Chapter 8: Like Being Nowhere at All
By the late 1970s, the deterioration of Toledo’s downtown had become an embarrassment to the city, and political and corporate leaders began to talk of the need to revitalize the urban core. The redevelopment plans hatched by Toledo business leaders in the early 1980s were the realization of the dream begun forty years before with the “Toledo Tomorrow” exhibition. Owens-Illinois concluded that the company’s headquarters should be replaced, and its executives Raymon Mulford and Edwin Dodd began talking with others CEOs interested in downtown redevelopment. One idea for revitalization was to build a convention center downtown, but in 1973, this plan was vetoed by Toledo voters. In June of that year, pop singer John Denver brought the deterioration of the city’s downtown to national attention by performing the bitterly satiric song “Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio,” on the Tonight Show. The song embarrassed the city fathers before an audience of millions.
Five days after Denver’s performance, The Blade reported on the creation of the Greater Toledo Corporation (GTC) to promote growth in the downtown area. Among its plans was to build a new continuing education center for The University of Toledo to be located along the river. But this was stopped by Toledo Blade publisher Paul Block, Jr., who had commissioned his own downtown redevelopment master plan. Block’s plan called for building a new county-city-state office building on land then occupied by St. Paul’s Lutheran Church. After several efforts to get the church to agree to move, the state office building had to be built on a different site. The 22-story building was completed in 1983.
Owens-Illinois continued to see a new world headquarters building as key to downtown development, and in 1977, the company purchased the land where Tiedtke’s had been located for its new headquarters building.Groundbreaking for the new 29-story headquarters took place on May 22, 1979, and nearly 6000 people, many of them O-I employees, participated. One SeaGate was completed in 1982.
The state office building and the new O-I headquarters were just the beginning of the plans for transforming downtown Toledo into a world-class city that did not resemble Denver’s infamous song. In 1984, a new upscale French hotel and a festival marketplace named Portside modeled after Qunicy Market in Boston opened. All of this development of the downtown was underwritten by a Byzantine financing scheme where each project served as collateral for the next. In 1987, a convention center was added to the downtown.
But the takeover of Owens-Illinois by the investment firm Kohlberg Kravis and Roberts in a leveraged buy-out and the downsizing of other Toledo corporations crippled the planned redevelopment. Few Toledoans had the disposable income to support Portside, and in 1990—just six years after it opened—it closed. The dream of making Toledo into a world-class city ended. In many ways, Toledo has yet to recover from the psychological blow of the failure of its grand downtown redevelopment.