Cleveland to Buffalo: The Lake Erie Corridor

Lake Erie is the shallowest and warmest of the Great Lakes, and the most troubled. In nineteen sixty-nine, the Cuyahoga River, which flows through Cleveland into Lake Erie, caught fire, not for the first time, but the fire drew national attention, and Time magazine ran dramatic photographs of the river burning, though they were from an earlier fire in nineteen fifty-two, and it became a touchstone of the environmental movement. The river burned because it was carrying industrial waste, oil, and debris from the steel mills and chemical plants along its banks.

The Clean Water Act passed in nineteen seventy-two in significant part as a response to the accumulation of evidence that American industrial waterways were no longer functioning as waterways. The Cuyahoga has since been cleaned substantially. You can fish in it now.

The improvement is real. Cleveland was the steel and manufacturing capital of the Midwest for most of the twentieth century, with a cultural infrastructure, museums, an orchestra, hospitals, that reflected that wealth. The Rust Belt transformation, which is the story of what happened when manufacturing declined and did not return, played out in Cleveland with particular visibility.

The city lost nearly half its population between nineteen fifty and two thousand. The people who left went to the suburbs, to the Sun Belt, or simply stopped coming. Buffalo, at the eastern end of Lake Erie, has a similar biography, industrial wealth, industrial decline, a recent period of modest reinvestment.

The Erie Canal, which opened in eighteen twenty-five and connected the Hudson River to Lake Erie and therefore New York City to the interior of the continent, made Buffalo one of the most important commercial cities in North America for several decades. The canal is still there.