrary to what one might assume given later Republican policies, the Nixon administration did not reduce federal spending on urban aid. Indeed, the administration distributed more federal money to cities than ever before; as a portion of total city revenue, direct federal aid increased from 6 percent in 1968 to almost 20 percent by 1974.93 Instead, in keeping with his policy of New

Federalism, Nixon argued that the old method of urban renewal funding was complex, overly bureaucratic, and inflexible to local needs, and called for the elimination of categorical grants in favor of unrestricted funding to be spent at the discretion of local officials. In 1971, Nixon proposed a new program of ―Special Revenue Sharing‖ to accomplish these objectives. The

1972 State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act initiated this program, authorizing the Treasury

Department to provide $30 billion to state and local governments over a five-year period.94

Unlike previous urban renewal provisions, revenue sharing funds came with few strings attached; local leaders could spend the money on housing, parks, social services, or, as many people argued, physical development projects that could shore up still-struggling downtowns.

91 This idea shapes the central theses of Flamm, Law and Order; Self, American Babylon; and Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis. 92 Flamm, Law and Order, 9. 93 Judd and Swanstrom, City Politics, 352. 94 Bernard J. Frieden and Marshall Kaplan, The Politics of Neglect: Urban Aid from Model Cities to Revenue Sharing, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975), 239.

67 And, in its initial form, the SLFA Act made no provisions that the public be informed on how these funds were spent.95

Federal aid under the Ford and Carter administrations attempted to simultaneously revive urban neighborhoods and spur downtown development. The Housing and Community

Development Act of 1974 eliminated most federal categorical grant programs in favor of

Community Development Block Grants, which required cities receiving the grants to report on how the money was allocated, and specified that the majority of funds had to be directed to low-income areas. The wide leeway given to local administrators, however, meant that the guidelines were often ignored and funds directed to affluent areas of the cities.96 In 1978

Congress approved the Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) Program, which gave federal grants to cities to subsidize commercial development, ostensibly providing jobs and economic stimulus to the city as a whole.97 Each of these new initiatives was accompanied by a simultaneous draw-down in the number of categorical grants for social programs that made up the bulk of urban aid programs of the mid-1960s.

These new postliberal strategies of federal aid therefore had profound implications for the growth of the urban tourist industry. The influx of general revenue sharing funds allowed cities to subsidize (or finance entirely at public cost) new convention centers, hotel developments, and stadiums in downtowns without passing on an unpopular tax hike to voters. The implementation of the UDAG program directed hundreds of millions of federal funding into downtown development. Freed from the specificities of earlier federal urban

95 Judd and Swanstrom, City Politics, 224-227; Nicki King, Federal Revenue Sharing: Variations on the Theme “Inner City Blues” (Santa Monica, CA: The Rand Corporation), 1973. 96 A Brookings Institution study, for example, found that in sixty-two cities receiving block grants, only 29 percent of the monies went to low-income neighborhoods. Judd and Swanstrom, City Politics, 228-230, n74. 97Dennis R Judd, The Politics of American Cities: Private Power and Public Policy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 340-351.

68 programs, urban leaders invested public dollars heavily in tourism projects as a seeming panacea for central cities. CBDG and UDAG programs subsidized convention hotels in one city after another, often much to the chagrin of advocates for poor and working urban residents98 Cincinnati, in anticipation of the expansion of its downtown convention center, used $6 million in UDAG funds to bring a 500-room Hyatt Regency hotel to downtown in

1981.

Decisions at the national level, then, had a profound impact on the available choices made by local urban leaders. Changing federal provisions enabled a shift in the political economy of these cities, swinging clout back to traditional urban power brokers and away from the ―maximum feasible participation‖ requirements of the Great Society, in the ongoing search for solutions to urban problems. It is not insignificant that tourism rose to ascendance within American cities at precisely the time of growing disillusionment with traditional urban renewal, even among many of its most fervent advocates. Despite the billions in federal aid poured out since the passage of urban renewal legislation, by the mid-1960s the problems of urban America remained, and in many cases had actually worsened.99 During opening ceremonies for St. Louis‘ Busch Memorial Stadium in 1966, city councilman Charles Farris celebrated the locally-funded stadium as ―proof that a city can renew itself without having to run to Washington for a handout every few years.‖100 Such rhetoric implicitly undermined traditional Great Society programs (and their emphasis on state-funded aid to racial minorities and the poor) while positing new development that catered to suburbanites‘ recreational tastes as the cure for urban ills. A Cincinnati Enquirer columnist in 1967 looked to the Walt Disney

98 ―Group Protests Downtown Grants,‖ St. Louis Post, 9 April 1978. 99 Teaford, Rough Road, 214-217; For a cogent discussion of the alternating euphoria and dismay over the outcomes of urban renewal, see Robert Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities, (New York: Routledge), 342. 100 ―Ground Broken for Downtown Sports Stadium,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 25 May 1964.

69 Company for solutions, arguing that even with the massive spending of federal urban programs, ―in the Queen City, as in other large cities, expectations and demands for instant results have far outstripped delivery of solutions.‖ Describing contemporary cities as congested, polluted, ―infested with bold criminals‖ and containing ―pockets of blacks‖ who

―embark on guerilla warfare against whites‖ the columnist held up Disney‘s new EPCOT community, with its theme park and complex of recreational facilities, as a potential model for Cincinnati and America‘s future cities.101 Given the disillusionment with traditional urban renewal programs, and the increasingly broad and flexible guidelines attached to federal aid money in the late 1960s and 1970s, using those funds to remake downtowns as tourist locales for an increasingly leisure-minded middle class was a reasonable decision.

The predominant emphasis these urban leaders placed on preserving downtowns above all else also had important implications for the turn toward tourism in later years.

Having largely failed to attract well-to-do Americans to live in the city, leaders of urban redevelopment hoped to convince them to play there. Tourism seemingly offered an opportunity to fulfill multiple needs of the central city-focused renewal planners: it brought people – more specifically, people with disposable income - back to downtowns, spurred property developments which could produce tax revenues, and it provided the rationale for large-scale building projects such as convention centers, hotels and stadiums that could in one fell swoop eliminate acres of ―blighted‖ sections of the city and replace them with gleaming new showcases. Furthermore, because such projects were intended to be seen and visited by outsiders, they provided a potent marketing symbol of the city‘s economic and cultural vibrance in a way that a bland office tower or industrial district never could. Baltimore mayor

101―Epcot May Be Hint of Things to Come,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 3 September 1967.

70 William Donald Schaefer used this rationale frequently, arguing that a successful tourist industry would make the city appear worthy of more intensive corporate investment. 102

The growth of tourism in solutions for urban revitalization was certainly not a one- sided transaction; that is, urban planners and renewal leaders did not simply ―choose‖ to develop their city‘s tourist industry. Rather, tourist industry leaders themselves lobbied aggressively for public subsidies, something they argued was necessary for the success of their industry and the cities themselves. In 1959, for example, the Cincinnati Retail Merchants

Association, the Convention and Visitors Bureau, Hotel Managers Association, a downtown property owners group and the city‘s AFL-CIO Labor Council jointly issued a statement to

Cincinnati city manager C.A. Harrel arguing the ―economic necessity‖ of a publicly-financed convention hall. They asserted that conventions were an opportunity to showcase the city to potential corporate investors; in their view, conventions were not merely a gathering of people but ―a mass marketing process.‖103 Similarly, owners of professional sports teams placed pressure on urban leaders to provide modern arenas that would attract suburban fans and guarantee higher ticket revenues; team owners often threatened to leave declining cities for the booming metropolises of the Sunbelt unless their home cities could offer new stadiums.

Cities almost always acquiesced to these demands, usually using federal urban renewal funds to clear land and build infrastructure for new arenas. Tourist businesses in these cities ran well-financed and increasingly sophisticated campaigns to make sure federal, state, and local funds for urban revitalization were directed towards downtown projects which would benefit their economic interests. The alliance of this tourist industry with local urban power brokers

102 ―Schaefer uses muscle quietly‖ The Sun, 2 January 1973; ―‘Eyes Forward,‘ Mayor Tells Business,‖ The Evening Sun, 6 February 1973. 103 Civic Development Corporation to C.A. Harrel, 12 November 1959. Box 7, Records of the Citizens Development Committee, Cincinnati Historical Society, Cincinnati, Ohio.

71 empowered by broad federal funding would come to drastically reshape central cities in the second half of the century.

In The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-

2000, historian Michael Bess, makes a distinction between what he calls ―profound change‖ and ―superficial change‖ in describing the green movement in late-twentieth century France.

In Bess‘s ecological framework, the former involved steps taken by farmers to eliminate pesticides and harmful fertilizers, comprehensive policies on water usage and limits on energy consumption by society as a whole. The latter, and the one Bess argues was adopted more readily, involves little change in the larger structure of human impact on the environment, and instead met the calls for ecological awareness with ―eco-friendly‖ consumer products, thus addressing the green critique while allowing the ecologically-hazardous consumer society to continue relatively unabated. ―The ‗green turn‘,‖ writes Bess, ―instead of replacing that economy with a slimmed-down, minimalist array of products, merely added a new theme to the plethora of choices available.‖104

It is within a similar framework that we might view the turn towards tourism in

American cities during the same period. Like the ―profound change‖ called for by radical greens, the solutions to the problems of the American city – poverty, racial segregation, unemployment, crime, inadequate housing and healthcare – required drastic alterations not only in the consumer-driven lifestyle of middle class Americans, but also in attitudes toward the city and those who lived in its confines. Middle-class, largely white, Americans were not willing to make these changes, nor, as the ―crabgrass-roots politics‖ of the 1960s showed,

104 Michael Bess, The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960- 2000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 188.

72 willing to pay for the government to work toward these extensive solutions.105 Finding

―profound changes‖ dissatisfying and politically untenable, urban leaders turned to the

―superficial change‖ of re-creating cities as tourist and entertainment districts. The failed search for solutions to the urban crisis thus created the conditions for the rise of tourism in

American cities, as leaders moved from a broader vision of urban renewal to a more limited goal of creating cities of leisure.

105 The phrase is borrowed from Thomas J. Sugrue, ―Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940-1964,‖ Journal of American History 82, no. 2. (September 1995), 551-578.

73 Chapter Two

From Social Center to Convention Center: The Changing Function of Downtown Hotels in the Postwar City

“In America the hotelkeeper, who was no longer the genial deferential „host‟ of the 18th-century European inn, became a leading citizen. Holding a large stake in his community, he exercised power to make it prosper. As owner or manager of the local Palace of the People, he was maker and shaper of a principal community „attraction.‟” -Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (1965)

Walking along Sixth Street in downtown Cincinnati, the contemporary visitor to the city could be forgiven for overlooking, amidst the bland postwar box office buildings, the

Terrace Plaza hotel on the corner of Vine and Sixth. A similar visitor in 1948, the year of the hotel‟s opening, would have made no such mistake. The Terrace Plaza was the first major urban hotel built in the postwar United States.1 Designed by the architectural firm Skidmore,

Owings and Merrill in a striking International style, the new hotel stood in stark contrast to the aging, soot-covered buildings of Cincinnati‟s downtown. The Terrace‟s design featured extensive use of glass and stainless steel, especially in the round rooftop restaurant (a novel idea for its time). Commissioned works by prominent modern artists graced the building‟s public spaces; the glass-walled rooftop restaurant featured a 32-foot long mural by Surrealist

Joan Miro, and an Alexander Calder mobile hung in the main lobby. Room design was equally progressive. Each room had 10-foot wide windows. Interior designers rejected traditional framed art in favor of abstract designs stenciled on room walls, and chose furniture with simple lines covered in “burn- and spill-proof” laminated plastic. Innovations such as mechanical beds that recessed into the wall, multi-function furniture (for example, a

1 Amy Elizabeth Cohn, ―The Architecture of Convention Hotels in the United States, 1940-1976.‖ (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1976), 17-18 discusses the Terrace Plaza as both a continuation and a departure from traditional architectural design and function in American hotels.

74 combination luggage rack-dresser-bar-desk) and built-in radio units maximized space and gave the rooms a “modern” feel.2

Cincinnatians in 1948 took great pride in the new “ultra-modern” hotel built in a city typically characterized as worn-out and behind the times. The city‟s newspapers ran dozens of articles about the development before the hotel even opened, detailing every new feature and advancement in its construction. The editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, taking in the view of downtown from the hotel‟s rooftop terrace, acknowledged that Cincinnati was “an old city - marked by antiquated structures, but evidencing progress in the . . . elegance of the new structure below.”3 Nearly 10,000 local residents visited the hotel on the day of its opening.4

Cincinnatians were not the only ones to praise the Terrace; the hotel also received national acclaim. Fortune magazine featured a lengthy article about the property‟s innovative combination of retail and hotel space, hailing it as “something entirely new in hotels.” Life similarly lauded the new development.5 Architectural Forum devoted a full-color, sixteen- page spread to the hotel‟s design. Time magazine also took note of the Terrace, calling it the city‟s “most revolutionary modern building,” although its characterization of the city as

“dowdy, old fashioned Cincinnati” did not sit well with civic boosters.6 Throughout the

2 ―Cincinnati‘s Terrace Plaza Hotel,‖ Architectural Forum 89, no. 6 (December 1948), 81-97. 3 ―Quaint Is Word For It As One Views 'Old City' From New Hotels Tower,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 17 July 1948. 4 ―Nearly 10,000 Crowd In At Terrace Plaza Debut,‖ Cincinnati Post, 20 July 1948; ―As New Hotel Opened To Public,‖ Cincinnati Times Star, 20 July 1948. 5 The hotel‘s design was considered innovative because of its unusual combination of multi-level retail space with hotel facilities. The Terrace was essentially designed as two buildings: the first seven floors were conceived as a massive, windowless retail and office space, while the 400-room hotel portion has a smaller footprint and rose eleven stories above the retail base. Life magazine noted that the building‘s large retail component allowed the hotel to have a consistent economic base, while its upper-floor hotel space gave every guest an airy room with a view; ―Storetop Hotel: Cincinnati‘s Terrace Plaza,‖ Life, 20 September 1948. 6 ―City Resents Dowdy Tab, Wires Time,‖ Cincinnati Post 21 July 1948.

75 country, architectural critics and national media recognized the Terrace Plaza as an admirable combination of superior architecture, innovative interior design, and solid economic planning.

The Terrace Plaza was notable for another reason, not apparent to observers at the time. It was to be the city‟s last downtown hotel built by a Cincinnatian. The Terrace Plaza was owned by the Cincinnati real estate firm Thomas Emery‟s Sons, Inc, whose president was civic leader and philanthropist John J. Emery. The Emerys had long been one of Cincinnati‟s leading families, with a financial base built upon a candle-making industry started by Thomas

Emery in the 1840s, from which he eventually moved into real estate development. After Mr.

Emery‟s death in 1903, his widow Mary became a noteworthy philanthropist and helped fund the building of the town of Mariemont, an early suburban planned community. Mr. Emery‟s sons inherited his real estate business and continued to expand its holdings, becoming one of the country‟s largest real estate firms. At the time they built the Terrace Plaza, Thomas

Emery‟s Sons, Inc., owned much of the prime real estate in the city. Their holdings included the landmark Netherland Plaza hotel and the adjacent 1930 skyscraper known as Carew

Tower – Cincinnati‟s tallest building and an Art Deco masterpiece.7 Cincinnati newspapers at the Terrace Plaza‟s opening praised John Emery for taking a “gamble” on Cincinnati and expressing “faith” in the future of his native city, a testament to both the prominent civic position of John Emery as well as anxieties about the future course of Cincinnati should others not follow his example.8

7 Edward W. Wolner, ―Design and Civic Identity in Cincinnati‘s Carew Tower Complex,‖ Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 51, no. 1 (March 1992), 35-47. 8 ―An Expression Of Faith,‖ Cincinnati Times Star 19 July 1948; ―A Man Building A City,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 20 July 1948.

76 The Terrace Plaza was only the first of many hotels to be built in downtown

Cincinnati in the postwar decades, but no later development enjoyed the Terrace‘s national exposure or local celebration. While the Terrace was lauded for its unique design, most of

Cincinnati‘s postwar hotels were much like those in other cities. Furthermore, later postwar downtown hotels were all constructed and operated by international corporations, which entered the Cincinnati hotel market to take advantage of the convention industry spurred by the construction of the city‘s convention center in 1967. The mass marketing and large-scale promotion involved in recruiting convention business for the city encouraged a homogenous built environment designed to serve corporate clients. Convention recruiters placed a premium on efficiency and standardization in their convention centers and hotels built to serve them. Where older downtown hotels had served as social centers and sources of civic pride for Cincinnatians, the postwar convention hotels neglected this function. The expansion of Cincinnati‘s tourist industry encouraged the development of a postwar downtown that held few memories and little meaning for the city‘s residents.

Suburban detachment from the central city has been a common theme in twentieth- century American urban history.9 Scholars have typically focused on racial tensions and fear of crime as the major factors for this phenomenon; while these are undisputedly key, physical changes to postwar American cities also encouraged that detachment. Certainly Cincinnati - and the other cities studied here - would have declined without the reconfiguring of its hotel industry; structural shifts in the city‘s economy and population were far more important. Still,

9 Key works which focus on this relationship include Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1989); Kevin Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue, eds., The New Suburban History, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

77 the geographic detachment from downtowns that many middle-class residents gained in the postwar period was only enhanced by a ―renewed,‖ often unfamiliar, downtown which encouraged psychological and emotional indifference. When older downtown hotels closed, the city‘s newspapers were filled with lengthy reminiscences about the role those institutions had played in the life of the city – Cincinnatians clearly felt a sense of connection with them.

As these places were destroyed and replaced by the largely standardized buildings of national hotel franchises intended only as lodging for convention-goers, Cincinnatians lost much of what made their city unique, and had less reason than ever to maintain ties to their downtown.

As remarkable as the architecture of John Emery‘s Terrace Plaza was its unusual timing. Few real estate developers looking for a sound investment in the 1940s would have considered building a hotel; indeed, only three major hotels were initiated in the two decades after 1930: the Terrace, the Statler Hotel in Washington, DC, and Houston‘s Shamrock

Hotel10 The decades before and after World War II were tumultuous times for the hotel industry. While the Great Depression obviously had a tremendous impact on the nation‘s economy as a whole, it had absolutely disastrous effects on the hospitality industry. Eighty- five percent of hotels in the United States went into receivership or were liquidated outright during the 1930s, and those that survived relatively intact had cut their labor forces and services drastically. Many were thus unprepared for the rush of hotel business that began in

1941 with the opening of the United States‘ involvement in World War II. While leisure travel was discouraged by War Department policies and propaganda, business travel related to wartime production boomed. In addition, the mobilization of millions of American soldiers

10 Time, ―No. 9 for Statler,‖ 19 June 1950.

78 filled hotel rooms with officers and infantrymen in route to domestic military bases or overseas battlefronts. Most hotels experienced occupancy rates of 90% or better through the war years, a rate almost unheard of in times of normal business.11

Despite this brief boom, hotels faced a difficult path in the decades after the war.

While the popularity of the automobile in the prosperous postwar years, combined with the construction of the interstate highway system, encouraged greater leisure travel, these automobile travelers usually sought more inexpensive, casual accommodations in the rapidly proliferating motels outside of the central city. This effectively ended the monopoly which downtown hotels had held on the travel market when travelers arrived in cities primarily by rail. By the 1950s, the increasing popularity of air travel, particularly by jet, also ate into hotel revenues. Jet travel reduced the number of days that a business traveler stayed in a city, and might in some instances eliminate the need for overnight accommodations altogether.12

In addition, many older urban hotels, even the finer ones, were located in rapidly declining areas of downtowns, which further discouraged business.

In 1945, most hotels, in Cincinnati and elsewhere, were located downtown, near railroad stations and the central business district. Hotels ranged in type from luxury hotels that served wealthy leisure visitors and business executives to establishments that provided affordable lodging for transient salesmen or tourists, to dingier quarters that often served as permanent residences for laborers or the poor.13 Most of Cincinnati‘s better hotels, such as

11 Gerald W. Lattin, Modern Hotel Management (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1958), 171. 12 ―More Than 6300 Air Conditioned Rooms Here‖ St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 5 January 1960. 13 It is difficult to know how many of Cincinnati‘s hotels served travelers and how many were residential lodging. Many performed both functions. For a detailed discussion of residential hotels in the city, see Paul Groth, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

79 the Netherland Plaza, the Gibson Hotel, and the 800-room Hotel Sinton, were located at the center of downtown, near the city‘s landmark Fountain Square. These hotels were built and owned by Cincinnatians, and most had a long history in the city. More modest lodgings were scattered throughout downtown and in some well-to-do suburban areas, while establishments patronized by transient laborers usually sat in low-rent areas near industrial zones or in the city‘s West End, near its railroad yards. Generally speaking, the quality of a hotel was indicated by its distance from the downtown‘s business, shopping, and entertainment attractions.

Cincinnati‟s Gibson Hotel was one of the city‟s great social centers. The 1912 neo-

Italian structure stood twelve stories tall and housed more than 800 rooms; it was located at the very heart of downtown, on the city‟s Fountain Square. Its luxurious lobbies and posh dining rooms served as the negotiating arenas for political deals and business ventures, and many notable civic organizations held their regular meetings, or in some cases permanent offices, in the hotel. The Gibson, like many fine hotels of the period, thus functioned as a social center and locus of civic pride for Cincinnatians, especially the city‟s civically-engaged middle class. These hotels served as political party headquarters, meeting places for local charity organizations, and sites of celebration and commemoration. Some Cincinnatians also lived there – the Gibson, like many hotels of the period, had a number of permanent residents.

Hotels thus played a prominent role in the larger community. A St. Louis newspaper in 1949 commended the city‟s Hotel Association, for example, as “an active supporter of most of the large civic drives” in the city.14 This function had its roots in early-nineteenth century

14 ―Hotels Here Spent $1,000,000 in 1949,‖ St. Louis Star-Times, 30 December 1949.

80 frontier towns, in which taverns or inns were simultaneously places of lodging, public debate, political proceedings, and social connectivity. As cities grew, their top hotels reflected their economic progress and evidenced their cultural refinement.15 Virtually every American city of any size had at least one such hotel. Paul Groth notes that beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, first-class hotels like the Gibson served as “an urban social center for the elite, a place to do business, and - for some - a place to live.”16 Hotels like the Gibson were thus much more than a place of lodging for visitors; they were a place of significance for locals as well.

The Board of Directors of the Gibson was intimately involved in the management of its hotel. The Board met monthly to discuss the details of the hotels business, its profit and loss, and future plans for the facility‘s improvement. Not content to merely sign off on profit reports and approve stock dividends, the board made decisions about questions such as what food to serve in the hotel‘s café, preventing employee theft, and whether or not to install televisions in guest rooms. The board‘s meeting minutes thus give valuable insight into the inner workings of the hotel as it sought to adjust to the changing demands of urban tourism in the postwar period, and illuminate some of the key issues affecting the postwar hotel industry, both in Cincinnati and in the nation as a whole.

15 Karl B. Raitz and John Paul Jones III, ―The City Hotel as Landscape Artifact and Community Symbol‖ Journal of Cultural Geography 9, no. 1 (1988), 28; Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz, "For the Accommodation of Strangers: Urban Space, Travel, Law, the Market, and Modernity at the American Hotel, 1789-1908," (Ph.D. diss., The University of Chicago, 2002); Lisa Pfueller Davidson, "Consumption and Efficiency in the ‗City Within A City‘: Commercial Hotel Architecture and the Emergence of Modern American Culture, 1890-1930," (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 2003) argues that these urban hotels were harbingers of modern corporate culture due to their rationalized standards of service and modern architecture designed to serve middle-class consumers. 16 Paul Groth, Living Downtown, 39.

81 Although it was nationally known as one of Cincinnati‘s oldest and finest hotels, the

Gibson faced a number of challenges at the end of World War II. The grand old house was showing its age; wartime restrictions on materials had caused the hotel to put off equipment repairs and facility upgrades. Besides their own aging facility, the directors of the Gibson

Hotel also faced the prospect of stiff new competition. The Terrace Plaza Hotel, with its hip modern design and climate controlled rooms, made the Gibson look (and in warm weather, feel) stuffy by comparison. This new competition clearly worried the managers of the

Gibson. In the months after the Terrace project was announced, the General Manager urged the board to make improvements to the facility that he argued would be essential ―to remain competitive in the Cincinnati hotel field.‖ In August of 1945, the members debated the feasibility of adding air-conditioning for at least some of the guest rooms, and proposed remodeling the Keyhole Bar and Sidewalk Café, two of the hotel‘s eating establishments.17 In

October, the personnel director also urged better training programs for the staff, as he found that ―guests are now feeling that the war is over and are demanding [better] service.‖

Improvements in service would be necessary ―to keep the good name that the Gibson rightfully has now.‖18

The hotel continually renovated its guest rooms in the years after the war. By early

1948, the expense of renovation was taking its toll on the Gibson‘s bottom line. Occupancy for 1947 had been below the previous year‘s, and while the general manager could still report to the Board that the hotel turned a ―reasonable margin of profit,‖ he noted that the high cost

17 Meeting minutes, 29 August 1945, Box 4, Folder 8, Hotel Gibson Board of Directors Papers (hereafter HGBD), Cincinnati Historical Society, Cincinnati, OH. 18 Meeting minutes, 31 October 1945, Box 4, Folder 10, HGBD.

82 of improvements were cause for concern in the coming year. At the same time, sales at the hotel‘s restaurants, often one of hotels‘ best sources of profit, were also on the decline. 19

The increasing cost of labor proved especially burdensome for the Hotel Gibson and hotels like it nationwide. The Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union, a national union with headquarters in Cincinnati since 1938, was the employees‘ negotiating body. The organization became increasingly powerful in the years immediately following the war, as it utilized the leverage created by greater numbers of travelers and the increased popularity of the convention business. Union membership increased by more than 100,000 in the first two postwar years alone.20 Hotels in cities desperate to capture the new wave of postwar travel could ill afford a protracted labor dispute. The Gibson increased union workers‘ wages in

October of 1945, and increased them again by 9% in December of 1946.21 A demand by employees in 1948 for increased pay and a shorter, 40-hour work week was also met by the city‘s hotels. The general manager of the Gibson estimated the new labor deal would cost the hotel almost $100,000 annually.22

Increases in labor expenses affected all hotels in the postwar era, but they hit especially hard at older fine hotels. Because these hotels offered a wide range of services and often operated multiple dining establishments, they employed literally hundreds of people.

The Hotel Belvedere in Baltimore, for example, listed 556 total employees on its 1947 payroll. Besides the requisite desk clerks, housekeeping staff, elevator operators and bellmen, the hotel also employed a wine steward, a team of chefs and wait staff, telephone exchange

19 Meeting minutes., 11 February 1948, Box 5, Folder 2, HGBD. 20 Matthew Josephson, Union House, Union Bar: The History of the Hotel & Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union, AFL-CIO. (New York, 1956), 308-9. 21 Meeting minutes, 22 December 1946, Box 4, Folder 24, HGBD. 22 Meeting minutes, 28 July 1948, Box 5, Folder 7, HGBD.

83 operators, barbers, newsstand clerks, and such specialized positions as room inspectress,

―oyster man‖ and ―salad girl.‖23 Cincinnati‘s Hotel Gibson even operated its own print shop.

Wage increases of even a small percentage could have an exponential impact for such a large- scale operation, especially when competing with newer hotels that offered fewer services and thus had smaller payroll obligations.

Nineteen forty-nine was an especially trying year for the Hotel Gibson. The hotel‘s manager had raised room rates in response to increased labor costs, but the needs of the downtown lodger were changing. Aggressive campaigns by the city‘s Convention and

Visitor‘s Bureau were attracting large number of business conventions to the city, but companies sending dozens or hundreds of delegates to a convention were hesitant to pay the

Gibson‘s higher rates for declining quality. The hotel‘s general manager in February of 1949 noted that ―business in general is finding a lower level, and the public is gradually becoming more cost conscious.‖24 In July of that year, the hotel showed a loss of almost $1200 for the month. Competing hotels with air-conditioned rooms had taken much of the Gibson‘s business during that especially hot summer.25

The board and employees of the Gibson attempted in vain to reverse the hotel‘s declining fortunes. In an effort to provide an influx of cash, the company in November 1949 applied for a second mortgage on the property in the amount of $700,000.26 In 1950, the board became especially concerned with marketing and promoting the hotel in conjunction

23 ―Schedule of Monthly Rates Paid By Job Classification,‖ Box 20, Belvedere Hotel Corporation Papers, Special Collections, University of Baltimore Libraries, Baltimore, MD. Other traditional first- class hotels had similarly sized staffs. The Jefferson Hotel in St. Louis employed 554 people in 1954. ―The Jefferson Hotel – Host to U.S. 50 Years,‖ St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 11 April 1954. 24 Meeting minutes, 9 February 1949, Box 5, Folder 14, HGBD. 25 Meeting minutes, 31 August 1949, Box 5, Folder 21, HGBD. 26 Meeting minutes, 30 November 1949, Box 5, Folder 23, HGBD.

84 with the Convention and Visitor‘s Bureau, something they had never discussed before. In

April of that year, the President‘s Report noted that first-quarter profits in 1949 had been only

$68,000, compared with $103,000 for the same period in 1948. The board also authorized the purchase of 50 air-conditioning units at a total cost of $15,000, a risky move given the company‘s thin bottom line.27 By May 1950 the manager suggested closing the Florentine

Room restaurant and Sidewalk Café during the slower summer months, and eliminating live music except during dinner. The next month, unable to sustain profitable operation of the hotel, the Gibson board of directors accepted a purchase offer from the Sheraton Hotel

Corporation. In the purchase, the Sheraton Corporation also acquired Cincinnati‘s Hotel

Sinton, an equally grand luxury hotel which had been purchased by the Hotel Gibson‘s board of directors just three years earlier.

The purchase of the Hotel Gibson and Sinton by Sheraton represented a common trend occurring in the Cincinnati downtown hotel market and in the hotel industry nationwide.

Chain hotels had existed since the late 19th century, but they expanded rapidly during the twentieth. In 1896, there were only three hotel chains in the United States, the early pioneers including the Flagler chain in Florida and the Fred Harvey Company in the Southwest, both closely linked with the railroad companies in those regions. By 1980, chains dominated the lodging industry, with an estimated 300 chains operating more than 100,000 hotels.28 The

Sheraton Corporation began in 1937 with a single hotel in Springfield, Massachusetts. After expanding in New England, the company began to acquire properties across the United States and in 1947 became the first hotel company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. By the

27 Meeting minutes, 28 April 1950, Box 6, HGBD. 28 Paul Ingram, The Rise of Hotel Chains in the United States, 1896-1980. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 3, 67.

85 time of the Hotel Gibson purchase in 1950, the company owned 32 properties in the United

States and Canada.29 Most of these were older buildings like the Gibson, fine urban hotels that were struggling under independent and undercapitalized private ownership.30 The company already operated the city‘s Hotel Alms, an upscale establishment in the neighborhood of Walnut Hills. With the acquisition of the Gibson and the Hotel Sinton,

Sheraton owned more than 2200 Cincinnati hotel rooms, by far the most of any company in the city.31 The postwar decades saw a steady decline in the number of independently operated, smaller hotels in Cincinnati‘s downtown. By the mid-1950s, more of the city‘s lodging was located in suburban areas, and many of the independent downtown hotels were no longer in operation or had been acquired by national chains. The Hilton Hotels

Corporation acquired the Netherland Plaza and the ultra-modern Terrace Plaza in 1956.32 By

1972, five years after the opening of the Cincinnati Convention Center, the list of downtown hotels was dominated by national chains such as Harris, Sheraton, and Hilton.33 The acquisition of Cincinnati hotels by national chains usually resulted in the replacement of local managers and stockholders with outside executives.34

The Sheraton Corporation temporarily redeemed the Gibson Hotel from its postwar doldrums. The hotel did quite well through the 1950s and early 1960s, thanks to a multi-

29 ―Stock Control Taken By Boston Concern, New Alms Operators‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 24 June 1950; ―Sheraton Hotels History at Starwood,‖ http://www.starwoodhotels.com/sheraton/about/history.html; Ernest Henderson, The Sheraton Story (New York: Newcomen Society in North America, 1959). 30 Sheraton purchased dozens of hotels like the Gibson; in St. Louis it acquired the city‘s Jefferson Hotel, in Pittsburgh, the jewel of the city‘s hotels, the William Penn, and in Baltimore the Belvedere Hotel. 31 ―$4,000,000 Involved in Two Deals,‖ Cincinnati Times-Star, 17 June 1950; ―Stock Control Taken By Boston Concern,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 24 June 1950. 32 ―Two Hotels in Deal,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 22 May 1956. 33 Cincinnati Ohio City Directory, Williams Directory Company, 1945, 1955, 1972. 34 ―Stock Control Taken By Boston Concern,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 24 June 1950.

86 million dollar renovation by Sheraton. Promotional material published soon after the sale assured potential guests that ―only the name ‗Gibson‘ is old…redecoration, renovations, and alterations…have kept the Gibson as fine and modern as the latest developments in engineering, science, and art can make it.‖35 In 1968, the hotel was in the national spotlight as the host of the national Governor‘s Conference, during which President Lyndon Johnson and his staff occupied an entire floor.36 Just one year earlier, however, Sheraton and all of its properties had been acquired by the ITT Corporation. ITT, originally a telecommunications company, began to acquire various business ventures in 1959; the company became somewhat infamous for its conglomeration of varied and unrelated holdings. By the late 1960s, the company was coming under fire from antitrust legal challenges, and it experienced financial difficulties.37 Seeking to cut costs, ITT found older facilities such as the Gibson expensive to maintain and began to either sell off the properties or cut costs drastically.38

ITT‘s purchase of the Sheraton chain signaled the beginning of the end for the Gibson.

The corporation‘s ―growth by acquisition‖ strategy was becoming increasingly unstable, and by the early 1970s the company placed its hotel priorities on new construction, not older properties. Simultaneously, the city of Cincinnati was seeking to reconfigure and expand its

Fountain Square landmark as the focal point of the city‘s renewal. This project involved the demolition of the entire block upon which the Gibson stood; the hotel closed its doors in 1974

35 Sheraton-Gibson Hotel, ―In Cincinnati the popular convention city, it's the Sheraton-Gibson, the leading convention hotel,‖ 1949. Rare Books Department, Cincinnati Public Library, Cincinnati, Ohio. 36 ―Lights dim on jobs, pleasure, history…‖ Cincinnati Post, 13 June 1974. 37 Robert Sobel, I.T.T.: The Management of Opportunity, (New York: Times Books, 1982). 38 Ibid., 243-246.

87 and was demolished in the same year. The city had already lost the Hotel Sinton, which had been sold by Sheraton shortly after its acquisition. It closed and was demolished in 1964.39

The Gibson certainly had plenty of company in its misery. Older downtown hotels went under on a regular basis by the early 1960s, as national occupancy rates dropped to their lowest point since the Great Depression.40 Hotel occupancy rates in St. Louis declined from

76 percent in 1951 to 62 percent a decade later. Pittsburgh saw occupancy rates drop from 81 percent in 1951 to 58 percent in 1960.41 In St. Louis, the 300-room Hotel Desoto was converted to a home for the elderly in 1956. The Melbourne Hotel was sold to St. Louis

University for use as a dormitory in 1960. Still others were converted into low-cost apartments.42 Others that remained open barely limped along; through the 1960s older hotels were frequently sold and resold as each owner made failed attempts to rescue the properties from indebtedness and decline.43

Changes in consumer spending, some mandated by new taxation policies, also damaged hotel profits in the 1960s. In November 1962, President John F. Kennedy announced a crackdown on the “widespread abuses” of corporate expense accounts for non- justifiable expenditures. Fear of more strict enforcement by the Internal Revenue Service curbed business executives‟ inclination to entertain clients with lavish evenings at hotel

39 ―Passing of the Sinton Hotel Recalls the Queen City‘s Most Elegant Era,‖ Cincinnati Post Times- Star, 29 May 1964. 40Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance, 133. 41 Horwath & Horwath, ―Hotel Operations in 1960‖ Series 6, Box 49, Greater Baltimore Committee Records (hereafter GBC), Special Collections, University of Baltimore Libraries, Baltimore, MD.. 42 ―Some Hotel Men Say Situation Here is One of Overbuilding,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 17 February 1964. 43 ―Jefferson Hotel is Up for Sale Again,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 14 November, 1974.

88 dining clubs or even to pay for hotel services such as laundry and bellhops.44 The National

Restaurant Association reported a nationwide average 16.4 per cent decrease in sales in the two months after the new IRS regulations took effect.45 Food and drink sales still represented a substantial portion of hotels‟ revenues in the 1960s, especially for older hotels which may have operated two, three, or even more such establishments. St. Louis‟ Chase-Park Plaza

Hotel asserted that the decline in business expense-account spending led to its decision to lay off 85 workers and reduce hours for 150 more in January 1963.46 This relatively unnoticed change to tax law had significant repercussions for the traditional downtown hotel. These older hotels made their money not just from room rental but from the extensive service and entertainment options they offered customers; such a curb on the most profitable customers eviscerated already thin profit margins and highlighted the problem of increasing labor expenses. Newer convention hotels, which minimized personal services and labor costs, did not feel the same pressures from the new tax policies.

The various trends of motel competition, increased labor expenses, continuous maintenance, and changes in consumer spending combined to create a moment of crisis for the hotel industry. Downtown hotels faced the prospect of either creating a new market for their services or shuttering their doors forever. These pressures forced a transformation in the industry‟s sales and promotion efforts, leading to greater professionalization, more sophisticated marketing, and a new business strategy. Modern Hotel Management, a 1958 textbook used by Cornell University‟s School of Hospitality, summed up downtown hotels‟

44 ―Expense Account Living Coming Under Close Scrutiny,‖ New York Times, 10 December 1962, 13.; ―Hotelmen Face Profit Squeeze,‖ New York Times, 15 April 1963, 86. 45 Ibid., 15 April 1963, 86. 46 ―Hotels Here Find Expense Account Crackdown Taxing,‖ St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 9 January 1963.

89 position well. “Counteractive measures must be taken immediately if the hotels are to stay in the black,” the author urged, “To win back the trade lost to motels or to replace it with new customers is a selling job.”47 They found their “new customers” in the rapidly expanding business of professional and corporate conventions. While hotels had always hosted smaller business conventions and fraternal meetings, such events became essential to the survival of downtown hotels in the postwar period. Modern Hotel Management called convention business “one of the best answers to slack rooms” for hotels struggling to stay afloat.48 A newsletter published by Sales Meetings magazine in 1958 outlined many similar issues. The newsletter chided hotel managers for ignoring “group business,” (i.e., conventions) and relying on their traditional customer base while doing very little marketing of their hotels. In contrast to earlier years when group meetings were seen as troublesome houseguests, hotel managers now had to consider “the new vital role of the convention guest as he relates to the well being of the hotel economy. Conventioneers can‟t be kicked around; there are too many competitors after them.”49

While conventions seemed a possible answer to urban hotels‘ ills, few cities possessed a large, dedicated convention center that could host the most profitable conventions. The quest for a convention center began even before hotels‘ postwar decline. In 1944, a group of

Cincinnati hotel managers, looking ahead to the lifting of wartime construction and travel restrictions and anticipating a decline of business to its pre-war levels, urged the city to put a convention center at the top of its priority list. Quoted in a Cincinnati Enquirer article, the group‘s leadership argued that a convention center was essential if Cincinnati hoped to keep

47 Lattin, Modern Hotel Management, 10-11. 48 Ibid., 174. 49 Sales Meeting Magazine, ―Newsletter for Executives,‖ Series 6, Box 11, GBC Papers.

90 up with other cities; compared to Cincinnati‘s 85,000 square feet of exhibition space, St.

Louis already offered 120,000 square feet, Buffalo 100,000, and New Orleans 110,000. In addition, these cities offered adaptable exhibit space under a single roof, a distinct advantage over Cincinnati‘ mélange of smaller meeting areas in hotel ballrooms and municipal halls.

Competing cities would have ―plenty of armament‖ and come in to the convention battle

―wearing brass knuckles.‖50 Cincinnati, they urged, would do well to arm itself for the coming conflict.

To better compete for the postwar convention business (and to focus hospitality businesses‘ lobbying efforts), the city‘s Chamber of Commerce in 1945 formed the separate

Cincinnati Convention and Visitors Bureau (CCVB).51 Despite this organizational effort, the group made little progress in actually gaining municipal support for a convention hall.

Debates over financing and location, along with the vast number of other problems faced by the city in the postwar years, hindered any real progress. At a 1955 meeting of the Cincinnati

Retail Merchants Association, CCVB executive vice president Joseph Turner voiced his frustration at the decade of delay, saying that it was indicative of the ―backwardness‖ of

Cincinnati, and that Columbus and 20 other smaller cities had surpassed the city in convention business. The lack of a convention center, he asserted, cost the city $2.5 million per year in lost potential revenue.52 In 1959 the Retail Merchants Association, the Convention and

Visitors Bureau, Hotel Managers Association, a downtown property owners group and the

50 ―Growing Need for Convention Hall,‖ Cincinnati Post, 9 August 1944. 51 Greater Cincinnati Convention and Visitors Bureau, ―Celebrating 50 Years of Service,‖ (Cincinnati, OH: GCCVB, 1995). Collection of the author. 52 ―City Losing Million a Year; Backwardness Fault Word,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 23 March 1955. It is difficult to know if Turner‘s statement was true or mere rhetoric – such alarmist claims were common among CVB officials.

91 Cincinnati AFL-CIO Labor Council jointly issued a statement to city manager C.A. Harrel arguing the ―economic necessity‖ of a convention hall. They argued that conventions had an effect far beyond the obvious dollars spent by visitors. They were an opportunity to showcase the city to potential corporate investors; in their view, conventions were not merely a gathering of people but ―a mass marketing process.‖ They ended their letter with a dire warning that addressed the growing importance of tourism in the postwar city. ―There should be no need to elaborate on the importance of this ‗outside money,‘‖ wrote the groups,

―Economic isolationism is a thing of the past…. The community that attempts to live within and upon itself is doomed.‖53 By linking support for the convention industry to the overall fortunes of the community at a time when the city was declining rapidly, convention promoters gradually began to gain allies in City Hall. All of the sales pitches, pleas and hand- wringing by Cincinnati's hospitality industry heads finally resulted in public approval of a bond issue for the construction of a new Convention-Exposition Center in 1962. The hall was completed in 1968 at a cost of $10 million.

The construction of the Cincinnati Convention-Exposition Center was a turning point in redefining the function and physical landscape of downtown. Consultants hired by the city when planning the center reminded city planners that the idea of ―convention facilities‖ encompassed much more than a meeting hall, and that the truly successful convention city also needed more hotels, more evening entertainment, and facilities ―for mass feeding of large

53 Citizens Development Committee to C.A. Harrel, 12 November 1959, Box 7, Records of the Citizens Development Committee, Cincinnati Historical Society, Cincinnati, Ohio.

92 numbers of people concentrated in a given area for short periods of time.‖54 Success in the tourist industry would thus require an entire urban infrastructure designed around the visitor, and in particular the convention visitor. Cincinnati, like most other cities in this era, eagerly pursued the development of this convention support system.

Older hotels, then, were not simply victims of the free market as consumers chose newer properties over the old. Rather, convention bureaus and city development planners made specific choices to direct investment capital towards new chain hotel construction rather than the renovation or support of older existing properties. Cincinnati Convention and

Visitor‘s Bureau executives applauded the purchases of local hotels like the Gibson for a simple reason: a national hotel chain like Sheraton or Hilton promised more convention money for the city. Sheraton executives touted the ―large staff of trained specialists and best

‗know-how‘ in the hotel field‖ of their sales and promotion department and promised that the company would ―attract conventions [to Cincinnati] whenever possible.‖ 55 While the former board members of the Gibson had been cautious about advertising nationally and had only in its last year discussed coordinated promotions with the CCVB, the Sheraton Corporation already owned more than thirty hotels, had an experienced sales staff, and was rapidly building a national reputation for consistency in accommodations and service. Similarly, the

Cincinnati Enquirer heralded Hilton‘s purchase of the Terrace and Netherland Plaza hotels in

54 Martin C. Dwyer, Inc. Market Evaluation Survey and Recommended Physical Requirements for a Convention and Exposition Center to serve the Metropolitan Area of Cincinnati, Ohio. (Chicago, IL: Martin C. Dwyer, Inc., 1965), 5. 55 ―Official of Sheraton Empire Visits,‖ Cincinnati Times-Star, 23 June 1950.

93 1956, asserting that ―the Hilton connection…will involve many referrals of business to

Cincinnati. The impact upon the convention and vacation traffic should be substantial.‖56

To be sure, customer preference did play a significant role in older downtown hotels‟ decline. For an increasingly professionalized and organized convention industry, older non- chain hotels were risky business partners, needing frequent maintenance and subject to the capricious standards of individual owners and managers. The physical condition of older properties often proved irksome to visitors. A convention delegate wrote to the St. Louis

Convention and Tourist Board in 1971 regarding his recent stay at the Lennox Hotel downtown. In addition to an “unfortunate dinner” at the nearby Gateway Hotel, the delegate complained of the lack of air conditioning, run-down furniture, non-functioning lamps, soiled carpet, peeling paint, and the occasional loss of water service in his room at the Lennox. The disgruntled visitor left St. Louis a day early and informed the board that he would discourage his group from meeting in the city again.57

Older hotels were also increasingly hard to sell to convention delegates accustomed to the standards of newer properties. In Cincinnati‟s Hotel Gibson, rooms as small as 10 x 11 feet were not uncommon, and while all rooms had windows, fewer than half offered views of the city. More common was a window to the interior “light court” or, worse still, the back

56 ―A Salute to Hilton,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 24 May 1956. 57 John A. Dewar to Morris B. Landau, 12 March 1971, Series 2, Box 21, Alfonso J. Cervantes Mayoral Files, Washington University Archives, Washington University, St. Louis, MO. The Lennox and Gateway, both built in the early 1910s, survived long enough to be beneficiaries of the fortuitous construction of the city‘s new convention center nearby in 1977, and historic preservation tax credits which made their redevelopment as luxury hotels a profitable venture. They currently operate as the Renaissance Grand and Renaissance Suites Hotels

94 alleyway.58 These became difficult to sell to potential conventioneers, especially when newer high-rise competition offered vistas on every side and relatively spacious rooms.59

Automobile accommodation was also an issue; newer hotels (often called “motor lodges”) constructed in or near downtown were planned with hundreds of parking spaces, while older hotels had to scramble to lease older, smaller parking garages scattered throughout downtown.60

Older properties were thus a significant liability for those who hoped to increase a city‟s convention traffic. As in the case of the guest at the Lennox, a bad hotel experience could ruin the image of a convention city. Even those hotels that were well-maintained could do little about customers‟ preference for large rooms, scenic views, and convenient parking.

Newer hotels, less susceptible to maintenance issues, constructed with the conventioneers‟ preferences in mind, and typically managed by national chains with strictly enforced quality standards, were the most profitable, and therefore most preferred, lodging in the postwar urban tourist industry. Traditional urban hotels trying to weather the postwar storm and remain profitable thus found little sympathy from local convention bureaus.

Indeed, despite consistently low occupancy rates in existing hotels during the 1960s and 1970s, cities continued to build new convention hotels in downtowns. Established hotels typically cried foul, claiming the market for rooms was already flooded. A typical response

58 ―The Hotel Bulletin: Describing the Hotel Gibson – Cincinnati, Ohio,‖ (Chicago, Ill: Hotel Bulletin, 1923), Cincinnati Historical Society, Cincinnati, OH. This pamphlet included floorplans for room floors which revealed room size and configuration. 59 ―When Clerks Wore Carnations and Dorsey Played,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 22 September 1974. Advertising material for the new 1959 Pittsburgh Hilton, for example, highlighted that ―all of the 813 rooms and suites face outside, each has floor-to-ceiling windows‖ The Pittsburgh Hilton. (Pittsburgh, Pa, 1959), Library and Archives of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, PA. 60 ―New Inn Downtown,‖ Cincinnati Post-Times Star, 22 March 1967.

95 came from Bud Cartier, executive director of the Convention and Tourist Board of Greater St.

Louis in 1973 as the city anticipated the opening of its new convention center. Cartier claimed downtown St. Louis needed 2,500 to 3,000 “first-class” hotel rooms for the center to succeed, “and „first-class‟ to the hotel patron almost always means new.” As to the concerns about older downtown hotels‟ ability to compete with new convention facilities, Cartier simply replied, “Remember the former Coronado and Melbourne hotels, both now owned by

St. Louis University, and the former DeSoto Hotel, now the Alverne Home? We‟ve already been through this before.”61 The strategy pursued by the convention and tourist board in St.

Louis, and many cities like it, was a purposeful restructuring of the city‟s hotel market, favoring new construction at the expense of older established hotels.

Those who protested this practice were often portrayed as incompetent or unreasonably demanding. A 1960 report to the Greater Baltimore Committee by the consulting firm Horwath and Horwath favored the construction of a new convention hotel in the city‟s downtown, despite protests from current hotel operators who cited low occupancy statistics and rapidly declining revenues. The report characterized older hotel operators as

“inclined to blame the declines on outside factors such as the decrease in downtown shopping activity, the ease with which the city can be by-passed on the new highway, and the general convenience of air travel.” The consulting firm rejected these factors, instead blaming the hotel operators, whom the consultants claimed were slow to adapt to modern marketing and seemed to be expressing “a widespread feeling that Baltimore owes them something.”62

61 ―Does downtown need more new hotels?‖ St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 21 May 1973. 62 Horwath & Horwath, ―Hotel Operations in 1960‖ Series 6, Box 49, GBC Papers.

96 The story of downtown hotels in the postwar period is thus not one of decline but of transformation. The period from the 1960 through the 1980s saw the construction of unprecedented numbers of hotel rooms within the downtown core, almost all constructed to support the simultaneous wave of convention centers built in American downtowns.

Observers were often mystified over the wave of hotel-building in postwar downtowns in the face of such dire business trends.63 New hotels, however, had many advantages over their older counterparts that went beyond customer preference. First, they represented new development, something city politicians desperately wanted in downtowns; a new hotel project could replace “blighted” sections of downtown properties with large new showcase high-rise hotels. They were also politically popular, unlike many urban revitalization or social service programs. The study conducted by Horwath and Horwath for the Greater Baltimore

Committee in 1960 asserted that, “Public opinion favors the construction of new hotels in almost any community. Most local people realize that their hotels are among the first contacts a visitor has with the city, and hence a new hotel tends to become a symbol of progress and civic pride.”64 Thus, much to the chagrin of older hotels, new hotels also frequently received financial subsidy, either in the form of tax abatements at the local level, or in the form of federal funds that cities used to seed downtown development. They therefore required little from city budgets and ostensibly returned large figures to city tax rolls. Finally, new hotel construction allowed convention industry heads to reshape the geography of downtown hostelries to gain maximum economic advantage; older hotels were typically located near the city‟s central square or perhaps the railroad station. Finding that conventioneers preferred

63 Teaford, Rough Road, 133-134 64 Horwath & Horwath, ―Hotel Operations in 1960‖ Series 6, Box 49, GBC Papers.

97 facilities within close walking distance to their main event, new hotels clustered around the city‟s convention center. New high-rise hotels thus met the needs of struggling downtowns, providing new “showcase” buildings and ancillary development, while allowing convention and visitors‟ bureaus to build the local convention industry to maximize profits.

Most of the impetus for postwar hotel construction in downtown Cincinnati came from the construction of the city‟s Convention and Exposition Center in 1967. Holiday Inn completed a 250-room motor lodge in the city‟s West End urban renewal area in early 1965, just across the highway from the convention center site.65 The Stouffer‟s Towers (today operated separately as the Four Points by Sheraton and Millennium Hotels) were built in two stages, completed in 1968 and 1977. Both towers were connected directly to the convention center by the city‟s skywalk system, and together provided 890 rooms, by far the largest hotel complex in downtown Cincinnati. In contrast to the stately neoclassical architecture of the

Gibson and other earlier hotels, the Stouffer‟s Towers looked like office buildings, indistinguishable from the other skyscrapers in the city‟s skyline. Also unlike the earlier downtown hostelries, the Stouffer‟s Towers were designed explicitly to accommodate the automobile; a 200-car parking garage was part of the 1968 tower. The Cincinnati Enquirer‟s architecture critic remarked a few years later that “neither one (of the towers) was especially distinguished” and judged the interior decoration to be “incompatible with the architecture, pretentious, unattractive, and cheap looking.”66 The critic was reflecting the realities of the convention hotel business. In contrast to the former first-class downtown hotels, which had emphasized the luxury of their accommodations and the quality of the visitor‟s experience,

65 ―Holiday Inn Cut Into Queensgate,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer 11 December 1964. 66 ―A New Age for City‘s Hotels?‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 19 April 1981.

98 the new breed of corporate-managed convention hotel decorated cheaply to maintain affordability and sought to maximize the number of room blocks it could offer to potential conventions.

This emphasis on functionality over refinement was a common feature of downtown postwar convention hotels. Large conventions made specific requirements upon hotel facilities, and hotels unable to meet those demands lost out on convention business. A 1979 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted the changing demands placed upon hotels. “While the vacationer is eying the hotel‟s luxuries,” the article noted, “[convention planners] are checking out the depth of the airwall between movable partitions,” evaluating the hotels‟ elevator equipment (to allow easy transit between guest and meeting rooms), and in general,

“are concerned mainly that the convention hotel works on a nuts-and-bolts level.” James P.

Low, president of the American Society of Association Executives, noted that luxurious decor common in older hotels was often an impediment to the needs of conventioneers, citing the example of one hotel which had “beautiful [meeting] rooms with spectacular chandeliers. But we can‟t use them at all, because the chandeliers get in the way of slide projections. Those rooms were built for bar mitzvahs, not for meetings.”67 Potential convention planners sometimes even sent anonymous “advance investigation squads” who evaluated hotels, even timing room service and assessed hotel housekeeping and maintenance standards.68

Logically, the more ornate a hotels décor, the greater the potential for neglect in cleaning or maintenance, especially given hotels‟ relatively tight labor budgets. Because the needs of

67 ―Fancy Fixtures in Hotels Don‘t Help Conventions,‖ St. Louis Post, 8 August 1979. 68 Ibid.

99 different conventions varied widely and conventions were essential for the success of downtown hotels, flexibility and simplicity became the hallmarks of convention hotel design.

Hotels were popular development projects for cities receiving federal aid, especially after the loosening of aid restrictions under the Nixon administration‟s “New Federalism.”

Nixon‟s program of revenue sharing, which gave local officials broad authority over the use of federal funds, allowed cities to direct funds to the subsidy of downtown development projects. Housing and Urban Development Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), initiated in 1974, superseded most urban redevelopment programs and provided large block grants of aid on an application basis. CDBGs were superseded by Urban Development Action

Grants, passed by Congress in 1977. UDAGs were specifically designed to promote development of convention centers, hotels, and other private developments primarily in the central business district. St. Louis used a $10.5 million UDAG in 1978 to purchase land for a luxury Western International hotel, downtown housing and a downtown shopping center.

Both local and national activists criticized the grants as propping up downtown development while neglecting urban neighborhood and acting with no community input. HUD Secretary

Patricia Roberts Harris defended the strategy, saying that hotels played an “essential” role in supporting urban economies. “Cities have a role as tourist centers and cultural centers, and there must be places to receive the people coming to them. [Hotels] increase the tax base…and I do not accept the criticisms of them.”69

The beginning of the 1980s saw yet another boom in downtown hotel construction, fueled both by the recent influx of unrestricted federal dollars and a seemingly unending

69 ―Group Protests Downtown Grants,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 9 April 1978.

100 growth in the convention industry. The Cincinnati Convention and Visitor‟s Bureau had urged an expansion of the city‟s convention center almost as soon as it was completed, arguing that the center‟s 96,000 square feet were insufficient to attract larger conventions.

Indeed, by 1980, the city was lagging behind many similar cities: Pittsburgh had recently completed a 131,000 sq. ft. convention center, St. Louis could offer 240,000, Cleveland

520,000, and so on.70 Cincinnati, however, faced a “chicken and egg” problem, as it needed more hotel space to host larger conventions but needed larger guaranteed conventions in order to attract new hotel development. Financial subsidy in the form of federal funds made potential investment in new hotels for the city much more attractive. In the period from 1980 to 1986, the city managed to expand the convention center to almost 300,000 square feet, and oversaw the completion of two significant hotel developments, the Western International

(later Westin) and the Hyatt Regency Hotel, both constructed with heavy doses of federal urban aid.

The Western International hotel was part of a larger development complex on the southern boundary of the city‟s redesigned Fountain Square. “Fountain Square South” was a mixed-use development containing office space, small retail shops, and the Western

International. In some ways, the original concept for the hotel hearkened back to the role of the Hotel Gibson as social center for the city. In the original plans introduced in 1978, the developer proposed a glass-enclosed “public living room” for the city, which would extend the public space of Fountain Square into the rotunda of the hotel and retail area. The hotel would thus be a gathering place for city residents as well as out-of-town tourists and

70 ―More Space or More Rooms: Tough Question,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, May 1981.

101 conventioneers. By the time plans were finalized in 1980, however, the space was merely called a “concourse”; it had no seating or any features to draw in people from the street.

Insiders hinted that Western International was less than enthusiastic about the “living room” concept and pressured the developer to make the space less attractive as a public gathering place.71 Once again, the new breed of Cincinnati hotels was designed for tourists, but not for

Cincinnatians. Indeed, planners apparently sought to discourage city residents from using

(and, by extension, caring about) the new downtown hotel.

At approximately the same time that plans for the Western International development were being finalized, city boosters were reeling in their biggest catch yet: a Hyatt-Regency hotel. The 500-room Hyatt Regency, combined with a Saks Fifth Avenue department store, was completed in 1983. City leaders and convention planners attracted the hotel/retail development with $6 million in federal UDAG financing and more than $13 million in infrastructure and parking construction provided by the city.72 Like many of the downtown hotels, it was located directly adjacent to the convention center, tied to it by two new publicly- funded additions to the city‟s skywalk system.

Much like the earlier Stouffer‟s Towers, the Hyatt was clearly a business-oriented hotel that placed a premium on quantity and corporate service. Jayne Merkel, the Cincinnati

Enquirer‟s architecture critic, noted the hotel‟s “rows of identical rooms,” but begrudgingly praised its irregular shape for disguising “the sense of unending sameness.” In contrast to earlier first-class hotels that emphasized luxurious dining rooms and ornate gathering spots, the Hyatt‟s 2000-person capacity ballroom looked like “a better place for a business meeting

71 ―Fountain Square South Almost a Success,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 15 November 1981. 72 ―Saks/Hyatt: The View from the City Manager‘s Office,‖ Cincinnati Post, 3 December 1980.

102 than a debutante party.” Considering the hotel as a whole, Merkel acknowledged that “there‟s nothing really remarkable here…and that‟s the point. It isn‟t supposed to be sensational, it‟s supposed to be comfortable.”73

Certainly the Cincinnati Hyatt Regency was the most architecturally distinctive of the city‟s postwar convention hotels. Indeed, the Hyatt corporation was something of an innovator in breaking the mold of the standardized, utilitarian postwar convention hotel.74

Beginning as a small Los Angeles airport motel acquired in 1957, Hyatt was a strong but modest hotel chain until the Atlanta Hyatt Regency opened in 1967. While Hyatt‟s rooms were as standardized and pedestrian as any other convention hotel‟s, the Atlanta property – and nearly all the chain‟s post-1967 new construction - featured an architecturally dramatic multi-story atrium that brought local “gawkers” downtown along with guests.75 Architect

John Portman won international recognition for the Atlanta hotel, and Hyatt repeated the

“show biz formula” in downtown hotels throughout the country, including the Cincinnati

Hyatt. “It‟s hard to sell just a pillow,” noted Hyatt President Hugo Friend in 1976, “you‟ve got to sell some sizzle, too.”76 In part, the Hyatts‟ massive open atriums were a nod to business realities; because hotel guests now expected exterior-view rooms, the interior space of a high-rise hotel became largely useless. Transforming that space into an architectural asset, however, was an innovation. Other hotel chains also hired Portman to design downtown atrium hotels, and other architects soon co-opted the atrium model.

73 ―Hyatt Regency Hotel Exemplifies Charm of Past, Spirit of Future,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 1 June 1984. 74 Cohn, ―The Architecture of Convention Hotels in the United States, 1940-1976‖, esp. Chapter 5. 75 For more on the Atlanta Hyatt and its effect on the city‘s hotel and tourism industry, see Harvey K Newman, Southern Hospitality: Tourism and the Growth of Atlanta (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 161-188. 76 ―Hyatt‘s Kingdom of Rooms,‖ New York Times, 29 August 1976, 91.

103 The addition of the Hyatt hotel was an especially fine feather in the cap of Cincinnati tourism promoters; by the early 1980s a downtown Hyatt hotel had become a sort of status symbol among cities that sought to market themselves as revitalized convention “hotspots.”

Nearby competing cities such as Louisville, Lexington, Indianapolis and Kansas City built downtown Hyatt Regency hotels in the late 1970s as centerpieces of their renewal efforts.

City officials in Knoxville, Tennessee, credited their Hyatt with spurring the downtown rebirth which enabled the city to host the 1982 World‟s Fair. A 1981 Cincinnati Post article, published as the city‟s incentive package for the Hyatt development was being finalized, quoted a hotel industry consultant on the hotel‟s symbolic value. “If you have a Hyatt in your city,” asserted the consultant, “you have more than a quality hotel; you have a quality city.”77

While convention and visitors‟ bureau executives gushed over the massive hotels built in Cincinnati since the opening of the convention center, echoes of the old city hotels‟ function as a locus of community could still be heard. Older hotels‟ operators were deeply resentful of their lower place in the visions of convention planners, as well as the generous public subsidies given to their newly-constructed rivals. Thomas Emery Realty Inc – the firm which built the Terrace Plaza in 1948 – in 1980 still owned the Netherland Plaza Hotel, originally built in 1931. The Emery firm emerged as vocal critics of the Hyatt project in the city, and especially the “unsubstantiated level of public subsidy” for its construction.78 The

Netherland Plaza underwent extensive renovation in 1982, and Emery Realty went to great care to emphasize their careful restoration of the hotel‟s rich Art Deco interiors and the hotel‟s advantage over newer competition. While the hotel‟s renovation was intended to make it more

77 ―Why is Hyatt So Hot?‖ Cincinnati Post, 21 February 1981. 78 ―Realtor Criticizes City For Glut of Luxury Hotels,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 20 November 1980.

104 competitive with newer chains, it was also intended to offer a distinct alternative to the generic design of convention lodging. The renovation‟s lead architect took a direct dig at the newer convention hotels, asserting that “people are tired of cold glass and steel spaces” in their hotels, and that the historic character of the Netherland would be an effective antidote.79

An employee stated that the hotel had no fear of business declining during the renovations; he noted that the Netherland Plaza was “more than a hotel. It‟s a part of the community.”80

While the Hyatt Regency brought back some of the architectural grandeur of the city‟s older hotels, it and the city‟s other convention hotels, operated by international corporations, failed to gain the same standing in the community held by the older hotels. Despite the Hyatt consultant‟s claim, this building that supposedly signified a “quality city” meant very little to most Cincinnatians.

This homogeneity and distance from the local community was furthered by another hallmark of Cincinnati‘s postwar tourist infrastructure, its skywalk system. Originally proposed in the 1950s, the city completed the first skywalks connecting Fountain Square with the convention center in 1971. The system of walkways expanded along with the city‘s tourism and convention industry, focusing primarily on linking together hotels, retail and dining establishments. Skywalks were added to the city‘s new Westin Hotel, the Hyatt

Regency, and to expanded parking garages surrounding the convention center. By the mid-

1980s, the system totaled more than 1.3 miles of above-street walkways.

While skywalks allowed pedestrians to travel easily around downtown without the troubles of traffic, inclement weather, or crime, they also represented an attempt to provide a

79 ―Hotel‘s Facelift Shapes Up,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 24 June 1984. 80 ―Netherland Work Blending Old, New,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer 29 June 1983.

105 spatially scripted experience that encouraged tourists to operate within a controlled and very limited vision of Cincinnati. Just as the downtown convention center and hotels built to complement it lacked distinguishing architecture or anything uniquely ―Cincinnati‖ about them, so the glass-enclosed skywalk system discouraged tourist engagement with Cincinnati and made the city seem almost like any other place. Indeed, promotional material for the remodeled convention center promised visitors that, via the skywalks, they could visit the convention center, their hotel, shops, restaurants, and take walking tours of the city ―without ever going outside.‖81 While few other cities had as extensive a skywalk system as

Cincinnati‘s, most tourist development in postwar downtowns emphasized convenience and spatial scripting of visitor experience; given the extensive investment devoted to the creation of an urban tourist infrastructure and the volatile environment of the postwar American city, protecting visitors from the ugly underside of these ―renewed‖ cities just made good business sense. Thus the tourist industry, in Cincinnati and other cities like it, reconfigured downtowns to keep the visitor largely isolated from the local rhythms of everyday life, and vice versa.

The Cincinnati Terrace Plaza hotel‘s moment in the sun was a brief one. After the initial burst of media attention and booming business at its opening, the Terrace came to be plagued by many of the same challenges faced by older urban hotels in the 1950s. The Emery real estate firm sold the Terrace property to the Hilton Hotels Corporation in 1956, while also leasing the older Netherland Plaza hotel to Hilton, for a total price of $25 million. John J.

Emery cited ―competitive conditions in the hotel field‖ and the ―greater need for specialized

81 Cincinnati Convention and Visitors Bureau. ―Cincinnati USA: You‘ve Got to See It‖ (Cincinnati, OH: c. 1986), Collection of the author.

106 services‖ as the primary reasons for selling the hotel.82 In the nearly six decades since its construction, the hotel has changed hands a number of times, passing from one international hotel corporation to another. Its modern interior design, considered groundbreaking at its opening, was replaced with more traditional décor in 1965, likely in anticipation of increased business upon the new convention center‘s opening. Joan Miro‘s striking mural, as well as works by Saul Steinberg and Alexander Calder, were donated to the Cincinnati Art Museum when the remodeling was complete. The rooftop Gourmet Room restaurant was redecorated in a traditional French style, complete with an 18th century bust of Marie Antoinette.83

Subsequent renovations have been equally unremarkable.

This transfer of a once locally significant property to an international corporation is symbolic of the larger effect of the tourism industry on downtowns in the postwar era. John J.

Emery embarked on the construction of the Terrace Plaza motivated by hopes of profit but also a vision of a hotel as a significant contributor to the larger life of the city.84 By the time the Terrace was completed, however, both the urban hotel and the downtown of which it was a part were already undergoing drastic changes that would forever transform the role of both.

As the cities‘ convention and tourist business increased, hotels which had formerly been community institutions, owned and patronized by locals, largely disappeared. They were replaced by convention hotels, operated by international hotel chains with few ties to the community. Most of these new hotels were very different operations from their predecessors.

The older prominent hotels in downtown Cincinnati were centers for the city‘s economic,

82 ―Hilton Takes Over Plazas,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer May 21, 1956. 83 ―Art Museum Chosen Home For Terrace Plaza Works‖ Cincinnati Post Times Star, 30 April 1965. 84 For a rich examination of John Emery‘s role as both a hotel developer and leading civic reformer, see Wolner, ―Design and Civic Identity in Cincinnati‘s Carew Tower Complex.‖

107 political and social leaders, and even those who were not regular patrons considered the hotels sources of civic pride and physical symbols of the city‘s history. At the time of the demolition of the Hotel Sinton, a letter to the editor of the Post Times-Star remembered the

Sinton, ―not only as my wedding place but also as the place of many happy dinners.‖85 When the Hotel Gibson‘s inventory was put up for auction, the Enquirer noted that ―for many

Cincinnatians…the closing of the Sheraton Gibson meant a painful break with the past.‖86

The new hotels that rose in downtown Cincinnati, and dozens of cities like it, served visitors well, but they failed to replace the function that the previous hotels had served as a place of connection and community in downtown.

In his book Devil‟s Bargains, historian Hal Rothman describes the economic and cultural consequences of tourism promotion in the twentieth-century American West. He makes a compelling argument about tourism‘s effect on power in local communities. ―When tourism creates sufficient wealth,‖ he asserts, ―it becomes too important to be left to the locals. Power moves away from local decision makers, even those who psychically and socially invest in the new system that tourism creates, and toward outside capital and its local representatives.‖87 Although he was writing about a different type of tourism, Rothman describes the changes that occurred in the postwar downtown hotel industry perfectly.

Convention and visitors bureaus, desiring continued growth in their industry, actively sought and encouraged the arrival of hotel chains into their cities and discouraged local hotels that were relative ―small-timers‖ in the convention business. ―Tourism‘s greatest danger,‖

85 ―We Commemorate the Sinton,‖ Cincinnati Post Times-Star, 24 October 1964. 86 ―Hotel‘s Last Guest – the Liquidator.‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 27 July 1974. 87 Hal Rothman, Devil‟s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West. (University of Kansas Press, 1998), 11.

108 continues Rothman, ―is its image as a panacea. Community leaders make imperfect choices based on insufficient information without recognizing the potential consequences. Only the benefits, the successes, the flow of revenue to state, county, and local coffers occupy their thoughts, not the increase in expenditures and the changing social picture.‖88 Leaders in

Cincinnati—and many other cities—certainly spoke of tourist dollars as a cure-all for their struggling downtown and pursued those visitors with nearly unbridled enthusiasm. They gained that market at considerable economic and social cost, however; in their desperation for downtown economic growth, corporate and government leaders had financially subsidized the removal of significant landmarks and replaced them with relatively the bland and locally insignificant infrastructure of the convention industry. When the old urban hotels fell to the wrecking ball and the convention centers and massive chain hotels were finished, the tourist- oriented downtown became a place perhaps more meaningful to the city‘s visitors than to its residents.

88 Ibid., 17.

109 Chapter 3

―FEAR and GREED‖: Race, the St. Louis Convention Center, and the Decline of Liberalism in the Postwar City

―There‘s no question but that the new center will go a long way toward revitalizing downtown. Visitors to this city now find it much more thrilling than most of us residents do.‖ -St. Louis American, 23 November 1972

“Coming back to St. Louis after many years…the city‟s surface has changed considerably. These changes, while putting a shine on the old city, are mostly cosmetic. The downtown areas seemed designed primarily for tourists.” -William Allman, ―St. Louis‖ US News and World Report, 19891

The ceremonial dedication of the new St. Louis Gateway Convention and Exhibition

Center in March of 1977 was a gala event, complete with color guard marches, speeches from politicians, and music from a 94-piece band.2 Later that year, the convention center hosted a

―Meet Me in St. Louis‖ Festival to mark the center‘s grand opening. The festival sought to recreate the city‘s famous 1904 World‘s Fair ―with period costumes, an old-fashioned farmer‘s market, and turn-of-the-century entertainment including St. Louis‘ famed jazz and ragtime.‖ The opening of the convention center also celebrated the city‘s corporate strength with an exhibition and trade show ―serving as a showcase for the products of today and tomorrow.‖3 Convention center executives estimated that over 300,000 people attended the two-week long festival.4 The new center covered four city blocks, contained more than

1 William Allman, ―St. Louis,‖ US News and World Report, 18 December 1989, 49 – 50, quoted in Robert Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities, 2nd edition, (New York: Routledge, 2003), 222. 2 Press Release, 28 March 1977, Convention Center - Special Events/Publicity – 1976-1978, Fleishman-Hillard Corporate Archives, St. Louis, MO. [hereafter FHCA]. 3 Eugene L. Beckerle to Aaron J. Fadem, 14 April 1977, Convention Center - Special Events/Publicity – 1976-1978, FHCA. 4 Press Release, 8 August 1977, FHCA.

110 240,000 square feet of exhibit space and over fifty individual meeting rooms.5 The $34- million structure was the centerpiece of the Desoto-Carr urban renewal project for the northern edge of downtown.6 Politicians and corporate leaders praised the center as a sign of the city‘s revitalization and economic health.

Despite the enthusiastic celebration, the St. Louis convention center was an unremarkable building. Like most convention centers of its time, the structure was a low- lying, largely windowless ―box with docks‖ that served its function but was generally unattractive. But behind the bland architecture lay a dynamic effort to remake the St. Louis city center and renew the downtown economy through the expansion of the city‘s tourist industry. The city of St. Louis was in many ways a forerunner in the utilization of tourism as an urban revitalization tool. This strategic emphasis on tourism as the city‘s economic savior shaped both public policy and the physical geography of St. Louis in the postwar era.7

The grand opening celebrations continued throughout the summer of 1977, and the center hosted its first major convention that October. Amidst all the activity of that first year, it might have been easy for a visitor to overlook two items that held the key to understanding how the city had arrived at this celebratory moment. In the main lobby of the convention center hung two plaques. One, unveiled at the dedication that March, honored the Land

Clearance Redevelopment Authority of the City of St. Louis, the municipal agency which

5 Press Release, 25 March 1977, FHCA. 6 ―Some Answers on the Convention Center,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, n.d. 7 For broader histories of St. Louis‘ postwar urban renewal programs, see James Primm, Lion of the Valley, St. Louis, Missouri, 479-528; Jon Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Joseph Heathcott and Maire Agnes Murphy, ―Corridors of Flight, Zones of Renewal: Industry, Planning and Policy in the Making of Metropolitan St. Louis, 1940-1980‖ Journal of Urban History 31, no. 2 (January 2005) : 151-189. Eric Sandwiess‘ St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001) places urban planning and renewal in a longer historical context, and pp. 231-238 address the postwar period specifically.

111 organized most of the city‘s renewal projects in the postwar era.8 The second plaque was unveiled in September of 1977 at a smaller, more subdued ceremony. St. Louis mayor John

Conway and Convention Center Director Eugene L. Beckerle officially dedicated the center‘s three main meeting halls, naming them the August A. Busch Jr. Hall, the United Labor Hall, and the Monsanto Hall, in honor of the city‘s corporate and labor coalition which had led efforts to complete the center. At the same ceremony, Conway and Beckerle unveiled the second plaque, dedicated ―to the voters of St. Louis and in particular to the black leaders who spearheaded the passage of the bond issue to commence construction.‖9

These ceremonial plaques, innocuous and probably largely ignored, placed a neat ending on what was actually a complex, conflict-ridden story of the center‘s construction.

The ceremonies dedicating the St. Louis convention center that year praised the building as evidence of city residents‘ unity and pride, a bricks-and-mortar ―monument to civic cooperation.‖10 While this was true to a degree, the building also sat at the center of a storm of controversy. The battle to win public approval for and build the downtown convention center in the 1970s created challenges to that supposed civic consensus and brought to the forefront long-simmering tensions within the city itself.

The chosen location of the convention center played a significant role in shaping the debate over its construction. The massive new structure sat at the northern border of downtown, immediately adjacent to the predominately African-American and largely poor neighborhoods of north St. Louis. Just north of the center, across Cole Street, stood Cochran

Gardens, one of the city‘s largest public housing projects. The twelve-building complex was

8 Press Release, 28 March 1977, FHCA. 9 Press Release, 27 September 1977, FHCA. 10 D. H. Laslo, et al. ―Building the Infrastructure of Urban Tourism: The Case of St. Louis,‖ in Dennis R. Judd, ed., The Infrastructure of Play: Building the Tourist City (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), 82.

112 completed in 1953 and, like most of the city‘s public housing, by the late 1960s had fallen into disrepair and become a haven for violent crime and drug dealers. The St. Louis Housing

Authority, which had sharply curbed services in the wake of a severe budget shortfall, could not adequately maintain the buildings nor protect their residents. The situation reached a crisis level in 1969, when the city‘s public housing tenants organized a 10-month rent strike in protest of the living conditions and attempts to raise rents.11 Outside the boundaries of

Cochran Gardens, the entire district of North St. Louis struggled: poorer African-Americans, many among the 20,000 black St. Louisans displaced by the city‘s Mill Creek Valley renewal projects in the 1950s, took up residence in neighborhoods abandoned by wealthier residents who had fled to the suburbs.12 By the 1960s, North St. Louis was strongly identified in the city‘s mental geography as a ―black‖ section of the city, while South St. Louis remained the traditional province of white ethnic groups. Residents of the North Side neighborhoods fought to maintain community stability in the face of high poverty and rising crime. A perceived lack of attention from city hall did not help matters; north St. Louisans regularly pointed to unenforced housing code violations, lack of basic maintenance of streets and sewers, and insufficient police protection as examples of municipal neglect. South St. Louis neighborhoods, by most accounts, did not face these same issues.13 The construction of a massive new publicly-financed tourist development in the face of neighborhoods that

11 For a sociological study of the St. Louis rent strike, and larger issues in the city‘s public housing of the period, see Charles Kimball Cummings, ―Rent Strike in St. Louis: The Making of Conflict in Modern Society,‖ (Ph.D. diss., Washington University, 1976), esp. Chapters 15-20. 12 Primm, Lion of the Valley, 496-497. 13 For just two examples of these issues, and North Side residents‘ efforts to address them, see ―Northside Residents Mobilize, Demand Protection, Demolition,‖ St. Louis American, 4 June 1970; ―Cervantes Regime‘s Grades on City Services Fall Short of Honor Roll.‖ St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 18-19 September, 1971. That the traditionally conservative - and pro-Cervantes - Globe-Democrat featured the failings of the city in north side neighborhoods suggests the extent of the problem.

113 embodied the city‘s critical social problems heightened residents‘ resentment and frustration with an urban power structure seemingly indifferent to their needs.

The construction of the St. Louis convention center thus laid out in bricks and mortar the changing priorities of urban leaders in the postwar era. It signaled the demise of the activist vision of New Deal and Great Society liberalism that had attempted to solve the social problems of cities for the past three decades, and marked the rising preeminence of tourism

(and broader corporate and private real estate development) as the supposed solution to the problems of the American city. Public housing projects like Cochran Gardens, built in the early 1950s at the height of activist governmental action in the city, represented the earlier vision of liberal social policy extending necessities like public housing to a city‟s disadvantaged.14 The convention center embodied the decline of this vision, and the return of efforts to direct urban revitalization toward the primary goal of downtown economic growth over a broader goal of municipal welfare.

Convention centers, and downtown tourist development as a whole, promised to create economically thriving cities at just the moment when traditional liberal solutions to urban problems were rapidly losing political legitimacy. Despite challenges from a substantial number of St. Louis residents, pro-center leaders succeeded in their goals by promising economic prosperity and a revitalized urban core while requiring little in the way of sacrifice or acquiescence to the ideals of the liberal activist state. Convention center promoters in St.

Louis - and other cities - used the language of civic improvement and community harmony in pushing for their project, but in fact the St. Louis convention center strained the bonds of that

14 To be sure, city leaders consistently manipulated much of this policy to serve the ends of downtown business interests (as outlined in Chapter One), but a vision of broader municipal improvement still maintained relevance through the twenty-five years after the end of World War II.

114 community and failed to address the substantive issues that led to the city‘s postwar decline. 15

Such an outcome was not inevitable; the ultimate method of building the convention center was only one of several courses available to city leaders. The resolution of business leaders to arrest downtown‘s decline at all costs, enabled by the urban political climate of the 1970s, shaped city leaders‘ choices and determined the ultimate winners and losers in the St. Louis convention center battle.

Though St. Louis built its convention center in 1977, conventions and professional organizations had been meeting in the city for more than a century. Conventions and expositions were among the earliest forms of urban tourism in American cities. The growing popularity of national fraternal organizations and increasing professionalization of business, combined with ever-intensifying railroad networks, created both the desire and ability for regional and national conventions.16 Midwestern cities like St. Louis were the early leaders in the convention industry, given their central location and nexus of railroad networks. The nation‘s first convention and visitors‘ bureau was established in Detroit in 1896, and competing cities quickly followed suit17 Many bureaus were initially a subgroup of a city‘s

Chamber of Commerce and became separate organizations as convention business became more substantial.

15 On the enduring utility of the rhetoric of civic beauty and community in St. Louis planning, see Sandweiss, St. Louis, 231-238. On the various uses of civic rhetoric to ―sell‖ urban redevelopment, see Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (New York: Routledge, 2003). 16 Catherine Cocks, Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850-1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press), 138-139; Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Random House, 1965), 143. 17 Meeting News, Volume 13, Number 11, August 1989 (Supplement), 7. Convention recruiters formed their own professional organization, the International Association of Convention and Visitors Bureaus (IACB) in 1914.

115 By the early decades of the twentieth century, the convention business was a significant component of large cities‘ economies. Local convention bureaus, as Catherine

Cocks notes, trumpeted the benefits of their industry to host cities, and ―never tired of estimating the number of conventions won, the number of visitors they would bring, and the amount of money the guests would spend.‖18 The rise of the convention industry was, however, concurrent with they heyday of the American city, and thus city bureaus were largely unsuccessful in gaining municipal financial support for their industry; efforts to recruit conventions were financed largely by hotels and other travel-related industries in each city.

Many cities did build some form of auditorium or exhibition hall during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, however, and many of these were municipally financed, in part because of the blossoming of public buildings encouraged by the City

Beautiful movement. Perhaps the best known of the centers of this era is Cleveland‘s Public

Auditorium, which opened in 1922 and was part of Daniel Burnham‘s 1903 Group Plan of neoclassical buildings that included the Cleveland Public Library and City Hall. Other cities‘ municipal halls were older still. Cincinnati‘s Music Hall dated from 1878, when it was constructed for the city‘s May Festival and annual industrial exposition. These halls sometimes served conventions, but they also housed local sporting events, musical performances, political rallies, or public debates. In addition to its meeting and theatre space, for example, Music Hall in Cincinnati also hosted local high school graduations and housed two nightclubs popular with locals from the 1930s through the 1950s.19 Thus these halls

18 Cocks, Doing the Town, 139. This effort to convince cities of the benefits of the tourist industry was a prominent topic in industry circles. During the 1920s, for example, the International Association of Convention Bureaus‘ own annual conventions frequently featured sessions with topics such as ―The Indirect Value of Conventions to a City‖ or ―The Trade Exposition – Its Problems and Relation to the City.‖ Meeting News, Volume 13, Number 11, August 1989 (Supplement), 14. 19 ―Elegance partners with nostalgia at Music Hall,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 10 October 1998.

116 functioned as meeting places for regional or national meetings, but just as importantly as sites for local sociability, civic debate, and commemoration. They functioned as a locus of social relations as much as a pure ―tourist magnet‖ for the support of the hospitality industry.

Tourism promoters of this period, writes Catherine Cocks, ―believed that their campaigns for city beautification and tourism would inspire civic spirit and social unity.‖20

After the public construction trend of the City Beautiful era, cities did not build publicly-financed meeting halls in any significant numbers until the 1950s, when, a new generation of convention centers began to emerge in cities across the country. 21 Most of these centers were financed with public funds, and many were built specifically for outside convention and trade shows and were rarely utilized for local social events. The outburst of convention center construction was the result of both drastic changes in the travel and tourism industry and the decline of American cities in the post-World War II period.

The growth of the business convention as an institution in the rapidly-expanding corporate environment of postwar America was a key factor in driving convention center construction. As the economy boomed and businesses expanded from regional to national enterprises, meetings of professional groups or the branch members of a large corporation became increasingly common. Forbes magazine, in a 1969 article celebrating what it dubbed

―The Great American Get-Together,‖ noted that the previous year had seen over 280,000 corporate conventions nationwide, compared to an average of 60 to 70,000 per year in the

20 Cocks, Doing the Town, 141. 21 Financing for public assembly halls did come from the federal Public Works Administration during the New Deal, but local government funding was extremely rare during the period. St. Louis‘s Kiel Auditorium, a 1934 structure located on the city‘s Memorial Park, was constructed with New Deal funding.

117 1950s.22 Older hotel meeting rooms were inadequate to meet the frequency and the increasing size of such conventions, and a large, dedicated meeting center became essential to capture a share of the corporate convention business. These meetings, bringing hundreds or thousands of professionals sporting company expense accounts, became the prime target of convention and visitors bureaus‘ recruiting efforts. These were far more lucrative than the conventions of religious or fraternal groups that often made up the main patrons of cities‘ convention facilities.23 A Cincinnati Convention and Visitors Bureau head dispelled the outdated image of convention delegates as ―fez-wearing‖ pranksters ―throwing buckets of water out of hotel room windows‖ in a 1967 Cincinnati Post Times-Star interview. ―Today‘s convention delegate,‖ he declared, ―is here on business.‖24

Changes in transportation technology – particularly the arrival of commercial jet air service in 1958 – also fueled convention growth. One convention bureau executive described the advent of jet travel as ―the single most important event that affected the course of convention history.‖25 Jet travel not only made conventions more convenient and frequent, it also tremendously expanded the competition. Where rail travel had previously given

Midwestern cities dominance in the convention game, now any city with a suitable airport

22 ―The Great American Get-Together,‖ Forbes, 15 February 1969. Wilbur Zelinsky examines in some detail the organization of conventions in the United States and asserts that hosting of conventions to be ―one of several functions setting the Postmodern City apart from its antecedents.‖ While one may quibble with the historical characterization, Zelinsky describes the process of convention industry building well. Wilbur Zelinsky, ―Conventionland USA: The Geography of a Latterday Phenomenon,‖ Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84, no. 1 (March 1994), 68-86. 23 These non-corporate gatherings are known in the tourism industry as ―SMERF‖ events - an acronym for ―sports, military, educational, religious, and fraternal‖ organizations. These groups were typically given second priority in convention recruiting. 24 ―How To Lure Conventions? Just Ask Joe,‖ Cincinnati Post Times Star, 3 August 1967. 25 Meeting News, 43.

118 could compete for its share of national meetings.26 Cities in favorable climates such as the

South and West became especially attractive, much to the anxiety of hospitality industry heads in the Midwest.27 Expanding or building new convention facilities with the largest possible meeting and exhibit space gave cities a significant (if short-lived) edge over cities with more attractive natural advantages.

The third factor encouraging the nationwide boom in convention center construction was the fate of the urban hotel industry. As discussed in Chapter Two, downtown hotels lost a substantial portion of their leisure travel business after World War II, and turned to conventions as a source of new revenues. Such hotels had previously viewed conventions as a necessary evil because of the strain they put on both service staff and traditional standards of decorum.28 The hotel that failed to court conventioneers in the postwar period, however, set itself up for bankruptcy and demolition. Hotel executives thus became aggressive proponents of convention center construction, and the meetings industry in general.

Combined with the downturn in traditional hotel business and expansion of the convention industry was a much larger general decline of urban America, as the trends of postwar suburbanization and corporate disinvestment left cities with declining tax bases and

26 In 1945, the International Association of Convention Bureaus identified Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Kansas City as seven of the top eleven convention cities. By 1981 Chicago and Detroit were the only Midwestern cities to make the top eleven. ―Cities Bid for Conventions,‖ Business Week, 11 August 1945; Successful Meetings, Convention and Exhibit Marketing Profile (New York: Bill Communications, 1983). 27 Meeting News, 44. 28 Amy Elizabeth Cohn, ―The Architecture of Convention Hotels in the United States, 1940-1976.‖ (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1976), 1-3. Cohn asserts that hotels in the prewar United States did not aggressively recruit conventions for the reasons mentioned above. However, Lisa Pfueller Davidson, ―Consumption and Efficiency in the ‗City Within A City‘: Commercial Hotel Architecture and the Emergence of Modern American Culture, 1890-1930,‖ (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 2003) argues convincingly that urban hotels actively vied for convention business by the 1920s. See esp. 38-39, 121-126. In any case, it can be said with certainty that in the postwar period conventions moved from being one component of downtown hotels‘ business to their primary source of revenue.

119 an disproportionate number of poor residents. From its peak population of 856,796 in 1950,

St. Louis lost more than 230,000 residents in the next two decades. The suburban exodus and urban decay which led to a decline in downtown hotels‘ business was distressing for leaders in the hospitality industry, but it also provided their most powerful political tool. Rather than spelling disaster, the decline of American downtowns became a boon for the tourist industry.

Tourism industry heads sensed the desperation of urban leaders, and moved aggressively to capitalize on this opportunity. Convention bureaus had long desired the building of a publicly- financed downtown convention center in order to increase their members‘ profits; now, by playing on the fears of urban residents and politicos they were able to successfully leverage the urban crisis to their advantage, promising a revitalized downtown in exchange for substantial public subsidy and governmental accommodation to the demands of their growing industry.

Urban political leaders, desperate for economic growth and fearing the consequences of inaction, increasingly met the demands of the convention industry. Struggling cities throughout the country raced to build ever-larger meeting halls, often with substantial public subsidy. Detroit built Cobo Hall in its downtown in 1960, and Chicago completed

McCormick Place in the same year. Cincinnati opened a convention center in 1968, and smaller cities also rushed quickly into the convention center game. A 1967 Business Week article pointed to a new convention center in Duluth, Minnesota as an illustration of ―the growing appetite even medium-sized, out-of-the-way cities have developed‖ for the

120 convention industry and its promises of urban wealth.29 The period from 1970 to 1985 saw the construction of more than 100 convention centers nationwide.30

St. Louis was thus hardly unique in its enthusiasm for a convention center; such large meeting halls became essential components of the ―tourist infrastructure‖ in all major

American cities during this period, especially those desperate to arrest urban decline. To fully grasp the dynamics surrounding the St. Louis center‘s construction, however, it is crucial to understand the opening of the center in 1977 not as an isolated event but as the result of a larger effort to expand that city‘s share of the national and international tourism market. St.

Louis‘ remarkably steep postwar decline and its enthusiastic embrace of the promise of tourist development illustrate some of the central tensions inherent in postwar urban tourism.

The postwar tourist industry in St. Louis had its genesis in the planning and development of the city‘s largest tourist attraction, the Gateway Arch. St. Louis‘s riverfront, had been the center of its nineteenth-century economic life, had collapsed by the early twentieth century into a dilapidated area of abandoned warehouses that was a thorn in the side of city leaders. Plans for the renewal of the riverfront had gone through several phases, beginning with proposals tied to the city‘s 1904 World‘s Fair, and subsequent others that called for a City Beautiful-inspired monument. None of these plans came to fruition, but interest revived during the Great Depression as it became clear that federal funding might be available for the construction of a monument to westward expansion. In December of 1933, prominent local St. Louisans formed the Jefferson National Memorial Association,

29 ―When Conventioneers Hit Town,‖ Business Week, 14 January 1967, 158-60. 30 Dennis Judd and Todd Swanstrom, City Politics: Private Power and Public Policy (New York: Longman, 2002) , 383.

121 responsible for securing funds to clear roughly forty blocks of the city‘s riverfront and construct the memorial. For these leaders, the construction of a memorial on the riverfront would accomplish three things: clear the downtown riverfront of undesirable properties, create jobs for unemployed St. Louisans, and provide a physical symbol of the city‘s progress and prosperity. While the arrival of tourists was obviously an implicit benefit, the recruitment of tourist business as a fundamental part of the city‘s economy was not a primary part of the original vision for the memorial.31

By December 1935, the group had secured a $6.75 million commitment of Works

Progress Administration funds from President Roosevelt, and received $7.5 million more from a voter-approved city bond issue. It was not until after World War II that the federal funding was completely assured and a panel of architects chose Eero Saarinen‘s catenary arch design for the Memorial. Still more legal and financial obstacles delayed the construction of the arch, finally begun in 1958 and completed seven years later, opening as the Jefferson

National Expansion Memorial (JNEM).32 While St. Louis had long been a regional tourist destination because of its city zoo, cultural institutions, and professional sports teams, the

Arch launched the city‘s tourist industry to unprecedented heights. The Arch drew 2.3 million visitors in its first year, and in 1967, the city‘s convention board changed its name to

31 Primm, Lion of the Valley, 479-481; Sandweiss, St. Louis, 232-234. See also Helen Lipstadt, ―Co- making the modern monument : the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial competition and Eero Saarinen's Gateway Arch,‖ in Eric Mumford, ed., Modern Architecture in St. Louis: Washington University and Postwar American Architecture, 1948-1973 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 32Primm, Lion of the Valley, 482-484.

122 ―Convention and Tourist Board‖ to reflect its increasing focus on leisure tourists as well as traditional convention recruitment.33 It continues to be the city‘s most popular attraction.

The Arch, however, was intended to be much more than the urban version of a

―worlds-largest-ball-of-twine‖ type of roadside tourist trap. From a national perspective, as

Hal Rothman has noted, the federal government intended the JNEM ―to articulate the glory of the American past and link it to the future of the nation‖ in the midst of the Depression.

―JNEM and other historic places,‖ continues Rothman, ―served as an elaborate and seemingly objective civics lesson, a psychological tonic for the socioeconomic ills of the nation.‖34

While the memorial was originally intended as a hopeful monument to a nation in economic turmoil, by the time of its opening in 1965, it expressed a new hope for the renewal of urban

America. City leaders spoke of the Arch as a symbol of ―a new spirit metropolitan pride and progress‖ as St. Louis sought to remake itself in the postwar era.35 While that effort at redevelopment and economic adaptation met with only limited success, the Arch itself has been enormously successful in establishing a branding ―image‖ for the city of St. Louis, and especially its downtown.

Even as the St. Louis Arch opened to national acclaim, many felt that the city‘s tourist industry was relatively underdeveloped, and that the rapidly-expanding meetings and conventions market could hold the key to reviving the city‘s economy. This strategy took center stage under the mayoral administration of Alfonso J. Cervantes. Cervantes was a St.

Louis native who, as a young man during the Depression, hitchhiked to California and

33 ―Cardinals, Arch Bring Tourists Flocking to City,‖ St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 24 August 1968; ―Increasing Tourism in St. Louis Reflected in Arch‘s Popularity,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 10 August 1969. 34 Hal Rothman, Devil‟s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West, (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1998), 154-157. 35 Heathcott and Murphy, ―Corridors of Flight, Zones of Renewal,‖ 152.

123 became a Hollywood entertainment promoter. There he gained a flair for salesmanship and public relations, skills that would serve him well in his later political career.36 After returning to his hometown, he served for a number of years as a Democratic member of the city‘s Board of Aldermen. Ebullient, optimistic, and aggressive, Cervantes repeatedly touted the benefits of the tourist industry in his 1964 campaign for mayor.37 Upon taking office in 1965,

Cervantes began immediately to promote tourism development and sought to strengthen cooperation between city government and St. Louis tourist businesses. The mayor actively courted national media coverage of the Arch and other points of pride in the city, including photographic spreads in national magazines, appearances on popular television talk shows, and escorting Johnny Carson on a personal tour of the city.38 The consummate salesman,

Cervantes declared in 1966, ―St. Louis today has a lot to offer but we have never merchandised our product.‖39

One of the mayor‘s earliest tasks was to improve and complete the park at the

Gateway Arch, which was surrounded by empty, unimproved land after the monument‘s completion. In February 1967, Cervantes called for the approval of a $2 million bond issue to create a landscaped park around the Arch, complete an adjacent museum, and to make other improvements. In a speech that month, Cervantes announced the formation of the Committee to Complete the Riverfront Arch Memorial, but he also used the platform to make a larger statement about the place of tourism in the new economy of St. Louis. The mayor admitted that ―St. Louis, like every other big city, is in a financial bind.‖ Acknowledging that the

36 Alfonso J. Cervantes, Mr. Mayor (Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1974), 28-29, 121. 37 Lana Stein, St. Louis Politics: The Triumph of Tradition, (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2002), 144. 38 Correspondence, 14 March 1968, Series I, Box 12, Folder 6, Alfonso J. Cervantes Papers, Special Collections, Washington University in St. Louis Libraries, St. Louis [hereafter AJC Papers]. 39 ―Cervantes Urges Establishment of Tour Promotion Bureau,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 23 June 1966.

124 obvious solution would be to increase industrial development, Cervantes claimed that ―St.

Louis doesn‘t have wide open spaces that would be needed for huge sprawling plants,‖ but proposed another solution. ―There‘s one industry that‘s big, has great promise, and uses the whole city as a plant,‖ said Cervantes. ―This is the tourist trade, or as it has become known in these days of air pollution, ‗the smokeless industry.‘‖ Cervantes went on to extol the virtues of the tourist industry for creating jobs and boosting the financial fortunes of the city, asserting that building a strong tourist trade would be ―like having a huge new industry with an annual payroll of $186,000,000.‖40

Cervantes‘ strategy of tourism development stumbled out of the gate, as promises of success turned into dismal failures. The most publicized of these blunders was the Spanish

Pavilion, a building from the 1964 New York World‘s Fair that was disassembled and moved to St. Louis. The architecturally-striking Pavilion was supposed to be the northern anchor of a downtown ―tourist triangle‖ along with the Gateway Arch and Busch Memorial Stadium.

Promotional literature soliciting donations for the building promised that the Pavilion would provide ―culture, education, and entertainment for all the people.‖ ―Travelers throughout the world will be drawn to the ‗Tourist Triangle‘,‖ continued the copy, ―as it becomes a ‗must‘ on every tour of America that dares to be called complete.‖41 Upon its opening in late 1968, the

Pavilion housed a restaurant, theatre, library, and art gallery. Despite optimistic estimates that predicted 800,000 visitors in its first year, the Spanish Pavilion was shuttered after less than a year of operation due to financial constraints. The city‘s business leaders, who had given only grudging financial support to the Pavilion initially, refused to throw good money after bad and

40 Speech, 24 February 1967, Series I, Box 12, Folder 6, AJC Papers. 41 ―The Spanish Pavilion and YOU,‖ Series 1 Box 13, Folder 3, AJC Papers.

125 provide more funds for the project.42 The Pavilion was eventually incorporated into a

Marriott hotel development, but the affair was a blow to Cervantes‘ political credibility.

Though the Pavilion was privately funded by the city‘s corporate citizens, many St. Louisans mistakenly believed the project to have been supported by public funds, and the perception was as damaging as reality.

Another of Cervantes‘ tourist ventures failed even more spectacularly. The mayor paid $375,000 - again obtained from St. Louis corporate contributors - for a replica of

Christopher Columbus‘ Santa Maria, also from the New York World‘s Fair, and brought it to dock on the city‘s waterfront. Shortly after its arrival in 1969, the Santa Maria came unmoored in a storm, floated down the Mississippi and crashed into pylons, damaging it beyond repair. In his autobiography Mr. Mayor, Cervantes defended the idea, saying that ―it did look like a good investment that would wow the tourists,‖ but the almost comical event dealt further damage to his political legitimacy. 43 In the 1969 city general election,

Republican politicians made surprising advances, with Cervantes holding his office by a much slimmer margin than expected. One fellow Democrat noted that ―Cervantes still is thought of as a wheeler-dealer‖ and pointed to the purchase of the Santa Maria as campaign fodder for opposing politicians. Again, while the Santa Maria was purchased with private funds, many criticized Cervantes for spending his time on seemingly hare-brained schemes instead of developing traditional economic policies.44

Cervantes‘ early missteps reinforced already-existing skepticism about the viability of tourism-based renewal for St. Louis. Donald Gunn, president of the city‘s Board of Alderman and a fellow Democrat, had expressed doubt in 1967 about the apparent neglect of traditional

42 Stein, St. Louis Politics, 145-146; Primm, Lion of the Valley, 500. 43 Cervantes, Mr. Mayor, 135. 44 Stein, St. Louis Politics, 149. The quote is from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 3 April 1969, 4A.

126 economic and social improvements in favor of headline-grabbing tourist projects. While acknowledging that the completion of the Gateway Arch and other efforts could be beneficial to the city, he feared that ―tourism is a fickle friend.‖ ―Tourism must be a secondary industry for our great city,‖ Gunn continued. ―Our prime objective ought to be the ‗meat and potato‘ business of industrial and commercial development.‖ Gunn asserted that he was not against tourism development per se, but he feared an overemphasis on such activity would take the focus off of the most pressing needs of the citizens of St. Louis, including ―good schools, sound race relations, the elimination of ghettos, adequate and fair job opportunities, [and] broad cultural advantages.‖ ―No matter how stimulating we may find the thought of tourism as an economic advantage to be,‖ Gunn continued, ―the tourist dollars simply will not pay for or produce this kind of community.‖45 Gunn‘s misgivings about tourism‘s promises emphasized the traditional values of urban liberalism – racial equality, access to education and employment, and assurance of a basic standard of living - in clear opposition to the growth-centered strategy of pro-tourist leadership. Always rumbling behind the scenes, this clash of visions between the pro-tourism leaders and those who espoused a more socially- oriented vision of urban community and economic development would take center stage in the debate over Cervantes‘ largest and most expensive project, a new convention center for St.

Louis.

Despite the nationwide attention on the new Gateway Arch and the Cervantes administration‘s enthusiastic recruitment of visitors, the St. Louis hotel market continued to experience a steep decline during the 1960s. The city‘s hotel occupancy rate for 1966 was the lowest of any major city in the country, and that trend continued in the following year.46 The

45 Speech by Donald Gunn, 29 March, 1967. Series 1, Box 12, Folder 6, AJC Papers. 46 Robert B Koplar to AJ Cervantes, 14 August 1967. Series 1, Box 12, Folder 6, AJC Papers.

127 millions of visitors flocking to the Gateway Arch on a vacation road trip were more likely to stay in the new motels on the city‘s outskirts, preferring the latter‘s free parking, convenience, and affordability.47 Struggling downtown hotels were problems for more than just their owners; the failure of such prominent pieces of downtown real estate could only further depress downtown property values, thus negatively impacting the entire increasingly-fragile central business district. Cries for a downtown convention center, a guaranteed revenue generator for hotels and downtown retail, grew ever louder.

Convention center proponents had an enthusiastic and powerful ally in A.J. Cervantes.

While Cervantes‘ pro-tourism strategy had produced only mixed results thus far, the convention center was to be the mayor‘s crown jewel. Cervantes later reflected that he believed the city had to move beyond efforts to attract family vacationers, that the city was missing out on the ―wholesale transient business – the big conventions that bring thousands of delegates at a time to those cities equipped with shiny, modern convention centers.‖48

In a speech before the Convention and Tourist Board of Directors in November 1967,

Mayor Cervantes announced that the city had commissioned a feasibility study to determine the need and cost for a new convention and exhibition center for the city. Cervantes noted that a number of other cities were building or had built convention centers, and that ―St. Louis can no longer afford to be left behind.‖ He confidently asserted, ―the investments made by cities for the purpose of attracting the visiting dollar have provenly paid a higher rate than any other single municipal investment.‖49

47 For a more detailed discussion of the loss of hotel business to suburban motels, see Chapter 2 of this work, along with John A. Jakle, Keith Sculle and Jefferson Rogers, The Motel in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Warren Belasco Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910-1945 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979). 48 Cervantes, Mr. Mayor, 137. 49 Speech, November 1967, Series 1, Box 12, Folder 1, AJC Papers.

128 The convention center - and St. Louis tourism development in general - garnered its strongest support from a group of individuals and agencies that, borrowing from previous scholars, I label the city‘s ―growth coalition‖ 50 – a group that included Mayor Cervantes, the city‘s leading banks and real estate developers, a downtown businessmen‘s organization known as Downtown St. Louis, Inc., the city‘s construction labor unions, the Convention and

Tourist Bureau, and local hospitality businesses. Certainly other groups and individuals supported or endorsed their efforts, but these formed the core of the convention center proposal‘s support. While such a label obscures important differences within this diverse group, it also illustrates their many commonalities. As their title implies, growth coalition members argued that a convention center was necessary to spur economic growth in St. Louis, and especially in its flagging downtown. The city‘s desperate situation justified the use of public funding to achieve growth, and, they argued, that revenue would quickly spread beyond the convention center, boosting city tax revenues and providing new opportunities for employment for the city‘s residents. Insuring consistent growth, in the coalition‘s view, should be the ultimate goal of the city‘s political leadership.

The convention center feasibility study commissioned by the city in 1967, published a year later by Los Angeles firm Economic Research Associates, found (not surprisingly) that

50 The term ―growth coalition‖ is used by Hal Rothman to describe similar pro-tourist leaders (bankers, landowners, planners, and developers) in the western communities that are the subject of his Devil‟s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West, 10. Rothman develops this definition from John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) who use the term ―growth machine.‖ See also Harvey Molotch, ―The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place,‖ The American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 2 (September 1976), 309-332. Though redefined and modified since its inception, the concept has come to be widely used by scholars discussing the political economy of urban development. Joseph Heathcott and Maire Murphy use the term ―redevelopment coalition‖ to describe St. Louis postwar renewal leaders. This group shared many interests with but did not precisely correspond to the group described here. Heathcott and Murphy, ―Corridors of Flight,‖ 155.

129 the city of St. Louis needed and could support a new convention center, projecting that the

$20 million investment would yield $171 million in new revenue each year. With this professional research offering legitimacy, the growth coalition of city government, hospitality industry heads, downtown business, and labor unions coalesced quickly to rally public support for a convention center.51

After initially considering an amusement park, hotel, and convention complex at the city‘s Union Station rail terminal to the west of downtown, Cervantes was persuaded by St.

Louis developer Leif J. Sverdrup to contemplate a site on the northern edge of downtown.

Sverdrup urged that the north section needed an ―anchor‖ to spur development and fight crime and ―blight‖ in the area. Perhaps not coincidentally, Sverdrup and Parcel Associates headquarters were located adjacent to his proposed site. By October 1970, the city had settled on the north downtown site and proposed a financing plan that paid for the center construction with a municipal bond issue, to be retired by a property tax increase and projected revenues from the city‘s increased tourism business. In December 1970 the St. Louis board of aldermen voted to put the bond issue on the upcoming March ballot.52

The campaign supporting the convention center bond issue was upbeat, banal, and relatively unsophisticated. During the winter and early spring of 1971, promoters plastered billboards and newspapers with advertisements featuring the slogan ―SMILE!‖ (an acronym for Successful Metropolitan Investment Lifts Everyone) and extolling the economic benefits of the new convention center. The public relations firm hired by the city proposed small-scale

51 For more on the role of economic consultants in legitimizing growth agendas in the city, see David H. Laslo, ―Proliferating Convention Centers: The Political Economy of Regenerating Cities and the St. Louis Convention Center Expansion,‖ (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri–St. Louis, 1999), which focuses on the process of the center‘s expansion in the early 1990s. 52 ―Convention Center is the northern anchor of the new Downtown St. Louis,‖ St. Louis Globe- Democrat, 23-24 July 1977.

130 efforts such as parades, slide presentations, and even nightly screenings of the 1970 feature film The Out-of-Towners as promotional efforts for the center.53

The convention center effort received its most vociferous challenge from the city‘s

African-American community, particularly working-class and poor blacks living in the city‘s

North Side neighborhoods near the center site. For these residents, the convention center was the latest in a long line of urban redevelopment decisions, made without their input, that infringed upon their communities while maintaining the city‘s system of de facto social and economic racial apartheid. Sharing these concerns was the Action Committee to Improve

Opportunities for Negroes (ACTION), a local self-described ―interracial human rights group‖ that strongly protested the center. Opposition also came from neighborhood representatives in other parts of the city, who felt that the growth coalition had captured the city‘s fiscal agenda and directed it towards serving the needs of downtown businessmen and tourists rather than addressing the concerns of underserved neighborhood residents. Whatever their specific concerns, opponents regularly appealed to a more holistic definition of urban success and a broader vision of urban government‘s responsibilities. They expressed fears that the heralded promises of tourism renewal signaled the abandonment of the urban liberalism of the New

Deal order and the decline of participatory politics in determining the future of St. Louis.

Early efforts to challenge the growth coalition were successful. The convention center plan was brought to an abrupt halt in the March 1971 city election, when the issue fell far short of the two-thirds majority necessary for approval. Indeed, more than two-thirds of the city voted against the proposed bond issue, a vote described by the local press as ―the worst

53 Memo, Alfonso J. Cervantes to Joseph Badaracco. 11 January 1971. Series I, Box 6, Joseph Badaracco Papers, Special Collections, Washington University Libraries, St. Louis. The choice of The Out-of-Towners was especially odd, given that the film is based around the troubles and mishaps a couple suffers while visiting a city.

131 defeat to a capital improvement proposal in recent history.‖ 54 Despite the sunny ad campaign that promised ―the biggest business boom our City has ever known,‖ voters were not convinced that the project was worthy of tax dollars, especially in the context of a recent housing crisis, underserviced neighborhoods, and rising crime in the city.

Immediately after the defeat of the issue, the growth coalition began strategizing new methods of advancing their vision. ―We‘ve lost the battle but we haven‘t lost the war yet,‖

Sverdrup publicly proclaimed.55 In February 1972 Cervantes established a task force of business leaders to explore alternative methods of financing the proposed center. The second proposal, placed on the ballot in November 1972, eliminated the property tax increase (the bond would, in theory, be retired by convention center revenues and merchant taxes from the city‘s general funds) and also required two-thirds voter approval. This time, the bond issue won by an overwhelming margin.56

Growth coalition spokesmen were typically vague when explaining how the new bond issue was to be retired without a property tax increase. A key shift in federal urban policy aided the city in financing the $25 million convention center in the midst of its own financial hardships. The key to the second convention center financing plan was a relatively new federal program known as revenue sharing, in which federal monies were distributed back to local governments for support of urban improvements. The Nixon Administration argued that previous federal aid programs had placed too many restrictions on implementation of funding,

54 ―Smile!‖ Box 1, Folder 2, Downtown St. Louis Inc. Records, Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, University of Missouri – St. Louis [hereafter DSL]; ―Center Plan Loses, Mayor to Try Again,‖ St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 10 March 1971. Quotation is from ―Center Could Boost Revenues,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 30 October 1972. 55 ―Convention Center is the northern anchor of the new Downtown St. Louis,‖ St. Louis Globe- Democrat, 23-24 July 1977. 56 ―Center Could Boost Revenues‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 30 October 1972; ―Convention Center Is Approved,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch 8 November 1972; ―Convention Center is the northern anchor of the new Downtown St. Louis,‖ St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 23-24 July 1977

132 and hampered local government‘s ability to respond to unique crises in individual communities. This program was officially enacted as the State and Local Fiscal Assistance

Act (SLFA) of 1972. Unlike most previous federal aid, however, revenue sharing funds had few specific guidelines as to their use. While revenue sharing funds could be utilized for transportation systems, infrastructure maintenance or environmental improvements, the act also allowed the funds to be allocated for ―ordinary and necessary capital expenditures as authorized by law.‖ In other words, urban leaders had almost no restrictions on the use of these federal monies. And, in its initial form, the act made no provisions that the public be informed on how these funds would be spent.57 The temptation among municipal leaders to use revenue sharing funds for capital improvements as opposed to improvement of social services was strong. Development projects were easily measurable signs of urban

―revitalization‖ – new buildings in the city‘s downtowns and on its tax rolls. In addition, they were permanent, whereas the implementation of social programs with federal aid was risky, as urban politicians could be put in the uncomfortable and politically perilous position of discontinuing such programs if federal funds dried up.

The timing of the SLFA was thus especially opportune for St. Louis growth coalition leaders, who without it would have faced an uphill battle in selling their project to citizens.

While the St. Louis convention center - unlike many postwar urban tourist developments - was subject to public approval, revenue sharing allowed growth coalition leaders to shuffle the city‘s finances in such a way as to disguise the center‘s true cost. The center appeared to be essentially self-supporting, when in fact it only shifted federal funds away from other city services. Pro-center leadership portrayed the center as a new solution to the social problems

57 Judd and Swanstrom, City Politics, 224-227; Nicki King, Federal Revenue Sharing: Variations on the Theme “Inner City Blues” (Santa Monica, CA: The Rand Corporation), 1973.

133 earlier addressed by categorical direct-aid programs. ―The implications for easing our housing crisis alone are tremendous,‖ claimed Ted McNeal, former Missouri state senator and co-chair of the Citizens for the Civic-Convention Center (CCCC). ―HUD [is]…through with solving St. Louis‘ problems by itself. It‘s looking for us to help ourselves before it gives any more help. The convention center…is an excellent means of showing our own commitment to solving local problems.‖58 The shift in federal policy away from the specific social programs of the Great Society and toward the relatively unrestricted – and more development- friendly – models of the Nixon administration thus enabled the flourishing of the urban tourist industry, both in St. Louis and nationwide.

The elimination of increased property taxes was obviously a significant factor in the passage of the second bond issue, but the second campaign was also starkly different from the first – far more sophisticated in its appeals and far-reaching in its efforts to convince voters.

If the first campaign was relatively low-key and positive, the second was an all-out blitz, utilizing every resource at the command of the growth coalition. The rhetoric and strategies of the second campaign, drawn here from marketing proposals, campaign materials, city documents, and the discourse of the city‘s media outlets, provide a valuable window into understanding how the coalition undermined the arguments of those who challenged their vision of tourist economic growth. Ultimately, the St. Louis convention center was the product of successful exploitation of fears of urban decline combined with a compelling (if unrealistic) promise of unbridled economic revival. In response to critics who challenged these arguments, the coalition showed a remarkable ability to navigate the complex racial

58 ―News Release, Citizens for Civic-Convention Center,‖ 24 October 1972, Series 2, Box 19, AJC Papers.

134 politics of the city and frame its vision of downtown development as the solution to the broad spectrum of ills that plagued the city in the postwar period.

At the most basic level, the growth coalition used two basic lines of persuasion to push the approval of the second convention center bond issue. A marketing proposal for the second campaign, submitted by the local public relations firm of Deppe and Associates, summed up the growth coalition message well. The convention center campaign, Deppe and

Associates proposed, should be driven by a ―twin theme – fear of what will happen to the city if the Center does not materialize, and desire to participate in the benefits if it does materialize. Or, more bluntly, fear and greed…two powerful emotional prods.‖ Unlike the first campaign, which had focused mainly on the positive economic benefits of the center, the second campaign took on a darker, more drastic tone, as promoters painted a picture of complete urban collapse without approval of the convention center. ―Every facet of the PR campaign,‖ continued the proposal, ―must make clear to the most apathetic St. Louisan that he is facing an ‗or else‘ situation, a ‗last chance‘ situation – a situation that could be bad but will be good if he acts.‖59 In sum, ―No bland, happy, smiling approach is going to sway the voter of 1972 – we‘ve got to hit hard, frighten them, and promise, if not utopia, at least progress.‖

Although the larger advertising firm of Fleishman and Hillard was ultimately chosen by the city to run the campaign public relations program, the strategy so colorfully outlined by

Deppe and Associates was utilized almost to the letter. The dual themes of the threat of urban decay and the promise of prosperity - fear and greed - drove nearly all public rhetoric around the second convention center proposal.

59 Deppe & Associates, Inc., ―A Proposal to Revitalize the Convention Center Concept,‖ Series 2, Box 20, Folder ―New Tourist Center‖ AJC Papers.

135 The prospective approval of the convention center brought promises of unprecedented and unrestrained urban revival from business and political leaders. Department store owner J.

Arthur Baer, president of Downtown St. Louis Inc., assured St. Louisans that the prospect of the new convention center meant that ―the city is now on the brink of what might be called its golden years,‖ he continued, ―in future years, the convention center will be seen as a turning- point in the city‘s history.‖60 Advertising pamphlets urged St. Louisans to ―Vote YES –

Make St. Louis a Really Great City,‖ as if the convention center proposition would suddenly solve the city‘s endemic problems.

The convention center issue was generally supported by the city‘s media outlets, which also used the ―greed/fear‖ rhetoric. As other scholars have noted, because newspapers and other media are inextricably linked to the fortunes of their city, they almost always support tourist development, especially that which promises to revitalize a struggling metropolis.61 The Globe-Democrat envisioned that the center would bring ―a resurgence of the city‘s heritage, a return to the halcyon era of easy-going good living, good dining and good entertainment.‖62 Just before the first vote on the convention center bond issue, the Post-

Dispatch ran an editorial implying that the entire fate of the city hinged on a convention center. The author asserted that the vote in the bond issue election was a ―choice between economic growth and decline‖ for St. Louis. The new center, the author speculated, ―will

60 ―City on Brink of its golden years‖ St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 11 November 1972. 61 See Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes, 70-73. For examples specifically relating to media‘s support for tourism and sports development, see Timothy Jon Curry, Kent Schwirian, and Rachael A. Woldoff, High Stakes: Big Time Sports and Downtown Redevelopment. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 87, as well as Robert C. Trumpbour, The New Cathedrals: Politics And Media in the History of Stadium Construction, (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006). 62 ―City on Brink of its golden years‖ St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 11 November 1972.

136 spark at least $55 million of private investment in the plaza…and untold millions of additional investment elsewhere.‖63

Tourism boosters in the city‘s media were also not above doomsday rhetoric that exploited fears of urban decline to achieve their ends. The day before the second bond issue election, a Globe-Democrat editorial argued that a defeat of public financing for the convention center would signal a ―haunting return to the fears and frustrations of the past‖ for the city. Such a course represented a ―dark road to nowhere.‖ After extolling the virtues of the center, the editorial concluded bluntly, ―Thus a vote against the convention center would be stupid. The voter would be…undermining his city‘s future and his neighborhood‘s future.‖64 Similarly, CCCC co-chair Ted McNeal declared in an ominous public statement,

―This issue will decide the fate of St. Louis.‖65 Investment in tourist infrastructure, according to this rhetoric, was absolutely necessary to save a rapidly deteriorating city.

A similar argument emerged in a series of news editorials produced by local television station KMOX-TV. In an evening broadcast on May 11, 1972 KMOX noted that despite the development of the Gateway Arch, the new stadium, hotels and other improvements to downtown, ―St. Louis [has] still not solved the problems of the hard-core jobless, the newly unemployed, housing for the poor, crime in the streets, and spreading blight.‖ KMOX assured its viewers that the key to getting the city back on track was a ―job-creating, wealth- producing, business-stimulating convention center.‖66 The editorial thus simultaneously acknowledged that previous tourist-oriented development had failed to address the central

63 ―A Yes Vote for St. Louis Growth,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 8 March 1971. Vague promises such as ―untold millions‖ frequently made appearances in convention center booster rhetoric, in part because the actual economic benefits of tourism investment have always been difficult to precisely quantify. 64 ―Turning Point for St. Louis‖ St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 6 November 1972. 65 ―KMOX-TV Editorial,‖ Box 1, Folder 2,DSL. 66 Ibid.

137 issues of urban decline, while promising that the convention center would be the key to solving those problems. Despite these apparent contradictions, growth coalition members

(and their supporters in the city‘s media) rarely wavered from their twin message of the fear of urban decline and the promise of unlimited prosperity.

Many St. Louis residents, however, remained skeptical that the promised riches would do anything more than create new wealthy for downtown property owners in the convention center area. They charged that the city, aided by the new flexibility of federal aid, had redirected the priorities of urban revitalization toward downtown development and away from the best interests of average citizens. During the second convention center campaign, five members of St. Louis‘ board of aldermen (a group that included future U.S. Congressman

Dick Gephardt) publicly demanded a major financial commitment to their neighborhoods as part of the convention bond issue, asking that $5 million from the city‘s federal revenue sharing funds be earmarked for neighborhood improvement for the next five years, thus equaling the $25 million to be spent on the convention center. Cervantes rejected the proposal, telling the aldermen to ―grow up‖ and accused the aldermen of ―trying to divide the city into downtown and neighborhoods.‖67 To be sure, the demand by the aldermen (labeled the ―young Turks‖ by political opponents) was in part political grandstanding in a much larger overall struggle for power in City Hall, but it also highlighted a real concern from the city‘s neighborhoods that the growth coalition had prioritized flashy downtown developments over basic municipal services. Pro-center moved quickly to defuse such criticism, arguing that the wealth generated by the center would spread into the neighborhoods by providing more jobs for city residents, higher tax revenues to pay for city services, and even the eventual reduction

67―Hits Back at Young Turks on Convention Center Bond Issue,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 8 October 1972.

138 of property taxes as the city coffers filled from tourist industry tax revenues. Approximately a month before the second bond issue election, Cervantes went before the city‘s Aldermen with a nine-page prepared speech defending the convention center and outlining the city‘s commitment to its neighborhoods, including precise statistics on the number of dead trees and loads of trash removed over the previous five years. While making no commitment of federal funds as the aldermen requested, Cervantes agreed only generally that ―we should and we must do more for the neighborhoods as money becomes available.‖68

One of the mayor‘s allies on the aldermanic board expressed exasperation with those who questioned the viability and benefits of the $25 million dollar project. ―All week long it has been an endless procession of blacks, Turks, and south St. Louis political leaders in the

Mayor‘s office, saying they are for the convention center if they could just get a piece of the pie,‖ complained Alderman Henry Stolar to the city press. Stolar portrayed the conflict as one of self-interested groups versus community-minded public servants, arguing that convention center doubters should ―put their personal axes aside and unite to obtain passage‖ of the convention center bond.69 By framing the convention center as a public-interest project essential to the health of the city, center promoters were able to portray their opponents (or anyone who questioned the broader value of public investment in the center) as self- interested, backwards, and lacking civic virtue.

Concurrent with the language of civic responsibility was an effort to minimize the argument that the convention center benefited only visitors to St. Louis, and to position the convention center as a public and civic institution, rather than simply an income generator for hospitality businesses. The public relations proposal submitted by the Winius-Brandon firm

68 Speech to St. Louis Board of Aldermen, 6 October 1972, Series I, Box 6, Joseph Badaracco Papers. 69 ―Hits Back at Young Turks on Convention Center Bond Issue,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 8 October, 1972

139 proposed utilizing ―a substitute name for Convention Center‖ in the second campaign.

―Although the new facility will primarily be used for conventions,‖ acknowledged the proposal, ―it is not necessary to label the facility as a ‗Convention Center.‘ In our judgment, this carries a strong implication that the facility will primarily serve the interests of out-of- towners rather than residents. Therefore, it is our recommendation that the new facility carry a non-descriptive name…or a name which centers attention on the city and its residents, such as Municipal Auditorium, Town Hall, Civic Center, etc.‖70 Like growth coalition rhetoric which labeled doubters as self-interested, the change in names for the center appealed to a sense of civic responsibility and virtue. Names like ―Town Hall‖ or ―Civic Center‖ referenced an earlier generation of urban buildings that had - at least ideally - served as centers of community pride and public dialogue.71 Again, while Winius-Brandon did not ultimately manage the bond issue campaign, pro-center campaigners quickly adopted the name-change tactic. Cervantes and other coalition members began calling the building the

―Civic-Convention Center‖ in public statements, and the language on the actual ballot for the bond issue labeled the project a ―Convention, Exhibition and Community Center Building.‖72

Of course, as the original proposal acknowledged, such terminology was disingenuous; private business and outside visitors would be the primary users of the center. Appealing to an ethic of the public good was simply a rhetorical tool to justify public funding. Pro-center leaders of the growth coalition thus gained significant political ground by framing the

70 Winius-Brandon Company, ―Convention Center Public Relations Proposal,‖ Series 2, Box 20, Folder ―New Tourist Center,‖ AJC Papers. 71 On the role of these earlier buildings, and the significance of names of such structures, see Cocks, Doing the Town, 139-142. 72 Citizens for Civic-Convention Center, promotional brochure, Box 1, Folder 2, DSL.

140 convention center as the single solution to the problems of the city and marginalizing opponents as lacking disinterested civic virtue.

It was clear to all, however, that one group ultimately controlled the fate of the convention center: the city‘s black population. The first center bond issue had been defeated heavily in inner-city black districts, and the proposed location of the center was a controversial choice within the black community. Many black St. Louisans perceived the convention center to be a project planned by and created for whites, with little likelihood of benefits extending to the black community. Just before the second bond issue election, Ozzie

Goliday, a 20-year-old African-American woman, noted that she didn‘t vote for the convention center in the first election because ―it doesn‘t do anything for my people. Let them put it in the white neighborhood because they are the ones who will be getting the good jobs.‖73 Goliday‘s statement highlighted several key issues that had long rankled the city‘s

African-American population: the highly polarized residential segregation of the city, the ongoing destruction of inner-city neighborhoods for urban renewal projects, and the persistent pattern of employment discrimination, particularly in higher-profile positions (the ―good jobs‖).

Members of the growth coalition were often frustrated with their inability to convince urban blacks of the benefits of a convention center and its supposed downtown revitalization.

Robert Hillard (of the Fleishman-Hillard marketing firm) echoed this sentiment in a February

1972 letter to Downtown St. Louis, Inc. chairman J.A. Baer. Hillard told of a conversation with Harold Antoine, a fellow member of DSL, noting that Antoine felt that the groups‘ recent meetings ―perhaps have concentrated overmuch on Inner City problems and problem areas . . . and that particularly the black members of our group should take an occasional look

73 ―North Siders Skeptical About Convention Center,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 2 November 1972.

141 at the larger picture‖ and refocus on downtown issues. He continued, ―In this case, if downtown goes down the drain, what good will ghetto problem-solving accomplish? What can be done to convince the black community that voting ‗yes‘ for a convention center is just as essential for the health of the total community as solutions to housing, crime, etc.(?)‖74

The campaign marketing proposals submitted for the second bond issue campaign make it clear that selling the black community on the center was a top priority. Deppe and

Associates proclaimed on the first page of their proposal that the convention center ―could unite black and white, Southside and Northside, business and labor.‖ In identifying the key reasons the first bond issue failed, the firm blamed the ―taxpayers revolt‖ of the early 1970s, a

―credibility gap‖ on the part of city officials, and racial polarization, in which blacks

―couldn‘t see spending tax money ‗so a bunch of white dudes can have their jollies‘‖ while whites ―either felt no involvement or assumed that ‗only the blacks will get anything out of it.‘‖ To combat these problems, Deppe and Associates proposed a new ―grassroots‖ approach that would be custom tailored to various groups – whites, blacks, labor, etc. The firm proposed constructing a task force to help ―precondition‖ the St. Louis public on the need for a convention center. In proposing the makeup of such a group, the proposal showed a shrewd understanding of the racial component of the political battle, as well as class divisions within the African American community itself. The task force, the proposal said, needed ―more black faces. And they should not be Establishment blacks…the ministers, the lawyers, the bankers. Let‘s get the black community‘s ‗Now‘ leaders on our side.‖ The firm proposed ―a militant young poverty worker…or a black radio station disc jockey, with his enthusiastic following‖ as the type of ―natural leaders‖ who could sell a convention center to the black

74 Robert Hillard to J.A. Baer, 29 February 1972, Box 1, Folder 2, DSL.

142 community. A competing proposal from the firm of Winius-Brandon also echoed the theme of building ―grass roots‖ support among special interest groups, with labor and black community groups at the top of the list.75

The growth coalition aggressively solicited the city‘s African-American leadership for support on the convention center issue. Black attorneys, doctors, university professors, and presidents of businesses – in other words, members of the city‘s black elite or professional class - staffed a number of the sub-committees of the Citizens for the Civic-Convention

Center, a fact publicized by the growth coalition.76 Three of the city‘s leading professional

African-American women also served as co-chairs of the Women‘s Committee of the

CCCC.77 The mayor‘s office courted African-American churches‘ support for the center, compiling a mailing list of eighty-five black ministers for the convention center campaign.78

The convention center proposal was heavily advertised in the city‘s black newspapers as well, and those papers regularly featured articles about professional black community leaders who endorsed the center.

Even after this targeted media campaign, the benefits of the new convention center to urban blacks still seemed dubious. Long-held resentment towards the city‘s leadership, which had been dominated by wealthy whites and a select group of black elites, made the promises ring hollow for some. Doubts were particularly strong among poorer and working-class blacks in the north side neighborhoods. A week before the second bond issue election, the

Post-Dispatch profiled Magnolia Gammon, a 60-year-old black resident of North St. Louis

75 Deppe & Associates, Inc., ―A Proposal to Revitalize‖; Winius Brandon Company, ―Convention Center Public Relations Proposal‖ Series 2, Box 20, Folder ―New Tourist Center‖ AJC Papers. 76 News Release, 24 October 1972, Citizens for Civic-Convention Center, Series 2, Box 19, Folder ―Convention Center Election‖ AJC Papers. 77 ―Convention Center Bond Issue Strongly Backed,‖ St. Louis Sentinel, 31 October 1972. 78 ―Black Ministers-Convention Center, 1972,‖ Series 2, Box 19, Folder ―Convention Center Election,‖ AJC Papers.

143 who declared her intention to vote against the convention center issue, even with the elimination of the property tax increase. Gammon cited the numerous failures of past urban renewal projects as one of her primary objections to the center, as well as the fact that the city‘s priorities seemed to misdirected in focusing on downtown while urban neighborhoods were struggling. The paper quoted Gammon: ―The main things should be homes, schools, hospital…How can they talk about a convention center, when people are living like this?‖

Without some concessions to the needs of black residents, Gammon and many other blacks in the city seemed unlikely to support the convention center. ―We‘re not getting anything one way or the other, so what‘s the motivation to vote for a bond issue?‖ The Post-Dispatch noted the distinct possibility that ―Mrs. Gammon‘s skepticism is typical of many voters on the black North Side.‖79

Other blacks were more direct in their opposition to the convention center plan. The

Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes (ACTION) was particularly vocal.

From its beginnings as an offshoot of the St Louis Congress of Racial Equality (CORE),

ACTION had been a thorn in the side of the city‘s business and political elites. The group, founded in 1964, focused specifically on expanding job opportunities for blacks and challenging the endemic racism in hiring practices at such St. Louis heavyweights as

McDonnell-Douglass, Wonder Bread, Southwestern Bell, and the city‘s utilities operations.80

ACTION was chaired by Percy Green, a controversial figure in St. Louis politics who often

79 ―Opponent of the Center Cites Unkept Promises,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1 November 1972. 80 For a thorough exploration of ACTION‘s development and its place in the context of black freedom politics, see Clarence Lang, ―Between Civil Rights and Black Power in the Gateway City: The Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes (ACTION), 1964-75,‖ Journal of Social History 37. no. 3 (2004), 725-754.

144 espoused theatrical tactics to draw attention to the plight of urban blacks.81 Green and other members of ACTION were undoubtedly the type of ―militant young poverty worker‖ that the

Deppe and Associates marketing proposal hoped to recruit for convention center support, but

ACTION‘s position on the center was clear. In response to politicians‘ claims that the center would benefit everyone through its creation of jobs and influx of ―outside‖ dollars, ACTION

Vice-Chairman ―Judge‖ Johnson responded, ―we have heard that lie before,‖ and asserted that bankers, politicians, and the city‘s business elite would be the only real beneficiaries of the center.82 At a city-sponsored rally supporting the second convention center proposal,

ACTION distributed flyers with the headline ―For a Unified Cause Kill the Convention

Center – It‘s a Trick!!‖ (the slogan was likely a mockery of coalition leaders‘ fondness for acronyms in bond issue campaigns).83 Green declared that the convention center was a

―device for downtown retailers and politicians to make money.‖84

Members of ACTION also often criticized the black wealthy and professional class of

St. Louis for aligning themselves politically with the city‘s white elite, while neglecting the urgent needs of the city‘s black population. In June of 1970, members of ACTION, wearing

81 For example, when downtown merchants launched a promotional program to promote downtown Christmas shopping in 1974, Green countered by encouraging criminals to focus their shoplifting on those stores, simultaneously targeting those merchants and exploiting suburban fears of black crime to discourage business. He perceived downtown department stores as merely another part of the power structure of the city that ignored the problems of blacks living around them. ―ACTION Encourages Shoplifting‖ St. Louis American, 12 December 1974. While retail stores have long been recognized as major sites of southern civil rights protests, there is an emerging historical literature which explores the relationship between northern downtown merchants and urban black politics in the 1960s and 1970s. For one of the best examples, see Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (University of Chicago Press, 2005), esp. Chapter 6 ―The Hollow Prize?: Black Buyers, Racial Violence, and the Riot Renaissance,‖ pp. 203-254. Such actions also had their roots in prewar African-American consumer activist campaigns against department store discriminatory hiring. See also Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003), 41-53, 286-288. 82 ―ACTION Against Convention Center Bond Issue,‖ St. Louis Argus, 26 February 1971. 83 Box 1, Folder 2, DSL. 84 ―ACTION Opposes Center Bond Issue,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1 November 1972.

145 sunglasses and berets and calling themselves a ―Guerilla Force,‖ had distributed leaflets in many of St. Louis‘ black churches entitled ―Are Negro Ministers Pimping Black Church

Goers?‖ The pamphlets asserted that ―the only issues your minister publicly supports are

‗city bond issues.‘ This is because white money changers (politicians) sponsor and pay him for misleading the Black congregation.‖85 The convention center campaign exacerbated the already-extant schism between urban working-class and poor blacks like those in ACTION and their more well-to-do counterparts. Editors of the city‘s African-American newspapers, the American and the Argus, were strongly supportive of the convention center bond issue. At the same time the city‘s two black newspapers maintained a cautious distance from ACTION and other politically active urban blacks, and were sometimes openly critical of these groups.86

It would be too simplistic, however, to characterize black political and business leaders who supported the convention center as mere pawns in the hands of the growth coalition elite. Many sought to utilize the convention center development as an opportunity for advancing African-American participation in the city‘s anticipated revitalization, and they made specific demands on the growth coalition. Four days before the first bond issue election, a group of black ministers and businessmen met with Mayor Cervantes, requesting that if the issue won approval, one third of both the construction labor force and maintenance force be blacks, that two members of the convention board of managers be blacks, and that black-owned banks and insurance brokers play a role in the financial management of the center. Cervantes refused to set precise numbers, but agreed to sign a resolution that

85 St. Louis American, 11 June 1970. 86 One editorial in the American, for example, accused the group of promoting the ―brain-washed fantasies‖ of the back-to-Africa movement while implying that male members of ACTION exploited their membership in the group to seduce white women. St. Louis American, 30 October 1969, 8.

146 promised a ―substantial number‖ of blacks in the convention center labor force, as well as some involvement with black financial institutions.87 Because the first bond issue was defeated, the agreement was immaterial. Still, such negotiations underscore both the importance of the black vote to pro-center forces, as well as the political negotiating skill of the city‘s African-American leaders in forcing St. Louis‘ growth coalition to officially acknowledge and address the economic inequalities that were a product of the city‘s long- standing racial divide.

The city‘s black press also used its voice to attempt to advance economic opportunities beyond the mere promise of ―jobs‖ for blacks. They called for entrée of blacks into more lucrative positions in the convention center, and expansion of black businessmen into the city‘s corporate community as a whole. Argus president Nannie Mitchell, after making it clear that the paper supported the bond issue, addressed ―the giant firms‖ pushing the convention center, declaring ―it is high time that these same firms look at key members of our [black] community who have the know how, integrity, community support and financial resources to serve shoulder to shoulder with them on their various boards of directors…our community will come forward even more enthusiastically [in support of the center] when they see this positive evidence of being included in.‖88 Thus Mitchell utilized the convention center issue to point to larger inequalities within the city‘s corporate power structure. An editorial in the black paper St. Louis Sentinel agreed that the creation of jobs for unemployed blacks was a positive effect of the convention center, but that the center ―is going to generate more than just jobs. It will have parking facilities; concession stands, insurance, etc…We feel that it is now time that black men have an opportunity to share in some of the bigger pie…We

87 Correspondence, 5 March 1971, Series 2, Box 20, Folder ―New Tourist Center,‖ AJC Papers. 88 St. Louis Argus, 19 October 1972.

147 will expect our share of jobs, yes. But we must also want to share in some of the broader aspects of these facilities which our votes are used to bring into fruition. The black man has come of age and he must be allowed to share in the financial levels of this city. There is no better place to start than the Convention Center.‖89

These appeals by the city‘s black leadership, while not insignificant, were never a real threat to the overall strategy of downtown development advanced by the convention center promoters. St. Louis‘ growth coalition gained sufficient black support for the convention center by catering to and mobilizing the city‘s middle class and professional blacks while largely dismissing the concerns raised by those African-Americans with less political and economic clout. In exchange for promises of new jobs and racial quotas in construction hiring, the convention center received editorial support in the city‘s black newspapers and active campaigning on the part of the city‘s black middle class – and, ultimately, black votes for the center bond issue. The opportunity for a trans-class racially-based opposition to the convention center was thus undercut. This process, which historian and sociologist Michael

Katz has termed ―selective inclusion‖90 – that is, making the opportunities for social and economic mobility available to a limited sector of the African-American population in order to depoliticize urban blacks – was a key component in aiding tourist development in downtowns, both in St. Louis and many other cities. The divide over the convention center issue furthered the splintering of the city‘s black population, which had united to defeat

89 ―A New Ballgame,‖ St. Louis Sentinel, 21 November 1972. 90 Michael Katz, ―Why Aren‘t US Cities Burning?‖ Dissent, Summer 2007.

148 segregation and Jim Crow institutions in the early postwar period but had begun to fracture over issues of class and political methodology by the late 1950s and 1960s.91

Lacking support from the city‘s black leadership, blacks of North St. Louis were largely left to seek other avenues for assuring that their concerns remained in the public discourse. Many felt they were eliminated before the conversation even began. In the same year the convention center bond issue won approval (1972) the city‘s Housing Authority began the demolition of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing project, only a few blocks northwest of the center‘s proposed location. As the Housing Authority proceeded with demolition preparations, a St. Louis HUD officer reported to the Authority that in his meetings with neighborhood black citizens‘ groups he found that ―they perceive the chain of events leading to the construction of the Convention Center and the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe as an indication that there is a plan between the city and the major businessmen to eliminate poor, black people from the Convention Center area.‖ The citizens feared that such a plan also included the eventual demolition of the Cochran Gardens project, and as a whole ―the real concern of these citizens is that the reuse of the Pruitt-Igoe land is being planned without consideration of the low-income and black community‘s needs.‖92 Several North Side residents echoed this suspicion on the eve of the second bond issue election. ―Everybody wants to sneak something down here so they can tear up the projects,‖ said one resident. Another predicted, ―I think the projects will close and the people will be left out in the cold.‖93

91 Clarence E. Lang, "Community and Resistance in the Gateway City: Black National Consciousness, Working-class Formation, and Social Movements in St. Louis, Missouri, 1941-1964," (Ph.D. diss.,University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004), especially 466-508. 92―Pruitt Homes and Igoe Apartments Public Housing Complex – Draft: Environmental Impact Statement.‖ St. Louis Office, Housing and Urban Development, May 1974, Series I, Box 8, ―Housing Authority‖ folder, Joseph L. Badaracco Papers. 93 ―North Siders Skeptical About Convention Center,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 2 November 1972.

149 Fearing the sort of top-down redevelopment that minimized low-income and black involvement, North St. Louis residents sought to leverage the convention center to gain commitments for improvements to their living conditions. Before the second bond issue election, a group of Cochran Gardens and other North Side residents petitioned Mayor

Cervantes, City Comptroller John H. Poelker, Alderman Joseph Badaracco, and HUD representative Elmo Turner for a guarantee that HUD would provide $40 million in the next three years for the rehabilitation of public housing, that no effort would be made to remove low-income residents from Cochran Gardens, and that ―rehabilitation of the Cochran apartments will be completed before the Convention Center is opened … as a symbol of St.

Louis‘ commitment to all its citizens.‖94 In response, the St. Louis Housing Authority issued a letter to all Cochran residents, citing ―assurances from the Mayor of the City of St. Louis, and other city officials‖ that the center would be a ―positive step‖ for the residents of

Cochran, though the letter contained no commitment to the specific improvements called for by residents. ―We wish to emphatically deny,‖ the letter continued, ―that there is any intent on the part of anyone to attempt a change in the operations of the Cochran development as a low-rent housing project.‖95 It is impossible to know, of course, what the long-term aspirations of the growth coalition were for a piece of such potentially valuable real estate, but

North Side public housing residents were able to gain a written commitment from the city that their homes would remain untouched (if not, as they hoped, substantially improved) by the convention center project.

The growth coalition was not unmindful of the thorny problem of building a gleaming new tourist attraction within plain view of a dilapidated public housing project. Besides

94 ―Petition‖ Series 2, Box 19, Folder ―Convention Center Election,‖ AJC Papers. 95 Correspondence, 6 November 1972, Series 2, Box 19, Folder ―Convention Center Election,‖ AJC Papers.

150 angering public housing residents, the location also risked losing business because of the perceived danger of crime from nearby projects. Those who objected to the convention center‘s chosen location often pointed to the area‘s high crime rate. One business owner in

South St. Louis expressed bewilderment that city leaders ―put [the center] down in that hoodlum neighborhood. People would come from out of town and go to a convention there, and they‘d get their clothes torn off of them.‖96 The St. Louis growth coalition ameliorated this problem by its favorite solution: real estate development. A year after the convention center‘s dedication, the city applied for and received a $15.5 million federal Urban

Development Action Grant (UDAG) to redevelop portions of downtown near the center. A portion of that funding – approximately $5 million - went to the city‘s Housing Authority, for rehabilitation and new construction in the Cochran Gardens project. The lion‘s share of the

UDAG went to the city‘s Land Clearance Redevelopment Authority, which used the funds to spur hotel and retail development around the convention center. The LCRA also used $2.5 million of those UDAG funds to purchase land and aid construction of the Columbus Square

Apartments, a 500-unit market-rate apartment and condominium complex located on the northern border of the convention center. The Columbus Square apartments were advertised as ideal housing for middle-income central business district workers, but they also served another function: a physical buffer between the convention center and the Cochran Gardens public housing project, which by the mid 1970s was in a state of frightening dilapidation.97

St. Louis‘s use of the convention center development to ―protect‖ downtown from poorer African-American neighborhoods was by no means unusual. Sociologist Larry Ford,

96 ―Merchant on South Side Unconvinced on Center,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 25 October 1972. 97 ―UDAG Report‖ Box 2, Folder 40, DSL Records, Addenda; ―Inside Downtown‖ newsletter, June 1978. Box 2 Folder 40, DSL Records Addenda; David H. Laslo, ―Proliferating Convention Centers,‖ 79.

151 in his recent study of downtowns, has observed that convention centers, because of their large size, are perfect ―walling‖ buildings to fence downtowns in from poor, often minority-heavy residential areas of a city.98 When Pittsburgh announced plans to construct its convention center in the early 1970s, city leaders raised immediate outrage by proposing a site in the

Lower Hill District on downtown‘s eastern border. The choice seemed to indicate an alarming insensitivity on the part of city planners. Not only was the Lower Hill District the historic center of African-American life in the city, but it was also a district still recovering from the ravages of the city‘s most controversial postwar renewal project, the Mellon Civic

Arena. The arena, completed in 1961, was built on ground previously occupied by hundreds of black households, with scant provisions made for their relocation.99 The convention center proposal seemed a disturbing instance of deja vu for Hill residents. Echoing many of their counterparts in St. Louis, protestors called for greater municipal investment in community development, especially suitable housing for the district, rather than the proposed convention center. Hill District native Sala Udin asked, ―How can they erect a commercial building adjacent to a community in such dire poverty?‖ Another community leader called the convention center proposal ―criminal when we need decent housing so desperately.‖100 In

Pittsburgh, city leaders eventually moved the center to a less controversial location near the downtown riverfront, but such victories were uncommon. In Atlanta, for example, the sprawling George World Congress Center (the city‘s convention facility) and Georgia Dome stadium wall off the western portion of downtown from the city‘s troubled West Side

98 Larry Ford, America's New Downtowns: Revitalization or Reinvention? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 300-302. 99 Roy Lubove, Twentieth Century Pittsburgh: Government, Business and Environmental Change (New York: Wiley, 1969). 100 ―Hill Leaders Oppose Melody Tent Location,‖ Pittsburgh Courier, 14 August 1971.

152 neighborhoods, an effect reinforced by major highways to the downtown‘s south and east.101

Opponents of such development rarely possess the organizational resources or political capital to prevent downtown-oriented leaders from physically erasing them from the view of the central city. In more recent years in St. Louis, the expansion of the convention center, the construction of a massive domed sports complex next door, and attached parking garages have reinforced the fortification blocking downtown properties from the still-struggling

Northside.

Construction crews broke ground on the St. Louis convention center in 1974.

ACTION continued protests after the convention center bond issue passed. As the center was under construction that summer, members of the group climbed to the top of a 50-foot piledriver on the site and hung banners alleging racial discrimination in construction hiring.102

A month later, ACTION vowed to work against a proposed $100 million city bond issue

(unrelated to the convention center) unless the city guaranteed broader benefits for the city‘s blacks, more employment of minorities in construction jobs, and a binding guarantee that fifty percent of the bond issue be spent in North St. Louis. ACTION leader Percy Green again pointed to what he labeled the ―1972 Convention Center Watergate Caper‖ as the type of

101 See Harvey K. Newman, ―Race and the Tourist Bubble in Downtown Atlanta,‖ Urban Affairs Review 37 (January 2002): 301-321; Larry Ford, Downtown America, 300-304. Ford notes other cities that have used their convention centers for similar walling purposes, including Denver and San Antonio. 102 ―Impasse,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch 11 July 1974. This echoed a 1964 act in which members of ACTION climbed a portion of the Gateway Arch to protest discriminatory construction hiring; it was this theatrical protest which first ―made a name‖ for the group. See Lang, ―Between Civil Rights and Black Power,‖ 725.

153 action which made he and many other black St. Louisans doubt the $100 million would be spent in the interests of the average citizen.103

As predicted by its promoters, the convention center was a catalyst for development in the area around it. The Sheraton chain completed a 614-room hotel just east of the center in

1977, which was followed by a 350-room Radisson hotel to the center‟s west.104 Little construction, however, took place beyond the immediate confines of the center. By fiscal year 1979-1980, the center had hosted more than half a million conventioneers.105 Still, in

1983, the center‟s management team judged the center to be already inadequate and began to plan an ambitious expansion and redesign.106 The tourism machine was seemingly insatiable, and the precedent of public subsidy continued in the city‟s future tourist developments. The past three decades have seen more than $639 million in public assistance for tourist and entertainment projects, including a perpetually-failing downtown mall (St. Louis Centre), a

1993 expansion of the convention center, and the construction of a new hockey arena and domed football stadium. These figures do not include additional financial concessions such as tax abatements or other credits107 Growth coalition leaders in the St. Louis convention center campaign typically portrayed the center as self-supporting, a venture which would require some initial public subsidy but would rapidly be able to “pay its own way” as convention revenues began to pour into the city. The reality, has not matched this ideal. In

1997, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article noted that in that year, 20 years after its grand opening, the convention center operated at an annual deficit of $2.8 million. This figure did not

103 ―ACTION is Against Bond Issue…Unless,‖ St. Louis American, 22 August 1974. 104 Primm, Lion of the Valley, 502. 105 Ibid., 501, 515. 106 Laslo, et al. ―Building the Infrastructure of Urban Tourism‖, in Dennis Judd, ed. The Infrastructure of Play, 82. 107 Ibid., 80.

154 include costs for annual debt service.108 Indeed, the story of the St. Louis center‟s troubled finances is all too common; while publicity for convention centers is almost always predicated on cost/benefit analyses which make them appear to be can‟t-miss generators of revenue, economic studies have determined that only one in ten convention centers operate at a profit.109

Public subsidy of business is not unique to the tourist industry, of course, and may well be justified if it delivers on its promises of strengthening a local economy. The record of tourist development in the postwar history of St. Louis has fallen far short of its promises.

The city failed to return to its ―glory days‖ as tourist industry leaders had promised. In the decade after the convention center opened, the city lost nearly 60,000 residents and posted one of the highest per capita crime rates in the nation, on par with such infamous locations as

Detroit, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles.110 Business was certainly good for the city‘s hospitality industries, but whether the convention center made St. Louis a better city, as the campaigns had promised, was a question which still remained unanswered.

At the most basic level, growth coalition leaders always justified the convention center in economic terms – the center would be expensive and require the reprioritization of public funds, but would be well worth the cost in the returns from the ―outside money‖ spent by conventioneers and tourists. These revenues would then flow back into city coffers and allow the city to provide better services to residents. What leaders too often failed to consider, however, was the social cost of building the convention center. In a time when the city was in

108 ―From ‗Box with Docks‘ to Plush Hall,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 27 July 1997. 109 Laslo, ―Proliferating Convention Centers,‖ 9, 18-19. 110 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Censuses of Population. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office), 1980, 1990.; United States and International Association of Chiefs of Police, Uniform Crime Reports for the United States.

155 the throes of a desperate housing crisis and remained one of the most racially segregated cities in the country (in both geographic and economic terms), the building of a convention center within plain view of decrepit housing projects and underserved North Side neighborhoods extracted enormous amounts of social capital. This is not to say that the building of the convention center and the larger expansion of the tourist industry were necessarily part of a purposely underhanded scheme to benefit wealthy landowners while ignoring the poor. No doubt many in the growth coalition really believed their rhetoric about the benefits of the center, and, admittedly, in the difficult urban economic climate of the early 1970s, St. Louis leaders had a limited set of options for steering their city into fiscal health. The issue, however, was not one of intention but of perspective. To the growth coalition, economic growth was its own reward, ostensibly spreading the benefits of the tourist industry throughout the city and providing job opportunities. To those who had been perpetually marginalized in the city‘s economic and political game, the push for the convention center appeared to be further proof that their needs for housing, healthcare, and economic equality were unimportant. They appealed to a model of liberal activist government that was responsible for ensuring equal economic opportunities and basic social welfare, a vision no longer endorsed by their pro-center opponents. The two sides simply spoke different languages, and the city‘s commitment to building a publicity-garnering playground for middle-class businessmen and those who catered to them divided the populace bitterly. As

Peter Eisinger has observed, ―No other type of major capital expenditure – not for roads, schools, wastewater treatment facilities, public buildings, jails, or sewers – has the potential to generate such intense divisions in local politics,‖ as publicly-subsidized tourist and entertainment projects.111 In the case of St. Louis, the debate over the convention center

111 For another examination of social versus economic costs in tourism development, see Peter

156 created greater polarization between social classes within the black community, and underscored the bond between the city‘s black professional class and its largely white corporate leaders. It also led residents of the city‘s neighborhoods to question civic leaders‘ commitment to their needs, and furthered the ―downtown vs. neighborhoods‖ tension which had long been a part of the city‘s politics.

The ceremony in September 1977 honoring the pro-center black leadership of the city was attended by representatives of St. Louis‟ National Association for the Advancement of

Colored People (NAACP) and Urban League. At the same ceremony, the three halls of the convention center were officially dedicated, one in honor of United Labor, one for the

Monsanto Chemical Company, and the third for the Anheuser-Busch corporation.112 To

Percy Green, the members of ACTION, and other blacks experiencing the struggles of a failing St. Louis on a daily basis, the program was no doubt a potent symbol: the middle class black community had rejected their concerns and allied itself with the corporate powers of the city.

The commemorative plaques hung in the convention center lobby in September 1977 were markers of the center‟s history that provided a narrative by which future visitors could interpret the building and its place in the city‟s postwar history. By dedicating the monument to “the voters of St. Louis and in particular to the black leaders,‖ growth coalition leaders implied a broad-based support from the city‟s residents, silencing the sharp fractures in the city‟s black community and the marginalized north St. Louis residents who opposed the

Eisenger, ―The Politics of Bread and Circuses: Building the City for the Visitor Class,‖ Urban Affairs Review 35, no. 3 (January 2000), 316-333. Quotation is from 328. 112 The honorary names were given because the city‘s unions, Monsanto Chemical, and Anheuser- Busch were the principal organizers of a last-minute capital fund-raising effort that became necessary after massive inflation and subsequent high interest rates on the convention center bond left the city $3.1 million short on funds to complete the center. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 23-24 July 1977. See also Laslo, et al., ―Building the Infrastructure of Urban Tourism,‖ 82.

157 center while appealing to the city for a return to traditional economic and social priorities.

Ultimately, Alderman Donald Gunn‘s 1967 warning about the promises of tourism as a

―fickle friend‖ fell on deaf ears. The promises of economic growth, seemingly with little sacrifice and little risk of failure, were too appealing to be challenged by increasingly marginalized appeals to the ideals of liberal urban policy. Indeed, efforts to challenge the convention center and tourist development were ineffective precisely because the political climate of the 1970s – and the resulting policies of downtown-oriented urban revitalization - marginalized those voices.

158 Chapter 4

City of Champions: Professional Sports, Stadiums, and Urban Revitalization in Pittsburgh

―In Pittsburgh, we live tough, we work tough…It‘s no picnic in Pittsburgh. There are a lot of mill workers, honest people. The work ethic is important. In Pittsburgh they work, go to church, have babies, and go to football games. That‘s it.‖

-Dwight White, Pittsburgh Steelers defensive lineman, 1971-19801

―And so we came into town through the Fort Pitt tunnel, at night. I don't need to tell you what a dazzling sight that is. It was an evening in early summer, and the Pirates were at home, and there, beyond the blazing city and the glinting rivers, lay that great bowl of light, dusted as if with stars by a million illuminated gnats hovering over it. The stadium where Sanguillen grinned, and my lost hero Clemente had once crashed into the walls, chasing down impossible pop flies. No, my first sight of Pittsburgh did not disappoint. Until then, I had been intrigued, fascinated, even charmed by the Pittsburgh in my mind, a city that continues to exist, somewhere deep down in there underneath everything that came after. But when our car burst out of the tunnel that night, I began to fall in love. Pittsburgh, the home of love.‖

-Michael Chabon, talk delivered at Carnegie Music Hall, Pittsburgh, 25 March 20012

As twilight fell on the evening of October 13, 1971, downtown Pittsburgh came ablaze in light. The crisp air of an Allegheny mountain autumn buzzed with an unusual energy. The downtown skyline was punctuated by the glow emanating from Three Rivers Stadium, packed with fans awaiting the first pitch of Game Four of the 1971 World Series. Game Four was an especially historic event, the first night game in the history of baseball‘s championship. Three

Rivers Stadium held a standing-room only crowd, the largest in the city‘s long history to that date, to see Pittsburgh‘s Pirates take on the Baltimore Orioles. Even more importantly, the game had a national audience of 60 million television viewers, bringing both the game and the city of Pittsburgh prime-time exposure. For this night, Pittsburgh was the center of the sports

1 Quoted in ―Super Bowl Fans Contrast in Style,‖ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 20 January 1979. Reprinted in Randy Roberts and David Welky, ed. The Steelers Reader (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 214-217. 2 http://www.michaelchabon.com. Accessed 12 July 2006.

159 universe, and in an age before cable television, arguably the center of American entertainment.

The Pirates won that night‘s contest 4-3, but the game was not the only thing that captured national attention. The New York Times the following morning spoke of the game‘s

―resplendent setting,‖ in the still-new stadium set against the bright downtown skyline. The

Sporting News noted that ―NBC‘s cameras caught the downtown scene beautifully from vantage points high in the stadium.‖ For the game, one historian has noted, ―Three Rivers

[Stadium] and the Pittsburgh area had become an enormous television studio.‖3

Television was, of course, the reason the World Series was now shifting to night games. Even though teams had played night games since 1935, the championship was traditionally an all-daytime event. The prospect of higher viewer ratings drove the Series into prime time.4 The game thus provided a golden opportunity for the city of Pittsburgh to market itself, through the vehicle of televised sports, as a vibrant metropolis. Despite the best efforts of its civic boosters and an extensive postwar renewal effort, the city found it difficult to shake a national image as a polluted coal-and-steel industrial town that had seen better days. As cameras panned across the downtown, the bright lights, towering skyscrapers, and packed stadium presented a new image of Pittsburgh: a city renewed, healthy, and alive.

While Three Rivers Stadium hummed with excitement on that October night, across town Forbes Field, the Pirates‘ former home, stood empty and quiet. The ballpark was already half-demolished, the Pirates having played their last game there in June of 1970.5

3 New York Times, 14 October 1971, 57. The quote from The Sporting News is taken from Aram Goudsouzian, ―Baseball in the Age of Disco: Race Respect, and the Pittsburgh Pirates,‖ in Roberts, ed., Pittsburgh Sports: Stories from the Steel City (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press), 187. 4 For a thorough discussion of the impact of television on sports, see Benjamin G Rader, In Its Own Image: How Television Has Transformed Sports (New York: Free Press, 1984). 5 ―Forbes Field Is Coming Down,‖ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12 October 1971.

160 Located in the neighborhood of Oakland, surrounded by museums, libraries, and the stately buildings of the University of Pittsburgh, Forbes Field had stood as a Pittsburgh landmark since its opening in 1909. The park had hosted four World Series of its own, including the

1960 Game Seven victory over the New York Yankees, considered one of the greatest games in the city‘s history and in the history of professional baseball. Team owners and city boosters, however, now viewed the venerable park as obsolete. Far from downtown, with ungainly columns and awkward angles that made television broadcasting difficult, the old ballpark could never have hosted the kind of national showcase spectacle that was lighting up

Three Rivers Stadium that night. If Forbes Field was a symbol of the glories of Pittsburgh‘s past, that past was now being dismantled piece by piece while the city celebrated across the river at the new stadium.

Forbes Field and Three Rivers Stadium were concrete and steel manifestations of two key moments in the complex economic history of the Steel City. Forbes Field opened at the height of the steel-and-coal era, when Pittsburgh stood as the nation‘s eighth largest city and a powerhouse of industry. When Three Rivers Stadium opened over sixty years later, the city was a much different place, still the center of a regional economy, but one beginning to feel the pangs of deindustrialization and moving quickly to position itself as a leader in a new emerging economy focused on research, technology, finance, and the expansion of the service sector. While on one level Three Rivers Stadium was little more than a typical 1970s-era sports arena, the stadium was also a key component in the city‘s reorganization of its economic structure, the product of city leaders‘ decisions about the function of downtown

Pittsburgh within this new economy.

161 Once infamously described in the nineteenth century as ―hell with the lid off,‖ by the late twentieth century Pittsburgh gained the more enviable title of ―America‘s most livable city.‖6 The process of that reinvention involved a post-World War II comprehensive program, known as the ―Renaissance,‖ of pollution and flood controls, slum clearance, redevelopment of downtown, and heavy private and public investment in restructuring the region‘s economy.

The principal agency which directed Pittsburgh‘s renewal was the Allegheny Conference on Community Development (ACCD), a group of the city‘s corporate leaders headed by the massive capital and political influence of the Richard K. Mellon family.7

Often overlooked in the story of the remaking of Pittsburgh is that the new postwar city was also closely tied to the emerging industry of tourism. Where urban boosters of the early twentieth century might have boasted about the millions of tons of steel produced annually or the large number of manufacturing jobs, by the dawn of the twenty-first their emphasis had shifted significantly. ―Pittsburgh is about to enter a new era in its economic and environmental transformation,‖ boasted a 2003 promotional brochure. The catalyst for this

―new era‖ for the city was the opening of a newly remodeled convention center, hailed as the centerpiece of ―a city with a whole new sense of urban tourism – a hot new downtown with

6 Interestingly, the famous ―hell‖ characterization of Pittsburgh was the product of an early promotion of urban tourism. Journalist James Parton actually meant his description of the city‘s industry as a compliment – a sort of nod to the ―industrial sublime.‖ He notes in the articles opening, ―There are three cities readily accessible to the tourist, which are peculiar, – Quebec, New Orleans, and Pittsburg – and of these Pittsburg is the most interesting by far.‖ James Parton, ―Pittsburg‖ Atlantic Monthly, January 1868, 17-36. Still, the quote has carried negative connotations ever since. The ―most livable city‖ award was given by the Rand-McNally company in 1985. Robert Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities. 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003) discusses the phenomenon of media rankings of cities and the relationship to American concerns with urban success and decline. See esp. 226-228. 7 Roy Lubove, Twentieth Century Pittsburgh: Government, Business and Environmental Change (New York: Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1969). While the most significant downturn in Pittsburgh‘s steel industry would occur in the early 1980s, the process of disinvestment and labor ―restructuring‖ began much earlier. Significant restructuring of the city‘s steel-based economy was already underway by the 1960s. John Hinshaw, Steel and Steelworkers: Race and Class Struggle in Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), 173-229.

162 totally cool things to do.‖8 The development of a postwar tourist industry in Pittsburgh involved the usual collection of downtown hotels, a convention center and entertainment districts seen in most cities, but none succeeded so prominently in remaking the city‘s national image as its professional sports teams and the stadium in which they played. Three

Rivers Stadium and the championship teams that played there in the 1970s were an essential element in the transformation of downtown Pittsburgh from a smoky center of industry to a

―totally cool‖ playground for urban tourists.

Pittsburgh is thus a prime example of a strategy pursued by many urban leaders in the postwar era: the use of professional sports teams and arenas as catalysts of urban revitalization. Sports historians have associated the rise of professional sports in the United

States with the process of urbanization, especially in the period from 1870-1920.9 However, the rapid expansion of the suburban middle class, the increase in available leisure time, and the growing popularity of television in the post-World War II era encouraged a second boom in the popularity of professional sports. The period also saw the increasing influence of professional sports as a cultural, political and economic force in American cities. The trend of suburbanization in the twentieth century led to a decline in city‘s amateur and semi- professional teams, initially formed out of racial, ethnic or neighborhood loyalties.10 In the

8 Susan Santa-Cruz Communications, ―Pittsburgh Powers Up: An Illuminating Weekend of Celebration,‖ Promotional Brochure, 2003. Collection of the author. 9 Benjamin Rader, American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Spectators (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1987); Steven Riess, City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). 10 On the rise of urban ethnic sports, see Riess, City Games, 93-123; As late as the 1940s, these teams competed with professional clubs for urban fans‘ time and money. Amateur participatory sports were extremely important to Pittsburgh‘s working classes. Francis Couvares, for example, in his study of industry and labor in Pittsburgh, notes that through the 1930s, the city‘s unions fought for the right to play Sunday baseball as hard as for any other cause. Couvares, The Remaking of Pittsburgh, 125. Rob Ruck, Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987) argues that black semipro and amateur baseball teams were more popular with the black community of Pittsburgh than their professional counterparts. These teams collapsed in the 1940s, as the integration

163 1920s a city may have had a half-dozen local baseball, basketball and football teams at the professional and semiprofessional levels, but by the postwar era these had usually given way to a single professional team that became identified on a national level with its city.

Sports franchises, once relatively minor members of cities‘ business communities, became in the postwar decades major players in the political economy of urban America.

This was in part due to aggressive team owners who sought to squeeze subsidies out of public coffers, but it was also the result of specific choices of the local political and business leadership who directed postwar downtown redevelopment. Sports teams, and their stadiums, gave cities substantial media attention and status at a period when urban leaders were aggressively working to maintain economic relevance and adapt to an emerging new economy based on consumerism rather than industrial production. Successful sports teams were thus a key component of the new amenities these leaders envisioned as crucial to the postindustrial

American city.

The Pirates would go on to win the 1971 World Series, and over the next decade the city‘s sports fans would see four Super Bowl championship teams and another World Series champion play in the stadium. In its first ten years Three Rivers Stadium played host to figures and moments that transcended the city to become national icons – the graceful play of

Pirates outfielder Roberto Clemente, the dominance of the Steelers‘ Steel Curtain defense,

Franco Harris‘ ―Immaculate Reception,‖ and the 1979 Pirates‘ championship team, led by the indomitable Willie Stargell. Such idols and moments represent more than just fodder for misty memories. Throughout the 1970s, as the city‘s industrial supremacy declined and economic outlooks turned bleak, as mills and union meeting rooms buzzed with anxiety over

of professional baseball in 1947 and continuing suburbanization eroded their fan base. See 45,186, 202-204.

164 the uncertain future of steel, the city‘s championships provided a rallying point and source of common identity for Pittsburgh residents. Furthermore, the success of Pittsburgh sports aided urban leaders who continued to insist their city was thriving in spite of hard evidence to the contrary. Just as it was in October 1971, the nation‘s attention would be drawn to Pittsburgh frequently in the 1970s. By the end of the decade professional sports would come to be just as potent a symbol of Pittsburgh as the steel industry; indeed the two were often linked in local and national media. The success of the city‘s sports teams provided a powerful counter- narrative and increasingly important positive national image amidst the ruins of the city‘s industrial decline.

Scholars of tourism have often described tourist development as universally negative, an exploitative enterprise that remakes places to serve tourists and diminishes or marginalizes local culture and local residents. While this argument carries validity in many cases, the story of professional sports in Pittsburgh – and in other American cities – complicates that picture.

Clearly, the focus of urban leaders on tourism and professional sports in the postwar years did remake a substantial portion of its downtown for visitors, and led to some level of resentment among the city‘s economic and social minorities. At the same time, however, Three Rivers

Stadium and the success of Pittsburgh‘s teams in the 1970s encouraged white middle-class suburbanites - who made up a substantial portion of the teams‘ fans - to maintain connections with the downtown, and provided positive news coverage for the city in the national mass media. Thus tourism‘s ascendance was not just about bringing travelers to visit, but also linking suburbanites back to the central city; in essence, making the suburban middle class into tourists and ―marketing‖ the city to them. Unlike other tourist developments which were marketed solely to outsiders and often discouraged local engagement, Three Rivers Stadium

165 helped to establish and reinforce a common local identity that could cross class, racial, and socioeconomic lines – i.e., a steelworker living in the city of Pittsburgh and a realtor in suburban Allegheny County could both support the city‘s football team, though they had little else in common. This shared identity, nurtured by media coverage, sports icons, and marketing, also unified a consensus about the value of professional sports to the city and surrounding region.

Professional sports arenas have a rich but relatively brief history in the American city; boxing, horse racing, and baseball were the most popular urban sports of the nineteenth century, and they were as likely to happen in a back alley empty lot or outlying field as in a dedicated, permanent arena. Because early professional and semi-professional teams sprang up and withered on an almost annual basis, few owners had the capital or the desire to build expensive, permanent arenas. Still, by the late nineteenth century, enthusiasm for professional sports, and in particular professional baseball, led to the construction of a number of ballparks. Because land in a city‘s central business district was extremely expensive, the parks were typically located on a city‘s periphery. Team owners, who typically also had a financial stake in urban transit companies, found that a location away from the city‘s center boosted streetcar ticket sales. Usually built of wood, the late-nineteenth century ballparks were cheaply constructed, flimsy, and often dangerously susceptible to fire. 11

By the early twentieth century, revised city fire codes and the continuing popularity of professional baseball led to a new generation of urban ballparks, built of concrete and steel and with greatly increased seating capacities. Between 1909 and 1916, ten such major league

11 Riess, City Games, 213-219.

166 ballparks appeared, including Shibe Park in Philadelphia (1909), Tiger Stadium in Detroit

(1912), Boston‘s Fenway Park (1912), and Chicago‘s Wrigley Field (1914). Like their less substantial predecessors, these parks were usually located in peripheral areas or urban neighborhoods accessible by streetcar lines. Pittsburgh‘s Forbes Field was part of this wave, built in 1909 in the university neighborhood of Oakland. Though a denser, mixed-income urban neighborhood today, Oakland at the time was the ―showplace of Pittsburgh culture.‖

The setting was in sharp contrast to the site of the Pirates‘ earlier field, Exposition Park, which sat across from downtown on the north shore of the Allegheny River, in the midst of an industrial district susceptible to flooding. The suburban neighborhood of Oakland provided a picturesque setting for what many Progressive-era urban residents considered a fundamentally pastoral, morally uplifting, and unifying pastime.12 ―Injecting green space into the heart of the city,‖ argues historian John Fairfield, ―the urban ballpark transcended the either/or of city/country.‖13 This new wave of ballpark building slowed by 1920 (Yankee Stadium in

1923 being a notable exception), and in subsequent decades economic depression and World

War II discouraged further park construction.

While urban boosters originally hailed this generation of ballparks as paragons of their cities‘ sophistication and modernity, by the postwar era many were beginning to show significant age, and revealed limitations that made them unattractive to the postwar suburban sports fan. When the ballparks were constructed in the first decade of the twentieth century, most patrons walked or took streetcars to the ballpark. The parks were

12 Besides the University of Pittsburgh campus, Oakland also featured the Carnegie Institute library, museum, and music hall, as well as a number of the city‘s architecturally notable churches and social clubs. Roy Lubove, Twentieth Century Pittsburgh: Government, Business and Environmental Change (New York: Wiley & Sons, 1969), 3. 13 John D. Fairfield, ―The Park in the City: Baseball Landscapes Civically Considered,‖ Material History Review 54 (Fall 2001), 23.

167 built into existing urban neighborhoods, and streets and lot dimensions often dictated their shape and configuration. Thus, space was at a premium and little or no automobile parking was provided in original plans. In the 1910s and 1920s, those few (but increasing) fans who drove cars to the ballpark could find parking on adjacent streets. As early as the 1930s, however, parking became increasingly difficult, and by the 1950s severe congestion in ballpark neighborhoods was a common complaint. A 1958 study evaluating Pittsburgh‘s need for a new stadium reported that seventy-five percent of fans now arrived at Forbes Field by automobile, an estimate which was probably on the conservative side.14 A year earlier, Cincinnati resorted to demolishing buildings surrounding Crosley Field in order to accommodate fans‘ cars.15

The problem of crime also presented serious challenges for sports teams across the nation, particularly those who were playing in older inner-city ballparks. Baseball had seen a serious drop in attendance in the 1950s and 1960s.16 This loss was in part a result of the deteriorating inner city, which often left older urban ballparks surrounded by neighborhoods that made many middle-class fans uncomfortable, especially given the increasing number of night games. Fears about pickpockets, muggings, or even more violent crime were quickly becoming a standard part of attending games. An article in a

1962 issue of Sports Illustrated entitled ―Keep Your Eye on the Ball…And a Hand on

Your Wallet‖ warned readers about a ―growing fraternity of thieves who are devoting

14 City-County Stadium Committee, Report on Proposed New Stadium. Pittsburgh, PA: September 1, 1958, 8. Box 127, Folder 1041, Papers of Edward H. Litchfield, UA RG 2/10, 1956-1965, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA. 15 ―Crowded West End Seeks to Solve Unique Parking Problem,‖ Cincinnati Post, 13 July 1957. Parking was a crucial issue in determining a stadium‘s continued usefulness. It is no coincidence that the only surviving ballparks from this early generation – Boston‘s Fenway Park, Chicago‘s Wrigley Field, and New York‘s Yankee Stadium – are located in cities with well-established public rail systems. Even in these three, the question of parking has remained a controversial issue. 16 Benjamin Rader, American Sports, 288.

168 more and more of their larcenous attentions‖ to sports fans. A columnist in The Sporting

News decried the increase in sports-related violent crime and declared that ―complete protection for the public had better come fast. People will not risk a beating or worse to watch baseball or any other sport . . . a crackdown can‘t come too soon.‖17 In Cincinnati, the Reds‘ Crosley Field was located in the largely African-American West End neighborhood, a place characterized by Mayor Eugene Ruehlmann as ―a part of town where you paid a kid to watch your car and still worried about your tires getting slashed.‖18 Reports of muggings, vandalism and theft, and complaints about illegal parking rackets around Crosley Field received regular attention in Cincinnati newspapers.19 Forbes Field, located in close proximity to the University of Pittsburgh, had less of a crime problem than some parks, but violence during a youth admission day in 1964 led to multiple injuries and three teens were arrested after assaulting another youth in a ballpark restroom. This event drew the attention of the national press, as a

Sporting News columnist cited it as proof of the dangerous conditions around ballparks and warned readers, ―hoodlums have no qualms about destroying property and roughing up spectators.‖20 It was rapidly becoming clear to team owners and city leaders around the

17 ―Teen-Age Hoodlums Must Be Stopped,‖ The Sporting News, 9 May 1964, 14. 18 Quoted in Robert Harris Walker, ―Gene Ruehlmann and Bob Howsam: Designing a Riverfront Winner.‖ Queen City Heritage 46, no. 2 (1988): 44. 19 See ―Police Try To Prevent Fans‘ Lament: They Took Me Out at the Ballgame,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 21 June 1964 and ―‘Brazen‘ Racket Victimizes Fans‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 19 August 1962 as two of the many examples. 20 The Sporting News, 9 May 1964, 14. Violence outside the stadium was not the only problem. As baseball scholar and historian Ron Briley notes in Class at Bat, Gender on Deck and Race in the Hole: A Line-up of Essays on Twentieth Century Culture and America‟s Game (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2003), on-field and spectator violence was also a primary concern of sports observers in the 1960s. Noting the increases in ballpark security measures to prevent such incidences, one columnist speculated, ―at this rate, stadiums will take on the appearance of prison farms, which might make the culprits feel right at home.‖ The Sporting News, 16 May 1970, 16. I am indebted to Briley for directing my attention to this article and the other Sporting News items cited above.

169 country that fears of violent crime could have serious consequences in the form of decreased attendance.21

Older urban ballparks, then, were ill-suited to accommodate the rising popularity of professional spectator sports in the post-World War II era, especially as the core audience became increasingly suburban. City officials also found them troublesome – the ballparks were hotbeds of petty crime and, more importantly, reinforced suburbanites‘ increasingly negative stereotypes of the city as dilapidated, congested, and crime-ridden.22 The postwar decades thus saw a new wave of stadium construction to accommodate the changing desires of both sports fans and city planners. These stadiums were typically multipurpose facilities, built to accommodate baseball and increasingly-popular professional football. New stadiums emerged in one of two types of cities: either rapidly-growing Sunbelt locales that sought professional sports as a status symbol and leisure amenity, or declining cities that desperately clung to their ―major-league‖ status and built new stadiums to keep their teams from leaving.

Thus booming cities like Houston (Astrodome, 1965), Atlanta, (Fulton County Stadium,

1965) and San Diego (Jack Murphy Stadium, 1967) built stadiums at the same time as St.

Louis (Busch Stadium, 1966), Cincinnati (Riverfront Stadium, 1970), Pittsburgh (Three

Rivers Stadium, 1970), and Philadelphia (Veterans Stadium, 1971). Unlike the old concrete- and-steel ballparks, many of these new stadiums were located near or inside cities‘ central business districts. This was particularly true in declining cities, where federal urban renewal assistance covered the costs of land purchase and clearance for local governments. In contrast, most Sunbelt cities‘ stadiums were located in suburbs near interstate interchanges.

21For another notable example of the decline of an urban ballpark and its subsequent replacement with a multipurpose stadium, see Bruce Kuklick, To Everything a Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia, 1909-1976 (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). 22 Fairfield, ―The Park in the City,‖ 27.

170 The new urban-renewal stadiums were built as multi-purpose arenas that sought to maximize seating while minimizing cost during turbulent economic times. Their consequent utilitarian design and the remarkable similarity of many of the stadiums led them to be dubbed the

―cookie-cutter‖ generation.

The 1963 Economic Study of the Pittsburgh Region, published by the Pittsburgh

Regional Planning Association, laid out in black and white what many Pittsburgh leaders already knew. Their economy was a dinosaur: massive, powerful, but also on the verge of extinction. The steady stream of wealth gained from the industrial output of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century discouraged innovation in new industrial technologies.23 Overspecialization in steel production made the region vulnerable to the large-scale industrial shifts that were on the horizon due to international competition in a globalizing economy. Indeed, leaders of the ACCD, who as executives in the cities‘ steel and financial powerhouses had an early view of the region‘s economic future, were already in the process of diversifying the economy, reducing the importance of heavy industry and moving the city‘s economy toward aerospace technology, finance, and research. 24 Progressive Architecture – which frequently featured Pittsburgh renewal projects in its pages - summed up the goal of this economic restructuring neatly: ―The city is going to be more white-collar, more sophisticated, more intellectual than it once was, just as the

23 Roy Lubove, Twentieth Century Pittsburgh, Volume II: The Post-Steel Era. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 3; Pittsburgh Regional Planning Association., Economic Study of the Pittsburgh Region (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963). 24 Roy Lubove, Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh: The Post-Steel Era; David B. Houston, "A Brief History of the Process of Capital Accumulation in Pittsburgh: A Marxist Interpretation," Joel Tarr, ed., Pittsburgh-Sheffield: Sister Cities. Proceedings of the Pittsburgh-Sheffield Symposium on Industrial Cities, Pittsburgh, Pa., November 1981 (Pittsburgh Pa: Carnegie Mellon University, 1986), 29-69.

171 processes of industry are becoming tidier, less obtrusive, than they once were.‖25 Never have seismic shifts in a region‘s economic structure sounded so simple.

Central to the ACCD‘s plan for making the city a center of technology was the expansion of the city‘s universities into major research institutions. To that end, the

Board of Trustees of the University of Pittsburgh, chaired by Richard Mellon‘s son-in- law, began to seek ways to expand the university‘s facilities. University Chancellor

Edward Litchfield outlined the crucial role the university‘s expansion would play in the new Pittsburgh in a 1964 speech entitled ―The University and the Economy.‖ Litchfield noted that ―we are all well aware that the competitive advantages which Pittsburgh heavy industry once enjoyed…have pretty well evaporated,‖ and pointed to Boston‘s ―clustering of scientific brains at Harvard and M.I.T.‖ and the subsequent expansion of research- based industries there as the model Pittsburgh should emulate. Litchfield argued that the growth of the university was crucial to the city, because ―the institutions making up the education-research-health complex . . . are not only participants but prime movers in shaping the economy of the region they serve.‖26 Because the University of Pittsburgh had an urban campus, space for new buildings was a scarce commodity. Forbes Field, home of the Pirates baseball club since 1909, was located immediately adjacent to the university and seemed the perfect place for new campus growth.

The university‘s purchase of Forbes Field would obviously require the construction of a new sports facility for the Pirates, as well as the Steelers who leased the field from the Pirates. Moving aggressively, as it did in so many endeavors, members of the

Allegheny Conference contacted John Galbreath, then owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates. At

25 ―Pittsburgh: A Study in Urban Identity,‖ Progressive Architecture, March 1968, 127. 26 Edward Litchfield, The University and the Economy (University of Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh, 1965), 11. Library and Archives Division, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, PA.

172 a private meeting, members of the committee told the owner that the land upon which

Forbes Field sat was needed for university expansion and offered to purchase it.

Galbreath later recalled to a friend that he replied, ―Why should I sell Forbes Field? It‘s a good park; we are doing alright and we are satisfied . . . No, I am sorry; I am not interested.‖ According to Galbreath, the committee members then revealed to him that the city intended to build a new, larger stadium at no cost to the Pirates. It was an offer he could not refuse.27 The university purchased the Forbes Field property in December 1958 for $3 million, with the provision that the Pirates could continue to use the park until the new stadium was completed.

The ACCD formed a subcommittee to study the possible locations for a new stadium and by 1962 the ACCD, the city of Pittsburgh, and Allegheny County had reached an agreement on a location in the neighborhood of Northside, just across the

Allegheny River from downtown Pittsburgh. The area was occupied by largely abandoned railroad tracks and deteriorated warehouses, and was also home to sixty-three families. A federal urban renewal grant of $14,400,000 and grants of $5,500,000 each from the city and county provided funds for land acquisition, demolition, and construction of parking lots and access roads.28

27 The narrative of the conversation between Galbreath and committee members is drawn from an interview with former Allegheny County commissioner William McLelland as part of a University of Pittsburgh oral history project. Other interviews and news accounts provide corroborating evidence. See William McLelland, interviewer unnamed, 18 November 1971; Frank Denton, interview by Nancy Mason, 26 September 1972; John Mauro, interview by Robert DiAiso transcripts, Pittsburgh Renaissance Project: The Stanton Belfour Oral History Collection, Archives of Industrial Society, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pa. 73:24, Boxes 1-3 [hereafter SBOHC]; ―Forbes Field‘s Sale to Pitt Given Okay,‖ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 29 November 1958. 28 Stadium Authority of the City of Pittsburgh, The Story of Three Rivers Stadium (Pittsburgh, Pa: December 31, 1969), 3. Box 1, Series XII, Folder 19, David L. Lawrence Papers, Archives of Industrial Society, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pa. [hereafter DLL].

173 In 1964, City Council authorized the newly-formed municipal Stadium Authority, the principal city agency supervising stadium construction, to borrow $28 million from local banks and issue 40-year revenue bonds to repay that amount when construction was complete.29 While the initial amount seemed more than enough to construct the new stadium, rising labor and materials costs soon required drastic design alterations. The original approved design for Pittsburgh‘s stadium was a semicircular shape with the stadium opening out onto a view of the Allegheny River and the city‘s downtown skyline.

The Stadium Authority asserted in 1965 that the proposed stadium would provide ―an aesthetically pleasing perspective‖ for those driving past it on the highway, and that the structure would ―make a significant architectural contribution to this most vital area.‖30

Lofty artistic ideals came crashing to the ground in 1966, when the construction bids came in more than $12 million over budget. In evaluating what had gone wrong, the Stadium

Authority argued that the original design ―required the use of extensive amounts of concrete and steel of un-uniform shapes which, in addition to greatly increasing the . . . costs, proved most complicated to erect.‖ Also, pedestrian ramps to the stadium were ―too artistically designed‖ and therefore needed simplification. 31 The key word in the

Stadium Authority‘s evaluation of the problem was ―complicated,‖ used repeatedly in the

1966 report to describe everything from the stadium seating to the land clearance and demolition. ―Pittsburgh still needs and deserves a modern sports stadium,‖ wrote

Authority executive director Burrell Cohen, ―Fortunately, there is a step between

29 Ibid. 30 Stadium Authority of the City of Pittsburgh, Stadium Progress Report No. 5. Pittsburgh, Pa, March 31, 1965, pages unnumbered. Box 1, Series XII, Folder 19, DLL. 31 Stadium Authority of the City of Pittsburgh, Stadium Progress Report No. 8. Pittsburgh, PA: August 1966., pages unnumbered. Box 1, Series XII, Folder 19, DLL.

174 mediocrity and superiority. It is called acceptability.‖32 The design revisions resulted in the enclosed, bland ―concrete bowl‖ structure similar to that in so many other cities. In this, the first generation of publicly-financed stadiums, planners often had to make design changes to accommodate their relatively small budgets and rising construction costs. 33 A simple, uniform design proved to be the best compromise between those two pressures.

When considered in contrast to the perpetually over-budget and ever more luxurious publicly-financed stadiums of the present day, stadium planners of the 1960s showed remarkable restraint.

By mid-1966, City Council had successfully negotiated 40-year leases with both the

Pirates and Steelers, seemingly ending the question of the teams‘ place in Pittsburgh and guaranteeing a long life for the stadium. After numerous delays and adjustments to reduce costs, construction finally began on April 25, 1968. Costs for construction continued to rise almost in proportion to the structure itself, and worker strikes delayed the opening even further. Finally, on July 16, 1970, with parking lots, access bridges and highway connections still incomplete, Three Rivers Stadium opened. The final cost of the stadium would be more than $40 million.34

32 Ibid., pages unnumbered. 33 Stadium planners in other cities faced similar constraints. William Bartleby Brown, in ―America‘s Baseball Stadiums: A History of Technology and Culture,‖ (M.A. thesis, University of Alabama, 1991), 28, argues that architects for Atlanta‘s Fulton County Stadium were limited in their creativity because of the urgency and low cost of the project. St. Louis and Cincinnati also faced similar pressures. ―Stadium Bids Top Estimate; Revisions May Be Considered,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 9 April 1964; ―Esthetics Said to Be Unchanged by Plan Revision,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 22 May 1964; ―Stadium Project Will Proceed Although Bids Exceed Estimates,‖ Cincinnati Times-Star, 29 September 1967. Also see Stadium Review Committee notes of 22 July 1966 in Box 21, Folder 35, Eugene Ruehlmann Papers, Archives and Rare Books Division, University of Cincinnati Libraries, Cincinnati, OH. 34 ―No Field of Dreams,‖ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12 July 1990.

175 The opening of Three Rivers Stadium was a high point in a long tradition of

Pittsburgh sports, but the planning, financing and design of the stadium also represented a significant shift in the relationship between professional sports teams and their cities.

Even though it came rather late in Pittsburgh‘s overall renewal, planners referred to Three

Rivers Stadium as a ―focal point of the Renaissance‖ for the city.35 This investment of the hopes of urban revitalization in Three Rivers Stadium was the fundamental determinant in nearly every aspect of the stadium‘s planning, financing, and construction

The use of public funding to finance Three Rivers Stadium was also a significant departure in the history of sports arena development. Before the 1960s, only six professional sports arenas in the United States had ever received more than fifty percent public financing. From 1960 through 1998, fifty-two arenas were built with fifty percent public financing or greater.36 Furthermore, as noted above, many of those recent stadiums were built in cities with declining populations and shrinking fiscal resources. Scores of scholars have noted the rising increase in public subsidies to support sports stadiums in postwar cities, and those in the discipline of economics have consistently argued that stadiums are a poor investment of public money.37 Such studies have typically pointed to

35 Stadium Authority of the City of Pittsburgh, ―The Stadium: A Focal Point of the Renaissance.‖ (Pittsburgh, PA: Stadium Authority of the City of Pittsburgh, 1964) Box 1, Series XII, Folder 19, DLL. 36 Timothy Jon Curry, Kent Schwirian, and Rachael A. Woldoff, High Stakes; Big Time Sports and Downtown Redevelopment. (Ohio State Universtiy Press, 2004), 129-130. 37The literature on stadium economics is extensive, with a heavy focus on more recent publicly- financed stadiums. Notable works include Judith Long, ―Full Count,‖ Journal of Sports Economics 6, no. 2 (May 1, 2005), 119-143; Joanna Cagan, Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money into Private Profit (Monroe Me.: Common Courage Press, 1998); Roger Noll, ed., Sports, Jobs, and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Stadiums (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997); Mark Rosentraub, Major League Losers: The Real Cost of Sports and Who's Paying For It (New York NY: Basic Books, 1997). These works are essentially unanimous in their determination that stadiums are a poor municipal investment in economic terms. Unfortunately, the preponderance of evidence amassed in such studies is routinely disregarded in the process of decision-making about stadium construction and finance.

176 manipulative owners gaining public subsidy by threatening abandonment, or the powerful

―psychological impact‖ of sports teams that garner them such favorable subsidies. As acknowledged here, there is much truth to those explanations. However, the growth in public financial subsidy for sports facilities should not be abstracted from the larger history of postwar urban redevelopment, in which public monies were directed to subsidizing a wide variety of private development of downtowns. The public financing of stadiums in this period was part of a larger effort to direct development into the central business district through the power and financial resources of local, state, and federal authorities. Though pro-stadium city leaders repeatedly argued that the stadium was essential for ―keeping‖ the teams and maintaining Pittsburgh‘s major-league status, it seems that the threat was actually relatively minimal, especially in the case of the Pirates.

While the practice of threatening relocation in order to wrest publicly-financed stadiums from municipalities has been a common tactic for team owners in more recent years, it seems likely in the case of Pittsburgh that the formula worked the other way: community redevelopment leaders publicly exaggerated the threat of teams leaving to rally support for public financing of Three Rivers Stadium‘s construction. Political and business leaders in

Pittsburgh and other cities like it made a conscious and deliberate decision that professional sports and a downtown stadium were key components of the new city they envisioned.

Team owners of the 1960s had not yet fully developed the strategy of manipulating fears of franchise relocation to direct public subsidy to their stadiums, but they rarely had to assert their place in the competition for urban resources. In an era in which tourist amenities were becoming an essential component of a successful city, Pittsburgh political and business

177 leaders preempted any serious discussion of team relocation. The fear of losing “major- league” status drove political and business leaders to action; as much as the loss of a team might hurt a city economically, the psychological effects could be just as damaging. The loss of a professional sports franchise amounted to a tacit admission that a city was dying. 38 As one scholar has noted, in the realm of urban competition and image-making, “without a Major

League team and the stadium to match it, a city simply does not count.”39 Pittsburgh mayor

David L. Lawrence echoed this sentiment at a public hearing on the proposed stadium on

December 11, 1963. Lawrence defended the importance of the stadium project, asserting that if the Steelers and Pirates left the city, “Pittsburgh‟s prestige - its standing among cities - would decline sharply. And this city would be substantially less attractive to industry, science, and other enterprise in search of a proper setting in which to operate.” Furthermore,

Lawrence continued, “community morale would be struck a devastating blow… Although it may not be clearly recognizable, there is a distinct relationship between the caliber of a city‟s sports enterprise and the caliber of its educational and health institutions, . . . its business structure, its recreational and entertainment facilities.”40 For Lawrence, and countless mayors like him in this period, a successful sports team and stadium had become much more than an

38 See Michael N. Danielson, Home Team: Professional Sports and the American Metropolis, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 107-116. Robert Trumpbour, The New Cathedrals : Politics and Media in the History of Stadium Construction (Syracuse N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2007), also gives substantial attention to the role of boosterism and media in stadium financing approval. See esp. 59-69. Also, for a specific case study see Joseph Rochford, ―The Games Cities Play: Cincinnati‘s Decision to Build Riverfront Stadium.‖ (Unpublished research, University of Cincinnati, 1985). Available in the Archives and Rare Books Department, University of Cincinnati Libraries. Rochford served for many years in Cincinnati city government and drew on this first-hand knowledge for his study. His work makes excellent use of primary sources, as well as numerous personal interviews with city planners and politicians, which are not available in any other source. Rochford makes a persuasive argument that Cincinnati stadium planners were motivated by urban boosterism and a desire to remain ―major league‖ as much as hard economic numbers. 39 Marieke van Rooij, ―Stadium Fever‖ in Michelle Provoost, ed. The Stadium: Architecture of Mass Sport (Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2000), 125. 40 David L. Lawrence, ―Statement at Public Hearing on Stadium Renewal Project‖ 11 December 1963, 78:15, Box 1, Folder FF, DLL.

178 added amenity. Leaders in major league cities like Pittsburgh understood that a professional sports stadium offered an experience that could only be found in a select number of cities and thus offered a relative monopoly on this piece of tourist and recreation infrastructure. Any city with sufficient funds – or borrowing power - can build a convention center, a museum, a hotel complex, or even a festival marketplace. Only a select few cities, however, can support a major-league sports franchise. For cities that had few other desirable tourist attractions, maintaining their status as a major league city was crucial. Such entertainment infrastructure was integrally linked with the overall success of the city – and even if the actual threat of a team emigration was relatively minimal, the popularity of professional sports provided an emotionally persuasive argument for stadium construction subsidies.

Despite the appeal of these arguments and the strong support of the influential

ACCD, the proposal to build an entirely publicly-financed stadium did not proceed without opposition. The most vociferous challenge came from William McLelland, chairman of the Allegheny County commissioners at the time the stadium was announced.

McLelland strongly critiqued the plan to offer the city‘s professional sports teams a new stadium at no cost, and led an unsuccessful effort for a voter referendum on the issue in

1962. As he later recalled, ―All heck broke loose; I was supposed to be obstructing, dragging my feet on the stadium, holding back something that should be done….many times I talked this over with people very close to Mr. Mellon and they all seemed to think that this was a good idea, that I was blocking the progress and that I should move ahead and let the city progress as it had been doing.‖ His cause failed, and was disastrous for his political career. McLelland believed his challenge to the ACCD stadium financing plan lost him the support of many political allies, as well as the city‘s press. After a narrow

179 election victory in 1963, McLelland was ousted in 1967.41 The popularity of professional sports and the civic boosterism associated with the stadium effort made McLelland‘s stance a precarious one. His quick rebuff when questioning the publicly-financed subsidy of the city‘s sports franchises highlights the importance of the stadium to the power players of Pittsburgh in this period.

The value of remaining ―major league‖ was exponentially increased in the minds of pro-stadium leaders by the construction of the stadium in downtown Pittsburgh. Team owners, who had surprisingly little say in the matter, often expressed a preference for suburban locations, which brought them closer to their core audiences and easily accommodated automobile parking and traffic. In 1963 a group of suburbanites embarked on their own campaign to have a privately-financed domed stadium constructed in suburban Allegheny County – efforts to engage Mayor Lawrence or other city leaders in this effort, however, were flatly ignored.42 From the beginning of the stadium project in

1958, city planners insisted that the stadium be located downtown. Part of this was a practical reality; federal urban renewal funding would subsidize the project by paying the cost of land clearance. But even given this subsidy, studies noted that suburban land would be less expensive.43 The stadium‘s location was intended to secure to downtown

41William McLelland interview, 18 November 1971. SBOHC. Others also questioned the use of public indebtiture to build the stadium. The Citizens Committee for Intelligence in Public Spending Projects, composed of Pittsburgh middle-class professionals, filed suit against the city‘s government in November 1965 challenging that the stadium financing plan was illegal. The group was primarily a ―taxpayer revolt‖ effort, and their attempts to challenge the plan were unfruitful. The Civic Club of Allegheny County also brought suit against the financing plan. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ruled against the suit in February 1966, and stadium planning continued unabated. For some discussion of the obstacles faced by opponents of stadium development, see Trumpbour, The New Cathedrals, 121-122. 42 Jim Dunbar to David L. Lawrence, 11 April 1963. Box 1, Folder FF19, DLL. 43 City-County Stadium Committee, Report on Proposed New Stadium. Pittsburgh, PA: September 1, 1958, Box 127, Folder 1041, Papers of Edward H. Litchfield, UA RG 2/10, 1956-1965, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.

180 the influx of consumer spending and ancillary real estate development that would spring from the stadium project., and to make downtown more attractive to suburbanites and tourists. In his 1963 speech endorsing the stadium, Mayor Lawrence asserted that the addition of Three River Stadium would make downtown Pittsburgh a tourist mecca. ―No downtown in the nation,‖ Lawrence speculated, ―will match the Golden Triangle in its appeal to convention delegates, tourists, and other visitors.‖44

Downtown locations also provided an opportunity to showcase the renewed city and influence national perceptions of the Pittsburgh region. The potential of televised sporting events to shape the image of the city did not go unnoticed by the city‘s political leaders. The 1979 World Series was a repeat contest between the Baltimore Orioles and the

Pirates. Though characterized by some media as ―a contest of grime‖ between two blue-collar towns, leaders of both cities sought to use the Series to change their image to outsiders.45

Pittsburgh mayor Richard Caliguiri wrote a personal letter of thanks to ABC broadcaster

Howard Cosell. ―Your laudatory words about Pittsburgh during the Series and the beautiful aerial views of our Point State Park and Golden Triangle were much appreciated by me and the people of the Pittsburgh area,‖ wrote Caliguiri. ―We have worked very hard in recent years to erase the smog and ‗smoky city‘ image of Pittsburgh and portray it as it is – a city of clean air, ethnic charm and scenic beauty.‖46

Remaking the image of older industrial cities required structures that demonstrated their cities‘ progressivism and technological sophistication; stadium backers consistently spoke of their desire to have a ―modern‖ stadium with ―state-of-the-art‖ facilities. In contrast to today‘s nostalgia-driven ballpark designs, city leaders in the 1960s wanted a

44 Lawrence, ―Statement at Public Hearing,‖ 1963. 45 Eric Garland, ―The End of Baltimore as a Blue-Collar Town,‖ Baltimore, December 1980, 53. 46 Quoted in Fimrite, ―Two Champs,‖ Sports Illustrated, 24 December 1979, 40.

181 stadium that would evoke the power of technology to transform the urban landscape. A fascination with technology and modernity was used infused into every aspect of stadium planning and construction. When Cincinnati broke ground for its stadium, it did so not with the traditional gold-shovel ceremony, but with a series of small electronically- controlled explosions that marked the future locations of the field‘s bases. 47 Cincinnati newspapers marveled that automobile traffic into the stadium would be precisely controlled by computers.48 An article in a St. Louis newspaper proclaimed the new Busch

Stadium would have ―the world‘s most modern playing field, which through the marvels of electronics eliminates all snow and mud and will be capable of drying up a cloudburst in minutes.‖49 The stadiums‘ artificial turf, while now largely unpopular, at the time was celebrated as another scientific innovation that would eliminate uneven playing fields.

―The proposed stadium is one of which all Pittsburghers can and will be justly be proud,‖ boasted the city‘s Stadium Authority, ―Complete with escalators, efficient public transportation, dining facilities, and other comforts, it can truly be called modern.‖50

Those who praised the design of the massive stadiums marveled more at their sheer scale and efficiency than at architectural character or beauty. In January of 1967,

Progressive Architecture magazine awarded a citation to the designers of Cincinnati‘s

Riverfront Stadium. Panelists on the jury characterized the structure as ―sensible‖ and noted that ―it‘s handsome because it solves the problem.‖ Another jurist asserted (without apparent irony), ―when we start to make big megastructures, it‘s time to stop fooling

47 ―All Done Electronically,‖ Cincinnati Post Times-Star, 1 February 1968. 48 ―Computer Will Guide Stadium Traffic,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 27 March 1967. 49 ―New Stadium to Have Weather-Proof Field,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 19 November 1965. 50 Stadium Authority of the City of Pittsburgh, Stadium Progress Report No. 5. Pittsburgh, PA, 31 March, 1965, pages unnumbered. Box 1, Series XII, Folder 19, DLL.

182 around with things like beauty and human scale and all that jazz.‖51 A 1959 feasibility study for Busch Stadium concluded that the enormity of the proposed project was a real asset, because the stadium would be ―of such a magnitude as to capture the imagination, interest, and support of the greatest number of people.‖52 A modern ―megastructure,‖ emphasizing technology and efficiency over architectural character, matched the goals of city leaders who wanted a symbol of their cities‘ progressive spirit. The stadiums represented the triumph of technology over all sorts of elements: weather, traffic, and, implicitly, even the city itself.

Such rhetoric was more than mere space-age infatuation with technology. The modern stadiums represented a new urban landscape of technological sophistication - a repudiation of their cities‘ increasingly obsolete industrial past and the enthusiastic remaking of the city for the postindustrial future. Later baseball parks diverged sharply from this philosophy. Baltimore, which attempted to build a new stadium during the

1970s but never gained traction, opened its Camden Yards ballpark in 1992. By that time, the cultural influence of the historic preservation movement and nostalgia for the industrial city created a new kind of stadium.53 Camden Yards was built of brick and steel, and emulated the early twentieth-century ballparks in its design. The stadium was located on the site of the city‘s decrepit Baltimore and Ohio rail yards. Instead of clearing the land completely, however, stadium planners incorporated a former B and O railroad

51 ―Fourteenth Annual P/A Design Awards,‖ Progressive Architecture, January 1967, 134-135. 52 Sverdrup & Parcel, Inc., ―Feasibility Report, Proposed Downtown Sports Stadium Project‖ (St. Louis: September 1959), 43. Series 3, Box 18, Raymond Tucker Papers, Special Collections, Washington University Library, St. Louis, MO. 53 Daniel Rosensweig, Retro Ball Parks: Instant History, Baseball, and the New American City (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005), makes the connection between the ―retro‖ craze of the 1990s and urban gentrification movements that sought ―authenticity‖ and legitimacy by co-opting cities‘ historic fabric.

183 warehouse into its site. Others have copied this formula, incorporating their city‘s industrial past into ―retro‖ ballparks. Such an approach, however, was anathema to stadium planners of the 1960s – the goal was to purge industrial decay, not celebrate it.

The Stadium Authority noted that one observer commented about the new Three Rivers

Stadium, ―I can‘t believe it – this doesn‘t look like Pittsburgh.‖54 Such a drastic departure was precisely the point.

The language of urban modernization was especially significant in Pittsburgh, because it many ways, the celebrated Renaissance program was the city‘s premier tourist attraction. Tourist brochures described Pittsburgh as ―a city where the old has given way to the new.‖ Such guides often took great pains to tell of the city‘s ―great pride in [its] redevelopment program‖ and praise the achievements of the Renaissance. 55 A walking tour brochure produced by the Pittsburgh Council for International Visitors also focused primarily on the ―exciting and ambitious project‖ of urban renewal, but expressed some ambivalence over the lack of historic integrity remaining in the city. ―This is some of

America‘s most historic ground, but there are few evidences of the city‘s earliest years . . . it was necessary to tear down the old to build up the new.‖56 Pittsburgh leaders saw the stadium as the next logical step in this modernizing of the metropolis. Mayor David

Lawrence argued that the proposed Northside location had to be remade, as the dilapidated industrial area was ―offending the sensibilities not only of Pittsburghers but of the city‘s many visitors.‖ The industrial site ―detracts from and is wholly incompatible

54 Stadium Authority of City of Pittsburgh, Stadium Progress Report No. 12, (Pittsburgh, PA, December 1970), 9. Box 1, Series XII, Folder 19, DLL. 55 Pittsburgh Convention and Visitors Bureau, ―Pittsburgh: Renaissance City of America,‖ 1976. Pittsburgh Council on International Visitors [PCIV] Collection, Library and Archives Division, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania. 56 PCIV, ―A Walking Tour of Pittsburgh,‖ undated. PCIV Collection, Library and Archives Division, HSWP

184 with the inviting vistas of Gateway Center and Point State Park,‖ Lawrence continued.

―At the historic Point, the Pittsburgh image is one of progress. Just across the Allegheny

River, the image is one of retrogression.‖57 Tourism materials of postwar Pittsburgh almost invariably celebrated the new, ―modernized‖ city, and Three Rivers Stadium was an essential component in completing that technologically-altered urban landscape

While its location reflected a desire to revitalize and showcase Pittsburgh‘s tourist- friendly downtown, Three Rivers' design was heavily influenced by the needs of its intended patrons: suburban middle-class families. The Pittsburgh Stadium Committee‘s

1958 stadium feasibility study argued that ―a stadium is a regional facility, drawing patrons . . . from a vast area outside of the city‖ and thus the city should build a new stadium ―readily accessible by the major segment of the population of Allegheny county, and if feasible, that of a several county area.‖58 Similarly, Preston Estep, a member of St.

Louis‘s Civic Center Redevelopment Corporation, took care to link that city‘s Busch

Stadium to the suburban population at the groundbreaking in May of 1964. ―This is not a

St. Louis city project alone,‖ asserted Estep. ―It means even more to our neighbors in St.

Louis County. This is their project too, and we hope they will join us in using all the facilities.‖59

The task of drawing suburban fans to a downtown stadium, however, created its own set of difficulties. The period during which Three Rivers Stadium was planned saw an increase of highly-publicized urban riots and violence, which combined with other images of decline to demonize the city as a place of crime and danger, especially to

57 Lawrence, ―Statement at Public Hearing,‖ 1963. 58 City-County Stadium Committee, Report on Proposed New Stadium. Pittsburgh, PA: September 1, 1958, 8. Box 127, Folder 1041, Papers of Edward H. Litchfield, UA RG 2/10, 1956-1965, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh. 59 ―Ground Broken for Downtown Sports Stadium,‖ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 25 May 1964.

185 suburbanites who might spend little time in the city. If the stadium was going to succeed, it would have to cater to the desires of middle-class fans and ease their fears. The decision to locate the stadiums downtown made that task more difficult than at a suburban stadium, and urban planners and stadium architects sought to close that gap. The October

15, 1963 issue of Downtown Idea Exchange, an information-sharing newsletter for architects and urban planners, envisioned the possibility of ―vast domes . . . arching over entire downtowns‖ that would allow cities to ―solve spot problems‖ and make their downtowns controlled spaces.60 Downtown stadiums like Three Rivers seemed to be a product of this philosophy of urban space. The very construction of these massive round, concrete stadiums suggests an environment designed to ensure a feeling of safety for middle class fans. The cities‘ older ballparks had been built into the existing urban streetscape, with entrances at street level and buildings on every side. The parks were closely linked to the urban space around them – fans attending the game jostled on the street with passersby and residents of the neighborhood. All of the new ―cookie-cutter‖ stadiums, in contrast, were built on ―clean slates‖ that focused more upon connections to interstate highways than to city neighborhoods.61 Such open spaces were relatively easy to secure and reduced the likelihood of a back-alley mugging as patrons left the ballpark.

Three Rivers Stadium was located across the river from Pittsburgh‘s downtown, surrounded by nothing but parking and empty land. Access to Cincinnati‘s Riverfront

Stadium was similarly limited by narrow footbridges spanning a sunken highway, which

60 Downtown Idea Exchange 10, no. 20, (October, 1963), 15. 61 Phillip Bess, City Baseball Magic: Plain Talk and Uncommon Sense about Cities and Baseball Parks. (Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Review of Baseball, 1989). Primarily an architectural study, Bess‘s work provides a comprehensive exploration of the changing philosophies of ballpark design.

186 divided the riverfront stadium from downtown streets. The stadium itself sat well above street level on a four-story parking garage.

The round shape of the downtown stadiums reflects this same sort of philosophy of safety and control. Pittsburgh Pirates third basemen Richie Hebner once commented about the cookie-cutter stadiums, ―I stand at the plate in Philadelphia and I don‘t honestly know whether I‘m in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis or Philly. They all look alike.‖62

Hebner‘s observation is illuminating: not only did the stadiums look the same, but from inside the stadium the cities themselves were essentially invisible. Encircled by the fortress-like walls, fans could easily ignore the city and feel reassured that they were protected from the threats of inner-city crime by a series of lengthy walkways, open spaces, metal gates, and security staff.63 Crime around the older ballparks, as well as the urban unrest of the 1960s, made stadium planners and officials extremely conscious of the need to insulate fans from an urban environment they perceived as unfamiliar and dangerous.

Thus, while the cookie-cutter stadiums were in the heart of the central city, they were designed around the needs of suburbanites: closely linked with interstate highways, surrounded by thousands of parking spaces, and, in an era of urban decline and unrest, designed to give suburban fans a sense of protection and separation from the downtown as

62 Quoted in Michael Gershman, Diamonds: The Evolution of the Ballpark (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 191. The quote is often used in books on stadiums and ballparks and its original source is unknown. 63 Cincinnati‘s Riverfront stadium was such a secure location that the stadium‘s operational manual outlined procedures for the use of the stadium as a ―command post‖ in the event of civil disorder, and contained further instructions for using the stadium as a ―military staging area‖ complete with instructions on the best routes and parking locations for military ―heavy equipment.‖ The manual also contained lengthy instructions for stadium staff in the event of a bomb threat. George Rowe, ―Riverfront Stadium: An Operational Manual‖ (Cincinnati, May 1974), 1a, 3. Archives and Rare Books Collection, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH. See also John Fairfield, ‖The Park in the City,‖ 27.

187 a whole. In this way, Pittsburgh‘s stadium – and its clones in Cincinnati, St. Louis, and other cities - functioned as early versions of what scholars have termed the ―tourist bubble,‖ a term to describe urban land use that creates ―islands of affluence that are sharply differentiated and segregated from the surrounding urban landscape.‖64 Thus while the stadiums did bring suburbanites to the city, they succeeded in part by intentionally obscuring the central city from most fans‘ view. These contradictions and complexities – an urban stadium designed around suburban desires, in the city but not of the city – were inherent to the process of transforming the postwar urban landscape into a tourist playground, revealing both the aspirations of city leaders and the realities necessary to enact this transformation.

Marketing to the suburban family audience required substantial changes to the interior of stadiums as well. Postwar stadiums featured new forms of entertainment designed to hold the interest of children - always a dependable source of concessions and souvenir revenue. Loud rock music between innings, an electronic scoreboard with animations and cheer cues, and a clowning mascot became a regular part of the experience of a game at Three Rivers Stadium – and increasingly, at all professional sports arenas.65

The relegation of on-field play to only one of several entertainment options within the new stadiums was a source of consternation to some. A year before Cincinnati‘s

Riverfront Stadium opened, Reds team president Francis Dale wrote to the city manager expressing annoyance that a large portion of the stadium‘s new $1 million scoreboard would be devoted to games, advertisements, and ―character animations.‖ ―We certainly

64 Dennis R. Judd, ―Constructing the Tourist Bubble,‖ in Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein, The Tourist City. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 53. For a specific case study see Harvey Newman, ―Race and the Tourist Bubble in Atlanta,‖ Urban Affairs Review 37, no. 3, (2002), 301-321. 65 Aram Goudsouzian, ―Baseball in the Age of Disco,‖ in Roberts, ed., Pittsburgh Sports, 194-195.

188 did not sign a forty year lease,‖ continued Dale, ―with the idea that the new stadium scoreboard would display less information about our game.‖66 Marketing to suburban families, accustomed to the advertising and variety available on television,

For those suburbanites seeking more comfortable and prestigious viewing areas, the new riverfront stadiums offered a recent innovation in stadium accommodations, the

―stadium club.‖ Older ballparks certainly distinguished between box seats and bleachers and were never entirely free of class distinctions, but the newer stadiums heightened the division between wealthy and working-class fans.67 Planners viewed these exclusive clubs as a source of revenue to offset the construction costs of the new stadiums. Catering to corporate clients and the wealthy, private stadium clubs embodied a new form of class distinction and separation in American sport. While a beer and a hotdog had traditionally been the limit of ballpark cuisine, Pittsburgh‘s Stadium Authority promised ―all the luxury of leisurely dining found in the best restaurants in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area‖ in the stadium‘s new ―members only‖ club.68 Such clubs were significant profit-makers for stadiums, and provided a mark of distinction and prestige for businesses entertaining clients. In addition, by providing a set of amenities desired by corporations and wealthy individuals, the stadium assured such patrons that Pittsburgh was a city in which they could consider doing business or living.

The new emphasis on corporate and suburban fans drew sharp criticism from some circles, especially given the stadium‘s location in the central city. A month after Three

Rivers Stadium‘s opening, The Fair Witness, an underground newspaper, ran a scathing

66 Francis L. Dale to Richard Krabach, 25 July 1969. Box 18, Folder 11, Eugene Ruehlmann Papers, Archives and Rare Books Division, University of Cincinnati Libraries, Cincinnati, OH. 67 Riess, City Games, 223. 68 Stadium Authority of City of Pittsburgh, Stadium Progress Report No. 6, (Pittsburgh, PA, August 1965), 9. Box 1, Series XII, Folder 19, DLL.

189 editorial that took city leaders to task for favoring the suburban middle class over the city‘s needier residents. Under the defiant headline ―You Can‘t Eat a Stadium,‖ the paper ran an illustration of an African-American child holding Three Rivers Stadium on a plate, complete with a decorative party toothpick protruding from the top. The article decried the splintering of the Northside community by the stadium construction and its adjacent highway access points. The columnist went on to assert that discriminatory hiring practices had blocked Northside blacks from gaining stadium construction jobs, and that current stadium employees were disproportionately from more affluent areas of the city or suburban communities. The Fair Witness also criticized the plans for the exclusive stadium clubs, pointing out that newspaper illustrations of the proposed club contained exclusively white patrons, and that general admissions tickets in the new stadium were almost double the cost of those at Forbes Field. ―The Three Rivers Stadium,‖ the author concluded sardonically, ―was conceived and designed as a show place and a play place for and by those same benevolent people who brought the city its past renaissance with its lack of care for the community . . . but what they won‘t say is that another community has been ripped off. The gala opening of the Three Rivers Stadium was not a celebration. It was a wake.‖69 While an editorial in an underground left-wing newspaper can hardly be said to represent the views of the general populace, it does give important insight into some urban residents‘ view of the stadium as simply the latest in a string of renewal projects that brought little benefit to those who lived in the city itself.70 The dedication of city leaders to building a sports arena was likely particularly upsetting to the city‘s black

69 ―You Can‘t Eat a Stadium,‖ Pittsburgh Fair Witness, August 1970. 70 Historical scholarship has been critical of Pittsburgh‘s renewal projects for many of the same reasons. For an analysis of pre-stadium downtown development, see Lubove, Twentieth Century Pittsburgh, especially 106-141.

190 residents, who just a decade earlier had seen the city‘s Hill District – a predominantly

African-American neighborhood – bulldozed for the construction of the domed Civic

Arena, which opened in 1961 and housed the city‘s Light Opera and professional hockey team. As city leaders sought to remake the experience of sports attendance into a palatable and attractive activity for white middle-class families, those who spoke for minorities and lower income citizens often objected that Pittsburgh leaders‘ vision of a revitalized central city, embodied in the new stadium, ignored their needs and concerns.

On a purely economic level, Three Rivers Stadium never lived up to its billing as a self-sufficient development generator. The ―spinoff‖ hotel, shopping, restaurant, and entertainment facilities envisioned in optimistic proposal drawings never developed, leaving Three River Stadium surrounded by practically empty land throughout its history.

―It turned out there was no market for these kinds of spaces,‖ one of the stadium‘s architects later conceded, ―The model went beyond the realm of economic reality.‖ 71 The situation was much the same in Cincinnati, where anticipated riverfront commercial development failed to materialize around Riverfront Stadium. In the end, the stadium designers‘ emphasis on accommodating automobile traffic may have been their biggest shortcoming. Architects repeatedly spoke of this generation of stadiums‘ connections to highways as one of their chief features, dismissing concerns about ―human scale‖ and the connection of their stadiums to the larger urban fabric. By designing their stadiums

71 ―Land Development near Three Rivers Stadium never materialized,‖ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 9 July, 1995; ―Come Full Circle,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 31 March, 2002. Ironically, in 1975, Pittsburgh city council was so desperate for some profitable use of the area that they sold two acres of land near the stadium to U.S. Steel for expansion of its supply operations, complicating the narrative of leisure amenities replacing the fading steel industry.

191 around highways and not people, stadium planners perhaps undermined their ultimate goal of drawing people into downtowns, not just the stadiums.

Stadiums‘ supporters quoted impressive numbers about their economic impact on their cities, but just as many opponents have argued that the stadiums‘ primary benefactors were sports teams, not city residents. Three Rivers Stadium was never able to pay for itself; even in the heyday of the 1970s, the city paid almost $1 million per year to help meet amortization costs on the stadium construction bonds. In 1990, after a decade of poor attendance due to the lackluster Steelers and Pirates, the city paid near $4 million per year in subsidies. The Pirates‘ only profitable year in the stadium was in 1971, and in

1981 team owner John Galbreath sued the city in an effort to break the team‘s original forty-year lease. Galbreath claimed he had lost more than $7 million since Three Rivers‘ opening and that the stadium, barely a decade old, needed millions of dollars in repairs.

The suit resulted in an agreement in which the city took over stadium operations and renegotiated leases for the Pirates and Steelers. In 1985, Galbreath sold the Pirates for a paltry $22 million, well below market value. As a result of the sale, Pittsburgh Mayor

Richard Caliguiri attempted to sell Three Rivers Stadium to an investor group. Finding no buyers, Caliguiri in March of 1986 asked city council to approve the sale of $21 million in bonds to help new Pirates ownership with stadium operating costs.72 After much political debate and charges of ―corporate welfare‖ from some citizen groups, city council approved the municipal bonds. Thus during much of the 1980s, a period when Pittsburgh was experiencing substantial economic turmoil, a significant portion of municipal budgets went to servicing the debt and maintaining the stadium. In addition, such public debt likely reduced the overall financial flexibility of the city. As one group of scholars has

72 ―No Field of Dreams,‖ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12 July 1990.

192 noted, resentment over raised taxes to finance stadiums and other tourist projects often translates into hesitancy to raise taxes for vital urban services such as public transportation or public schools. Such large bonds on the market also generally drive interest rates on government bonds higher, making competing bonds for non-tourism projects more expensive. 73

Pittsburgh leaders who advocated for the construction of Three Rivers Stadium, however, never spoke about the project in purely financial terms. Rather, they insisted that professional sports played a larger role in the city by both building community pride and keeping the city ―on the map‖ as a major league metropolis. In these terms, the value of professional sports in Pittsburgh is undeniable, if unquantifiable. The city did receive substantial positive media coverage throughout the 1970s and the success of its sports teams shaped an identity, both national and local, for the city‘s residents. A humorous

Post-Gazette column published on the eve of the 1979 Super Bowl, which pitted the

Steelers against the Cowboys of Sunbelt boomtown Dallas, contrasted the style of the two cities‘ fans. ―The Dallas fan flew here in a Lear jet…He‘s staying over at the Le Club in

Ft. Lauderdale. The Steeler fan got in late last night in a van with decals on the windows after working the split shift, and he‘s staying in a room for two with seven other people in a motel.‖74 The Steelers 35-31 victory over the Cowboys reinforced Pittsburghers own sense of identity - resilient hard-working survivors in the face of adversity.

The link between the various elements of the city‘s blue-collar culture, its postwar renewal, and successful sports teams was particularly prominent in a December 1979 issue

73Curry, et al., High Stakes, 131. 74 ―Super Bowl Fans Contrast in Style,‖ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 20 January 1979. Reprinted in Randy Roberts and David Welky, ed. The Steelers Reader (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 214-217.

193 of Sports Illustrated, which honored Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw and Pirates captain Willie Stargell as ―Sportsmen of the Year.‖ The first page of the story was a two- page spread photo of Bradshaw and Stargell, in full uniform, standing in a Jones &

Laughlin steel mill surrounded by a group of millworkers. The message of the article was clear: Bradshaw and Stargell had become ―Pittsburgh guys‖ - tough, hardworking, resilient, like the steelworkers themselves. The city‘s identity, once tied almost exclusively to its industrial might, was now also closely linked to its professional sports teams. The article also went to great lengths to specifically parallel the renewal of the city and the success of its teams. Indeed, the article read like a civic booster‘s promotional brochure. ―Pittsburgh is no longer the Smoky City,‖ the magazine informed its readers and then continued on to describe the city as ―thoroughly attractive, with fine vistas from the hills and bridges, good restaurants and bars and a spiffed-up downtown that has a name of its own, the Golden Triangle.‖ Victory on the playing field equated to the triumph of Pittsburgh itself. Bradshaw reinforced the shared identity of team and city. ―The

Steelers are the best example of what the city‘s personality is,‖ said Bradshaw, ―The fans get up for big games. They‘re like us. They‘re good, honest working people who come out to be entertained.‖75 There is deep irony, of course, in the linkage of Pittsburgh‘s sports teams with the city‘s working-class culture at just the moment when the city‘s heavy industry was in decline and city leaders were actively attempting to diminish this aspect of the region‘s image. Professional sports provided a new identity for the post-steel era, a key part of the vision of city leaders for remaking the image of Pittsburgh.

75 Ron Firmrite, ―Two Champs from the City of Champions,‖ Sports Illustrated, 24 December 1979, 36-45.

194 Both locally and nationally, the identity of the Pittsburgh has become inextricably linked with its sports teams, especially the Steelers. The team colors shared by both the

Steelers and Pirates – gold and black – are also the colors on the city‘s flag, and have been incorporated into the uniforms of the city‘s police and fire department. In September

2006, when Pittsburgh mayor Bob O‘Connor died of cancer, the Pittsburgh press was quick to link the city‘s grief and that week‘s season-opening Thursday evening football game. After the mayor‘s funeral that morning, his son Corey O‘Connor led Steelers fans in ―the official twirling of Terrible Towels‖ at Heinz Field just before kickoff. 76 The

Pittsburgh alternative newsweekly City Paper noted that the convergence of football and a funeral ―might seem like bad timing in any other city‖ but instead compared the upcoming

Steelers game to a New Orleans jazz funeral, where ―the band abandons the funeral dirge for the music of spontaneous joy… They remind themselves that the death of a beloved community member can bring the rest of the community together.‖77 When Three Rivers

Stadium was demolished in February 2001, Pittsburghers reminisced fondly about the memories of on-field glory and its meaning for the city. A Post-Gazette columnist reminded readers that, despite the fact that the stadium was often maligned by critics, it played a central role in shaping the city‘s national image: ―This is the place,‖ noted the column, ―that enabled Pittsburgh to be called the City of Champions in the 1970s.‖ 78 In fact, tourism industry heads today face an uphill challenge in advertising other facets of the city, such as its museums, arts, and rich ethnic neighborhoods. ―We don‘t have to sell our sports teams,‖ Bob Imperata, executive vice president of the Pittsburgh Convention

76 ―In Pittsburgh, a confluence of funeral and football,‖ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 7 September 2006. 77 ―The Mayor‘s Good Name,‖ Pittsburgh City Paper, 7 September 2006. 78 ―Let‘s Not Forget the Great Times at Three Rivers,‖ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 20 June, 1999.

195 and Visitors Bureau said in 2005. ―In fact, we try to communicate to people that we‘re more than just sports, but that‘s sometimes a challenge.‖79

The building of Three Rivers Stadium marked a literal and symbolic turning point in

Pittsburgh‘s narrative of renewal. It marked a major milestone in the changing role of professional sports in the city, especially as sports became more television-friendly. It represented not only a positive national image spread through television and an expanding national obsession with sports, but also the reorganization of the city‘s economy as elites in the ACCD sought to boost the region‘s stake in the new research-and-technology based economy.

The Three Rivers Stadium story is also illustrative of the multifaceted character of postwar urban tourism. The stadium was a complex representation of goals and aspirations for the city of Pittsburgh, and of the role of professional sports in the postwar American city.

Maintaining Pittsburgh‟s status as a major league city came at a significant financial cost, both in the initial stadium construction phase and for years afterward. In many ways this decision also strained the bonds of community, creating resentment among struggling inner- city residents and bitter battles in local government. The stadium was indisputably a substantial drain on urban resources in a time of economic and social crisis for the city. And yet, to characterize the commitment to professional sports in Pittsburgh as a simple “devil‟s bargain” is to ignore the role that the success of the Pirates and Steelers played in maintaining a sense of civic cohesion and shaping a positive national image for the city during the turbulent 1970s. The concept of the “psychological value” of professional sports to a city

79 Telephone interview with the author, 1 December 2005.

196 cannot be dismissed simply as a rhetorical device; it has a remarkable, if difficult to quantify, resonance in the discourse of the modern American city.

Economists and contemporary critics reasonably argue that regardless of its value to a city, stadium construction and professional sports are irresponsible and even illegal uses of public money. Unlike stadium construction of more recent years, however, the building of

Three Rivers Stadium was initiated and directed by civic leadership, rather than mercenary team owners manipulating the city for subsidy of their private industry. Political leaders in the postwar period made deliberate choices to elevate professional sports to a far higher position in the city than it had held before. Pittsburgh mayor David Lawrence and other

Pittsburgh leaders described the city‟s sports teams as essential to its economic well-being, as the indicator of the city‟s national standing. This was in marked contrast to the role of sports in the prewar American city, in which sports – professional or otherwise – was one of only many other indicators of the city‟s success, and local identity was shaped as much by religious heritage, political affiliation, labor activism or a broader civic consciousness as by organized leisure activities. Pro-stadium leaders were both reflecting and shaping reality – in the consumer-driven economy of the 1960s and 1970s, leisure experiences like professional sporting events did become more popular and important to middle-class fans. Leaders in

Pittsburgh and other cities, however, elevated sport to a religion by positing it as essential element of a community‟s identity, in part because they wanted to justify public funding for stadiums that would draw investment and real estate development into downtowns, the ultimate goal of almost all postwar urban renewal. Once this role was well established in public discourse, it set a precedent from which city leaders could not retreat. Team owners

197 later learned to manipulate this same rhetoric to gain ever-increasing public subsidy for their own personal profit

In their work Cityscapes and Capital, Michael Pagano and Ann Bowman argue that

“city building, at its very core an activity involving capital investment and land use, is also very importantly an effort at image creation or preservation.”80 To judge the success of

Pittsburgh sports in image creation for the city, it may be worthwhile to contrast the experience of Pittsburgh with its fellow industrial city (and longtime football rival) Cleveland,

Ohio. To judge these cities‟ recent histories only by the fortunes of their sports teams is, of course, simplistic and ignores any number of key economic, social and political factors. Still, as one scholar has argued, the perpetual failure of Cleveland‟s professional sports teams in the era of deindustrialization deeply affected the city‟s standing in the national discourse about

American cities. The teams and the city simultaneously developed an image as “losers” and became the butt of late-night talk show jokes; hence both the city and Cleveland Municipal

Stadium became known as the “Mistake by the Lake” during the 1970s.81 Pittsburgh fared little better than its rival in retaining industry or population during the same decade, and yet it was labeled “The City of Champions” and perpetually drew the national television spotlight to its remade downtown. The record of professional sports as urban revitalization in

Pittsburgh must therefore be understood in the specific context of the goals and aspirations of civic and corporate leaders, who were phenomenally successful in utilizing Three Rivers

Stadium and the city‟s sports teams as a tool in remaking Pittsburgh‟s national image. This victory in image-making cannot be dismissed, for it was the language of image, the

80 Michael A Pagano, Cityscapes and Capital: The Politics of Urban Development (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 44. 81 Philip C. Suchma, ―From the Best of Times to the Worst of Times: Professional Sport and Urban Decline in a Tale of Two Clevelands, 1945-1978‖ (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 2005).

198 appearance of success, bolstered by a successful tourist infrastructure, that determined the winners and losers of late-twentieth century urban America.

199

Chapter 5

Tourism, Image-making and the Festival Marketplace in Baltimore‘s Inner Harbor

―The city of reality necessarily must fall short of providing a completely satisfying milieu for its residents; whereas the ideal city can reflect what its inventor finds dissatisfying about the cities of his own day and what he wishes that urban life might be.‖ -Anselm Strauss, Images of the American City

―So Baltimore is that rare thing, an old city which is not dark nor grimy nor shabby, an old city in a new business suit!‖ -Marion Warren and Mamie Warren, Baltimore: When She Was What She Used to Be

Perhaps no city in America has undergone a greater transformation in public image over the past forty years than Baltimore. If it was familiar at all to outsiders in the 1950s and

1960s, the city was thought of as the junior sibling to Washington, DC, a gritty and parochial port town whose best days were behind it. A 1969 Life magazine article entitled ―Cage of

Fear‖ focused on the city‘s runaway violent crime rate.1 Acknowledging a program of ambitious renewal programs in the 1960s, the New Republic in 1966 cautiously opined,

―Baltimore Might Make It,‖ probably not the ringing endorsement city leaders hoped for.2

Inner-city rioting in 1968 following Martin Luther King‘s assassination further tarnished the city‘s image and brought its tenuous history of race relations into sharp relief.

Today, the national image of Baltimore is inextricably linked to the tourism and recreation-oriented development of its Inner Harbor, home to a glittering array of marinas, sailboats, hotels, popular restaurants, the National Aquarium, and the wildly successful

―festival marketplace‖ development known as Harborplace. The city that went virtually ignored (or reviled) during much of the twentieth century has for the past quarter century been

1 ―Cage of Fear,‖ Life, 11 July 1969, 16-23. 2 ―Baltimore Might Make It,‖ The New Republic, 9 April 1966, 17-18.

200 the subject of countless glowing reviews in national magazine features and newspaper travel sections. Newsweek magazine in 1979 heralded ―Baltimore‘s Comeback.‖3 ―What is reviving

Baltimore?‖ asked Business Week in 1977.4 The answer, for Business Week and many other media outlets, was the city‘s booming tourist industry, centered around its historic Inner

Harbor. Harborplace developer James Rouse and the Inner Harbor made the cover of Time magazine in 1981, with the feature article lauding Rouse as an ―urban visionary‖ for bringing

―natives and tourists by the thousands [who] turn Baltimore's Inner Harbor into a continuous celebration.‖5

Creating and maintaining a city‘s image to outsiders has always been a function of a city‘s leadership. Such efforts however, became drastically more important in the postwar era. As reams of magazine and newspaper articles chronicled the economic downturns, suburban exodus, and rising crime in city after city, urban politicos and corporate executives worked aggressively to provide a counter-narrative to this eulogy. Such image-shaping often involved extensive advertising campaigns, solicitation of positive news coverage, the recruitment of new industry, or, increasingly, the construction of a tourist infrastructure that shifted the focus of outsiders away from the problems of a city and toward its recreational and entertainment amenities.6 Often these tourist developments, through media coverage and city promotional campaigns, become the primary determinants of a city‘s image to outsiders.

Visitors to the city, directed to these tourist spots, gain a positive – and carefully scripted –

3 ―Baltimore‘s Comeback,‖ Newsweek, 15 January 1979, 34-5. 4 ―What is reviving Baltimore?‖ Business Week, 15 August 1977, 122-3. 5 ―He digs downtown,‖ Time, 24 August 1981, 42-44. 6 For two specific case studies of efforts at image-making in postindustrial cities, see John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon, ―Collateral Damage: Deindustrialization and the Uses of Youngstown,‖ and S. Paul O‘Hara, ―Envisioning the Steel City: The Legend and Legacy of Gary, Indiana,‖ both in Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, eds., Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).

201 understanding of the city which is then shared with family and acquaintances, thus further altering the consensus about a city‘s appeal.7 Tourism thus becomes both the means and the end for urban image-making. Those cities which cannot attract visitors, or cannot offer visitors sufficiently enjoyable experiences, typically are devalued in both the media and popular thought. In the immediate postwar years, though Baltimore leaders invested heavily in redevelopment programs, the city lacked a definite image in the national media, and its tourist industry was virtually nonexistent.

The redevelopment of the Inner Harbor, and particularly Harborplace, have been praised by its supporters for reviving the city, spurring new redevelopment in downtown and providing thousands of jobs to the city. As discussed below, critics have challenged these assertions and questioned the degree to which the economic benefits ―trickle down‖ to city residents. However, the revitalized Inner Harbor had an ancillary benefit that arguably eclipsed its role as economic engine – it played a fundamental role in reshaping the image of the city of Baltimore on the national stage.

Baltimore‘s Inner Harbor was its raison d‟etre, supporting an active shipping business as well as giving birth to various components of the shipbuilding industry, eventually including steel and oil refining. By the 1950s, the waterfront had deteriorated a great deal, chiefly because modern cargo ships had grown too large for the shallow and narrow Inner

Harbor. Baltimore continued to serve as a significant port, but nearly all shipping activity moved two miles seaward up the Patapsco River. The inner harbor area was a central concern for the Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC), the consortium of city business leaders who pushed postwar redevelopment in the city. The GBC took up waterfront redevelopment as its

7Anselm Strauss, Images of the American City (Free Press, 1961), 69.

202 second initiative after the successful launching of the downtown Charles Center development project. Initially the hope was to dredge and widen the harbor to return it to viability, but the

Maryland Port Authority discouraged this effort. Upon determining definitively that the Inner

Harbor had ―no future … as a cargo facility,‖ the GBC began to consider other uses for the waterfront space. 8 The architectural firm of Wallace-McHarg, hired as consultants on the project, noted that ―there is too much land around the inner harbor and not enough use,‖ and that ―maximizing the value of the water‖ would be essential to renewing the area. The harbor, the architects noted, ―would be so much better if the area had something to draw people to it and then something to see when they got there.‖9

In 1964 the Greater Baltimore Committee, at the request of the mayor‘s office, introduced the Inner Harbor Plan, a thirty year, $260 million urban renewal initiative that was even more ambitious than the Charles Center project. Charles Center had taken a more conventional urban renewal strategy that had emphasized commercial office and retail development, while the Inner Harbor plan, building on the Wallace-McHarg recommendation, emphasized the expansion of public space, cultural activities and tourist-oriented development.

The 1964 Plan emphasized office and residential development, the traditional anchors of urban renewal projects, and also included provisions for 87 acres of open public space, including playing fields and picnic sites, something rarely seen in central city revitalization plans of the era. In 1965, the city created the Charles Center-Inner Harbor Management

(CCIHM) to coordinate development in Charles Center and the harbor. The CCIHM was the

8 Meeting Minutes, Inner Harbor Municipal Center Steering Committee, 7 October 1963, Series III, Group D, Box 1, Greater Baltimore Committee Papers, University of Baltimore Special Collections, Baltimore MD. [hereafter GBCP] 9 Ibid.

203 first of a number of quasi-public such agencies in postwar Baltimore that had control of public financing (and the city‘s power of eminent domain) but very little in the way of public accountability. CCIHM could negotiate development contracts privately, for example, and was not required to solicit competitive bids for renewal projects 10 In 1968 the city obtained

$22 million in Housing and Urban Development grant funding for land purchase and clearance in the 240-acre Inner Harbor area.11

Once dilapidated wharf facilities were demolished, the U-shaped waterfront was turned into a grassy mall with a concrete-and brick walkway, awaiting a developer willing to take on the risk of investing in downtown Baltimore. By the early 1970s, the inner harbor became a sort of de facto gathering place for Baltimore public events. This ―promenade‖ hosted a variety of public functions, including political rallies, ethnic festivals, and other community events. The most popular of these was the Baltimore City Fair, an event founded in 1970 by a coalition of business and civic leaders to bring city residents and commercial activity into downtown. The fair was a success; 340,000 people attended the first fair, and by

1973, attendance had grown to 2 million and the fair moved from Charles Center to the open space of the harbor waterfront.12 The success of the fair on the harbor encouraged the expansion of waterfront activities, actively recruited and developed by the mayor‘s office and the Greater Baltimore Committee. The nineteenth-century frigate USS Constellation was docked in the harbor in 1972, lending an air of historical character to the waterfront. More

10 See David Harvey, ―The View from Federal Hill‖ in Elizabeth Fee, Linda Shopes, Linda Zeidman, eds., The Baltimore Book: New Views of Local History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 233; Marc V. Levine, ―Downtown Redevelopment as an Urban Growth Strategy: A Critical Appraisal of the Baltimore Renaissance,‖ Journal of Urban Affairs 9, no. 2 (1987), 107. 11Robert Vexler, Baltimore: A Chronological & Documentary History, 1632-1970 (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y: Oceana Publications, 1975), 84. 12 Harvey, ―The View from Federal Hill,‖ 236.

204 people downtown, for any reason, meant more business for downtown retail, and just as important, the image of a healthy city.

In the early stages of harbor redevelopment came the 1971 election of City

Councilman William Donald Schaefer as mayor of Baltimore. Schaefer, a Baltimore native and admirer of old-style machine politics, demonstrated an almost-fanatical dedication to the city. Described by one of his aides as an ―absolute boss with complete control,‖ Schaefer was determined to project a national image of Baltimore as a ―business-friendly‖ city.13

Schaefer understood that the image of Baltimore as a successful city was as important as any substantive improvements his administration could make. The mayor constantly criticized the city‘s press for publishing stories about violent crime in the city or questioning his strategies for urban renewal. ―One headline about a rape or a murder disintegrates all the good publicity

(about downtown),‖ complained Schaefer.14 Schaefer linked his political fortunes to the renewal of the harbor; the success of events such as the City Fair and ethnic festivals on the waterfront encouraged Schaefer and GBC to consider a way of institutionalizing a kind of permanent festival that would provide the vitality, activity, and – most importantly – revenue of the temporary waterfront activities.

The mayor understood the importance of the booming tourist industry to shaping the national image of a city, and upon his election immediately began a campaign to reform and improve tourism promotion in the city. The utilization of tourism and recreation to reform

Baltimore‘s image required a significant remaking of its tourist industry. Tourist activity had been rather feeble throughout most of the city‘s history. As in so many things, the city played

13 Levine, ―Downtown Redevelopment as an Urban Growth Strategy‖, 105-106. 14 ―Schaefer uses muscle quietly‖ The Sun, 2 January 1973; ―‘Eyes Forward,‘ Mayor Tells Business,‖ The Evening Sun, 6 February, 1973.

205 second fiddle to Washington DC in the competition for travelers. The nation‘s capital was an obvious tourist attraction, and Baltimore, a traditionally blue-collar port city, had fewer cultural amenities to draw visitors The city‘s role as a railroad terminus made it convenient for conventions, but compared to other cities of the same size, Baltimore hosted relatively few large meetings. The city‘s Convention and Visitors‘ Council (CVC), founded in 1968, was a latecomer to the game; by that year most other cities had had such a promotional organization for decades.

In light of the city‘s weak tourism promotion, in May 1971 the Greater Baltimore

Committee established a ―Promotion Subcommittee‖ to ―implement effective economic development and to develop promotion, convention and tourist programs for the Greater

Baltimore area.‖ The subcommittee, in a report later that year, criticized the city‘s relatively new Convention and Visitors‘ Council. Compared to successful convention cities,

Baltimore‘s convention income was minuscule, and the subcommittee report pointed out that convention business had actually declined since the council‘s establishment, falling nearly thirty percent from 1969 to 1970. The hotel and motel association of Baltimore also reportedly expressed dissatisfaction with the Visitors‘ Council. In short, the report concluded,

―the image of the organization vested with the responsibility of promoting Baltimore‘s image is essentially negative and self-defeating. It has not done and cannot do the job required of it.‖ The subcommittee recommended the replacement of the CVC with a group called

―Baltimore-Forward Thrust‖ that would also focus on convention and tourism promotion, but would have broader membership from the city‘s corporate community and be more heavily funded.15 Suffice to say that before the advent of its Inner Harbor redevelopment, Baltimore

15 Greater Baltimore Committee, Promotion Subcommittee Report, December 1971, Series III, Box 1, Baltimore Economic Development Corporation (BEDCO) Papers, Special Collections, University of

206 had little in the way of a serious tourist industry; indeed, by the early 1970s the industry was seemingly on its last legs. The CVC was ineffective, its main civic center was largely useless for conventions, the city‘s two sports teams were threatening to leave town, and Washington,

D.C. was far more popular with both conventioneers and the family vacation crowd.

William Donald Schaefer‘s determination to utilize public subsidy and the power of city government for shaping the city‘s image via tourist development, however, would change all of this. Furthermore, the city‘s existing hopes to redevelop the Inner Harbor provided the perfect location for the tourist infrastructure need to capitalize on this growing industry.

While the mix of festivals, concerts, and special events encouraged by the city in the early

1970s brought both residents and tourists to the waterfront, they did so only sporadically, and in the winter the harbor was largely barren. Furthermore, special events did not provide what every city desired in the financial straits of the 1970s – downtown properties that provided a consistent stream of tax revenues. The Schaefer administration, working closely with the

Greater Baltimore Committee and CCIHM, made physical development of the Inner Harbor a top priority during the 1970s. Upon taking office, Schaefer implemented the GBC‘s recommendations, replacing the city‘s Visitor‘s Council with a new organization that combined state, city, and corporate funding to more effectively recruit conventions for the city. The GBC and Schaefer also worked early in his administration to secure state funding for a new sports stadium near the Inner Harbor, a lengthy, convoluted process that was not consummated until Schaefer became governor of Maryland in 1986. Moving with breathtaking speed, in 1975 Schaefer also proposed the construction of a new convention

Baltimore, Baltimore, Md.; ―Greater Baltimore Committee urges visitors council be replaced,‖ Baltimore Sun, 18 January 1972.

207 center near the harbor‘s waterfront, financed entirely by state and city funding.16 In 1976

Baltimore residents approved a city bond referendum to construct a $21.5 million dollar aquarium on the Inner Harbor, financed entirely by the city.17 Baltimore was fast accumulating a critical mass of tourism infrastructure around the Inner Harbor, but still lacked the type of development that would bring the crowds and excitement of the City Fair to the harbor on a permanent basis. It found this, of course, in its most popular tourist development,

James Rouse‘s festival marketplace.

James Rouse was a central figure in Baltimore‘s postwar history long before the advent of Harborplace. A native of Maryland‘s eastern shore, he made his mark in Baltimore as a mortgage lender in the late 1930s, but soon expanded into residential and commercial real estate development. Rouse emerged as a leader in postwar Baltimore, and a national leader in urban renewal efforts in general.18 He also was a founding member and head of the Greater

Baltimore Committee. In 1958, Rouse built Harundale Mall in suburban Baltimore, the first enclosed shopping mall east of the Mississippi. Rouse had idealistic visions that shopping malls would serve not only as retail locations but as ―Main Street‖ type centers of suburban political, social, and cultural life. While malls never became the public arenas that Rouse hoped, he became enormously successful at developing them. By the late 1970s, the Rouse

16 Press Release, Office of the Mayor, 30 October 1975, Series III, Box I, BEDCO Papers; ―One Day, Baltimore‘s New Center Will Prove Its Worth,‖ City Paper, 22 September 1978. 17 ―Aquarium Loan Approved by Voters,‖ Baltimore Sun, 3 November 1976. 18 For a thorough discussion of Rouses‘ efforts at urban planning and revitalization, see Howard Gillette, ―Assessing James Rouse's Role in American City Planning,‖ Journal of the American Planning Association 65, no. 2 (Spring 1999), 150-168. Rouse‘s early life and career are well chronicled in Joshua Olsen, Better Places, Better Lives: A Biography of James Rouse (Washington, D.C: Urban Land Institute, 2003) and Nicholas Bloom, Merchant of illusion : James Rouse, American's Salesman of the Businessman's Utopia (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004).

208 Company had developed more than thirty enclosed shopping malls throughout the country and had become a major player in the retail development business.19 While his company expanded, Rouse still maintained his enthusiasm for urban renewal and remained very involved with the activities of the Greater Baltimore Committee.

In 1973, the city of Boston selected the Rouse Company to serve as redevelopers for its historic Faneuil Hall, a building with a prominent place in the American Revolution that had been threatened by demolition in the 1960s. After a lengthy process of negotiations over financing and planning, the development, incorporating Faneuil Hall and the adjacent Quincy

Market as ―Faneuil Hall Marketplace‖ opened in 1976. Rouse‘s development defied the traditional dictates of retail development: it had no anchor department stores to draw patrons, little available parking and was located in the midst of the central city. Utilizing the historic structures of the hall and market, the Rouse development featured small independent vendors selling high-quality handmade crafts, fresh bread, and gourmet foods. Vendor pushcarts, originally added to disguise the market‘s lack of permanent tenants, soon became a staple of the market, as did the mimes, jugglers, and busker musicians hired by the company to add a

―festive‖ air to the experience. Faneuil Hall Marketplace was an instant success; it drew downtown workers and tourist families by day, while at night the market became a party spot for the growing yuppie demographic. By 1979, the Rouse Company claimed, it drew more visitors than Disneyland.20

Although the Faneuil Hall Marketplace was hailed as a unique innovation in postwar urban retail, it was not entirely novel, but rather built upon earlier models that attempted to

19 Bloom, Merchant of Illusion, 109-110. 20 For a complete narrative of the planning and implementation of Faneuil Hall Marketplace, see Bloom, Merchant of Illusion and Olsen, Better Places, Better Lives, as well as Bruce Ehrlich and Peter Dreier, “The New Boston Discovers the Old: Tourism and the Struggle for a Livable City,‖ in Dennis Judd and Susan Fainstein, eds., The Tourist City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 170-174.

209 utilize existing urban buildings to revitalize the urban core. As historian Alison Isenberg has demonstrated, a number of historically-themed projects, including San Francisco‘s Ghirardelli

Square, St. Louis‘ short-lived Gaslight Square, and Underground Atlanta, all undertaken in the 1960s, provided a precedent for the success of nostalgic commercial development in downtowns. The 1970s saw renewed interest in reclaiming the historic fabric of central cities, as the historic preservation movement evolved from the province of antiquarians into a strategy for reclaiming (and profitably developing) what remained of cities‘ historic architecture after the land clearance of early postwar renewal.21 This movement to preserve historic buildings coincided with and was reinforced by a broader trend of residential gentrification in the 1970s and 1980s, in which middle and upper-class residents began to reinhabit and redevelop urban neighborhoods. Substantial corporate and public investment in downtown office buildings encouraged young professionals to seek out living quarters close to work that also defined them as sophisticated, nonconformist, and well-to-do urbanites.

While this much-hailed ―return to the city‖ was often exaggerated in its scale and impact, the

―yuppie‖ phenomenon provided a new impetus and direction for urban redevelopment. ―City governments and local elites were quick to grasp the significance of redefining the city as a place to shop and be entertained,‖ notes historian Robert Beauregard, ―rather than as a site for making flour, brewing beer, or writing insurance.‖22 In the Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Rouse discovered the immense potential for selling the experience of the city itself, and in particular the experience of the pre-industrial city in which the historic open market – the nostalgic point of reference for the new ―festival marketplaces‖ – had provided a locus of social relations and

21 Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 272-292. 22 Robert Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of US Cities (New York: Routledge, 2003), 214.

210 public discourse seemingly absent from both the suburban shopping center and the previously abandoned postwar city.

The unbounded success of the newly-opened Faneuil Hall marketplace gave hope to

Baltimore leaders that the formula could be repeated in their city. Hoping to build on the momentum generated by the already-substantial public investment in the Inner Harbor, Martin

Millspaugh, president of Charles Center-Inner Harbor Management, invited James Rouse in

1976 to consider developing some portion of the waterfront. ―We believe there exists an excellent opportunity within the Inner Harbor,‖ wrote Millspaugh, ―to create a major commercial attraction which will service not only local traffic but draw the business visitor and the tourist.‖23 While as a longtime redevelopment leader and associate of the CCIHM

Rouse certainly had an ―inside track‖ to this opportunity, the offer was not as attractive as it may appear in hindsight; few developers had any interest in investing in Baltimore‘s waterfront in the uncertain financial times of the mid-1970s.24 Even while Faneuil Hall opened to nationwide acclaim, executives of the Rouse Company were skeptical that the same concept could work in Baltimore, particularly in light of the continued economic decline of its downtown. Upon touring the harbor site, Rouse executive Edwin Daniels, Jr. offered a blunt assessment of a potential development‘s success in the harbor. ―It scares me,‖ he wrote in a company memo, ―While the Charles Center is wonderful and the city has benefited, has anyone really made any money from it? By that I mean private developers. Haven‘t a number of the buildings gone bankrupt?…The hotels are not making it. Restaurants come and go. The small retailing…is marginal.‖ Daniels also remained skeptical about the continued

23 Martin Millspaugh to James W. Rouse, 2 August 1976, Series I, Subseries 5, Box 35, James W. Rouse Papers, Columbia Association Archives, Columbia, MD. [hereafter JWRP] 24 Bloom, Merchant of Illusion, 168 discusses Rouse‘s remarkable willingness to consider the Inner Harbor when few others would.

211 success of the festival marketplace model. ―I‘m not optimistic about the public‘s ability to absorb more ‗fun‘ retailing…Everyone is in the car barn, wharf, warehouse, factory game…How much can survive? I don‘t think anyone is making any money.‖25 Rouse design director Laurin Askew also expressed ambivalence. ―I fear there is not much life in this area now, today,‖ he wrote. Askew emphasized that the development, if built, would need a substantial base of local customers. ―I doubt we will succeed from tourist trade only,‖ he concluded.26

Despite these uncertainties, the Rouse Company determined the project to be a potentially profitable venture and in August of 1977 requested commercial development rights from the city, and the company‘s proposal for a retail center on the waterfront was approved by City Council in early 1978.27 Unlike many postwar tourist projects, Harborplace was financed by private capital, although the city utilized public federal aid to add parking and other required infrastructure improvements. The Rouse Company agreed to pay the city a lease of $100,000 per year, with possibilities for profit-sharing after certain profit thresholds were met.28

The proposal to develop the Inner Harbor for commercial use raised the ire of some

Baltimoreans, who after the clearance of the waterfront in 1968 had come to embrace the waterfront as a public park. Many feared that commercial development would eliminate the open views of the waterfront and privatize what had become a public space. By March 1978 these residents, organized as Citizens for Preservation of the Inner Harbor, began a petition drive to place the proposed Rouse development on a public ballot. The group was successful

25 Edwin A. Daniels, Jr. to K.A. Gorman, 16 March 1977, Series I, Subseries 5, Box 35, JWRP. 26 L.B. Askew, Jr. to K.A. Gorman, 15 March 1977, Series I. Subseries 5, Box 35, JWRP. 27 Bloom, Merchant of Illusion, 168. 28 ―Rouse Shows Plans for Harbor,‖ Baltimore Sun, 7 September 1978.

212 in gaining a referendum for the November 1978 election, though Mayor Schaefer and

Baltimore city leaders also successfully placed their own issue on the same ballot, that allowed the Harborplace development but preserved the remainder of the 26-acre waterfront as park space. A heated political campaign throughout that summer offered,, as the Baltimore

Sun described it, ―a discreet test of the city‘s competing need for economic self-sufficiency and its desire for a living space free of commercialism.‖29 The Rouse Company and the city collaborated on an effusive promotional brochure that promised a bonanza of tax revenues, more than 1,000 new jobs, and ―$ Millions in new business‖ ―Think of a place that has everything!‖ urged the brochure, ―Harborplace is that place!‖30 The optimistic promises were difficult to ignore, and the referendum approving Harborplace won overwhelmingly.

Like the Faneuil Hall marketplace, plans for Harborplace called for an emphasis on small, local vendors and a variety of entertainment to draw customers. Early brainstorming sessions among Rouse Company staff declared traditional department store goods such as

―family clothing‖ and ―curtains and draperies‖ to be ―out‖ of consideration, while ―costume jewelry, handbags, wine and liquor, art gallery, candy, florists, books and candles are ‗in‘.‖

―The merchandise offerings have to be special, different, unusual,‖ agreed the staff members.

Rouse staff also emphasized the need for a light-hearted and bustling atmosphere in the development which should communicate a sense of ―‗festival‘, ‗excitement‘, and ‗harbor- oriented.‘‖31 Vice President Bruce Alexander told a gathering of Baltimore leaders and private citizens that ―Harborplace…will be an event, with the sights and sounds that give

29 ―The Great Inner Harbor Marketplace Row,‖ Baltimore Sun, 4 June 1978. 30 ―Harborplace‖ campaign brochure, Series I, Subseries 5, Box 35, JWRP. 31 Edwin A. Daniels, Jr. to Bruce D. Alexander, 26 October 1977, Series I, Subseries 5, Box 35, JWRP.

213 pleasure and entertainment.‖32 Rouse executive John Levering declared that ―jugglers, singers, etc., etc., are a must!!!‖ in the Baltimore marketplace. The memo also encouraged careful attention to cultivating a sense of authenticity in the market‘s operation that would enhance its appeal as a uniquely urban space. ―Logistics of the market are a part of the overall ambience,‖ wrote Levering. ―Supplies arriving, trash departing…people carrying things to and from are a part of the atmosphere and the sense of reality, of earthiness. They should not be too much hidden or prettied up.‖33 Efforts to insure an atmosphere of spontaneity, variety, and ―earthiness,‖ however carefully constructed and controlled, were a central part of the festival marketplaces‘ formula for success.

Rouse commissioned Benjamin Thompson, the architect for the Faneuil Hall/Quincy

Market development, to again serve as architect for the Baltimore market. In September

1978, plans for the market, which consisted of two two-story glass-walled pavilions on the corner of Pratt and Light Streets, were unveiled to the public. Despite a lack of actual historic fabric, the design for the two Harborplace marketplaces were nostalgic allusions, described by the Sun as recalling ―the colorful waterfront warehouses of past eras.‖34 Here the distance of time aided the Rouse Company in utilizing the formula of nostalgia. By the time plans were unveiled in 1978, the harbor had been cleared of actual ―waterfront warehouses‖ for a decade, and the port had ceased its full functioning long before that. In its working prime, the harbor

32 Draft, Statement of Bruce D. Alexander, 11 May 1978. Series I, Box 5, Folder 35, JWRP. 33 John Levering to James W. Rouse, n.d., Series I, Subseries 5, Box 35, JWRP; The exposure of ―back stage‖ functioning – such as garbage collection or deliveries- is a central component of what Dean MacCannell has called ―staged authenticity‖ that provides the tourist with a sense they are seeing the ―real‖ thing and not a managed and orchestrated place. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 94-99. 34 ―Rouse Co. Inner Harbor Marketplace Would Have 140 Shops in 2 Pavilions,‖ The Evening Sun, 6 September 1978.

214 was a polluted, foul-smelling, gritty, working district of longshoremen and sailors – ―colorful‖ would likely not have been the first adjective chosen by most of its contemporaries.

Because the harbor waterfront had already been cleared of older buildings and the pavilions were relatively simple structures, Harborplace took little time to construct.

Groundbreaking took place in January of 1979, and the pavilions opened to the public on July

1, 1980. Much as in Boston, the opening was a massively popular event – thousands of locals and visitors thronged the waterfront in a week-long celebration. ―Hallelujah for

Harborplace,‖ declared the Baltimore Sun.35 ―I have never seen capitalism look more attractive than it does right now at Harborplace,‖ offered another editorial.36

All who attended Harborplace‘s opening festivities recognized a central point: the marketplace marked a major departure from the city they had known before. Far from reflecting the culture of Baltimore, the festival marketplace and its ancillary tourist attractions were physical developments devoted to changing that culture. In an Evening Sun editorial entitled ―Harborplace: Finally, something Washington doesn‘t have‖ the columnist asserted that the opening of Harborplace represented ―a promotion to major league status‖ for the city.

He continued, ―Too many Baltimoreans still look on their city as a blue-collar town, a shots- and-beer-chaser kind of place. It isn‘t so. That‘s ancient history, another Baltimore. The corner has been turned for a white-collar, service-oriented Baltimore, which is hustling convention business. That‘s what Harborplace is all about.‖37

Not all observers saw this upscale shift in such boosterish terms. A leader of a local housing coalition noted that, ―Harborplace is a little out of the average worker‘s range…it‘s

35 ―Harborplace succeeds as a people place,‖ Baltimore Sun, 3 July 1980, 18A. 36 Quoted in promotional brochure, ―Harborplace: Downtown Baltimore,‖ Series I, Subseries 5, Box 36, JWRP. 37 ―Harborplace: Finally, something Washington doesn‘t have,‖ Baltimore Evening Sun, 3 July 1980.

215 not like a park, a neighborhood bar, the kind of things people are used to.‖38 Even the normally pro-Rouse press expressed some ambivalence about the ―new‖ Baltimore and how the courting of the tourist industry might change the blue-collar character of the city. ―Until fairly recently, Baltimore had been rebuilding itself primarily for Baltimoreans,‖ noted a Sun editorial just before the marketplace‘s opening. ―But with the convention center, convention hotel, aquarium and now Harborplace, this city is determinedly seeking a much bigger audience as it moves from its calloused-handed, white-stoop and beer-tavern past into the big- time tourist scene.‖ Yet, the author acknowledged, ―away from the inner harbor there will the older, less eye-catching Baltimore which hitherto has appealed to visitors as an authentic working city…we hope that always at the Inner Harbor, efforts will be made to bring the old and new Baltimore together.‖39

Bringing old and new together was, of course, precisely what the festival marketplace concept purported to do. Festival marketplaces, in their design and functions, appealed to a popular nostalgia among the American middle class about cities. This utilization of traditional urban character and functions in a tourist development, however, led to new anxieties around tourist development. Particularly strident were cries that Baltimore‘s Harborplace was

―inauthentic‖ – by which it seems most critics meant that it alluded to traditional urban functions in its form and images but did not reflect them in its purpose, clientele, or relationship to the broader community. When the local press hailed the development as a return to the heyday of downtown, one nostalgic letter to the editor compared visiting the marketplace with the experience of patronizing the downtown department stores, restaurants,

38 ―Fireworks, Concerts Key Huge Celebration,‖ Washington Post, , 2 July 1980, B1. 39 ―Baltimore Goes National,‖ Baltimore Sun, 29 June 1980.

216 hotels, and theaters of his youth, and concluded that Harborplace ―is an artificial pile of brick and glass totally lacking in any resemblance to the real Baltimore of old.‖40

Questions of authenticity swirled amidst discussions about Harborplace. Part of the uncertainty was spurred by the Rouse Company‘s claim the site‘s authenticity in its marketing. In a statement to City officials and Baltimore citizens who reviewed the

Harborplace plans, Rouse Company Vice President Bruce Alexander noted that many critics of the proposed Harborplace ―fear what they describe as ‗crass commercialism‘ – that is, the plastic, the inauthentic, the franchise fast food operation.‖ Instead, Alexander asserted that the marketplace would ―reflect, in an authentic way, the history and traditions, the roots if you will, of the city of which it is a part.‖41 In another interview Alexander emphasized that

Rouse wanted ―local people and want Harborplace to have the flavor of Baltimore.‖42 A

News American columnist asked rhetorically of Harborplace ―Is it Baltimore? No. But it is just what we need. Baltimore is not a very stylish city . . . But this particular space – as open to public view as anything in town – is an example of excellence.‖43 Another editorial admitted that there was something ―missing at Harborplace…But whether that‘s important or not I‘m not entirely sure.‖ Responding to Baltimoreans who argued Harborplace wasn‘t

―real‖ the editor asked, ―Would you rather have Harborplace, or a stagnant slough? The answer is obvious…but that still doesn‘t stop some of us from looking at all the shiny newness and thinking, cantankerously and quite irrationally, that something‘s missing.‖44

Implicit in all of these opinions about the ―new‖ Baltimore was a clear sense that

Harborplace and the other tourist development in the harbor carried an inherent exchange

40 ―Harborplace: ‗Miracle‘ or ‗Waste‘?‖ Baltimore Sun, 10 July 1980 [emphasis added]. 41 Draft, Statement of Bruce D. Alexander, 11 May 1978. Series I, Box 5, Folder 35, JWRP. 42 ―Rouse opens Harborplace leasing Office,‖ Baltimore Evening Sun, 6 April 1979. 43 ―Is it Baltimore?‖ Baltimore News American, 2 July 1980 44 Peter A. Jay, ―Oral History,‖ Baltimore Sun, 4 July 1980.

217 value. For good or ill, remaking Baltimore to fit the tastes and desires of a national audience seemed to involve the removal or suppression of local customs and culture. While such a suppression could never be total, it was obvious to many native Baltimoreans that the

―authentic‖ city that they knew was in direct tension with the national image Schaefer and business leaders sought to project. ―If we comfortable, complaisant, backward Baltimoreans don‘t watch out,‖ noted another newspaper columnist, ―our city will become chic. All signs are pointing that way.‖ The columnist went on to express hope that the city would become

―not a place to rub elbows with celebrities but a place to enjoy city life as it really is for most people. This homey state of things is suddenly not to be shunned but to be sought.‖45 While developers made claims to authenticity, locals often challenged Harborplace planners‘ definition of what constituted ―local character‖ and the ―authentic‖ Baltimore.

Non-native observers also realized that Harborplace seemed to be more about improving Baltimore‘s image than reflecting its real character. New York Times architectural critic Paul Goldberger noted, with gentle sarcasm, that the marketplace was part of

Baltimore‘s effort ―to be thought of not as a harsh, crime-ridden city, but as a community of middle-class professionals, all in love with the idea of living in a vibrant downtown.‖

―National magazines,‖ continued Goldberger, ―have filled their pages with color photographs of Baltimoreans sitting in chic new cafes and shopping for exotic produce in expensive new markets.‖ Still, the effect of Harborplace was limited; Baltimore was still ―not the nation‘s prettiest city, or its most livable or its most energetic. What it is is an old American city that has begun to look at itself as a fairly healthy being, and that alone is worthy of praise.‖46

45 ―Baltimore is now a city with ‗class‘ all its own,‖ Publication and date unknown; clipping from Series I, Subseries 5, Box 36, Folder 12, JWRP. 46 ―Baltimore Marketplace: An Urban Success,‖ New York Times, 18 February 1981, A18.

218 While the initial enthusiasm at Harborplace‘s opening faded in the following weeks, the marketplace continued to be the city‘s most popular tourist attraction. At the one-year anniversary of the development, a Rouse Company executive reported to Mayor Schaefer that an astounding 18 million people had visited Harborplace, with approximately 20% of those from outside the state of Maryland. Even allowing for an artificially high attendance estimate, the figure is remarkable. Sales figures and estimated tax revenues to the city and state in the first year exceeded initial expectations.47

Though Harborplace was a tremendously successful tourist development, its larger role in the everyday life of the city was still uncertain – and in some ways intentionally minimized. The Rouse Company and city officials repeatedly spoke of Harborplace as a

―people place‖ that brought pedestrian traffic back to the city. The actual design of

Harborplace, however, disconnected the marketplace from the downtown and discouraged patrons from interaction with the non-tourist portions of the city. Light and Pratt Streets were widened as part of the harbor renewal plan and formed a multilane barrier around all three sides of the Inner Harbor. Critics have noted that ―one feels a sense of isolation at the Inner

Harbor‖ and ―unlike the traditional urban experience, one must commute to the harbor to participate in its activities.‖48 Thus, while Harborplace and subsequent tourist developments brought increased pedestrian activity and ―liveliness‖ to downtowns, they did so primarily within a very small, contained, and protected space. Rouse himself seemed to be aware of the need for some management of contact between Harborplace and the city. In a 1978 memo

47 Mathias J. Devito to William Donald Schafer, 18 June 1981, Series I, Subseries 5, Box 36, Folder 12, JWRP. 48 ―What‘s Right (and Wrong) about the Inner Harbor,‖ Planning, April 1992, 31.

219 Rouse listed ―special circumstances‖ that Harborplace faced compared to the traditional mall development. His concerns included ―invasion by people visiting harbor, not Harborplace,‖

―gangs,‖ ―crowd control‖ ―security‖ and ―large numbers of working class people.‖49 In struggling to adapt the model of the suburban mall to a tourist location in the heart of downtown, the Rouse Company would find the separation of the harbor from the city by Light and Pratt Street a helpful barrier in ameliorating many of these problems. The Inner Harbor development functions as the quintessential example of the ―tourist bubble,‖ allowing visitors to patronize the shops of Harborplace and tour the National Aquarium while minimizing their interaction with the non-tourist portions of the city.

The question of whether or not the Inner Harbor should be primarily a public urban space or a privately managed retail area was not entirely resolved by the November 1978 election approving the Harborplace development. The early years of Harborplace saw significant tension between Baltimore residents who treated the pavilions and promenade as public park space and those who desired to control it as a tourist-friendly controlled private property. As historian Lizabeth Cohen has demonstrated, the postwar decades saw the geographic redistribution of civic space, from traditional urban ―town squares‖ or city plazas to shopping centers and suburban malls.50 The movement of mall-style retailing back to downtown created new tensions and uncertainties about the meaning and function of urban commercial space, especially space that took on the form of public urban markets. Ever- attentive to the image of his new crown jewel, in May 1981 an alarmed William Donald

Schaefer penned a memo to the city‘s police commissioner and police chief about behavior at

49 ―Thoughts in Moving Ahead on Harborplace,‖ Series I, Subseries 5, Box 35, JWRP. 50 See Lizabeth Cohen, "From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration of Community Marketplaces in Postwar America." American Historical Review 101 (October 1996), 1050-1081.

220 Harborplace. ―I am concerned over the security of Harborplace,‖ fretted Schaefer, ―Last weekend I personally observed:

A. Use of radios in a loud fashion B. Private individuals ―tapping in‖ radios on City electric lines C. Riding of bikes on the promenade D. Disorderly action – man stripping

Schaefer continued, ―Harborplace is one of the ‗showcases‘ of the city. We must coordinate activities so patrons will feel secure.‖51 The city‘s police force added additional patrols and guard kiosks around the inner harbor in response. Approximately a year later, the city also announced new rules limiting demonstrations and solicitations in the Inner Harbor area, despite an earlier state supreme court decision invalidating such laws. The precipitating event had been efforts by Hare Krishna members to distribute literature near Harborplace. The new ordinances limited assembled groups to 15, required advance permits for public demonstrations on the harbor waterfront, and required solicitors and demonstrators to maintain set distances from pavilion entrances and outdoor dining tables.52

Baltimoreans themselves clearly had difficulty identifying Harborplace as a private shopping center rather than a public urban space. Indeed, so closely identified was the Inner

Harbor development with Mayor Schaefer and the city as a whole that Schaefer‘s office continually received correspondence and comments about Harborplace, ranging from customers‘ dissatisfaction with merchandise to parents‘ concerns about their children‘s

51 Memo, William Donald Schaefer, 6 May 1981, Box 408, Folder ―Harborplace‖ William Donald Schaefer Papers, Baltimore City Archives, Baltimore, MD [hereafter WDSP]. Such micro-managing was not at all unusual for Schaefer, who became famous for driving around the city after work hours cataloging abandoned cars, uncollected garbage, and other deficiencies in municipal services and demanding immediate correction to these oversights in sharply-worded memos the following morning. 52 ―New park rules aim at limiting gatherings in the Inner Harbor,‖ Baltimore Evening Sun, 25 March 1982.

221 overtime work schedules.53 The mayor‘s office dutifully forwarded such messages to the

Rouse Company for resolution. It is not insignificant that many Baltimoreans considered

Harborplace to be under the purview of the city and not a private corporation. The marketplace seemed nearly inextricably linked with city government and the greater program of civic improvement. ―Harborplace may be a private development,‖ noted the Baltimore

Chronicle, ―but – from the backing and cooperation of the municipal government to the enormous amount of free publicity in the form of pre-opening huzzahs from the media –

Harborplace is firmly embraced into the civic bosom.‖54

In the years since its initial opening, Harborplace has continued to be a major tourist attraction for the city of Baltimore, though it has departed significantly from its original concept. As discussed above, Harborplace and its predecessor, Boston‘s Faneuil Hall

Marketplace, were both ―sold‖ to their respective cities as places that would reflect local character and culture, and would feature small, unique shops and stalls run by their owners.

When Harborplace was officially approved in 1978, project manager Bruce Alexander told the News American that the Rouse Company was soliciting applications for retailers who featured ―the unusual, someone with quality merchandise who isn‘t mass producing something you can buy in any department store in town.‖ Preferred food merchants would be those who ―respect the ethnic quality of food in Baltimore.‖ Alexander also noted that the company was soliciting owner-operated retail, and actively encouraging minority ownership

53 ―A Concerned Parent‖ to William Donald Schaefer, 9 August 1981, Box 408, Folder ―Harborplace‖ WDSP; William Donald Schaefer to Anthony Hawkins, 27 August 1981, Box 408, Folder ―Harborplace‖ WDSP. 54 ―Lessons from Harborplace,‖ Baltimore Chronicle, July 1980, 1.

222 of businesses.55 An early draft of the leasing strategy for Harborplace reveals the Rouse

Company‘s aims for the marketplace. The strategy outlined the need for two ―anchor‖ restaurants, which ―must have a local flavor and be genuine.‖ In determining the prospective tenants desired in Harborplace, the Rouse Company aimed decidedly middlebrow, appealing to a desire for the unique and uncommon without alienating middle-class consumers who had limited amounts of discretionary leisure income. Fast food would be allowed, but chains should be ―new and unique to the area.‖ Burger joints such as McDonald‘s and Burger King were deemed ―not acceptable.‖ Similarly, merchandise retailers would avoid ―high fashion‖; the leasing strategy endorsed leather shops, book shops, and local handicraft retailers, while declaring upscale retail such as Ann Taylor, or Baltimore fine men‘s clothing retailer Eddie

Jacobs, Ltd inappropriate.56

Within a very short period, however, both developments (and subsequent ones like them) became dominated by national chain retailers and food merchants, looking more like suburban malls than the historic city markets on which they were modeled. Harborplace‘s business model, like that at Faneuil Hall, was not especially conducive to the type of small- scale entrepreneurial business that the Rouse Company envisioned. Lease applicants came fast and furious upon the announcement of Harborplace‘s approval; Rouse officials claimed they had already received more than 500 applications for the market‘s 125 spaces before the leasing office actually opened. The Rouse Company refused to release rental fees to the public, saying only that tenant rents ―will be high and will require a high-volume business.‖57

The diversity and local character of Harborplace fell victim to the marketplace‘s own success.

55 ―Vendors Flood Rouse for Shops in Harborplace,‖ Baltimore News American, 10 December 1978. 56 ―Leasing Strategy (draft),‖ 27 December 1978, Series I, Box 5, Folder 35, JWRP. Ironically, the now chain- dominated Harborplace development has not one but two Ann Taylor stores. 57 ―Rouse opens Harborplace leasing Office,‖ Baltimore Evening Sun, 6 April 1979.

223 Approximately a year after its opening, Rouse Company president Mathias J. DeVito announced that sales revenues in the first year totaled $40 million, or more than $300 per square foot of leased space. ―You don‘t see sales figures like that anywhere but on New

York‘s Fifth Avenue and Beverly Hills‘ Rodeo Drive,‖ he claimed.58 With such high standards for returns, small local vendors who faltered or could not match more established national retailers were obvious targets for replacement. Furthermore, the Rouse Company issued only annual leases, making underperforming or slow-to-establish vendors easy to replace. Fresh foods and produce vendors were especially vulnerable; in the initial 1978 leasing strategy, Rouse executives had noted that ―market food‖ businesses ―are historically and will in the future be low rent payers,‖ but that such vendors were ―a key merchandising element needed to create the flavor of a market.‖ In the face of multi-million dollar annual profits, and the prospect of even greater returns, it eventually became difficult for the Rouse

Company to justify the intangible ―flavor‖ values that low-revenue food vendors could provide.

The gradual replacement of local fresh foods and craft vendors with national retailers may have also been influenced by the demographics of Harborplace patrons. A 1982 study of

Harborplace patrons, conducted at the request of Federated Department Stores as a precursor to the possible establishment of a Bloomingdale‘s department store in Harborplace, came to an interesting conclusion: ―non-resident visitors‖ constituted almost half of Harborplace‘s sales, and that percentage was rising quickly. A similar report conducted at the one-year mark for Harborplace expressed surprise at the unexpected percentage of patrons from out of town.

To a far greater degree than even its predecessor in Boston, Harborplace was rapidly becoming a tourist magnet. Furthermore, a large portion of these visitors were relatively

58 ―For Baltimore, A High Tide of Success,‖ New York Times, 9 August 1981, 20.

224 affluent, with more than sixty percent reporting annual household incomes in excess of

$35,000.59 Early research into Harborplace‘s clientele also indicated that the city‘s working- class and minorities were not especially interested in the festival marketplace. Another Rouse

Company report in 1981 found that ―Harborplace does not penetrate city or suburban blue- collar neighborhoods particularly well… (it) is extremely dependent upon affluent areas for much of its sales support.‖60 Still another study, conducted by the University of Baltimore, discovered that while locals of various classes may have visited Harborplace once, regular attendees were typically affluent whites in their 20s and 30s, with an increasing number of these visitors from outside the Baltimore metropolitan area.61

Thus by the early 1980s Harborplace was increasingly an attraction for well-to-do tourists and suburbanites and not a market for local city residents. While tourists ostensibly travel to experience new local customs and culture, the massive national popularity of national franchise hotels and motels, for example, demonstrates that travelers also value the familiar, the known quantity in otherwise unfamiliar surroundings. Scholars of tourism have noted that tourist development tends to encourage and foster standardization, both from site to site as well as within individual locations.62 Given the increasing number of tourist patrons, is perhaps not surprising that the local, ―quirky‖ vendors that originally filled Harborplace soon gave way to national retailers and restaurateurs. This need for familiarity in tourist destinations was well-known among professionals in the tourist and hospitality industry. ―The

American traveler wants change, but not too much change,‖ noted a 1971 article in Cornell

59 ―Executive Summary, Consumer Research, Harborplace‖ April 1982, Series I, Box 5, Folder 35, JWRP. 60 The Rouse Company, ―Consumer Research Report: Harborplace,‖ January 1981, 8. Series I, Subseries 5, Box 36, JWRP. 61 ―Who Goes to Harborplace and Why,‖ Baltimore Sun, 19 July 1981. 62 Fainstein and Judd, The Tourist City, 12-13.

225 University‘s Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, ―Returning to his room at the end of a day of sightseeing, the tourist welcomes the Hilton rooms which to him represent safety and the familiar…The lobby décor can contain whatever symbolizes the locale; the dining room too. But make the menu American. We don‘t play around with our stomachs.‖63

The expansion of chain retailing and dining establishments allowed Baltimore tourists to experience the novel and unfamiliar surroundings of the Inner Harbor, but still be assured of a reliable, if unadventurous, meal at chain establishments such as the Cheesecake Factory and a consistent and familiar merchandise in stores such as the Gap or the Yankee Candle Company chain. Such changes that catered to the widest possible customer base may have boosted the bottom line of Rouse marketplaces, but it undermined the initial appeal of festival marketplaces as unique urban locales. ―It‘s a shame,‖ observed one local shop owner at New

York City‘s South Street Seaport, a Rouse marketplace opened in 1983. ―People come here for a seaport and what do they get? A shopping mall, just like they have at home.‖64

While the construction of ―imageable‖ tourist spaces has been a favorite formula for postwar urban revitalization, the building of a Rouse festival marketplace has not been an instant recipe for success, particularly in smaller declining cities. Flint, Michigan‘s Water

Street Pavilion, built by Rouse‘s Enterprise Development Corporation, is one well-known example. As highlighted in Michael Moore‘s documentary film Roger and Me (1989), the

Water Street Pavilion was a miserable failure among several in Flint‘s efforts to become a tourist mecca. After being subsidized by an already cash-strapped city government for several years, the marketplace closed and was purchased by the University of Michigan-Flint to house student services and the university‘s bookstore. Other Rouse marketplaces in

63 Donald E. Lundberg, ―Why Tourists Travel,‖ Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, February 1971, 80-81. 64 ―Rough Sailing for South Street Seaport,‖ New York Times, 29 March 1998, 14:1

226 Toledo, Ohio and Richmond, Virginia experienced similar fates.65 Developers began to alter the formula as marketplaces faltered. This often involved reducing souvenir and novelty shops and adding high-end retail that catered more to well-to-do urban professional residents.

―What you need is five or six exclusive dress shops,‖ noted one developer, ―If it‘s just a festival market, the local people have nothing to come back for.‖66 Despite the promises of tourist shoppers saving the city, locals remained essential to the survival of most downtown retail development.

These examples proved the limitations of the festival marketplace, which was far from a guaranteed success in urban redevelopment. Rather, a confluence of local factors seems to ultimately determine the success or failure of festival marketplaces. Perhaps most important is sufficient local population to supplement the slower times when tourists are not in plentiful supply. Another is an infrastructure of tourist attractions that can attract customers –

Baltimore‘s National Aquarium, waterfront convention center, and Camden Yards stadiums provide this for Harborplace, as does Boston‘s rich collection of historic sites related to the

American Revolution, whose visitors then also patronize Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market.

While festival marketplaces can be central components of a tourist ―trophy case‖ they seem to be less successful without these primary tourism generators. A third factor seems to be location; those marketplaces which remain success are often connected with waterfronts or a city‘s ―front door.‖ St. Louis‘ Union Station, a festival marketplace developed by the Rouse

Company after James Rouse‘s retirement, has limped along since its opening in 1985. Its

65 Bloom, Merchant of Illusion, 92; Dennis Judd and Todd Swanstrom, City Politics: Private Power and Public Policy (New York: Longman, 2002), 395. 66 ―Cities, Developers Seek New Approaches As Festival Markets Lose Some Luster,‖ Wall Street Journal¸ 11 December 1986, 35.

227 location on the western edge of downtown, far from the tourist activity of the riverfront and sitting amidst warehouses and neglected parking lots, has done the market no favors.

Festival marketplaces have also come to embody, for some observers, the worst excesses of the postindustrial tourist city. Like their counterparts in the popular press, academic critiques of marketplaces often focus on the issue of authenticity, deriding them as ideological manipulations that commercialize history and provided a sanitized ―urban‖ experience. ―Tourists continue to flock to the Inner Harbor – but are they getting the real thing?‖ asked one scholarly article.67 Others have criticized the marketplaces for providing the ―illusion of publicity‖ rather than a ―genuine public city‖68 – a critique certainly supported by the controversies over public use of Baltimore‘s inner harbor.

Despite these shortcomings, in the mid-1980s it seemed Baltimore had found the formula for urban revitalization, and that recipe involved extensive investment in an infrastructure of tourist attractions that would draw suburban families to the urban core. By

1985, more than 30 cities nationwide were planning or building large downtown aquariums, and National Aquarium officials were planning a $20 million expansion to meet unexpected customer demand. One observer correctly identified the continuum between this new craze for downtown aquatic life and earlier efforts at tourism development. ―As domed sports stadiums and convention centers were to the last two decades, aquariums are ‗the next generation of civic-booster projects‘,‖ wrote a Wall Street Journal reporter.69 Festival marketplaces also became the urban redevelopment fad of the 1980s. Creating and defining

67 Kelly and Lewis, ―What‘s Right (and Wrong) about the Inner Harbor,‖ 28. 68 M. Christine Boyer, ―Cities for Sale: Merchandising History at the South Street Seaport,‖ in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 181-204. 69 ―Forget Big Convention Halls; Now Cities See Aquariums as Urban Renovation Tools,‖ Wall Street Journal, 22 November 1985, 33; ―Cities Looking to Aquariums as an Economic Lure,‖ New York Times, 10 August 1986, 34.

228 an image of the city of Baltimore as a ―comeback city,‖ was a central role of the Harborplace development. ―For the last 15 years, we have been working to move Baltimore from a strictly blue-collar town to a more cosmopolitan city. I think Harborplace is part of that movement,‖ noted GBC executive director William Boucher, ―It also symbolizes the change in a physical sense of what‘s going on in the city and in the attitudes of its people.‖70 Throughout his fifteen year tenure, Schaefer carefully crafted a national media campaign that positioned his city as the ―Renaissance City‖ of the 1980s. Esquire magazine declared Schaefer the ―best mayor in America‖ in 1984.71 As important as Harborplace‘s economic benefits was its public relations role – creating an image of urban life that both featured the vitality, ―street‖ commerce and public interaction of traditional urban life with the cleanliness, control, and leisure activities that spoke to an American public grown accustomed to the world of the suburban shopping mall.

While William Donald Schaefer and members of the GBC intended the Inner Harbor to serve as a symbol of the ―renaissance‖ of Baltimore, in the years after Harborplace‘s completion the Inner Harbor also became a symbol, in a negative sense, for critics. The hard statistics of crime, poverty, education, and unemployment challenged city leaders‘ efforts to portray the downtown as a revitalized tourist playground. In the quarter century since the

Inner Harbor‘s rebirth, city leaders have consistently struggled to redirect the lens of public scrutiny away from the city‘s struggling neighborhoods and toward the glittering mass of tourist playgrounds on the waterfront. A 1983 political cartoon by popular Baltimore Sun cartoonist Mike Flanagan depicted Mayor Schaefer in an argument with black Democratic primary challenger William H. Murphy, Jr. before a televised election debate. Schaefer holds

70 ―Bawlamer, meet Harborplace,‖ Baltimore News American, 2 July 1980. 71 Harvey, ―The View from Federal Hill,‖ 237; ―Who is the Best Mayor in America?‖ Esquire magazine, October 1984.

229 a large screen with a photo of the Inner Harbor‘s redevelopment, while Murphy points to a similar screen with a picture of dilapidated slums. A distressed TV cameraman exclaims

―They‘re arguing over backdrops!!‖72 ―Arguing over backdrops‖ might well summarize much of the discourse around Baltimore in the past three decades. The dissonance between the city‘s image as a revitalized tourist hotspot and the continuing downward spiral of its inner city has framed the terms of debate over Baltimore, both in the local and national press.

In the early years of the Inner Harbor‘s renaissance, William Donald Schaefer and other supporters pointed to the tourist industry centered around the harbor as a generator of tax revenue and ―spin-off‖ downtown development. The city‘s tax rolls certainly grew in the post-Harborplace years; by the early 1980s, the city‘s tax base was four times higher than in the 1960s, before the city undertook the downtown Charles Center and Inner Harbor redevelopment projects.73 Boosters also credited the Inner Harbor redevelopments with creating 14,000 new jobs in the city. Critics, however, have charged that most of these jobs , though most of these were low-paying and part-time service sector jobs that could not adequately replace the high-wage manufacturing and union-protected jobs in the city‘s shipping industry, and that as a whole the wealth of the Inner Harbor developments has failed to ―trickle down‖ to the city‘s residents. A Sun editorial published a year after Harborplace‘s opening challenged readers to move ―out of the lush circle of shops and stores….a mile, maybe half a mile‖ into the dilapidated neighborhoods of South Baltimore, in which residents regularly petitioned a neighborhood relief center for basic living necessities. ―Can it not be said,‖ concluded the editorial, ―that the enormous success of Harborplace is diminished by the

72 Cartoon, Series I: Flannery, William Donald Schaefer Political Cartoon Collection, University of Baltimore Special Collections, Baltimore, Md. 73Levine, ―Downtown Redevelopment as an Urban Growth Strategy: A Critical Appraisal of the Baltimore Renaissance,‖ 110.

230 poverty on its fringes?‖74 Soon after Harborplace‘s opening, Baltimore housing activist

Ralph Moore appeared on ABC‘s national Nightline program and vociferously debated

Schaefer on the merits of the new tourist-oriented Inner Harbor, criticizing the large amounts of public subsidy and political capital poured into the marketplace, Aquarium, hotels and convention center while the city‘s housing and employment statistics remained abysmal. The critics certainly had ample evidence to back up their arguments; from 1970 to 1990, for example, the period in which Inner Harbor redevelopment activity was at its peak and should have been delivering on its promises of economic renewal, the city of Baltimore lost 47,000 jobs.75 An internal city economic study in the late 1980s determined that the Inner Harbor and downtown required $17 million more in city services than they returned in tax revenues.76

Schaefer‘s successor Kurt Schmoke famously observed in 1991, ―If you were revisiting

Baltimore today after a twenty-year absence, you would find us much prettier and much poorer.‖77

Schmoke, who won election as the city‘s first African-American mayor in 1986, criticized the ―dual city‖ condition of Baltimore and Schaefer‘s incessant efforts at image- making.78 Still, Schmoke changed little in the city‘s redevelopment priorities, as the city continued to make generous and often loosely-monitored loans and grants to encourage downtown tourist and commercial projects.79 In 1995 Schmoke acknowledged that his

74 ―Dark shadows in Harborplace‘s bright circle,‖ Baltimore Evening Sun, 17 July 1981. 75 Richard C. Hula, ―The Two Baltimores,‖ in Dennis Judd and Michael Parkinson, eds., Leadership and Urban Regeneration: Cities in North America and Europe (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1990), 208. 76 Harvey, ―The View from Federal Hill,‖ 239. 77 Quoted in Tony Hiss, ―Annals of Place: Reinventing Baltimore,‖ New Yorker, 29 April 1991, 62 78 On the ―dual city‖ as a syndrome of postindustrial cities, see Beauregard, Voices of Decline, 187. 79 Hula, ―The Two Baltimores,‖ 210-211.

231 decision to ―reduc[e] the P.R. apparatus in City Hall‖ had made it difficult to match Schaefer in encouraging a positive image of the mayor and the city.80

In their work Cityscapes and Capital, Michael Pagano and Ann Bowman note, ―In transforming aspirations and visions into reality, local officials attempt to project a favorable and distinct image of the city. One approach to image projection is the creation of a unique place identity, a symbol so prominent that it is the city.‖ Baltimore‘s Inner Harbor, filled with ships‘ masts set against the glowing Harborplace and the hotels and office buildings of downtown, has become that kind of symbol for Baltimore. Other cities have also utilized their tourist attractions as media images. In St. Louis, the Gateway Arch has been enormously successful in establishing an ―image‖ for the city, and especially its downtown.

Within the city itself, the Arch is ubiquitous, incorporated into countless company logos, slogans and advertisements. But it is outside the city, on a national and international scale, where the structure has carried the greatest weight. Like the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of

Liberty, or the Golden Gate Bridge, the Arch has come to define its city in popular culture.81

Critics who in subsequent years laughingly compared the St. Louis Arch to the McDonald‘s

―Golden Arches‖ were not far off the mark; the Gateway Arch became a branding logo designed to enable easy recognition and successful marketing of a ―product‖ – the city of St.

Louis itself.

Tourism development continued to hold enormous appeal as a potential tool for revitalizing urban images – and thus, in theory, reversing cities‘ decline. A 1983 open letter

80 ―For Baltimore Mayor, A Shaky Incumbency,‖ New York Times, 7 September 1995. 81 Michael A. Pagano and Ann Bowman, Cityscapes and Capital: The Politics of Urban Development. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 44-67, 108-9.

232 to the city leaders of Newark, New Jersey by scholar Stanley Winters, published in the New

York Times, acknowledged that the city ―has enormous image problems based on myth, and lamentably, reality.‖ Winters argued that tourism would not only bring money to the city, but also ―compel the city to upgrade the services vital to reversing its national image.‖ For the centerpiece of this tourist development Winters proposed a large tower that would serve as a landmark and ―distinctive and memorable‖ identifier for the city ―so that approaching travelers will say ―There‘s Newark,‖ just as they say ―There‘s Paris,‖ or ―We‘re nearing

Toronto.‖82

Image-making through tourism and entertainment came to dominate economic strategies in other struggling cities as well. Leaders in Camden, New Jersey also sought to emulate Baltimore‘s strategy. Facing an image as a decayed, crime-ridden deindustrialized city, Camden leaders in 1983 hired American Cities Corporation, a subsidiary of the Rouse

Company, to prepare a comprehensive development plan for the city‘s waterfront. American

Cities emphasized the importance of image-shaping as a role of a proposed retail and entertainment facility on the Delaware River. ACC encouraged Camden to pursue an

―induced market‖ via a ―public attraction facility‖ that would ―act as the focal point for the overall project and will significantly improve Camden‘s image, - critical to stimulating market support.‖83 So engrained was the need for tourism-friendly image-making in the postindustrial city that a well-cultivated positive public image was now seen as a prerequisite for substantial economic and social improvement – rather than the other way around.

Although the proposed specialty retail, hotel, and theater complex never materialized, historian Howard Gillette argues that, ―henceforth the driving force for redevelopment [in

82 ―Newark Needs a Tower to Bring in the Tourists,‖ New York Times, 17 April 1983. 83 Quoted in Howard Gillette, Camden After the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-industrial City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 126-127.

233 Camden] would no longer be industrial, or even primarily office development, but that of a powerful entertainment district with wide regional appeal.‖84 The city received $52 million in state funding for a waterfront aquarium, and eventually added a publicly-funded minor-league ballpark and the World War II battleship U.S.S. New Jersey as a museum on the banks of the

Delaware River.85

Efforts to intentionally create an image for a city can often meet with strident opposition, however, especially when the desired image clashes with the everyday reality of a city‘s residents. While Harborplace and the larger Inner Harbor makeover became the predominant representation of the city in the national media, the creation and maintenance of

Baltimore‘s public image has been an ongoing project. Baltimore‘s image-makers have seen sharp challenges in more recent years, for example, by portrayals of the city in the work of

Baltimore natives Ed Burns and David Simon. Simon, a former Baltimore Sun journalist, wrote two nonfiction works, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) and The Corner:

A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (1997), both of which were set in Baltimore and became critically-acclaimed television series, ―Homicide‖ on NBC, and ―The Corner‖ as a miniseries on the premium HBO cable network. ―The Wire,‖ another HBO series collaboration between Burns and Simon, also uses Baltimore as the backdrop for exploration of the critical issues plaguing American inner cities, including failing schools, political corruption, and drug-related crime. Simon noted in an interview with Baltimore‘s alternative

City Paper that ―the show doesn‘t represent all of Baltimore and would never claim such, this show is not unique to Baltimore…it happens to be Baltimore. But if you‘re watching the show in St. Louis or Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Chicago, you relate to things in your own

84 Ibid., 126-127. 85 Ibid., 123-144.

234 vicinity.‖86 Distressed that their city was now the poster child for urban decay, City Council members in November 2002 considered a resolution to commission an ―upbeat‖ image makeover for the city, awkwardly dubbed, ―Let‘s Not Just Imagine a Better Image for

Baltimore.‖ They deferred when Simon threatened to pull the show‘s filming out of the city, thus taking away substantial job opportunities and tax revenues.87 A marketing consultant hired by the city in 2005, however, took specific aim at these troublesome portrayals in its initial report. ―The perception of Baltimore is ‗The Wire,‘ ‗The Corner,‘ ‗Homicide (Life on the Street)‘… a hopeless, depressed, unemployed, crack-addicted city,‖88 Months later the consultants held a ―brainstorming‖ session to plan the city‘s ―makeover,‖ which consisted of gathering city business and civic leaders in a downtown hotel and asking questions such as,

―If Baltimore were a car, what would it be?‖ and ―Are we a martini, or a beer?‖ The consultants suggested the difficulties of Baltimore were not ―a problem with the product, it‘s the image and perception in the marketplace.‖89 Such is the language of civic improvement in the tourist-oriented city, in which urban recovery is just a matter of finding the right sales pitch.

Festival marketplaces, and other historically-themed urban tourist attractions, emerged at just the time when the issues of the postwar urban crisis were fading from national public discourse. As national publications ceased bemoaning cities‘ decline and celebrated their

86 ―Under the Wire,‖ Baltimore City Paper, 28 May 2003. 87 ―The Nose: Let‘s Not Just Imagine a Better Image for Baltimore,‖ Baltimore City Paper, 19 February 2003; ―A Baltimore Without Hairspray or Diners,‖ New York Times, 1 June 2003; ―Stealing Life,‖ The New Yorker, 22 October 2007. 88 Associated Press, ―Baltimore seeks image makeover,‖ 8 November 2005. 89 Associated Press, ―The secret of selling Baltimore,‖ 29 May 2006.

235 apparently restored downtowns and gentrified neighborhoods, such developments seemed to have ―saved‖ the city – despite acres of evidence to the contrary beyond the tourist downtown and the small chic urban neighborhoods. Festival marketplaces provide all the basic requirements of ―experiencing‖ a city – being outdoors rather than confined in a building, walking among large crowds of people of ostensibly different ethnicities, tastes, and values,

―window shopping‖ through ―streets‖ of goods, and purchasing locally-unique foods and consumer products. In doing so, marketplaces provided the idealized urban center which could then be celebrated in the media and to a visitor‘s friends and acquaintances. They demonstrated a remarkable ability to reflect an image of urban revitalization, to draw from their urban settings a sense of tradition, organic vitality and the ever-elusive ―authenticity‖ while disguising the actual city outside their borders. What Dean MacCannell has described as ―staged authenticity,‖ a production which shields the actual locale from tourists (and vice versa), while presenting an image of ―authentic‖ local character, certainly characterizes the design of festival marketplaces.90

And yet, scholars have been too quick to condemn or dismiss marketplaces, and other tourist development, as ―inauthentic‖ – and therefore somehow morally and culturally inferior to non-tourist space – while proposing few alternatives beyond a return to an ostensibly pure

―public sphere‖ that likely never existed. As other scholars have noted, while festival marketplaces are ―artificial‖ in many ways, their success in adapting the historic character of cities to present-day market realities has provided the impetus for other, less structured and

90 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist, 214.

236 less corporately-controlled, adaptations and uses of the historic city.91 Festival marketplaces reminded Americans of what their idealized city could be, and demonstrated what their current cities most definitely were not. ―Cities are Fun!‖ (as Time magazine famously trumpeted in 1981), may have been a limited and consumer-oriented civic ideal, but convincing postwar Americans to think positively of central cities at all was a significant achievement.

In doing this, the festival marketplace provided an image, however inadequate, of a lively public sphere that could absorb varieties of people – visitors, locals, suburbanites, workers – into a heterogeneous and celebratory community. This vision of urban life is both the best promise and most pernicious inadequacy of the festival marketplace, for they also risked reducing the civic ideals of the late twentieth century to maintaining that image, and nothing more.

91 See Ehrlich and Dreier, ―New Boston Discovers the Old,‖ 172-173; John Goss, ―Disquiet on the Waterfront: Reflections on Nostalgia and Utopia in the Urban Archetypes of Festival Marketplaces,‖ Urban Geography 17, no. 3 (1996), 221.

237

Epilogue

Despite an initial groundswell of support, the 2001 boycott of downtown Cincinnati, initiated after the killing of an unarmed black man by Cincinnati police, never gained much traction. Black entertainers such as Bill Cosby, Prince, and Spike Lee canceled appearances in early 2002, but boycott leaders managed to convince only nine groups to cancel planned meetings in the city. The last major convention to withdraw its plans to meet in the city was the national Urban League in 2002; by 2004, convention business was booming again. "I haven't seen much evidence of [a boycott] for a long time," noted mayor Charlie Luken in

2004.1 Even the city‘s local NAACP chapter declined to join the boycott and only moved its annual fundraiser out of downtown after pressure from local black protestors and the national organization‘s president.2

The tactic of economic boycotts to achieve goals of racial equality had, of course, a largely successful history in the African-American civil rights movement, from the

Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-1956 to the picketing and boycotting of downtown retail in the early 1960s. These efforts were effective in large part because urban blacks made up a central core of the customer base for the busses, lunch counters, and downtown five-and-dime stores that were the targets of protest. The 2001 boycott of downtown Cincinnati, however, could claim no such power. Downtown was dominated by businesses that made most of their money from tourists and suburbanites – the convention center, hotels, sports stadiums, and trendy restaurants. These customers were either unaware of the boycott (especially in the case

1―Events revive as boycott wanes: Downtown crowds defy 3-year-old initiative,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 19 September 2004; ―Conventions return to Cincinnati as 3-year boycott loses steam,‖ Chicago Sun-Times 27 September 2004. 2 ―NAACP changes plans for dinner,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 22 August 2002.

238 of tourists) or disagreed with its goals and essentially ignored it. Whereas boycotting had been a powerful weapon in past eras, downtown was now so tourist-oriented that city residents had little power to influence its economic fortunes. The boycott thus relied upon the cooperation of others; those who most actively supported the boycott – the city‘s working- class blacks and community activists – never really used downtown anyway.

The tourist-dominated central city of the twenty-first century is the product of a set of purposeful decisions made by urban leaders during the postwar era. There was nothing inevitable about its manifestation. As this dissertation has demonstrated, tourism‘s often exploitative nature has little to do with tourism‘s inherent characteristics but rather lay in the choices of civic leaders who saw a revitalized, often tourist-oriented downtown as their highest goal, and utilized their means (public subsidy, investment capital, and political power) to achieve that end. Powerless to stem the tide of deindustrialization and suburbanization, leaders agreed to subsidize, with billions of dollars in public finances, the construction of an infrastructure of tourism within downtown.

Tourism encouraged redevelopment of small sections of downtowns but left cities as a whole largely untouched. The promises of tourist industry wealth spreading throughout the urban economy seem to ring hollow – the four cities studied here, despite extensive tourist development, continue today to be among the nation‘s poorest.3 Despite this fact, time and again tourist industry heads have returned to public coffers to subsidize their businesses.

Urban leaders, desperately fearing losing any business, and particularly one which so directly shapes their cities‘ images, have been all too willing to direct federal and local aid to meet these demands. As constructing stadiums, hotels, and entertainment districts in downtown became the top priorities of urban leaders, the needs of local residents became subordinate, or

3 ―Cincinnati: Top 10 Poorest,‖ Cincinnati Enquirer, 30 August 2007.

239 in some cases ignored altogether. This was both the source of resentment and the weak link in the 2001 Cincinnati boycott.

Tourism brought people into central cities, and provided in many cases positive opportunities for suburbanites who remained nostalgic about the traditional American city to reconnect with their downtowns, albeit in a limited and consumer-oriented way. The tourist industry did not, however, restore cities to their former ―golden era.‖ A historical perspective suggests that while tourism has undoubtedly changed American cities, expectations of an tourist-sparked urban revival were unrealistic. The postwar American city did not get ―off course‖ from its predestined path to ever-larger growth and sophistication; it rose to remarkable heights at a specific moment due to a confluence of specific factors, and was then forced to adapt to a new set of investment choices which have moved in a different direction.

Indeed, the record of more than 60 years of master plans, visions and the like seems to indicate that the best course of action for cities‘ leaders is to address the reality that their cities never will return to that former place of economic and cultural supremacy, and to focus instead on creating a more just and livable community in their current state.

Historian Robert Fogelson writes in his work Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-

1950, ―If there is reason today for optimism about the future of downtown, it can be found not in the many cities that have built downtown malls and convention centers, but in the few cities where many Americans have rejected the traditional concept of the good community and instead opted to live in apartments in or near the central business district.‖4 By the

―traditional concept of the good community‖ Fogelson means to refer to suburbia. The definition of ―good community,‖ however, may be the central question in determining the

4 Robert Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 396.

240 impact of tourism in the American postindustrial city. If ―good‖ is defined as entertaining and interesting places to shop, play and eat, then tourism development in many American cities has been successful. If this definition includes broader indicators such as low crime rates, healthy school systems, and minimal poverty, however, the ability of tourism to deliver that sort of community has been much less convincing.

Tourism has an important role to play in the postindustrial American city; cities should be entertaining and attractive places to visit, and tourism is obviously a major industry that cities cannot afford to neglect entirely. The history of postwar urban tourism, however, suggests that an overzealous dedication to enhancing this role at the expense of the greater urban community leads to discord, resentment, and the remaking of central cities to serve the interests and tastes of outsiders rather than locals. An understanding of postwar urban tourism that places its development in the larger context of American urban history gives valuable perspective for engaging the role of tourism in cities today. If the myth of the democratic street of an idealized past is laid aside, tourism need not be feared as the ―Disneyification‖ of the city, which has always been shaped by private interests and constructed around the wishes and vision of a select civic and corporate elite. Similarly, if the hopes of unprecedented revival are put to rest – by recognizing the historical factors that have shaped cities‘ trajectories – we can evaluate tourism for what it is: another in a long line of investment choices that shape the economic and cultural life of the city. Understanding tourism as continuity and not an ominous departure enables us to move past academic debates about the nature of tourism development and to work to insure that our cities are not only nice places to visit, but also good communities in which to live.

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