FORMER BIG CITIES PUSH BACK THE SHADOWS
Crisis breeds opportunity and Big City implosion created opportunity for a new breed of Big City mayors. Teaford called them “Messiah” mayors. Their names, familiar or not, were: Coleman Young of Detroit, William Schaefer in Baltimore, Ed Koch in New York City, Richard Caliguiri in Pittsburgh, George Voinovich in Cleveland, Vincent Schoemehl of St. Louis and James Griffin in my Buffalo. To these names one can add a sixties’ survivor, Boston’s Kevin White. Chicago and Philadelphia missed the messiah mayor boat (Frank Rizzo a law and order, anti-busing police chief, conservative and populist, didn’t fit Teaford’s mold). Minneapolis, with a weak-mayor form of government and Cincinnati with a city manager were not in the running. Messiah mayors demonstrate that successful economic development in a crisis environment requires more than choosing the correct economic development strategy. It is a complete package including leadership, power-management, hard work, charisma, image and confrontation.
Messiah mayors had boosted the spirits of many urban dwellers and made them proud of their cities … [They] fashioned enough of an urban consensus to keep themselves in power … [and] eliminated some of the obstacles in the way of revitalization. These messiah mayors may not have worked as many miracles as they claimed, but they were generally adept enough … to keep up the illusion of success. (Teaford, 1990, p. 307)
Their success required use of charisma to harness political and bureaucratic power. Most messiah mayors were attacked as bosses in that they constructed a new-style political machine based on city bureaucracies, projects, pork, jobs and services to get them through elections. CETA public service jobs were great until 1982. On the whole, these mayors were not cerebral—or nice guys; they were aggressive, in your face, publicity hounds and credit-takers who established a reputation for getting things done and inspiring confidence. Power and personality became intertwined. Policy areas other than ED were vital, but ED was their meat and potatoes. Gruen was correct: downtown is the visible symbol of former Big City metropolitan viability, and the CBD revitalization was a defining characteristic of messiah mayors.
Refunction the CBD, But First “Pay the Bills”
Messiah mayors embraced a fairly consistent set of ED strategies. In the late seventies and eighties several strategies were attempted. These included CBD revitalization (office, corporate HQs, downtown malls), festivals, waterfront (and entertainment) districts, convention and tourism destinations, eds and meds, sports stadiums and cultural/arts districts. But the one they all had to follow before any other was to “pay the bills”—dealing effectively with the fiscal crisis. This required battling the unions and reducing budgets and public expenditures. Their success in this endeavor was measured by ratings from credit agencies—and by voters appreciative of a serious effort to keep taxes low.
By 1980 a big-city mayor was a success if he or she could just keep the city from going bankrupt. … Thus deficit and debt figures were powerful answers to police officers threatening to strike or neighborhood groups demanding improved services … between 1977 and 1985 the number of municipal employees dropped in ten out of the twelve older central cities … three slashing their personnel more than 20 percent. (Teaford, 1990, p. 263)
Cost-cutting, efficiency, wage stabilization, personnel reductions and tax increases were the dark side of the messiah mayor. Voters understood they were bankrupt, or on the precipice; the saving grace was that austerity worked. In 1981, after six years, NYC reentered the money markets. In 1985 Koch retired the last of the federally guaranteed debt. Voinovich massively reformed city administration, personnel management and fiscal management: an austerity program and bank loans at favorable terms, tax and utility fee hikes—and big layoffs. The city income tax was raised by 33 percent. In 1983 Cleveland reentered the national bond market, and in 1987 it paid off the last of its crisis debt and the state commission that had handled its finances was disbanded.
A part of that solution was, in Teaford’s words, “a heavy strain of ballyhoo about the long-awaited arrival of central city renaissance, a rebirth that supposedly would soon fatten starved budgets and relieve residents of some of their tax burden” (1990, p. 268). The central pillar of that ballyhoo relied on the visible physical redevelopment of the city.
Rebuild the Core
Visible and believable city revitalization meant messiah mayors and economic developers returned, yet again, to physical redevelopment and public–private partnerships. They couldn’t call it urban renewal; mercifully, UDAG and Rouse came along. Rouse’s first festival market project, Boston’s Faneuil Hall, was completed in 1976. It was pioneering (inspired by San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square) and its success redefined urban renewal. The most popular and publicized physical redevelopment strategy was simply to hire Rouse and copy Boston’s Faneuil Hall-Quincy Market. Rouse prospered, becoming a modern-day Daniel Burnham. South Street Seaport in New York City (1982), Market East in Philadelphia, St. Louis Union Station, Portland’s Pioneer Palace and Riverwalk Marketplace in New Orleans were other Rouse festival marketplaces built in the eighties. Some were never completed (Niagara Falls and Buffalo). What made it all possible for the cash-strapped cities was UDAG, the one remaining vestige of the Age of UR.
Rouse redefined UR into a mixed-use waterfront/entertainment/development project anchoring the development with museums and tourist attractions. The Harborplace Project (mid-1980s) in Baltimore, Rouse’s hometown, provided a good example. Residents and tourists used the facilities and enjoyed themselves. Redevelopment no longer was symbolized by the displaced poor and minorities. Festival marketing attracted local middle-class spenders and tourists. Food, shopping, views, street entertainment and a dollop of culture and art—a festival market and waterfront redevelopment was the ultimate mixed-use district that redefined the inner city as safe and a fun place. Rouse had given urban renewal new meaning and a positive emotional attachment.
Projects of this period include: Detroit’s waterfront Renaissance Center, San Francisco’ Fisherman’s Wharf, Salt Lake City’s Trolley Square, Denver’s Laramer Square, Chicago’s Navy Pier, Atlanta’s Peachtree Plaza, Kansas City’s Crown Center, St. Louis’s Laclede’s Landing and Union Station, and New York’s South Street Seaport. A typical example, St. Louis Center, opened with 200 shops anchored at each end by a department store. Union Station was a 90-year-old rail depot and train shed with 80 shops, 22 restaurants and a hotel. For the most part they still remain today, interwoven into the present-day tourism strategy and urban fabric.
In their effort to rebuild and refunction the CBD, former Big Cities caught a break. Cyclical growth in the commercial/office sector, driven by a national shift to a service economy, provided opportunities for CBD redevelopment. Commercial growth led to relocation of corporate and regional headquarters to the CBD. Private sector office and HQ strategies helped offset the sustained decline of CBD retail resulting from the collapse of CBD department stores and the rise of “big box” specialty retail. Downtown ceased being the metro areas’ prime retail center. Instead, it would function as the administrative office and corporate headquarters function for the region. Mollenkopf’s concern at the time, however, was valid: “some eastern cities have a rich supply of these activities (HQ and corporate, banking offices)—cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Boston. Others, particularly the industrial cities, like Buffalo, Youngstown, Toledo, Gary and the others … do not” (Mollenkopf, 1983, p. 233).
No matter the city, examples of big-name private sector CBD projects can be found. For the most part these projects were natural and organic, not the consequence of ED. Chicago’s Sears Tower went up; Milwaukee built its First Wisconsin Center. From a 20 percent commercial vacancy rate in 1973, NYC dramatically—and rapidly—lowered it to 4 percent by 1978. It continued through 1986 as the city opened 45 million more square feet of commercial space. A similar office boom spurred Caliguiri’s “Renaissance II” in Pittsburgh that equaled the total square footage of the previous two decades. Cleveland constructed the 45-story Sohio Building, and Cincinnati a new Proctor & Gamble corporate HQ. The Baltimore Sun declared 1984 “the year of the crane” (Teaford, 1990, pp. 269–72). Office and headquarter commercial growth, however, was not a universal panacea. Detroit’s Renaissance Center, headquarters of General Motors, was at best a mixed success—by 1983 its debt/ownership restructured.
Messiah mayors used tax-exempt bonds to enhance arts and museums. Pittsburgh and the Heinz Foundation established a mixed-use cultural district in the Golden Triangle; Cleveland’s Playhouse Square and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame captured the headlines and attracted crowds; Baltimore’s Mayor Schaefer developed in his signature Inner Harbor project, the National Aquarium; and Shea’s Performing Arts Center and Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo are examples of culture and theater as elements of urban revitalization. The image, if not a reasonable reality, of downtown refunctioning was forged during these years. Partly this was made possible through a revolutionary and media-catching redevelopment, Gruen’s “downtown mall.”
In the eighties, a number of central cities built regional downtown malls to support remaining department stores and provide ridership to mass transit lines built in the early 1970s: “Supporters of downtown malls hoped that they would do for the central business district what regional malls did for suburbia: provide attractive, safe and comfortable environments for shoppers; restore economic vitality, and perform vital social, cultural and community functions.” Arguably, such malls were a poor imitation of the more grandiose plans proposed by Gruen in the late 1950s and early 1960s; nevertheless they were popular and in vogue with public opinion. West and Orr uncovered nearly 20 such downtown malls; another eight were built in central cities outside the CBD (West and Orr, 2003, pp. 194–5). For the most part these malls were constructed in the Northeast and Midwest (Boston, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Columbus Ohio, the Bronx, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Cleveland, Providence, Buffalo and St Paul.
Sports and Stadiums
Sports stadiums, despite any claims to the contrary, are not job generators. The real functions of a sports stadium are (1) image, perceived by city residents and leaders as urban competitiveness; and (2) a ton of just plain folks getting together to watch their heroes, make fools of themselves and have fun—often with their families. The purposes behind sports stadiums drive us more refined folk nuts. In academia and think tank land there is a body of literature (Delaney, 2003) devoted to cataloging the job creation failures and taxpayer subsidies, marking these “redevelopment” projects as abject failures, fat cat capitalist greed and a distortion of true public purposes. (Full disclosure: As an ED CEO, my agency built/financed/managed major league stadiums—I am proud of it.) Rich capitalist owners should build their own facilities, but sports arenas are complicated affairs for an economic developer.
Stadiums address the needs of community residents to feel proud and garner respect for their home town—home team—their home city. There’s nothing wrong with civic patriotism! Rich folk civic patriotism builds opera halls and modern art museums that more normal folk won’t go near. Sports provide the social and often psychological glue vital to a positive community and metropolitan fabric. And, more than that, a sports team that moves and leaves an empty stadium is a perceived rejection of that community—quite likely a real loss of national status and competitiveness, and a visible structural testament of the city’s fall from greatness. Failure to update, modernize, create a sports sizzle experience falls to the public arena. The failure of public officials to provide a competitive stadium will cost elections, generate intense and never-ending media criticism, and create a sense of public sector incompetence held by large segments of a community’s population. Sports stadiums are an integral element of an effective strategy of urban revitalization.
So, no surprise, messiah mayors built sports stadiums as a very conscious effort to generate approval and the perception of urban revitalization:
A big city had to have big-time sports, and a giant domed stadium [and an exploding score box, luxury boxes, cheerleaders and entertainment] could supposedly lure business and visitors just like an up-to-date convention center. Mammoth sports arenas, elaborate meeting facilities, and vibrant festival marketplaces all seemed to spell visitors dollars and a fun reputation for a traditionally begrimed urban core. They were all part of the promotional package of the late 1970s and the 1980s. (Teaford, 1990, p. 276)
Minneapolis started the decade off by building a domed stadium to keep the Vikings and Twins in town. The Vikings’ existing stadium—“the old Met” or the “Ice Palace” in Bloomington, a suburb (now the site of the Mall of America)—became vulnerable in the late sixties when the new AFL/NFL merger expressed strong discontent with stadiums of less than 50,000 seats. After more than a decade of anxiety and debate, the domed Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome opened in 1982.16 (It was later torn down and replaced in 2014 by U.S. Bank Stadium—apparently stadiums do not enjoy a long useful life.) Allegedly the politics behind the HHH came into place with the opening of rival Detroit’s domed stadium, the Pontiac Silverdome (Hartman, 1974). In that instance the central city stole the stadium from a suburb.
Baltimore suffered through a reverse experience. The Colts in 1984 left town for Indianapolis (literally in the middle of the night—after being threatened with foreclosure). Schaefer scrambled, not only to find a replacement but also to retain the Orioles. The solution was the two-stadium ($235 million) Camden Yards project, one that, 30 years later, is considered a success and a Schaefer achievement by local residents—and voters. Cleveland, of course, migrated to Baltimore in the 1990s, making the project the success it was. The St. Louis Cardinals moved to Phoenix and the Los Angeles Rams eventually moved to St. Louis during the 1990s as well. Watching all these public relation disasters, Coleman Young rushed to modernize Tiger Stadium, finding big bucks in a very distressed city to keep them in place. While I support stadium construction with public dollars, I admit these case studies are little more than an ED soap opera.
Convention Centers and Tourism
Dennis Judd, concerned with “the industry without a smokestack” and its role in downtown revitalization and intercity competition, found (in the 1960s) that about 65 American cities operated convention bureaus to attract and assist convention groups. By 1977, their number had increased to approximately 100 and doubled again by 1983. Judd observed a 1972 survey uncovered 70 cities that had opened, had under construction or were actively planning construction of multi-million dollar convention centers. Municipal leaders as of 1978-79 were Chicago, New York, San Francisco, New Orleans and Washington DC (the top five in conventions), but New York, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta and Los Angeles led in number of attendees (Judd, 1984, pp. 388–93). Judd is not comfortable convention centers are a sound economic development strategy; nor is Chester Hartman, who asserts that “most large convention centers lose money” and not all cities that compete ought to (Hartman, 1974, p. 165). The industry appears highly concentrated; winners win big, but losers … well, lose.
In 1977 St. Louis opened its new convention center, the nation’s tenth largest, and the race was on. Baltimore, Pittsburgh and the Jacob Javits Center in New York City were enormous convention centers built within nine years of St. Louis’s opening. By that time St. Louis had dropped to 19th place. Chicago enlarged McCormick Place and retained its number one status, beating out the 22-acre, 90,000 occupancy Javits Center. Cleveland and Cincinnati revamped/expanded facilities to compete in the national convention and meetings industry. Detroit built Cobo Hall and Boston the Hynes Convention Center. The approach did not inevitably generate success; some cities failed miserably in attracting tourists, filling hotel beds and signing up conventions and meetings. Other cities made it work: Chicago, New York, Las Vegas, San Francisco and New Orleans (“the usual suspects”) did fine. A few medium-size cities competed effectively at a regional level. Local publicity campaigns helped, but ran out of dough; absent the sizzle we were left with the gristle. Over the next decades, many convention centers/hotels turned into chronic open sores in the downtown fabric (Judd, 1984, pp. 388–400).
A remarkable initiative that redefined state-level tourism is remembered to this day: “I LUV NY.”17 The iconic tourism campaign was launched in 1977 by New York City and later picked up by New York State. The campaign, adapted from an earlier Montreal Canada advertising campaign, caught on. City after city developed a high-priced media image attraction strategy touting each as the destination of a lifetime. Often these tourism campaigns were turned on their head and advertised to local citizens and metropolitan residents: Buffalo’s “Talking Proud,” “I Love New York,” “My Kind of Town” and Detroit’s “Super City USA” and the Four Tops singing “Do It in Detroit” appealed to out-of-towners and local residents alike. These strategies complemented the messiah mayors’ need for faith in their city’s future and the need to deliver visible achievements to justify that faith.
In the eighties tourism and conventions meshed with corporate HQ, festival markets, waterfront redevelopment, cultural districts and sports stadiums: they all countered the shift from manufacturing to the service economy—demonstrating that former Big Cities could compete. A new urban life style, sports teams, TV shows (Mary Tyler Moore’s Minneapolis, WKRP Cincinnati) hinted at today’s “branding.” A viable tourism program affirmed a resident’s hope that their city was attractive to others. Emerging from the era of Big City collapse this was economic development at its best. Capturing this reaffirmed pride, an article in the Saturday Review explained:
the big city, our big city, is not indispensable to our self-esteem, so much so we take a chauvinist delight in luring a Peter Rose to our ball team, or a Zubin Mehta to our symphonic podium … our thirst for urban display is overriding the less glamorous priorities of health, welfare, and education.18
That messiah mayors favored CBD revitalization in partnership with a corporate sector did not necessarily mean they were at war with neighborhoods. Jimmy Griffin was an exception to this, but even he was forced by the city council to fund neighborhood opponents with CD dollars. Coleman Young, despite his labor union and neighborhood activist past, was more extreme in his CBD orientation than most messiah mayors. Detroit’s Poletown is testimony to that. At the other extreme was Boston’s Kevin White, who pioneered in a former Big City a neighborhood-based-political strategy.
White told the city council that “for too long urban renewal in Boston has emphasized rebirth of the downtown area at the expense of the neighborhoods” (Teaford, 1990, p. 240). His first two administrations set up neighborhood “little city halls” (terminated in his third, however). Messiah mayors had to deal with CD neighborhood movement during their tenure. Pittsburgh’s maverick Peter Flaherty, in 1969, vowed: “As a mayor I will concentrate on the neighborhoods, rather than on the downtown section.” St. Louis Mayor Alfonso Cervantes stressed two “pressing priorities” for his administration: “the fight against crime and the fight to preserve our neighborhoods.” Neighborhoods were an established component of most Messiah-era redevelopment. City councils in Cincinnati, Baltimore and Minneapolis protected neighborhoods and urged their redevelopment as core to their city’s ED strategy
Stability Achieved
A rough, but surprisingly durable stabilization for former Big Cities followed after 1990. They didn’t die after all. Periodically, the media would tout a “back to the city” movement—usually by young professionals (never families)—and CBD and central city population would tick upward. One or another former Big City would be cited by the media and the Policy World as the decade’s comeback kid. Gentrification articles were sure to follow. And then bad times hit and the numbers went down. Comeback kids faded into the mists. Cynical? Perhaps?
But another, less comforting trend could also be observed. The two-region Big City hegemony had seemingly drifted apart. The Midwest, the Great Lakes states/cities were now the Rust Belt. True, most former Big Cities were re-labeled as “legacy cities,” cities hobbled by their ungrateful suburbs with economies that ranged from chronic decline to a slow, fragile growth in the best of economies. In the Midwest farm belt rural decline was noticeable, but what really screamed out was that deindustrialization hit the Midwest harder than the East Coast and Mid-Atlantic. The Midwest was the nation’s industrial heartland. Comparative advantage helped our East Coast financial centers, but not so much the industrial heartland.
The “new auto alley” was followed by Michael Moore’s Roger and Me documentary about GM and Flint Michigan. Michigan and Detroit became ground zero for the American auto industry transition. During the 1980s the Chicago metro area lost 188,000 heavy industry jobs (-33 percent). Rouse’s Midwest waterfront and festival markets, lacking sufficient discretionary income, a profound city/suburban racial distribution. and on the fringes of the tourist trade did markedly less well; Toledo’s Portside waterfront project failed outright. The Midwest was making the transition to the service/finance/technology economy less well than its eastern neighbors (Teaford, 1993). It was a much harder slog for economic developers in the Midwest and Great Lakes.
Between 1990 and 2000 average metro population growth for the 17 Big Cities of the North and Midwest was almost 8 percent (only Buffalo and Pittsburgh metros lost population); central cities declined 2.3 percent (McDonald, 2008, p. 270, Table 15.2). Thirteen of 17 metro areas increased population between 2000 and 2006 (Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Boston lost metro population). New York City came roaring back. Washington DC grew the most jobs. After stabilization in the 1990s, however, central cities mostly pulled backed between 2000 and 2006. Of the 17, only Kansas City, New York, DC, New York City, Columbus and Indianapolis enjoyed any pre-Great Recession population growth (in order of growth). Detroit and St. Louis lost the most (McDonald, 2008, p. 270, Table 15.2; pp. 308–10, Tables 17.1 and 17.2). McDonald concludes: “recession and jobless recovery have placed in jeopardy the continuation of the [former Big City] urban rebirth of the 1990’ and hampered of … central cities to turn the corner” (2008, p. 313).
Somewhere between 33 and 35 percent of the population live in our largest cities (nationally). It has ranged around that since 1930. Our faithful Big City chronicler, Jon Teaford, asserted the post-1980s’ gap between Big City and its suburb never closed: “instead central cities pursued a different path … a distinctive market niche that would distinguish them from suburban competitors.” The central city would not be the monolithic “hub of all metropolitan life,” rather it characterized itself as the “urban way of life different from the prevailing suburban norm” (Teaford, 2006, p. 166). If so one might make a case that an unspoken de facto polycentric metro area had emerged from the Big City collapse of the seventies.
Big City hegemony had passed into our history, but former Big Cities and their (de facto) polycentric metro areas had not! A rough, fragile, uneven stabilization of former Big Cities had emerged from the implosion of the 1970s. Messiah mayors had managed to keep central cities afloat and restored fiscal and some functional stability to jurisdictional economic bases—but population mobility was still working against them. With occasional blips and bleeps, exceptions that prove the rule, this grudging stability, verging on stagnation, of Big Cities and their metro areas has been a foundation of our contemporary economic/community development worlds.
Ron W. Coan 