Midwest Cities Find Rebirth Lapping at Door

For most of this century the Midwest’s industrial cities turned their backs to the water, lining the Great Lakes and river shores with soot-spewing factories, dreary warehouses and the clutter of ship docks.

No more!

The economy has changed and so have the waterfronts. Scores of rusty cities from Duluth, Minn., to Buffalo, N.Y., see the source of urban rebirth lapping at their shorelines. Taking their cues from cities on the East and West coasts, they are building everything from marketplaces and museums to office buildings and luxury housing at the water’s edge.

Sweating, muscled, hard-drinking longshoremen are being replaced in waterfront bars by wine-sipping young professionals in designer clothes. Big ore-carrying ships are being replaced by sailboats.

The trend washes ashore in Cleveland today when ground is broken for a new boat harbor on the shore of Lake Erie. If the entire $268-million project is built as proposed, it will include an aquarium, a year-round enclosed garden, a maritime museum and an area of small shops.

“The waterfront is an amenity that makes the downtown a more attractive place,” said Cleveland Mayor George V. Voinovich. “It is an absolutely wonderful asset that will make our downtown as competitive as any in the country.”

Cities are using waterfront development as a leverage to downtown rehabilitation, said Donna Wise, president of the Center for the Great Lakes. “They’re looking at waterfront development from a dollars-and-jobs perspective. They are developing new tax base and creating a tourist draw.”

Economically Important

A survey by the center found that scores of Midwestern cities are finding economically important new uses for outdated industrial shorelines. For example:

--Detroit’s waterfront is experiencing a development boom, triggered nine years ago when Henry Ford II and other investors erected the fortress-like Renaissance Center hotel and office complex. Now, more than a dozen commercial and residential projects valued at hundreds of millions of dollars are under way along the Detroit River in an area where just a decade ago it was not only unsafe to walk but unsafe to drive a car at less than 40 m.p.h.

--Duluth’s Lake Superior waterfront was once dominated by giant grain and iron ore ship-loading facilities. Now it features a resort, shopping center and convention space. An abandoned brewery has been turned into a restaurant, hotel and shopping complex. A group of museums has taken over an old depot building. Two lake-shore parks and a boat basin are under construction.

--Toledo, Ohio, has, in the last seven years, turned its once derelict Maumee River waterfront into one of the most successful redevelopments in the region. The shore now boasts a 32-story Owens-Illinois Corp. office building, two other office complexes, a renovated block of 19th-Century office buildings, an 80-shop marketplace and a four-star hotel. A 400-room hotel, a convention building and trade center are under construction. The marketplace alone generated $14.5 million in sales in 1984.

Dying, Decayed Area

“Look at it,” boasts Mayor Donna Owens. “It shows what can take place in a dying, decayed, depressed, bleak area.”

The Toledo project, covering six square city blocks, last year generated $10 million in tax revenues and created 4,000 new downtown jobs, a 20% increase in center city employment. A new city park draws upward of 35,000 people to Friday night concerts and festivals. “It’s phenomenal,” Owens said.

‘Cataclysmic Changes’

“What we’ve seen across the country is the use of the waterfront as a resource to broaden (a city’s) economic base,” said John D. Bilotti, mayor of Kenosha, Wis. The Lake Michigan city is an automobile and heavy manufacturing center that has been hard hit by “cataclysmic changes in our economy,” the mayor said.

A $20-million waterfront project is on the drawing boards in Kenosha. “We’re talking jobs in terms of construction and permanent jobs related to the shops, restaurants and retail stores. We’re combining it to revitalize our downtown, which sits only a few blocks away,” Bilotti said.

Baltimore Project

Successful waterfront projects in such cities as New York, Boston, Baltimore and San Francisco have inspired the rising tide of development in the Great Lakes region. Baltimore drew more than 18 million people to its redeveloped Inner Harbor area last year, a section of the city considered to be an urban wasteland 25 years ago.

The rush to revitalize cities by redeveloping the shores where their growth began in the late 18th and early 19th centuries is also being fueled by the movement to preserve and restore old buildings, and by dramatic improvements in regional water quality in the last 15 years.

“When I was growing up in Cleveland in the 1950s and ‘60s, you just did not go near the water,” Hunter Morrison, the city’s chief planner, recalled.

Lake Erie was so polluted in the early 1970s that water purification devices had to be installed at city beaches to allow swimming. The Cuyahoga River gained infamy when debris and oil on its surface caught fire. Now, thanks to cleanup efforts, fish have returned to the river and its shoreline contains some of the hottest redevelopment property in Cleveland.

‘Fad Phenomenon’

But waterfront development might not be the catalyst many communities are hoping for.

“You have a fad phenomenon at work,” cautioned Dick Rigby, co-director of the Waterfront Center in Washington, D.C. “There’s a danger of looking at an installation that’s worked in Norfolk or Santa Monica and trying to install the same kind of thing in, say, Lorain (Ohio).”

Rigby cites the trend in the 1960s and ‘70s to save downtown business districts by constructing malls. “People slapped malls into downtowns and many of them are duds.

“It took 25 years to bring the Baltimore development to fruition, 25 years of effort and controversy, and many people don’t see that. They just see the success,” Rigby said.

“We know it’s going to take a long time,” Cleveland Mayor Voinovich said. “But this is a start.”

Researcher Wendy Leopold contributed to this article.