Steel City: What the River Made and What It Cost

The Cuyahoga River valley in Cleveland's industrial era was one of the most productive stretches of industrial land in North America. Iron ore arrived by boat from the mines of Minnesota's Iron Range, traveling through the Great Lakes to the port at the mouth of the Cuyahoga. Coal arrived by rail from the mines of Appalachia. The Flats, the valley floor where the river bent south before emptying into Lake Erie, was lined with blast furnaces, rolling mills, foundries, and the long low warehouses of the ore storage yards.

The steel Cleveland produced moved east to supply the manufacturing economy of the entire northeastern United States. At the industry's peak in the first half of the twentieth century, the Cuyahoga Valley was working day and night, seven days a week, and the city around it was organized entirely around that fact. The working shifts shaped the neighborhood schedules. The soot from the stacks settled on every windowsill. The river ran colors that varied with what the mills were producing.

The cost was ecological, borne primarily by the people living adjacent to the valley who were not the people living on Millionaires' Row. The discharge went into the river because nobody prevented it. The air quality was what it was because nobody regulated it. The communities next to the plants, immigrant workers and Black families, experienced the industrial economy at its most extractive.

The steel industry began its long decline in the nineteen sixties and collapsed through the nineteen seventies and eighties as cheaper foreign steel undercut American producers. Cleveland lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs in a decade. The Flats became what it remained for twenty years: a landscape of shuttered mills, toxic sites, and abandoned rail yards.

Upstream, the Cuyahoga Valley is a national park now. The river has recovered in ways that would have seemed impossible when it was on fire.