“The Best Things in Life Are Here” in “The Mistake on the Lake”: Narratives of Decline and Renewal in Cleveland, 1959–81

Like many other American cities in the Northeast and Midwest in the post–World War II era, Cleveland, Ohio, experienced a protracted “urban crisis”—a combination of downtown decline, population and business flight to suburbia, disinvestment, deindustrialization, racial unrest, and environmental degradation.  Building on emergent scholarship on the lived experience of urban decline and bids to reshape civic image and identity, Souther’s paper explores efforts by business and civic leaders (most of them suburbanites) to counter increasingly negative local and national perceptions of Cleveland in the 1960s-70s, as the city’s onetime slogan “The Best Location in the Nation” increasingly rang hollow.  In addition to well-known programs of physical redevelopment, these leaders worked to reestablish confidence in and recognition of the city as an important place.  Such efforts ranged from cosmetic treatments of symbolic city places and spaces to persuasive narratives—expressed most notably in news media and political and marketing campaigns—of either sustained greatness or rebounding from past difficulties.  Souther’s paper also examines divergent local responses to boosterism gleaned from personal interviews, manuscript collections, and op-ed pieces and letters to the editor of local newspapers.  These counter-narratives revealed deep class, race, and spatial fractures in Cleveland’s sense of place.  The paper seeks to expand our understanding of the creation and reception of urban place-making efforts beyond those typically directed toward prospective investors, residents, and tourists to encompass the often contradictory stories a declining city’s people tell themselves and others about place.