Firestone Park: The Company Town Utopia

Just south of downtown Akron, the streets begin to curve in a particular way. The blocks bend around a central park in long, gentle arcs. The houses mix styles, craftsman bungalows next to Colonial Revivals, modest frame houses beside more substantial brick homes. This is Firestone Park, and every inch of its design was deliberate.

Harvey Firestone built this neighborhood in nineteen fifteen and nineteen sixteen to house the workers of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. The neighborhood was planned with civic buildings such as a church and a school. He envisioned a community where families of different income levels would live side by side, unlike the rigidly class-separated neighborhoods that grew up around other industrial cities.

Firestone was competing, consciously, with Frank Seiberling of Goodyear, who was building Goodyear Heights on the east side of the city at the same time. Both rubber barons understood that stable, satisfied workers were more productive than transient ones. Company-built neighborhoods were both philanthropy and labor strategy.

The tree-lined boulevards and curving streets of Firestone Park reflected the garden suburb ideas of the day, a planning philosophy that promoted green space, mixed uses, and walkability in working-class neighborhoods. It was a forward-thinking design for its era, and the neighborhood has held together remarkably well. Thousands of people still live here.

Today Firestone Park is recognized as one of Akron's most distinctive historic neighborhoods. The design that Harvey Firestone commissioned more than a century ago, curved streets, a central park, civic institutions, shaped a community that outlasted the company that built it.