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All this had not fallen into Cleveland's lap by happenstance. Before the U.S. was in the war a year, bushy-haired Mayor Frank Lausche (now Ohio's Governor) got industrialists, business leaders, bankers, Chamber of Commerce and city and county officials together for postwar planning. More than two years ago the town's smartly run electric utility (Cleveland Eectric Illuminating Co.) began its own campaign to sell Cleveland's strategic location (about half the U.S. population is within a radius of 500 miles), its skilled-labor supply, excellent rail and lake transport, abundant water and low power rates. It got plenty of help from civic boards and other Cleveland boosters.
Time & Space. In its 150th year, Cleveland does not wear its age and prosperity becomingly. It is not a tidy city; it is a hodgepodge of the handsome and modern, the ugly and downright shabby. Almost everything about it—except its many miles of parks and its fine residential suburbs*—is soot-grimed. Its bustling downtown area rubs shoulders with tumble-down slum shacks and tenements. Out Euclid and Prospect Avenues, beyond the teeming shopping and theater district, the once-proud mansions of last century's tycoons are now forlorn, neglected relics in a conglomeration of juke joints, rooming houses, gas stations, and quick-lunch shacks. Cleveland's looks—as if it were close to the rotting end of many years of decay—belie it; the city is in the middle of quick-changing growth, with space to do it in.
The city lacks a distinctive flavor; many a visitor complains that it has no flavor at all. It is neither Eastern nor Western. It is both Big City and Small Town. But it has one characteristic not peculiar to Cleveland but peculiarly fierce there: its citizens' burning, restless enthusiasm for community efforts toward improvement and getting along with each other.
Cleveland's civic spirit breaks out in a multiplicity of overlapping committees, advisory councils and dozens of luncheon meetings every working day. The town is the civic joiner's paradise. Clevelanders are not content to be just boosters; they bicker endlessly and constructively fight bitter battles over almost every facet of community life. Able, 47-year-old Democratic Mayor Thomas A. Burke has citizen committees to advise on almost every activity from racial problems to running the city's huge stadium (capacity 81,000) and its big convention-drawing Public Hall. Labor leaders sit on many committees.
Out of Cleveland citizens' alertness to listen to a Plan had come by this week the hope of a badly needed face lifting and general expansion of sources. Greater Cleveland had voted a series of bond issues—about $58,000,000 in all—for streets, sewers, hospitals, schools, etc.
There was even hope this week that something might get done soon with the town's long-neglected, rattletrap municipal trolley system. Cleveland's Council caught the citizens' fever, approved a $25,000,000 subway-rapid transit plan. It and other transit plans had been kicked around for more than 15 years.