Abstract

Gerald Meyer describes changes in the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood.

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Interviewee

Meyer, Gerald (interviewee)

Interviewer

Hunter, Tiffany (interviewer)

Project

Detroit Shoreway

Date

3-30-2006

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

64 minutes

Transcript

Tiffany Hunter [00:00:00] You know, you're going to give me knowledge because I have no clue what's going on because let me give you a tidbit of my background. I'm not from here. So you're, what you're going to give me is definitely going to be great. So [turning to facilitators], you guys ready?

Gerald Meyer [00:00:16] So where are you from?

Tiffany Hunter [00:00:18] Where am I from? Kentucky. Down south.

Gerald Meyer [00:00:19] Where in Kentucky?

Tiffany Hunter [00:00:21] Where in Kentucky?

Gerald Meyer [00:00:22] Yeah.

Tiffany Hunter [00:00:22] Louisville.

Gerald Meyer [00:00:24] OK.

Tiffany Hunter [00:00:24] Right outside Louisville, Kentucky.

Mark Souther [00:00:26] I'm a southerner myself. I'm from Georgia, actually. But I had a friend who lived in Louisville. Yeah, so I'm a little country girl, so...

Gerald Meyer [00:00:32] And then how do you get along? How do you get to Cleveland to do interviews? You in–

Tiffany Hunter [00:00:35] School.

Gerald Meyer [00:00:36] You're a student at CSU too?

Tiffany Hunter [00:00:37] Yes, I am.

Gerald Meyer [00:00:39] In what program?

Tiffany Hunter [00:00:40] Actually, this is Urban History, Mr. Tebeau's thing. But this totally different than what my field is, but it's pretty interesting.

Gerald Meyer [00:00:48] What's your field?

Tiffany Hunter [00:00:49] It was in Psychology?

Mark Souther [00:00:50] Oh, Psychology.

Gerald Meyer [00:00:50] Oh, in undergraduate school you mean?

Tiffany Hunter [00:00:53] Yes.

Gerald Meyer [00:00:53] Yeah.

Mark Souther [00:00:53] My fiancée teaches at Tri-C.

Tiffany Hunter [00:00:55] Really? That's really cool.

Gerald Meyer [00:00:57] So where did you go to undergrad?

Tiffany Hunter [00:00:59] Oh, I'm still, I still am an undergrad.

Gerald Meyer [00:01:02] Oh, you are an undergrad here?

Tiffany Hunter [00:01:02] Yeah, I still am.

Gerald Meyer [00:01:03] OK. But you took Psychology earlier, you were telling us, huh?

Tiffany Hunter [00:01:08] Yeah, and still am. Still taking it, so...

Gerald Meyer [00:01:10] So what got you to Cleveland?

Tiffany Hunter [00:01:13] Pretty much. It was... This is how it is. It's funny. I'm the type of person not afraid to go out and do, you know, anywhere in the world. So my dad lived in Columbus for a while, all right? And then I was like, well, you know what? Let me try it. Let me get a little bit further from family and go to Cleveland. So that's pretty much how it happened. So. It's pretty funny.

Gerald Meyer [00:01:35] That's normal.

Tiffany Hunter [00:01:37] It is normal. OK. Well, Today is March 30th, 2006. I'm here interviewing Jerry? Or Gerald?

Gerald Meyer [00:01:47] Jerry or Gerald. But Jerry informally. [cross talk].

Tiffany Hunter [00:01:49] Meyers.

Gerald Meyer [00:01:51] And it's actually Meyer.

[00:01:53] Meyer. Yeah. No "S".

Tiffany Hunter [00:01:55] It's a typo.

[00:01:55] M-e-y-e-r is my name.

Tiffany Hunter [00:01:57] Gotcha. Jerry Meyer.

Gerald Meyer [00:01:57] I don't know how you have it spelled.

Tiffany Hunter [00:01:59] I had M-y-e-r-s.

Gerald Meyer [00:02:02] Yeah. But it has. See it has an "E" before the "Y".

Tiffany Hunter [00:02:09] Mmm.

Gerald Meyer [00:02:09] It's M-e-y-e-r.

Mark Souther [00:02:10] It's my mistake. I'm sorry. [cross talk] I think I had it right initially and then...

Tiffany Hunter [00:02:15] Now... [inaudible] Okay. All right. Well, first of all, like when and where were you born?

Gerald Meyer [00:02:24] I was born in 1944 in Wilmington, Delaware.

Tiffany Hunter [00:02:30] So, okay, now I'm going to ask you the question, okay? Wilmington, Delaware. How did you end up in Cleveland or in Detroit?

Gerald Meyer [00:02:38] I grew up in Delaware and Maryland, and I went to high school through there. And then when I got ready to go to college, I looked at liberal arts colleges. And two of them I looked at were in Ohio. One was at the College of Wooster, where I ended up going, and one was at Oberlin. So I ended up in Wooster. And after I graduated from Wooster, I went to the University of Chicago in Chicago for two years to get a Master's in Social Work. And when I was done that I was applying for jobs, I'd had support through graduate school from an international YMCA scholarship. So I wanted to go work for a YMCA. So I looked in Cleveland and around the nation I found a job here, basically, and I ended up back in Cleveland.

Tiffany Hunter [00:03:19] You moved back to Cleveland.

Gerald Meyer [00:03:21] In 1968.

Tiffany Hunter [00:03:22] 1968 in Cleveland? And was it particularly the Detroit Shoreway area? Or did you move...

Gerald Meyer [00:03:26] Well, when I first moved here, I was working at the Brooklyn branch of the YMCA, which is on West 25th and Denison, now called Pearl Road and Dennison, and I lived in the Old Brooklyn neighborhood for two and a half years, say, yeah, about two and a half years, and then I moved to this neighborhood before it was called Detroit Shoreway in 1970.

Tiffany Hunter [00:03:48] So initially before it was just Detroit Avenue, I guess?

Gerald Meyer [00:03:52] Well, actually, the whole area was lumped together with what's now called Ohio City in a city planning district called the Near West Side and everybody called it the Near West Side. Then they sort of lumped everything together that was from the river to 85th Street or further west even. Near West Side.

Tiffany Hunter [00:04:11] So you've been here in the Detroit Shoreway for thirty years perhaps, right?

Gerald Meyer [00:04:16] Thirty-five, almost.

Tiffany Hunter [00:04:17] Thirty-five? So how has the community changed or to you? What's... From, I guess, let's say from the time you came back 'til now, how much has it changed?

Gerald Meyer [00:04:31] Well, I don't know. It's hard to quantify amount of change, but it's changed a lot, obviously. When I moved to the neighborhood in 1970, I would describe it as being heavily ethnic oriented, ethnic at that point being Italian, Romanian, some German, some old-line Scotch-Irish. But the ethnicity influence was heavily Italian and German and Romanian, particularly on the streets and in the neighborhoods just around Detroit Avenue. Mount Carmel Church, being an Italian parish, attracted a lot of Italians or Italians had come from certain small towns in Italy and settled in the area, particularly north of Detroit. And they were beginning to move south of Detroit onto Clinton Avenue, where I live. And they were... There were some there by the time I moved there. And then St. Mary's Church, which had been here, and St. Helena's and a couple of others had attracted Romanian families. So there were a number of Romanian families on the street, old-line Romanian families. Some had been there a long time, some were relatively new. And then one of my immediate neighbors was Irish, who actually his family at that point, he wasn't the guy, the gentleman who lives there now but anyway, the house has been in the same family ever since it was built sometime in the late 1800s, early 1900s, the street I live on was mostly built between 1895 and 1910 probably. But his family's owned the house all the time and that's an Irish family and they were connected with St. Colman's more, but a lot of Irish in the neighborhood too. And then another lady on the other side was German who had immigrated in early '50s after World War II, maybe late '40s. And she was a widow by the time we met her in the '70s, but she had immigrated with her husband from Germany after World War II. So you had a real mix of ethnicities around the neighborhood.

Tiffany Hunter [00:06:36] So like as if walking down Detroit Avenue or the Detroit Shoreway area towards let's say the Arcade, is that the same... the Gordon Square Arcade, is that the same ethnicity that you still see like in this area?

Gerald Meyer [00:06:52] Well you'd see some of that in the area, but you'd see much... The change from them would be that the Italian emigres have dispersed more and moved to the suburbs and now you have some Hispanic, you know, largely Puerto Rican, but a mixture of Hispanic emigres to the area, Puerto Ricans not necessarily being not Americans since they're U.S. citizens. But we also have Asians on our street from primarily Vietnam, but I think in the neighborhood generally there's a group of Cambodians and others. And the Hispanic emigres to the area have broadened. So, for instance, my church, which is Bethany Presbyterian Church, we've had a Hispanic ministry and do a lot of bilingual stuff. And we've had a large group of Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, people from Central America in the church for... They did not live in this neighborhood necessarily. And actually, lately, a number of them have moved to Florida, so they've left the community. But there was a fairly significant Nicaraguan, Guatemalan, El Salvadorian population in the general community, which wasn't here in 1970 at all. You know, basically it came after 1990. Came after the wars in Central America in the '80s. And a lot of people came in the '90s. [cross talk]. So there's been a lot of change, you know. But there's also a lot of stability in this neighborhood in that some of the old-line families are still on my street. You know, my neighbor who's Irish who's in his, probably 70 now, his family's been here a long time, and now his children, who would be the grandchildren of the original, or maybe the great grandchildren, but anyway his children are talking about taking over his house if he needs to move or dies and fixing it up now. Whether it's a good idea or not, it's not... But, you know, you've got the stability. These people identify with this neighborhood.

Tiffany Hunter [00:08:50] I'm going to shift gears a little bit and ask why did you get involved with the Detroit Shoreway Community Development Organization?

Gerald Meyer [00:09:00] Well, when I moved to the neighborhood, my training and my interest was in community work and I was trained as a social worker, but I was trained particularly in group work and community... what was called community organizing at that time. And when I moved to the Detroit Shoreway community, I moved to work for the West Side Ecumenical Ministry, now located at 52nd and Detroit, but at that point its offices were on Bridge Avenue, about 44th Street, and I was like a community organizer for them with church groups in the various neighborhoods on the West Side and we split the neighborhood into four different segments. This segment, 65th Street Cluster we called it, which was churches around West 65th Street, was a very strong segment and there was a lot of leadership from Bethany Presbyterian Church, Calvary Reformed Church, Hope—what's now Hope Wesley Methodist—but was, I think, just Hope. There've been mergers, so the names have changed. And there was a little involvement always from Mount Carmel and from St. Colman's, and from St. Stephen's actually too, which was the German parish in the neighborhood. So I got very involved with the neighborhood and people in the neighborhood and was working a lot with programs to involve youth. Eventually in my job, I helped organize some of the first elderly meals programs in the neighborhood under the Older Americans Act of sometime in the late '60s that passed and we used church sites to run those from. They're now consolidated into one site, I think. But anyway. So I was involved in the neighborhood in my work and I lived in the neighborhood and I always was interested in political activity. And the other, besides the churches, the other main organizing factor in the neighborhood that time was the Political Ward Club. What was then Ward 3 of the city of Cleveland had a fairly strong Democratic ward club and I got active in it and I was sort of a threat to the old-line people because I was young and aggressive. But Mike Zone, who was the councilman at that time, whose son Matthew Zone is now the councilman, Mike was very interested in community organizing and doing things positive. He was he was an old-line Italian from the old-line Italian community, but he was open to working with anybody. So he and I became friends and I began to work with him a bit. And actually, I'd been helping him organize things and doing things. And one day, actually in the Gordon Square Arcade here, there was a barbershop. He had his travel... His family had a travel agency, he and his wife had established a travel agency a few years before it was in the Gordon Square Arcade in one of the storefronts, and he's down the street having his haircut in the barbershop, you know, next door. And I was walking down the street and he waves to me and waves me in. And while he's sittin' gettin' his haircut he says, Guys down at City Hall want me to form a business organization, an industrial organization, in this neighborhood. The economic development department down there—which at that point was probably four people or less, it was a small organization—have formed a group over on the East Side called LADCO, Lakeside Area Development Corporation, and it is a coalition of the businesses in that neighborhood, and they want to do the same thing in this neighborhood. And Mike and I talked about it a bit. I asked him more about it. Eventually I said to him, Well, Mike, I think it's a good idea, but you've got a real difference between that neighborhood, LADCO, and this neighborhood and that is that that neighborhood is almost 100 percent industrial, commercial, industrial, frankly. This neighborhood, the industry's along the railroad tracks and up toward the lake, but you've got streets running up to it. And at that point in 1970 Census, probably 15 percent of the people in the neighborhood walked to work. They walked to their factory jobs. You know, people on my street worked at Union Carbide, which is now where Battery Park's going in. And they'd walk to Union Carbide. A guy on my street, an Italian and his wife, owned the bar that was right next to Union Carbide's battery plant, and they served lunch to a lot of those workers, you know. And it was that kind of neighborhood. People walked to work. People in the neighborhood who owned the local restaurants, you know what there was of them, there weren't as many restaurants as we think. It would be more neighborhood bars that served food. But it was that kind of neighborhood. So I said to him, I think if you're going to form an organization here, it ought to be a mixed organization. It ought to involve the residents, it ought to involve the commercial strip, people on Detroit Avenue that were retail merchants, and the industrial leaders, you know, the people that run the factories, basically. So from that and some discussions, we incorporated the organization. And I was one of the first board members representing the community, I guess. I don't remember. I remember some of the early board members and one of the early board chairmen was the human resource director at Union Carbide.

Tiffany Hunter [00:14:13] Amazing. You kind of tornadoed into all this stuff, right? Or just kind of fell into it?

Gerald Meyer [00:14:17] Well, you sort of get into it if you show leadership. This is still true. I mean, I always said in those community organizing days and I was doing it both in my work and in the neighborhood for it because I was in the neighborhood, 10 percent of the people usually got involved in things and 10 percent of the people could make a difference in things because if they got involved, they'd make things happen. You know, you'd never have a community engagement that gets 100 percent of the people involved. It Just doesn't happen. But if you can get 10 percent actively involved in something, things will change. Things will happen.

Tiffany Hunter [00:14:52] You had mentioned the Union Carbide Company. And what I would like to know about that particular area is the Alkaline Battery, or you know, the Eveready Battery factory, it's pretty much had a lot of history, so–.

Gerald Meyer [00:15:07] Yeah, Union Carbide became Everready Battery Company and now it's Energizer Inc., and its research facility, which is the outgrowth of what was here is out in Westlake. The battery plant basically closed and battery production was transferred. Otherwise, though, the location here did have the research in it too before it moved to Westlake. Research and development, I guess you'd call it, is what's out in Westlake. So, you know, as it has transitioned, that building probably went vacant 10 years ago is my guess—I don't remember the exact dates, but sometime in the '90s—and now it's been taken down and the site's being redeveloped as housing.

Tiffany Hunter [00:15:50] Yeah, I actually had visited that site and looked at it and it's what like 14 acres?

Gerald Meyer [00:15:56] Probably about that.

Tiffany Hunter [00:15:58] So I mean, what is Battery Park going to offer to Detroit?

Gerald Meyer [00:16:02] To the neighborhood?

Tiffany Hunter [00:16:04] To the neighborhood.

Gerald Meyer [00:16:05] Well, along with a lot of other things, since 1990, the city's developed a lot of relatively new housing or renovated housing and, you know, we've had a lot of it in this neighborhood, partly because we have a very... Detroit Shoreway, being a strong economic development group, has been able to acquire land and financing and get things built and sell 'em. And I think Battery Park's a continuation of that. The Battery Park project will allow you to have a new product, which is some people want a new house, not an old house. I mean, I happen to live in an old house and like having fixed it up even though I spent a fair amount of money on it. But it's still a good deal in my mind and it's a lot more character and probably last several hundred years if people maintain it. But anyway, you know, people want new products so I think that's what it mainly offers. And it offers you a chance to... I mean, one of things that it offers too is to integrate the community northward toward the lake. And as long as you can overcome the barrier of the railroad tracks and the Shoreway, Battery Park's advantage is that one of the underpasses under the Shoreway is right there at 76th Street and it's from 73rd to 76th. So if that underpass is cleaned up and made more attractive, it gets a good access directly to Edgewater. it runs right to the beach, actually. I mean, you could literally walk through that tunnel and end up on Edgewater's beach and, to give you an example, in 1969 when I moved here, no in 1968, when I moved to the city, Carl Stokes had just been elected mayor. The city that summer, because of the amount of pollution in Lake Erie, would not let anybody swim at Edgewater Park until they put a curtain in around the swimming area and chlorinated it artificially to kill the bacteria. So Edgewater Park in 1968 was really unhealthy to swim in. By today's standards, they probably shouldn't have even done that. They probably should've just said nobody can go in, but they couldn't keep people from going in because people go down there and go swimming. I mean they walk from their houses. In the summer this neighborhood sees lots of families and kids walking in their swimsuits to Edgewater Park to use either go fishing or to use the walking paths or at that point or to swim. At that point they were swimming there and there was baseball fields on that park. There weren't fishing piers and stuff. It wasn't developed as it is now. But anyway. So at that point, the lake was so polluted and particularly from runoff from the sewage plant, there's a sewage treatment plant right next to it, basically. And from the stuff that came down rivers and out of the storm sewer system that aren't separated in town, when they'd overflow it'd get too polluted. Thank goodness it's clean enough now, you don't have to do that.

Tiffany Hunter [00:19:02] You never would even know there's a sewage plant next door dumping all this water and all this pollution into the water.

Gerald Meyer [00:19:11] Well, one of the impetus for the environmental legislation of the late '70s was "Lake Erie is Dead." There was a famous, I don't remember whether it was in Time magazine or Newsweek, but one of the newsmagazines had on the front of the cover of the thing, "Lake Erie is Dead." And it documented how the pollution had killed the active... Well, polluted it so you shouldn't swim but also killed a lot of the fish and created algae bloom in the bottom and all that stuff. And you know over... since we passed legislation and began to clean up the pollution sources that did all that, the lake, Lake Erie's come back rather significantly. Still has problems, but it's much, much better than it was. But Lake Erie being dead was a big... That and maybe fires on the Cuyahoga River, which there was one of. You don't know that story?

Tiffany Hunter [00:20:00] No, no, no, so...

Gerald Meyer [00:20:02] In the late '60s, one of the railway trestles that crossed Cuyahoga River was, I think basically too polluted by, would you call it creosote or oils of some type, and there was an oil slick on the river and basically a train went by and a spark lit it up and the surface of the water burned because there was oil on it or oils on it, and the fire boat had to go down and put the fire out on the river.

Tiffany Hunter [00:20:36] Oh boy.

Gerald Meyer [00:20:38] So it's another example of... It's one of the reasons in the late '60s and early '70s, Cleveland became the butt of a lot of national jokes. Lake Erie is dead. Its river burns. Mayor Perk was opening a trade show and he used an acetylene torch to cut the ribbon and set his hair on fire. So we had a mayor with his hair on fire. And then in 1979, we had young boy mayor, Dennis Kucinich, who's now congressman. And Dennis was 32 or something. I remember that. I remember that race very well if you want to talk politics sometime because... But Dennis and the city defaulted on the bonds to the banks, and so we were in default. And even though it was technical default—we always paid our interest, the banks just hadn't rolled the notes over—we got another bad black eye.

Tiffany Hunter [00:21:22] Mm hmm.

Gerald Meyer [00:21:24] So through the '70s, Cleveland got a lot of black eyes in public forums, you know, nationally. If you traveled during that time, people would say, well, how are you from Cleveland? And my son, who's 31 now, was born in '74, he remembers a T-shirt that I think I may still have that said, I'm from Cleveland. I've survived the tough times, or something like that. It had a very positive slogan, but it was referring to Cleveland as a tough place and the tough get going. You know, Cleveland is a tough place, but the tough get things going. We're trying to give positive spin to the negative view.

Tiffany Hunter [00:22:03] So with what you were doing with the development, would that kind of have suppressed the rumors and things like that from, you know, people not visiting... [cross talk]

Gerald Meyer [00:22:12] Well. Yeah. You know, one of the things that's always true, and this is true even now, the image of a community, whether it be a small community like Detroit Shoreway or the image of a city nationally in the press is usually either a lot better than its reality or a lot worse than its reality. It's never always matched. And during the '70s, we always said when we traveled, you know, we always got asked about all these problems. But when we'd tell people, hey, it's a nice city, we got a lot of great people, the economy's not doing badly. 'Til the... We had an economic depression in the '80s, it kind of hurt us, particularly when the interest rates went up nationally. But Cleveland's always been a very friendly, outgoing city. You know, a neighborly city. You know, we had good neighbors. We liked people in the neighborhood we liked working with. You know, you got great assets here. And just to mention one of them nearby, the West Side Market was one. We'd always promote the people when they'd come, we'd go take them there and they'd say, We have nothing like this in our city. You know, we don't have a market that's municipally owned that has all these vendors and you can hear 15, 16 different languages being spoken. You know, back then it was largely European languages. Today you go you're gonna hear Arabic and Thai or you're going to hear most anything from the vendors and the customers, Indian dialects, whatever. So anyway, there's always a lot of assets and people usually have a worst damage or better image than the neighborhood or the community. They don't have a right on one, you know.

Tiffany Hunter [00:23:49] So I feel like that worst-best image is Battery Park, you know, are the residents really wanting something like Battery Park to have? Are they resistant to it or, you know, is it...

Gerald Meyer [00:23:58] Well, I don't know specific resistance to it. I think generally most residents that are aware of what's going on are positive about it. Then they'll be some other residents who frankly don't know. To give you an example. Matthew Zone, one of the things that he's done as a councilman recently is organized a Ward 17 forum, and my wife's involved in the leadership of it. She knows a lot more than I do about it, but I know generally about it. One of the things they did in that forum last year in the fall was organize a trolley tour of the Ward 17, which is broader than Detroit Shoreway. But Detroit Shoreway is a good example. And that trolley tour was going to show people both redevelopment sites and what was going on in the neighborhood, what either had happened already or was likely to happen. Battery Park was one of the places I think they went by and they had a narrative with it to explain what was going on. And they got about 70 residents to go. And they were from different streets in the neighborhood. Now, that's 70 out of, what, 5,000 residents or something. But those 70 people, a lot of them, they know a little bit about what is going on their street but they didn't hear about Battery Park or if they lived up this way, they might not have known anything about the development down on the old Joseph and Feiss factory at 53ird and Walworth, where they're putting in housing. They had a fire a week or two ago and burned six units that hadn't been finished. But anyway, that development they didn't know about. So people went on that tour and learned a lot and most people were very excited to find out so much was going on. And they had so much in common with their neighbors, their neighbors being from different sections of the ward area. One of the things to go back to Detroit Shoreway, originally, the Detroit Shoreway boundaries were very limited. They were originally were just 65th, or actually 45th to 85th, but south to Franklin Boulevard. And we actually created the name. We meaning Mike Zone and I and maybe a few other people. Because there wasn't a name for the neighborhood. And we said, well, what are the most common landmarks? How can we identify it? And Ohio City was beginning to be used as a name for the area around 25th and Fulton Road and Lorain and stuff. And it was a historic name because Ohio City actually was an incorporated city back in the 1800s before it merged into Cleveland. But this neighborhood had only been developed in the late 1800s or early 1900s and it never had a separate name. So we picked Detroit Avenue and the Shoreway as the identifying characteristics and used that name. And then later on Detroit Shoreway expanded the boundaries south at least to Lorain. I think they may have broader boundaries now. They might go south to Clark or even south of Clark they go to. But you know, the the boundaries of the organization were expanded.

Tiffany Hunter [00:26:59] So Detroit stretches to Lakewood too, right?

Gerald Meyer [00:27:00] It goes, yeah, it goes through Lakewood.

Tiffany Hunter [00:27:01] Pretty far. Okay.

Gerald Meyer [00:27:03] Detroit Road was the main road that went to the city of Detroit at one time. You know, it was the farmers path to Detroit. Yeah. [cross talk] That's the reason it was named Detroit. Well, that's... And Lorain Road went to Lorain County. I mean...

Tiffany Hunter [00:27:19] Interesting.

Gerald Meyer [00:27:19] That's the reason Euclid went to Euclid, Ohio, a suburb. I don't know whether St. Clair had anything that or not. St. Clair and Superior I think just came from the Great Lakes. [cross talk]We can tell you some other history, too, about the city.

Tiffany Hunter [00:27:40] Okay. [laughs].

Gerald Meyer [00:27:40] Well, one of the things that's funny about the city is that in the 1910s, I think it was, originally the city had no numbered streets. So you didn't have a 65th Street. You didn't have an 85th Street or a 58th Street. All the streets were named. Even the names... 65th Street, I forget what the name of it was, but some of the downtown streets. On what's now Ontario was Ontario. That's one. But Ninth Street, I think, was Erie. And there's the Erie Street Cemetery across from Jacobs Field. And that name comes from the street I think. But in the 1910s or something [1906], they changed all the street names that ran north–south to numbered streets so the postal system would work better and people could identify where they lived better. But because the city had grown up not with a regular pattern, the street numbers didn't actually come out consistent. It's one of the reasons you get streets that skip in town.

Tiffany Hunter [00:28:37] Yeah, they do skip.

Gerald Meyer [00:28:38] You get a lot of that.

Tiffany Hunter [00:28:39] Exactly. They skip, you know, it's like you're driving down...

Gerald Meyer [00:28:46] You'll go from from Ontario to Fourth Street downtown and then to Ninth Street and there'll be no intervening street, you know, or maybe Sixth is in there someplace. But there'll be some numbers that are always missed. Yeah.

Tiffany Hunter [00:28:59] So I'm going to go back to some of the redevelopments. What are the other redevelopments that you guys or that your organization is doing around the...

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