ILSR’s 50th Anniversary Racial Justice Storytelling Project
Exploring how ILSR’s history, ongoing work, and mission intersect with the movement for racial equity.
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Toledo’s Dorr Street bears the deep scars of federal policies that stripped away Black economic power and prosperity. Once a thriving center of Black business, Dorr Street was decimated by discriminatory practices that prioritized urban expressways over vibrant communities.
In this episode of Building Local Power, Toledo Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz addresses this destruction and the long-overdue promises of renewal. With $22 million in federal funds now aimed at reconnecting the Dorr Street neighborhood torn apart by I-75, there’s a glimmer of hope. While this investment can’t undo the past, it’s a crucial step toward healing.
Toledo Mayor Wade KapszukiewiczIn situations like this, and what we’ve begun to do, government is going to have to put its finger on the scale and correct the mistakes that were made when government put its finger on the scale the other way.
As the city undertakes transformative projects like the Uptown Innovation District, Toledo’s renewal efforts stand as a powerful testament to the resilience of its people and the strength of community-driven change.
Mayor Kapszukiewicz:
We know when it began, it turned Dorr Street from the unrivaled hub of African American life in Toledo, full of shops and stores and camaraderie and family and economic energy into, with a few exceptions, largely vacant, economically-distressed corridor that now serves in many ways as a signal to the African American community of broken promises, neglect, and almost a sense of, “How little the power structure must care about us.”
Reggie Rucker:
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Building Local Power. I am your co-host, Reggie Rucker, here with my co-host, Luke Gannon. What’s up, Luke?
Luke Gannon:
Hey, Reggie. You know, the end of this ILSR era is starting to hit me and I’m a little scared and sad.
Reggie Rucker:
Yeah, the countdown is on and then it’s beginning to start to feel so real, but I am so excited with how we’re closing out this Eras Tour, if you will. I hope the Swifties will forgive me for that one. Luke, what do you have for us today?
Luke Gannon:
Continuing with our Toledo miniseries, which expands our racial justice storytelling project and our story map titled “The Fall and Potential Rise of a Black Business District,” we are turning to the mayor of Toledo who details the history of federal policy that led to Dorr Street’s destruction. In the late 1930s, federal agencies created by FDR’s administration to stem the tide of Depression-era foreclosures and spur homeownership, published color-coded maps to show where they perceived the risk of borrowers defaulting on government-backed mortgages. The maps rated the neighborhoods according to their characteristics, including the race of their residents. Predominantly Black neighborhoods were described as high-risk regardless of the income status of their households. The largest portion of Toledo that was highlighted red or risky in the Homeowner’s Loan Corporation’s map was the Dorr Street neighborhood of Toledo.
Toledo’s current mayor, Wade Kapszukiewicz, was born in 1972 and doesn’t have first-hand memories of a time when the city had a thriving Black business district, but he does know the history. Here’s the mayor speaking with ILSR’s Ron Knox for ILSR’s Racial Justice Storytelling Project.
Mayor Kapszukiewicz:
I’ve only known the Dorr Streets after its heyday, after the so-called urban renewal. Federal government with the Great Society blight removal policies of the late ’60s into the ’70s, the completion of the interstate highway system, the building of the interstate highway system, had a profound effect on neighborhoods in this country, and not exclusively, but overwhelmingly a negative impact on communities of color. We see it in Toledo and we see it most literally, and certainly symbolically, along Dorr Street.
Luke Gannon:
The 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act funded the construction of the long-planned interstate highway system that would connect American cities and hasten suburbanization. Local officials and policymakers around the country chose to build parts of the new highway system in central urban neighborhoods. These urban expressways serve to effectively clear blighted homes and businesses, typically from low-income neighborhoods. The effect was often to wreck neighborhoods that had little political influence to push back against city planners, neighborhoods that were almost always majority Black. Toledo was no different.
Mayor Kapszukiewicz:
Our museum, when it was built in 1921, ’22, early ’20s, was connected. It was a 60-second walk from Lawrence Avenue and Detroit Avenue, which is just a turn of the corner to Dorr Street, and so the museum was a part of the neighborhood. It was a part of the neighborhood. When the interstate was built, I-75, there was a choice about whether it should gouge up this neighborhood, that neighborhood, the other neighborhood, and unfortunately, as we now know, it gouged up and divided a historically African American neighborhood. And now from a drone or from a couple hundred feet in the air, you can see it starkly. You have the museum, this great museum, this wonderful neighborhood adjacent to it, you have this literal chasm like a canyon, a Grand Canyon almost, and then on the other side, impossible to connect, is the neighborhood now largely African American, very challenged, that can’t get to the museum.
They might say, “Well, that museum’s not for everyone.” It’s a symbol. They can’t get to the amenities that we all should enjoy, and that one story can be told and seen countless times throughout Toledo’s history. We know when it began, it turned Dorr Street from the unrivaled hub of African American life in Toledo, full of shops and stores and camaraderie and family and economic energy into, with a few exceptions, largely vacant, economically-distressed corridor that now serves, in many ways, as a signal to the African American community of broken promises, neglect, and almost a sense of, “How little the power structure must care about us. They obviously don’t care about us or else the situation wouldn’t be allowed to endure,” because the interstate and urban renewal began to negatively affect the character of Dorr Street. Almost immediately, there was a recognition by the power brokers that, “Whoops, we might’ve screwed up here. It’s okay, we’ll make it right. We’ll do this, this, and this. We’ll do A, B, and C and X, Y, and Z.” Those promises were made and almost none of them were kept.
Luke Gannon:
By the summer of 1974, most of the buildings on Dorr Street were gone, taking the once thriving businesses with them. Today, while a few Black-owned businesses remain, the corridor largely stands empty, a testament to the decades of damage inflicted by transportation and housing racism on the neighborhood.
Mayor Kapszukiewicz:
The interstate highway system in Toledo was completed in 1972, probably a little later than other parts of the United States, and it is not a coincidence, in my opinion, that Toledo’s population steadily grew from its first census. Toledo was founded in the 1830s, so the first federal census was in 1840, and our population steadily grew every 10 years. It was larger in 1850 than it was in 1840, larger still in 1860, 1870, 19, 1920, ’30, ’40. The city consistently grew up until the census of 1970, when it peaked at about 383,000 people. And then, for the first time, beginning with the census of 1980, population was a little lower. 10 years later, 1990, it was lower still, 2010. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of factors that went into that, but it is more than a coincidence that the population decline of Toledo began the instant the interstate highway system was completed in Toledo.
Other parts of the country, it was completed a little earlier. We were a little late to the game, but I-475, which is our beltway that connected the whole system, was finished in the spring of 1972. It is more than a coincidence that that was the moment when population began declining, when it became easier to flee the city than to want to be in the city. It may have begun initially as a perception, the perceived sense that it was safer in the suburbs or the schools were better in the suburbs. It may have started as a perception, but then over time, over 30, 40, 50 years, it actually becomes a reality when the wealth of the community leaves. And then, at some point, the businesses, the core businesses in the heart of Toledo say to themselves, “What the heck are we still doing located here in the core of Toledo when all of our workforce and employees are on in the suburbs? We’ll just move out to the suburbs.”
Toledo is not special in that regard, this has been happening all over the country, or at least all over the snow belt, rust belt, water belt, industrial Midwest for 50, 60, 70 years. Happily, I believe, the pendulum is swinging back and these are now relatively positive times for urban America. The pandemic has a way of skewing statistics, but the last year, before the pandemic began, was the first year since the invention of the automobile that cities grew faster than their suburbs, and so there is a pendulum of momentum that is swinging.
Luke Gannon:
The pendulum is beginning to swing upward, but this progress depends on serious investment in the communities that were harmed. The mayor now faces the critical challenge of leveraging city, state, and federal funds to rebuild Black economic wealth, prosperity, and power along the Dorr Street corridor.
Mayor Kapszukiewicz:
The more challenging question is, “Well, what do we do about it?” One of the things, and this is a time where it is sometimes difficult to find hope, it is difficult to focus on the positives at a time when they’re sometimes hard to find. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that we live in a real divided country right now. Red state, blue state, us, them, and so in that environment, it’s tough to find things maybe that give us hope. One of the things that gives me hope is what we were able to accomplish last year. We won a grant from the US Department of Transportation as part of the infrastructure bill. It’s called a RAISE Grant, and it was $22 million. The purpose of which is to reconnect the very neighborhoods that were destroyed by the completion of I-75 with the parts of town that they used to be able to walk to, now they can’t.
I’m not saying that that $22 million is going to solve 65 years of broken promises and disinvestment, but it’s a heck of a good start. The work is going to begin this year and you’re going to start to see whether it’s a connectivity, streetscape, transportation routes, signage, and investments that are going to connect Dorr Street, parts of what we call the Junction Neighborhood, to the parts of Toledo that they’ve been divided from, because of poor public policy generations ago. I think that $22 million is going to make it easier for citizens who live in and around Dorr Street, in and around the Junction Neighborhood, to interact with one another better, to interact with neighborhoods that 70 years ago were adjacent but then became divided when I-seventy-five was constructed. I think it will help connect those people to others, to opportunity, to business in a way that would have been literally impossible without it.
Luke Gannon:
The city is developing projects to revitalize Toledo. In the uptown neighborhood in Toledo, the community and city are working on an innovation district anchored by a 100-year-old historic building called The Jefferson Center, which is going to be a hub of tech and workforce development. It will be the anchor of an entire neighborhood that will stretch out from uptown to the museum next to Dorr Street that Mayor Kapszukiewicz referenced earlier.
Mayor Kapszukiewicz:
If this innovation district takes hold the way we think it will, there will be innovation there, there will be jobs there, and sure, you can get to those jobs in a number of different ways, with a car or a bus route, but the best way to be able to do it would be to be able to walk and to connect to it, frankly, in the way that you used to be able to before I-75 came and urban renewal divided it. You’re going to see improved transportation routes. You’re going to see more and more frequent bus connections, you’re going to see streetscape improvements, you’re going to see a connectivity that will connect people to other people, but also to business opportunity, and frankly, I mean, let’s just say it plainly, to jobs. That was the way America of the late 19th century and early 20th century was built.
People lived in a neighborhood and they were able to walk a block and a half to the tool and die shop where they could make their living, or walk a block this way to the Coca-Cola bottling company, which still exists in an older part of Toledo or [inaudible 00:14:55], and when it came time to purchase the goods and services you needed, there was always a little store at every corner. A lot of times, the shop owner lived in the second floor and the little grocery stores down below, and you can see remnants of that world all throughout the United States. For better or for worse, the automobile has changed an awful lot of that, and for years, people have their automobile and driven out to a suburban shopping complex to go to the mall or the supercenter, and that might start in dribs and drabs at first in the late ’50s, early ’60s, but then the momentum becomes real.
Luke Gannon:
Federal investment is crucial for rebuilding our cities. It was a multi-million dollar effort to construct highway systems that tore neighborhoods apart, and the same energy must now be redirected to restore and rebuild these communities.
Mayor Kapszukiewicz:
Investments from Washington that we have seen in the COVID environment and the response to COVID are no less than the most significant investments that the federal government has made in American cities since the New Deal, since the WPA and some of those efforts that pulled the country out of the Great Depression, and Toledo benefited tremendously from those programs and that raised grant we got is the beginning, I think, of a turnaround that can, I hope, undo some of the wrongs that were committed years ago. Government is going to have to put its finger on the scale to incentivize the things we want to see along Dorr Street and disincentivize the things we don’t want to see. We don’t want to see dollar stores there. If the market were allowed to operate the way it wants to, there unfortunately would probably be nothing but dollar stores all the way up and down Dorr Street.
We have to and have begun to create disincentives, restrictions, regulations to prevent that. When the economy is broken, when an economy is broken, there has to be a referee, perhaps. The referee has to come in and call balls and strikes, so we need to do that, and we’ve started to do that during my time as mayor in pockets. Because of the leadership of our largest employer and our largest health system, ProMedica, we do have a fresh market grocery store option. Not as large as we’d like it to be, not everyone has access to it, we frankly could use five or six more of them sprinkled up, but now we do have a long Adams Street next to the Ebeid Center, a grocery store and a grocery store that has fresh vegetables and fruit the way any grocery store would anywhere in Toledo.
Right along Dorr Street, we built a brand new state-of-the-art, eight to $10 million library branch, the Mott Branch Library. You might say, “Well, that’s not private sector, that’s a public entity, our libraries.” That, it is, but the investment will sometimes… Again, government has to go first and make a sizable investment like the $10 million built-from-scratch modern library that we have there on Dorr Street, and the investment can follow. It’s a neighborhood, it’s in junction, it’s actually one street over on a street called Nebraska, but I would still consider it generally the same neighborhood. There is an old historic church, and actually, this is one of the next challenges that urban America is going to have to confront. As population shifts, frankly, in some cases, as Catholics have smaller and smaller families, the next big challenge is what to do with these vacant churches that America has on its hands.
The first big example of that in Toledo occurred, it was actually the first year I was mayor. St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, which in its heyday when it was built in 1890, was one of the important Polish Catholic neighborhoods in Toledo. Over time now, Catholics have moved elsewhere and it was… I don’t know that there were Catholic services there for the last 30 years maybe. My mom tells me she remembers going there when she was a little kid in the 1950s, but for years, right in the heart of the African American community, is this iconic church just vacant. The dioceses wanted to demolish it, they had the wrecking ball out there, literally ready to go, and working… Talk about government having to put its finger on the scales. Our congresswoman, my office, our county land bank, we swooped in, saved the building, have now undertaken a multi-year conversation about what to do with it, and we have a business that is on the verge of opening there, so we are going to have to, and have begun, to put our finger on this go the other way.
We are going to have to subsidize the efforts to turn what would have been literally a parking lot into something that I believe is going to be a thriving business, but not because we crossed our fingers and hoped that capitalism would take care of it. In situations like this, and what we’ve begun to do, government is going to have to put its finger on the scale and correct the mistakes that were made when government put its finger on the scale the other way. If we weren’t putting our finger on the scale in that way, we wouldn’t have the e-buy grocery store up in Uptown, we wouldn’t have the $10 million Mott Branch Library, we wouldn’t have saved St. Anthony’s Church. I mean, it’s going to take a long time. I think we’re starting to do it.
Luke Gannon:
The destruction of Dorr Street was an intentional decision made by the federal government dismantling Black power and wealth in Toledo. Today, the city, state, and federal government must begin to undo these by reinvesting in Dorr Street. Thank you, Mayor Kapszukiewicz, for your work and beginning to repair these generational harms.
Reggie Rucker:
Luke, great job again, presenting this context that paints a more complete picture of Toledo, Ohio, and the hundreds of communities across the United States that share a similar story and are working to recover from the similar injustices that wrecked those communities. Mayor K, thank you for your time in bringing us your perspective of the destruction and efforts to resurrect your cherished community, and again, to Ron on our team, great job collecting these stories from on the ground in Toledo. And to you, our listeners, thank you as always for tuning in. We’ll be back again in two weeks with more from this story in Toledo, but in the meantime, check out the show notes from today’s episode, which includes a link to our Racial Justice Storytelling project to dive deeper into how monopoly power is deeply intertwined with the racist policies that destroyed Black communities in the name of urban renewal.
As always, you can visit ILSR.org for more on our work to fight corporate control and build local power. As we look forward to a Building Local Power future without the brilliant Luke Gannon, please send an email to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org, and let us know if you have thoughts on what we should do next with the show. Is there a format you like more, a topic or voices you want to hear more of, or city we should go to next to extend the city series? We’re all ears. This show is produced by Luke Gannon and me, Reggie Rucker. The podcast is edited by Luke Gannon and Teo Noel. The music for the season is also composed by Teo Noel. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power.
Exploring how ILSR’s history, ongoing work, and mission intersect with the movement for racial equity.
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