Connecticut on Lake Erie
In the new vernacular of citizens’ band radio enthusiasts, it is known as “Junk Area,” or “The Dirty City.” From as far west as Omaha, the call “Heading for the Dirty City, good buddy,” heard over the airwaves, means only one thing to CB-ers: Heading for Cleveland—the city where rivers have been known to catch fire and burn. Poor Cleveland.
But the elegant suburbs of Cleveland to the east of town—Shaker Heights (now largely Jewish), Cleveland Heights, and the rural, horsy towns of Hunting Valley, Pepper Pike, and Gates Mills—are far from dirty. Though many of the old Cleveland families—Mathers, Cases, Hannas, Humphreys, Gwinns—have “escaped across the border to the Philadelphia Main Line,” and though the Rockefellers deserted Cleveland long ago, the families who constitute what might be called the working wealthy are all in the suburbs. But, like Grosse Pointe, the Cleveland suburbs have managed to shrug off the city that spawned them, to blink at Cleveland’s squalor, and to concentrate, instead, on their own immaculateness. The great mansions still line the length of Shaker Boulevard with an air of self-satisfaction so complete that the local joke is: “Nobody really lives in those houses. You never see anyone go in or out. There’s never a sign of life from any of them.”
Younger, more adventurous souls, meanwhile, have ventured farther afield—into the rolling hills of Summit County, south of Cleveland, where, oddly enough, it is possible to find a perfectly preserved old New England village. It happened this way. When, in the eighteenth century, the Crown was dividing up territory among its American colonies, the colony of Connecticut felt cheated. After a certain amount of haggling, Connecticut was mollified by being given a wide strip of land along the southern shore of Lake Erie, stretching over 120 miles from the Pennsylvania border as far westward as Sandusky—three and a quarter million acres in area. This so-called Western Reserve of Connecticut remained technically a part of the New England state until as recently as 1800, when it was ceded to Ohio. The region was largely settled by Connecticut families, who established Western Reserve University in the town of Hudson, which had been settled by a Connecticut man named David Hudson (alleged to have been a descendant of Henry Hudson) and incorporated in 1799. Later, when the university moved to Cleveland, its handsome old brick buildings in Hudson, built between 1820 and 1840 and reminiscent of Harvard Yard, were taken over by Western Reserve Academy, a private college-preparatory school.
Western Reserve, both as a college and as a prep school, attracted the wealthy from Cleveland and nearby Akron, and in the years immediately following the Civil War, little Hudson became the “secret” retreat of Cleveland and Akron millionaires who had made money in steel, coal, and rubber products. Here they purchased and restored the quaint New England salt-box houses and Federal mansions that were charmingly clustered around a New England village green. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Hudson received a boon in the form of an endowment trust fund from a Cleveland coal tycoon named Ellsworth, who also erected a memorial clock tower to himself on a corner of the green. Mr. Ellsworth’s gift was designed to preserve the town intact, but there were a couple of strings attached: All power lines had to be buried, and the town was to be dry. The former stipulation has been honored, but not the latter. Although Ohio has state liquor stores, the town of Hudson has one of the few privately owned liquor stores in the state.
Today, Hudson is still small—population around five thousand—and considers itself a very special place, where it is important to own a “century house,” one that is at least a hundred years old. Its residents include remnants of the community’s Old Guard—Mark Hanna once had a house there—who live on inherited money, and prosperous young executives who commute thirty minutes to Firestone and Goodyear in Akron, and forty-five minutes to Republic Steel in Cleveland. Life revolves around the Hudson Country Club and the one “social” bar in town—the Reserve Inn. The Daughters of the American Revolution have an active chapter there, and the Hudson Library Historical Society and the Garden Club are also socially important. Every year, the town turns out for the Annual House and Garden Tour, which is followed by an “ice cream social” on the green. There are no Jews and no blacks in Hudson (black day help is imported from Twinsburg, down the road) and there are virtually no Democrats. It is rumored that some people in Hudson feel that the National Guard did the right thing when it opened fire on students at nearby Kent State University several years ago, and a number think that a few more bullets sprayed around would have been a good idea.
As an Andorra and an anachronism—a New England village where a New England village has no real business being—Hudson, Ohio, presents a series of contradictions. Although most of its residents are wealthy, the town is said to be “a collection agency’s nightmare” as far as the paying of bills is concerned. According to Mr. James Bonbright Anderson, who made his home in Hudson for several years, the town is “strait-laced, staid, and stuffy—and yet everybody is screwing everybody else. When I lived there, everybody was getting a divorce—including me.” Not long ago, the head of the school board divorced his wife and married a neighbor across the street, whose husband married another woman, whose husband married the ex-wife of the head of the school board. For all its emphasis on New England quaintness, Anderson says, “Everybody was seeing a psychiatrist, everybody was smoking dope at parties, everybody was popping pills. One doctor—in order to keep a woman’s husband from finding out about her pill habit—used to hide her prescriptions for them under a potted palm in the lobby of the movie theater.” Hudson likes to use the words “peaceful,” “serene,” “charming,” “Old World,” and “quiet” to describe the community, and when freights carrying ore and coal thunder through town on the Pittsburgh & Cleveland line, people treat the noise as though it did not exist.
Outwardly, Hudson seems to present a solid, conservative front, with citizens toiling one for all and all for one for the betterment of the little community. Actually, the town is sharply divided within itself. The north side of town, for example, is the most desirable, with the east side of East-West Road coming next. (The two main thoroughfares, East-West Road and North-South Road, come together at the village green.) No one who is anybody would live in the south or the west part of town. As in many small towns, there is another wide social gulf between the men who belong to the Rotary Club and the men who belong to Kiwanis. “Rotary always attracts the bankers and the upper-management men,” says one resident. “Kiwanis is for shopkeepers.” It is impossible to belong to both. The Lions occupy a social level between Rotary and Kiwanis. There had always been a rift between the pupils at the public school and the day students who attended Western Reserve Academy, and when, not long ago, in an effort to be modern-minded, a Montessori school was established, it created a third division. The Akron Firestones helped endow it and sent their children there, and it became very chic to serve on the board of the Montessori school. Soon, however, along Hudson’s thriving gossip grapevine word spread that the school was being used for other purposes and that its rooms had from time to time become the scene of after-hours extramarital carryings-on. Police interest was aroused and then for some reason faded. The school, meanwhile, became the target of teen-age vandals, of whom Hudson seemed to have more than its share.
Perhaps when a town such as Hudson becomes so enisled, so encapsulated, so inverted, so smugly proud of its architecture and unusual history, it loses all sight of reality. While maintaining its dreamlike “character,” it begins to live the dream. How else can one account for the things that seem to go so wrong in enclaves like this? Why, for example, when a drug rehabilitation program called Head North was instituted for local high school students, did students from the third and fourth grades of the elementary school show up? Why did a respectable executive start painting murals on vans? Why don’t Hudson people pay their bills? Why did an elegant “piping party,” with Scottish bagpipers, end up with guests drunkenly trying to peer under the pipers’ kilts? There has even been some odd municipal behavior. Though Hudson is known as a fiscally conservative, even tight-fisted, town—and a town where there are no buildings more than three stories tall—why did the town fathers splurge not long ago on an expensive piece of firefighting equipment with a snorkle that would extend eleven stories into the air?
Is it possible that living in a community that is too perfect, too controlled, can inflict a kind of paranoia on its citizens? Perhaps, in a town where everybody lives like everybody else, one tends to feel like everyone else—anonymous—and people start to wonder who they are. One former resident of Hudson describes it as “a little like living in colonial Williamsburg, or Disneyland. I began to feel as though I had to get away to summer camp or something, to start making bird feeders and lanyards.” Perhaps, in a community where everything is too rigidly standardized, where there is so little diversity, where there are no real problems, artificial or at least synthetic problems—such as drugs—must be created. In order to create the racial balance that it wanted, for example, Hudson’s Montessori school had to import black students from Twinsburg. They have not done too well.
Perhaps it is dangerous to overidentify with a place, its history, its tradition, its architecture. When Levittown, Long Island, was first developed a number of years ago, from a handful of floor plans that were reversed from block to block, it was cheerfully predicted that Levittown would one day be a slum. But this has not happened. Over the years, the once stupefying sameness of Levittown houses has all but disappeared, as Levittown home owners have added to their houses, individualized them with landscaping, knocked down walls and added pools and patios. The “planned” look of Levittown is gone and, today, Levittown is a pleasant, prosperous middle-class suburb where many of the original owners still live and have raised their families.
While Levittown looked to the future, Hudson looks to the past. And the pretty little town—perfect in every detail that meets the eye, a little jewel—has been so admired that the experiment is being tried elsewhere. Eight miles west of Hudson is the little town of Peninsula, which, during Prohibition, was where all the local brothels were. Peninsula has old houses too, which had become run down. Now Peninsula is being restored, renovated, redecorated, and New Englandized—with quaint little Old World shops (a glass blower’s shop, for example)—under the supervision of a young interior decorator whose work has found much favor with members of the Firestone family. The object is to turn Peninsula into another Hudson. Already people are saying, “Isn’t it cute?”
But at least anything is better, as they say in Hudson, than living in Cleveland, a city that has become virtually unlivable—or Akron, for that matter. In Hudson, the trees are big and leafy, the fields are green and rolling, the houses are freshly painted, and the air is sweet.
Today, among other disasters in faraway Cleveland, the Republic Steel Company throws out iron oxide particles from its great smokestacks in such quantity that an entire stretch of Interstate 77, for miles around the intersection of 480, has been stained a bright, angry red.
Poor Cleveland.