Abstract
Activist Phil Hart of Cleveland Heights, Ohio discusses his involvement in the fight against proposed highway construction during the 1960s. The construction, which would have crossed through Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights, was considered a threat to those communities, as well as to the environmental balance of the local ecosystem - particularly at the Shaker Lakes nature reserve. Hart places this local struggle within the context of a "national rebellion.. against urban freeways" and provides details on resistance to other such plans in the Greater Cleveland area. Hart places much of the blame for urban decline on policies that de-emphasize public transit and encourage the development of competing suburban communities, as typified by the actions of Cuyahoga County Commisioner Albert Porter. Other topics of discussion include grassroots organizing, political lobbying, and activist groups CSTEP (Citizens for Sane Transportation and Environmental Policy) and Stop the Stub, as well as considerable biographical information.
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Interviewee
Hart, Phil (interviewee)
Interviewer
Bifulco, Anthony (interviewer)
Project
Shaker Lakes Nature Center
Date
6-29-2006
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
65 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Phil Hart Interview, 29 June 2006" (2006). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 902005.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/226
Transcript
Anthony Bifulco [00:00:01] This interview is with Phil Hart. Yes, it is. On June 29, 2006, at approximately 9:30 in the morning. And first question is, when and where were you born?
Phil Hart [00:00:16] Cleveland, Ohio, 1922.
Anthony Bifulco [00:00:20] If you can just tell us a little bit about your recollections, just general about what your community was like growing up in Cleveland as you grew up.
Phil Hart [00:00:30] Well, I was born in Glenville and grew up in Glenville. Glenville School, high school was fantastic. It was 95% Jewish, most from immigrant parents. You know, very difficult times through the Depression. But we all grew out of it and were better for it. I went to Ohio State and Western Reserve, got a degree in architecture and came back to Cleveland. Well, I went to Chicago for Illinois Institute of Technology, where I got a master’s in architecture and then came back to Cleveland and set up a practice. And we still lived in Glenville a little bit, and then we moved to Cleveland Heights.
Anthony Bifulco [00:01:29] About how old were you when you moved to Cleveland Heights?
Phil Hart [00:01:33] Well, my father had died in 1944 and I was in the Navy. When I came back, my mother had moved to Cleveland Heights. So it was during that period that she moved to Cleveland Heights. And therefore I moved to Cleveland Heights. So I Wasn’t married until 1949. Graduated in ’48 from Reserve.
Anthony Bifulco [00:01:57] at that point, you lived in Cleveland Heights, you set up your architectural firm, correct?
Phil Hart [00:02:03] Yes, I did. That was in 1952. And the firm was set up in Cleveland, though. But we lived in Cleveland Heights, on Bellfield, from there.
Anthony Bifulco [00:02:17] How did you become involved with, interested in the Shaker Lakes? You know, what was your source of interest and how did you get involved?
Phil Hart [00:02:29] Yeah, I want to back up at some point and put a background in, but I’d like to answer your question first. There was a man by the name of Will Irwin. Will Irwin was a professor of political science at Reserve. And he started a thing called Town Meeting. And what that was was a series, maybe every month, something like that, of issues that were important to the community. And I became part of. Because I taught at Reserve. I knew Will and became involved with it. And one of the issues that came up was, hey, there’s some freeways coming up into Cleveland Heights. And you know, what’s it about? What do we do about it? And so that was an issue for the Town Meeting. And that’s how Ray basically got involved with it. And then things worked from there. But Will Irwin was a very important person in this whole thing. And he’s in Texas now, so he’s a little bit hard to get a hold of.
Anthony Bifulco [00:03:40] Well, from there, when exactly did the throughway fight become a fight? I mean, when did they- Who was important in the idea behind building a throughway when they wanted to build it? When and how did this throughway fight get underway?
Phil Hart [00:04:00] Okay, now let me back up a little bit. You start with pre-war Cleveland, pre–World War II Cleveland, we had a very fine system of streetcars. Any place that you wanted to get to in Cleveland, you can get through the streetcar system. And we had what was called an interurban system. You guys know about that? No? You could take a rail, electric, rail transit to Geneva-on-the-Lake, Cedar Point, Youngstown. This whole Northeast Ohio was connected by an interurban system. And of course, you know, we all forget about it. But that was our way of getting around. No one had cars, and no one couldn’t afford anything. So that was very much entrenched. During World War II, for some ungodly reason, the city of Cleveland decided they would get rid of all the streetcars. So they sold the streetcars to Toronto, who put in a great system of their own. And we were just kind of left without that. And we were also left without the interurban. So that all passed away during World War II. What started then was Dwight Eisenhower, as President, came up with the concept of we should have a whole system of freeways throughout the country that would be a national defense system. That was its basic idea. And it’s very important. That’s where it came from. It’s important that it came from Ike. And it was kind of, if there was any precedent, it was what Germany did with the Autobahn. And that happened before the war. We did have some turnpikes, like the Pennsylvania Turnpike was pre-war, pre–World War II. But the idea of freeways was, wow, somebody else paying for it. You take your car on it and you go everywhere, free. But then you had a whole bunch of things that happened. Along with that, the United States government formed the Department of Transportation, very powerful, that sprung into Ohio Department of Transportation, who became important here. Then that sprung into, at that time it was a seven-county transportation study. Now it’s the NOACA, which is five-county. But then it was seven-county. Then on top of that, we had a county engineer by the name of Albert Porter. His name is going to come up again. Very important figure. He controlled transportation in Northeast Ohio or in Cuyahoga County. He did one thing that I think is totally unforgettable, unforgivable, and it’s also been forgotten. Somewhere in the early ’50s, Cuyahoga County passed a bond issue to build a subway in downtown Cleveland. Okay, Bert Porter, who- Let’s get him straight. He was a county engineer, but he was also head of the Democratic Party in the county, which made him a very powerful guy. He also- I don’t know whether he invented it, but he started the Two Percent Club. You know what that is? Two Percent Club is if you work for me, you got to kind of give me some help in getting elected all the time. So 2 percent of your salary will somehow get to my campaigns, which other people have since taken up. Tom Delay and all those guys. But anyway, Bert Porter, besides pocketing the subway downtown, he was a highwayman. He was a concrete man. He didn’t want to hear of anything else. He was the- He was the guy most responsible for all of the transportation in Cuyahoga County, and he ruled, and he wanted a freeway. Well, okay, so what you got going is- And you asked who were the opponents? You know, where was the conflict? Well, you start with Congress, who mandated, or the President, who mandated Congress, who mandated Department of Transportation, Ohio Department of Transportation, Bert Porter. The Concrete Association, the Asphalt Association, the Automobile Association, all the GM and all the three, the Big Three. And everybody wanted freeways. Oh, don’t forget the truckers, you know, so you had all of these things. So there. Here we are, this little group of people in Cleveland Heights, and we’re taking on, you know, this fast kind of thing. And how do you beat them? And that was very difficult. We started by going after our city councils, and I’ll back up and tell you who we were in a moment. But we went after city councils because there’s nothing you can do without having city council. City councils were- They were made up of good people. Both cities were Republican at the time, and they were entrenched into the national politics of, hey, freeways and what’s good. Oh, you got to remember one thing that happened in- I think his name was Wilson. He was president of GM, and he said this most famous statement, what’s good for General Motors is good for the country, and vice versa. So that’s the tenor of the times. And the councils were sitting there and saying, well, you know, what’s good for the country is good for Cleveland Heights, good for Shaker Heights. And they didn’t really see the big picture of it. So that was our first approach, was to go into the cities and get them to start becoming aware of what was going to happen. Let me go into the organizations. The first organization was the Lee Freeway Citizens Committee that was formed in around 1964. Okay. And I don’t remember who the head of it was, but do you want names? I will give you some names.
Anthony Bifulco [00:11:08] The names that you can remember.
Phil Hart [00:11:09] Well, I’ve researched them, so I can give you their names. Burt Griffin, who is now a retired judge. He was at the time probably the head of Legal Aid Association, pardon me, Society, Legal Aid Society. And then myself, man by the name of Bill Lowry, who was an attorney in Shaker Heights. Dick Stoddard, who was an attorney in Cleveland Heights. Will Irwin, whom I’ve talked about. Worth Loomis. I have these names written down so you can have it. Art Blum, who was a social from SAS School of Applied Social Science at Reserve. Bart Claussen, who was a very powerful guy. I don’t remember where he was from. Probably a lawyer. Jim Reswick, who was the head of the- He was at Case at the time. He was head of the Engineering Design Center and very much interested in transportation. A man by the name of Sam Mantell. Charles Miller. Jim Davis, who is still alive and well in Cleveland. He was brought in by Carl Stokes, I think, to be his legal counsel, and then became a lawyer here. And a woman by the name of Ann Felber, who kind of crossed over into- She was the environmentalist. So those are the people that at least I can figure out. But the Lee Freeway Citizens Committee was the first committee formed, and that was when we first went into the political action. The interesting thing to note is that this was- We connected with Shaker Heights and we formed a group together with Shaker Heights and Republicans and Democrats both. First time in my life, probably the last time I went live, everybody sat down and worked the parties. It wasn’t a matter of trying to fight each other to who was going to do it. But, okay, hey, you’re a Republican, go after this guy. You’re a Democrat, go after that guy. And it was a very much of a joint, real cooperative kind of situation, which was beautiful. My recollection is a little hazy about Lee Freeway Citizens and where it went, but somewhere along the line, we- Oh, let me back up. There are- What is often misunderstood or not understood is how many freeways were involved in the system around Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights. What we had was what we used to call the Outer Belt, which we now call 480. And we had the Lakeland Freeway, which is now, you know, 2 and 90 and stuff like that. The proposal was to put a Clark Freeway in, which was running east and west, and that would parallel Shaker Boulevard. Okay? Nice place to put it. Right between Shaker Boulevard and Shaker Lakes. Right on the Shaker Lakes. There was a saying, and today it sounds terrible, but I’m going to say it, that what we were in our- In our hate of the freeway people, a highway planner looks at public parkland like a pervert looks at a virgin, because it’s virgin territory, if you will. There’s a parallel. Railroads looked at where the rivers were, because that was the easy way of going. And then highways looked at where the railroads were. And the city of Cleveland has been damaged very much by that because they took the easy way out with the rapid transit system and put it where the railroad was, which was exactly where no people were, which was kind of strange for mass transit. But anyway, let’s keep on. Here’s the Clark Freeway. Then connecting the Outer Belt, or 480, with the- Well, it’s 2, is the Lee Freeway, and that comes down parallel to Lee Road, cuts through Shaker Heights, cuts through the most expensive part of Cleveland Heights, and has, right at the middle of Shaker Lakes, has the interchange - 64 acres - with the Clark Freeway and then goes on to the lake. But in between that is the Central Freeway, which comes up right between Cedar and Fairmount and makes another interchange near Lee Road. Going further, there’s the Heights Freeway, which paralleled Monticello going down. So you had the system and the DOT people and ODOT people were very clever because everything- It was like the body. The neck bone is connected to the cheekbone is connected to everything. So what we learned very early on is that everything’s connected. And once something is mandated somewhere, it mandates the rest. And what happened was that we had pretty much stopped the Lee Freeway. And again, I’m hazy on all those details, but as we found out after we were victorious in that there was the Outer Belt. The 480 was to be built with a stub. That was the future of Lee Road, of the Lee Freeway. Pardon?
Mark Sack [00:17:32] What does stub mean?
Phil Hart [00:17:34] Stub? I’ll tell you about that. Every time that you have an interchange, when you’re looking into the future, you put an interchange in. That may not happen right now, but they put in a connection to the next freeway, which is called the stub. Okay? Well, what we didn’t know was that the 480 stub, if that were built, would have mandated the Lee Freeway. Again, everything is connected to everything. Then we had to form another organization called Stop the Stub. And that’s the one that really started to catch on because the whole thing started to fall apart for, or come together for us, really. I’m trying to get the time, the timing a little bit. But let me tell you about our trip to Washington. And I don’t remember whether it was Stop the Stub or the next one, which is CSTEP, Citizens for Sane Transportation and Environmental Policy. That happened. So there’s three organizations that we had. But let me go to Washington. It became apparent that we had talked to everybody around here, but we had to go to Washington. And in Washington was our representative, and his name was Charles Vanik, Charlie Vanik, who later became a judge. And he was very revered and marvelous liberal, very strong, wonderful personality. He was the Lou Stokes of the day, and he was always accessible. Burt Griffin and a man by the name of Charles Miller, whom I don’t remember, and myself went to Washington, and we went to see- Well, first we went to see the Bureau of Public Works, and they- They were kind of saying, well, there’s possible you might be able to get what you want. But they weren’t very happy about things. Then we went in to see Charlie, and we told him what we were there for. And he sat back in his chair, big chair behind his big desk, and he said, let me get this straight. You guys from these rich cities of Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights are coming to me to stop some freeways from going through your city, and I live in Maple Heights, and we have 480 coming right through us. Where the hell were you rich guys when we needed you? I hope those freeways goes right up your ass. We were stunned, you know, couldn’t say a word. Just looking at him and said, geez, Charlie, where did this come from? And then he sat back and roared and said, okay, now, can I help you? So that was the beginning of making a real intervention into the system, because once you get a representative on your side, you got things going for you. And he did help, and he put us on the right track. We were there the same time we were there, and this could give you a date on it. We were there the day that Adlai Stevenson died. So that’s a possible date. You historians connect. We then got the Cleveland Press to come out with an editorial saying Stop the Stub. And the idea was to wait for the seven counties study. What these highway guys do is they push through. And they didn’t like to wait for the federal government or anything else or anybody. They didn’t want citizens getting involved in anything. So the more they pushed, the better off it was for them. But in the meantime, seven-county study had not done any studies. So we kept on saying, wait till that goes up. And then also consider mass transit. Because at that time, DOT and ODOT were- They were for freeways, and that’s what they were for, nothing else. So we made some headway there. In the meantime, Cleveland Heights made- The City of Cleveland Heights made a Cleveland Heights Transportation Advisory Committee. And most of us were put on that. And Shaker Heights made a Shaker Heights Transportation Advisory Committee. And most of the committee that we were on was put on that later on. Dick Stoddard got appointed to council in Cleveland Heights. And we’re starting to get some power rolling here. Then we came- Once we stopped the stub somehow, it was still going on. And then CSTEP came in. CSTEP is the- I got to get this one right. What’s it mean? Citizens for Sane Transportation and Environmental Policy. And that came to be a very effective, large committee. All the committees were getting larger as we went on and as our success got better. And the final incident was we had a meeting at Byron Junior High in Shaker Heights. The exact date of that is January 28, 1970. Incidentally, our first attempt at this, the Town-hall Meeting, was in 1964. So we’re talking. This is six years. This is longer than it took for World War II to get over World War I. Anyway, it’s a long time. We put together a group of people. I’ve got the names here. The head of the committee at that time was Worth Loomis. Will Irwin talked about. He talked about what the proposal was and what it means. This was I-290, which was the Clark Freeway now. So now we’re battling the Clark Freeway. We had Norm Krumholz, who’s director of Cleveland Planning Committee, who is now a professor at CSU. [loud lawnmower noise] Sure. I was talking about the meeting at Byron Junior High. Norm Krumholz made a presentation. Ellen Felber, who was from the Air Conservation Committee, made a presentation. Rev. McCracken, who was the director at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church here in Cleveland Heights, and a powerful guy at the time, made a presentation. And then I made a presentation. Everybody talked. And I’m a visual guy. So I put a slideshow together. And the slideshow- The slideshow at the time, this is 1970, and was not very sophisticated. So I just had two projectors and put the slides together and had music on a separate tape recorder. And I was trying to coordinate all this stuff and get each one going. You know, today everything is computerized, but I was just into Putting this show on. Right? Incidentally, there was about 2,500 people. So you can see that incrementally we were growing and growing. All of them could not fit into the auditorium. So there’s some people out in the hallways and stuff like that with speakers out there. But I showed my show, which was basically taking Shaker Lakes and taking pictures of it and gradually showing what’s happening as a freeway comes in and then ending up with a picture of a freeway that came from Los Angeles, you know, with all the interchange kind of configurations. And when I got done, I was so relieved, and all of a sudden the roof fell down, or what felt like the roof falling down, because there was an absolute burst of applause and screaming. And people really got involved after that. We had Ralph Taylor, who was the service director of Cleveland, Dick Stoddard, councilman, and Bill Lowery, and then what Citizens can do with Alan Bartunik, who was House of Representatives in Ohio, and Hollington, who was also House of Representatives of Ohio, and Jim Davis. So that was the committee. What had been going on is that you can’t plan these things. All you can do is work it. And we were working all the systems that we could with the newspapers and all that. When you can generate 2,500 people coming to one place, you’ve got your grassroots going. And I don’t know that everybody joined, but we certainly did collect money. And we had quite a bit. We had something like $6,000 of donation into the CSTEP organization, which is a lot for a community kind of space. But, you know, maybe that kind of answers your question of how we grew. We grew because we got- We made connections because we got the newspapers, we got the consuls. Both mayors of Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights came out and made strong statements about stopping the freeways. It became clear that the freeways, if they would have been put in, Cleveland Heights would have been destroyed as a place. If you can imagine all the intersections and the freeways that are flowing through there and flowing through the heart of the richer element of Cleveland Heights. You take any element away from Cleveland Heights and you’re doing badly. And almost the same thing with Shaker Heights. Not quite. And there’s also no question that it would have broken up a very important part of the first-ring suburbs. It would have destroyed them. And so now we’ve got exurbia and all that, that comes around. The defeat of these freeways was a great thing, but it had its consequences. I, for one, have no problem with it, but it meant that Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights couldn’t develop the way Beachwood developed or other places because it became known that if you’re going to have an office building, you better have it next to an interchange so that you can get to all the freeways, etc. And Cleveland Heights didn’t have that. If you notice, there are very few office buildings in Cleveland Heights because of that. So that it stopped our development in one way and enhanced our development in another way. And I’ll take it the way it is right now. We did good and it was for a good cause. I later became a councilman in Cleveland Heights. Started out with the Community Improvement Awards Committee, which happened about same time, about 1970. [loud landscaping noise]
Anthony Bifulco [00:30:20] Mark, is it affecting it at all? As far as you can tell? [recording pauses and resumes] We’re on.
Phil Hart [00:30:36] Just at the time we had the meeting at Byron Junior High, there was a headline in the- Maybe it was just after that that Bert Porter was asked to comment about all of this. And he came up with this very famous statement about, you know, all this is about a rinky dinky duck pond, which he was referring to Shaker Lakes. And, you know, you ask, how did we work people up? How did people come in? Can you imagine telling people in Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights that all they have over there is a rinky dinky duck pond? And that- That just incited everybody. It was wonderful. It was a great statement. In February 6, 1970, Governor Rhodes- So somebody had to get the Rhodes, I don’t know who that was. Announced abandoning plans for the Clark Freeway. So now we’ve completed the Lee Freeway, the Stub, and the Clark Freeway. And that once you do that, you’ve mandated that you can’t put the Heights Freeway in and you can’t put the Central Freeway in. So they all go, how were we connected with the Nature Center or the beginning of the Nature Center? In my recollection, not very. I think they were just- They were two independent, parallel movements. We heard about it and said, wow, wonderful. You know, and obviously you can see from our literature that we were part of- Our effort was to save the Shaker Lakes. But theirs was a brilliant move. Get the Shaker Lakes to be a national landmark, and now you got them untouchable. So they kind of put the finishing touches on things. But other than that, to my knowledge, there wasn’t a lot of interchange that, you’ll have to find out from other people, but it just wasn’t there. My part in a lot of this was doing visual things. I created maps, created the slideshow. And, you know, you can tell somebody the Lee Freeway is coming, but when you show them the diagram of where it is and what it’s doing and where the freeway, the interchanges are. And interchanges again. Okay, so there’s an interchange, but when you say there’s 67 acres of interchange, which means that that’s the actual site of the interchange. But then the attached part to it just goes over that. So you really got doing things visual. I found I was at least able to help getting that point across. You had some other question that was-
Anthony Bifulco [00:33:41] I guess my original question was, and I’m going back a little ways about just trying to explain more about how you were able to get so much community support. Because you mentioned that meeting at Shaker Heights Middle School had 2500 people. So by that point, there was a real groundswell, and you guys were able to accomplish that. And what are some of the, I guess, tactics, strategies you used? I mean, you did mention raising money. How is that used, that kind of thing?
Phil Hart [00:34:12] Yeah, the first tactic was to get the Republicans and Democrats together. And the second one was, as I said before, was to get to the politicians, get to the city councils, get to your representatives, and you got to do these things one at a time. I mean, you know, but each time you do it, it builds. So you go to Charlie Vanik, who is a U.S. Representative, and say, well, we’re backed by the council of Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights. Then you can take Charlie Vanigen, who says, hey, come on, let’s stop this thing, and you go back and use him to go to the next step. A lot of this stuff didn’t faze any of the highway engineers who were above and beyond all of this stuff. And they were untouchable. They were unmovable and untouchable, but they are also subject to the politicians. And so we got to the politicians through that. And as you build up, you know, I don’t think you can plan these things. You do them step by step, and you, and you take advantage of everything. I can’t overemphasize that. The importance of having Democrats and Republicans working with each other and getting to their companions and their friends to bring that together, that was great help. But the money that we raised was used to get out advertisements. I don’t know whether we advertised, but we put out handouts and leaflets and things like that. The good old how you work the system. And it worked.
Anthony Bifulco [00:35:55] Do you remember anybody or any groups even inside of Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights, who continued to be proponents or were proponents of building the freeways that you can remember local people, maybe in the city councils, Shaker Heights and Cleveland to actually wind up to go through with building freedom?
Phil Hart [00:36:16] Yeah, Shaker Heights and Cleveland council hadn’t really considered it. I mean it was just not part of their okay, it’s going to happen and if someone Washington says it’s good, why we’ll go with it. I don’t remember anybody of the citizenry that was, after it was explained, that wasn’t against the freeways. I don’t remember anybody, any group. There wasn’t another organization saying, you know, let’s have the Lee Freeway. It didn’t exist. You got to go back to those times. It was a different time than today. Today you have so much television, so much way and got the Internet. It would have taken us two seconds to get the story out on email and the Internet, but that didn’t exist. So you had to do it the hard way. But it was just the old-fashioned- A lot of sweat and a lot of work and a lot of committee meetings and getting people into the important positions and getting them and getting them aboard. Just building it up.
Anthony Bifulco [00:37:32] How time-consuming was it for you? You mentioned it was approximately a six-year struggle which is quite a lengthy period of time in the 1960s. You had a full-time job. You were an architect. You were running your own business, or starting your own business.
Phil Hart [00:37:47] I had my own office since 1952. I was chair of the department of architecture at Case Western Reserve and Western Reserve and had been teaching the fifth year design. It was on all kinds of committees. You know, everybody was busy at those times. But this was something for the public good. And I can’t tell you how much time there was. It’s like everything, there was big pushes and then there would be a slack time and big pushes and slack time but there was enough big pushes so that a lot of energy put forth. And I was not- Obviously I was not the only one. And the other people that were doing it and had their connections and they worked it. So you were working it all the time without spending that kind of time. Can you replicate this kind of thing? It’s hard.
Anthony Bifulco [00:38:42] Do you remember any times or moments in time during the struggle, six-year struggle, where it looked bleak? Success didn’t look likely? Where it looked like your efforts were going to fail?
Phil Hart [00:39:02] There’s always ups and downs and yeah, there was down times when you buck into that whole system that I talked about. It’s a powerful system to buck so that, yeah, there was times that said boy, you know, we can’t break through. But I don’t think anybody ever got it, got to the point of saying, giving up. It became clear that we were fighting for the life of our community. And there was still altruism around. I would like to spell that word or something like that because no one understands that. But most, most of the guys were. And there weren’t too many women. But you know, obviously when guys are working on it, the women are behind them. But most of the guys were veterans of World War II or the Korean War and they’re still looking for a better life. And we all found it in the first-ring suburbs. It was just perfect for us. Education system was great. There was community. I want to emphasize that the community is hard to come by, but we had it, it was there and we didn’t want to see it destroyed. So we had a purpose. And it’s very much like in World War II times where we had a purpose, you know, and a purpose in life and we were fighting for something. I was in the Navy in World War II, aboard an LCT landing craft tank. I was a skipper, very young age, which was, you know, you get responsibility over lives of a lot of people that carried over. So I think it’s partly the times and partly the desire, the desire to keep what you had and have that grow rather than be stunted. So I don’t think there was any bleak times where we thought it was impossible. We knew it was impossible to begin with, but we knew we were right. Yogi Berra said- I love Yogi Berra, and his philosophy, and I have a whole collection of it. And one of them is if you don’t fight for what you think is right, you’re wrong. And I think that’s what we were doing. We were fighting for what we thought was right and we took on the forces of the United States.
Anthony Bifulco [00:41:36] And what comes to my mind is just, you know, looking at the maps. And if the throughways would have gone in, it becomes plainly obvious it would have devastated Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights, no doubt. I mean, just, just wondering if you could explain more specifically what exactly, in what ways it would have destroyed the two suburbs?
Phil Hart [00:42:02] Well, first of all, it would have taken something like 360-some acres out of Cleveland Heights, which is a lot of acreage, and it would have destroyed, we estimated, something like a thousand houses. Well, that’s a thousand families that are relocated out of Cleveland Heights with no way of ever retrieving that because- And let’s see, we have approximately 12,000 houses in Cleveland Heights. So you’re taking over not quite 10% of the housing of Cleveland Heights. And you don’t replace that. Well, let’s go into a little deeper into that subject, particularly when you look at what kind of housing is being displaced, your property valuation goes to heck, just gone, destroyed in many ways your income tax for cities. When you’re taking away the high-income people, Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights, you’re destroying that as an income because you have this stuff that’s now federal property. So besides the- And also when you divide a community, as a planner, you think of things as what divides and what joins. And sometimes you have a street that can be joining people and sometimes streets become a barrier. Well, when you have a freeway, that’s a barrier and you’ve created a barrier one way or the other. And I don’t remember whether this was up or down. The more that the freeway is on the grade, the more it becomes a total barrier and you can’t get through, the more it’s up above, you can at least have a park underneath it, but it’s still- So you really have vacated prime property and you have vacated prime advocates of your city. So besides physically doing it, you’ve just destroyed a great deal of the community spirit and the community taxation and community income. That’s devastation. And Washington didn’t care and Columbus didn’t care.
Anthony Bifulco [00:44:39] Can you think of or know about any other struggles against throughways in the area? Maybe that would affect or did affect other suburbs?
Phil Hart [00:44:55] I don’t remember any here, but there were some going on in the country and I remember the one in San Francisco that they had built, partially built, and all of a sudden it stopped in midair and they stopped that so that there was starting a national rebellion against not freeways by itself, but urban freeways. Because of what it does to the community, we’ll live without it. But yet there was movement all around the country to stop the freeways and the start of a movement to substitute freeways with mass transit. One of the issues with mass transit is in the name itself. What it implies is you’ve got to have mass and works in New York. As you take a city of Cleveland, it got to be a spread city. It’s very difficult to work with mass transit, particularly when you put the mass transit where people aren’t.
Anthony Bifulco [00:46:08] Okay. From there, and once the freeway fight concluded, you said you got onto the city council of Cleveland Heights. Were there any other issues related to the freeway? Was the idea dead and buried by 1970, early ’70, with Rhodes saying that they were going to abandon it, or was there more to the fight, residual fight? Did the idea ever resurface, that kind of thing afterwards?
Phil Hart [00:46:42] I don’t think it did. And the control passed to from the seven-county study who was, was in its formation and fairly weak. Now everything has to go through NOACA and of this level. And NOACA has become very much a part controlled by communities. And they have members of their board that are from represent many communities, if not all the communities in the five-county. I don’t think it’s all the communities, but many of them. So it’s much more community-oriented. I know the head of it, Howard Mayer, who is a planner and not a freeway person. So that things have changed and no, I don’t know of any. The whole tenor of the times have changed. And freeways, if there’s any problem with freeways today, two of them. One is how to maintain them, which is difficult and the second one is stopping them from becoming wider and wider and wider. You know the dual, dual freeway, we have one right near here. 271 partly is a dual dual. So you got 4, 8, 10, 12, 12 lanes, something like that, freeway, try and cross that. So hopefully we’ve stopped. Well, if there’s anything that’s of issue today that I think is important is an offshoot of the freeway which is suburbia and the growth of spread cities. And what that hooks into is the whole idea of conservation. You both, all of us here have been affected by a sewer system that is now being put in. And we have these intersections in Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights where they’ve been digging down 300 feet for the last five years or something like that, finally cleaning a couple of them up. But that’s a sewer that’s put in to take care of out there. And every time you take care of out there, you make more out there as possible. So there’s a resurgence against that too. And that’s why Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights are important again. And important that we saved it for because of the freeways. So it all ties together. But conservation in my mind has taken over things concerns like freeways. And what we’re concerned about now is not just saving Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights, but saving the planet. And I think that’s the important fight right now. And even that’s turning around. You start to get newspapers coming out, articles about green buildings and how to conserve on energy and doing away with fossil fuel kind of stuff. That’s where I think the fight is right now. And it’s a genuine fight. And again you’re up against some of the same old opponents. Just stop and think about General Motors and how they’re sitting there fat and dumb, if you will, by not even picking up on- They don’t have a hybrid out, and hybrid isn’t the answer yet, but they don’t even have a hybrid out. So it’s kind of a battle against the same system. And how do you win it? Same way, newspapers are important. You got to get the common folk. Which means- I went to a meeting the other day that I was the chair of, and big meeting, there’s 100 people there or something like that. My first question was, how many here? When you go to work, either ride a bicycle, walk, or drive in a car that gets 30 miles on a gallon. And a few hands went up. But, you know, that’s got to change. I drive a hybrid. I’m getting 45 miles on a gallon. But we do have to do something about fossil fuels. And the federal government, again, is lagging. They’re doing everything they can to promote pollution, and that’s the next battle. But it’s no longer local. That’s global. So now you take this experience and try and make it global. That’s tough, but you got to do it and it’s happening. Does that tie things together?
Anthony Bifulco [00:52:06] Very well. Did you have any- Have you in your past experience, have any involvement with the Shaker Lakes Nature Center other than playing a big part in blocking the freeways, which ultimately would have precluded the creation of the Nature Center? But other than that, have you had any ongoing involvement with the Nature Center?
Phil Hart [00:52:26] Yeah, it’s strange how things come around. In my spare time, I take photographs and I’ve been taking them for a long time. But I got into digital and started to feel my way through that and found out that there was a photo club at the Nature Center. So I joined it. And I had been mostly taking photographs of people, buildings, and the relationship of people and buildings and urban sites. You got to be fast and quick, and you shoot a lot. You take what you- It’s response, quick response. Well, I went to the Nature Center and like the people, I started talking with photographers, but started to take pictures of nature. And taking pictures of nature is exactly the opposite of urban taking, because you got to be patient. Did you see that gourd out here hanging there? That’s a wren’s nest. I decided to take pictures of the wren. Try that sometime. They’re fast, they’re quick, they never sit down. And I got some marvelous pictures of them. But because I learned from the Nature Center, you got to be patient. So I set up and set up the camera. But anyway, that’s a funny answer to your question, but the Nature Center does things great. They have a green building there, which I totally approve of. I’m into green buildings and my architecture does that. So the things that the Nature Center are doing is just. It was a great thing that we saved it and to see some of the school kids that go there and what they’re learning because nature isn’t around. If I go back to my childhood, some of the things that I miss today. We used to have Baltimore Orioles and we used to have Blue birds. Anybody ever see a bluebird around here? No. Blue birds, they almost look like robins, but they’re blue and red and, you know, and that kind of thing was- There was always something of that around. But Nature Center now has gotten that. And because we are an urban area, it’s essential to have places that have something to do with nature. Just as an off subject, I spent a week or two in Florida this past winter. I don’t want to see Ohio and Northeast Ohio become Florida. They tear down everything. They start from scratch. There’s no little mound anywhere. They level everything off, get rid of all the trees and put in condos that all have gates on it. And the streets, the main streets are so impassable because you can’t get on them because there’s so much traffic on it. And they’re all going to shopping areas that are continuous, just continuous shopping areas. I don’t want to live in a community like that. So Nature Center has great bearing on our life here.
Anthony Bifulco [00:56:20] I kind of wanted to circle back to a question that had to do with something you mentioned when you were talking about the freeway fight, and that is that it was a different time. And part of the reason why it was a different time, you said, because there was a different or greater sense of community. I was wondering if you could tell us more about what you mean by a greater sense of community in the 1950s and ’60s, a greater value in community than there is today?
Phil Hart [00:56:53] Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is that the communities were much more stable. People didn’t move around as much. The kids stayed at home. I have three kids, and they’re all out of the- All out of Ohio. They’re all over the country. That didn’t happen. Families were much more united. And that meant that instead of being transitory in your place, you had roots down and the roots mattered. My wife once got a job in San Francisco, and we almost moved there, and we didn’t because of roots. Partly for my business, but, you know, my practice, but partly because our roots are here. And I think it’s different today. Roots are very shallow communities. [loud landscaping noise] The continuity isn’t there. When you look at the list of how many people that I gave you for the Lee Freeway fight and how many people are here and how many people aren’t here, and that’s even without the death toll, they’ve moved out. So that makes a big difference. And the second part of it is what I said before. There’s two parts to it. One is the altruism and the sense of purpose that came out of World War II. But then we went through the Me Too generation. And Me Too is the opposite side of community. And I think that’s important in our life, that it’s different than in the ’60s. The ’60s were just about the end of that period. The ’50s was still there. We even do this through laws. Cleveland Heights has a law that no more than three unrelated people can live together. When I was a kid growing up, my grandfather had a house near 105th Street and he lived there. And my grandmother and my aunt and uncle and their kid and another aunt and uncle and another cousin, and then anyone that was destitute would live there. All against the law of Cleveland Heights now. So there’s all kinds of things working against this sense of community. There can’t be a sense of community if you’re going to leave and if you don’t know whether you’re going to leave or not. So the times are different.
Anthony Bifulco [00:59:54] Is there anything else that we didn’t ask that you would have liked to have had a chance to talk about, explain, think about that about the questions and responses?
Phil Hart [01:00:29] No, I think I pretty much covered what I saw going on. And of course, it’s personal. And I hope you talk to somebody else that has. There’s still some people in Cleveland, and Burt Griffin is a perfect one if you want to get in touch with them. Very respected lawyer, activist. But no, I think I’ve covered everything I wanted to say, probably even more.
Anthony Bifulco [01:01:00] Mark, do you have anything that you want to add to ask?
Mark Sack [01:01:04] Just in the two interviews we’ve done previously with Shaker Heights folks, they’ve complimented Cleveland Heights a number of occasions. Not so much in the freeway fight aspect of this, the Shaker Lakes, but in its commitment to the upkeep and the maintenance of the Cleveland Heights side of the Shaker Lakes area. Can you comment on that? Having been on council for a number of years, is there an ongoing. Has there been an ongoing commitment to maintain and sustain the Cleveland Heights area that is part of the Shaker Lakes?
Phil Hart [01:01:46] Yeah, you know, that was so much part of the commitment that it was never discussed, it just was. But the thing you’re touching on is the cooperation between Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights. I was wishing for more when. When our councils got together, it was always very friendly and how could we work with each other? But, you know, cities are set up to be in competition with other cities, so there’s always that friction. It was never expressed. And Shaker Heights people, and I know the staffs work together. The police department works together. Fire department works together. I remember. Well, okay, go to another one. Another fight. The Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights did a project together when they cut off that road that was called Lovers Lane, right near Lee Road, and put a new bridge and all that kind of stuff. And that was easy cooperation. But down in Doan Brook, as just before it hit Martin Luther King, somebody in their wisdom, and I don’t remember who, decided they were going to put a dam right behind the. What’s it called, those wonderful strip housing, row housing on Fairhill, the stucco housing, which back up to that, to the Doan Brook that goes down at Doan Brook is just a great place. Had they put that dam there, it really was a detention dam, but it was still. Even so it was a dam, it would have flooded much of the rest of the ravine between there and the lower Shaker Lakes. And that was a very unfortunate call. Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights and part of the city of Cleveland, we got together, but at least this was easier because. Because it was consuls that were saying, no, we don’t want this. And so we fought them and we got them to move it to a different location where no people were involved. That was down the hill.
Anthony Bifulco [01:04:25] Who wanted to do that?
Phil Hart [01:04:26] Pardon?
Anthony Bifulco [01:04:27] Who wanted to build that? The City of Cleveland, did they have jurisdiction?
Phil Hart [01:04:30] I don’t remember. Pardon?
Anthony Bifulco [01:04:31] City of Cleveland?
Phil Hart [01:04:33] No. It had to be the county. Could have been the state, but I don’t remember. But that’s official record. But that was a different kind of fight because it was at least the city that was aware of it before the citizens tried to get the city to say, hey, do something. But even so, you always have to fight the guys that are looking for virgin land. You got to be vigilant. Did that cover you? Yeah. Okay.
Anthony Bifulco [01:05:10] Any other questions? I think that concludes our interview. Thank you very much.
Phil Hart [01:05:15] Okay. It’s been fun.
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