Sunday, June 06, 1999
Akron 'has come a long way'
A link in trhe rust belt starts to shine
BY JOHN AFFLECK
The Associated Press
AKRON, Ohio — It's a clear spring evening, a night when the sunset seems to last for hours and the breeze is just cool enough that baseball fans pull on sweaters as they amble from restaurants and bars to the nearby park.
Inside the quaint, red-brick stadium, a few players warm up on the outfield grass while others sign balls. Kirby Twigg is showing his sons, 8-year-old Jeremy and 5-year-old Josh, the art of asking for an autograph.
The whole scene is so pleasant that, even though he works at a printing business here, Mr. Twigg is still surprised he's in downtown Akron — a place that once could have been defined in two words: Rust Belt.
“I can remember the old, dilapidated buildings, places that were totally abandoned,” Mr. Twigg says, looking out at the city from Canal Park, home of the minor-league Akron Aeros. “Akron has really come a long way.”
Many locals would agree.
While often overshadowed by Cleveland, a much larger city credited with bringing vibrancy back to its downtown 40 miles to the north, Akron has started a renaissance of its own in recent years.
Big, publicly funded projects such as Canal Park have been bolstered by private investment, breathing some life into what had become a shell of a city center.
“Growing up, shopping downtown was such a treat,” said Diane Craddock, watching the Aeros from behind home plate. “Then everything disappeared. Now we're bringing it all back.”
Akron's rise and fall was tied to the rubber industry.
Once the home of four tire makers — companies now known as Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., B.F. Goodrich Co., GenCorp and Bridgestone-Firestone Inc. — Akron grew in wild spurts.
Between 1910 and 1920, the city's population grew from 69,000 to 208,000. Eventually, more than 300,000 people lived in Akron.
George W. Knepper, a 73-year-old city native and now a professor emeritus at the University of Akron, remembers those days when downtown was vigorous — if hastily built and poorly planned — and the whole town stank with the smell of molten rubber.
No one noticed. Residents got used it and, hey, it was the stench of prosperity.
“It was an exciting place,” Mr. Knepper recalled. “It was also — ahhh — ugly.”
Then in the 1970s and '80s, the bottom dropped out. A combination of factors, including takeover attempts and product recalls, destroyed Akron's tire-making industry.
Factories shut down. Mr. Knepper estimates the city lost about 35,000 manufacturing jobs between 1970 and 1990. Today, there are no major tire plants in the city once known as the Rubber Capital of the World, although Goodyear is still headquartered here.
Big downtown department stores closed as the job losses and competition from suburban malls annihilated the commercial district.
Downtown Akron got so bad in the early 1980s that local product Chrissie Hynde, lead singer and songwriter of the Pretenders, immortalized the town's plight in the tune “My City Was Gone.”
The first two line are: I went back to Ohio. But my city was gone./ There was no train station. There was no downtown.
Later, Ms. Hynde observes: My city had been pulled down — reduced to parking spaces.
But Akron has fought back.
Public officials in the past decade have poured money into projects aimed at luring people back downtown.
“Our strategy was that if we can modify people's behavior we may be able to modify their attitudes. We modify their behavior by giving them something they can't find somewhere else,” said Jim Phelps, deputy mayor for economic development in the administration of Don Plusquellic, Akron's mayor since 1987.
In the past five years alone, Mr. Phelps estimates $100 million or more has been spent on Canal Park; Inventure Place, a science museum that houses the Inventors Hall of Fame; and the John S. Knight Center, a downtown convention center.
Those efforts, helped by the economic boom of the 1990s, have sparked some action.
Canal Park, for example, attracted 521,122 fans last season, the best attendance figures in Class AA. A district of bars and restaurants has sprung up around the park, doing good business before and after games.
Businesses have started to return. Akron's jobless rate as of April was 5.5 percent, a little above the state and national average but lower than Cleveland, Dayton or nearby Canton.
Tony Troppe, a local developer, recently renovated two grand, old buildings near the city's federal courthouse and has had little trouble renting space to lawyers and other professionals.
Mr. Troppe joked he used to drive downtown “to hear my muffler reverberate off the empty buildings,” but said he now finds his tenants want to be part of an area that has more character than a suburban industrial park.
GOJO Industries Inc., a professional skin care products maker, plans to move its headquarters with about 250 employees into the old Goodrich headquarters next year.
GOJO Chief Executive Joe Kanfer said his company was drawn by the prospect of being “in a community and part of the excitement that community brings. We think that's enriching.”
Of course, Akron still has its share of problems. Inventure Place has battled budget deficits since it opened in 1995. The city schools have received low ratings from the state, and the police department has been plagued in the past year with a spate of officer arrests.
And while the U.S. Conference of Mayors has made Akron a finalist for its national livability award, Forbes magazine in its May issue ranked Akron 154th out of 162 cities on its list of best places to do business.
But downtown, the mood is upbeat. Some people have even stopped longing for the days when rubber was king.
“Akron today is a much better place to live and work than it was in the good, old days,” Mr. Knepper said.
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