September 30, 2017

From Flames to Free: The Symbolic Restoration of the Mighty Cuyahoga River

Soundtrack: Burn On by Randy Newman

There must be a thousand rivers like the Cuyahoga in America, and ten thousand around the world.. it runs only 84 miles, only drops 500 feet, drains only 809 miles of America's 3 million.  On top of that it drains in the ignominious City of Cleveland, which Eddie Murphy implied many years ago in Beverly Hills Cop was not much of a place for classy execution, well before I ever got to see it with my own eyes and give it a personal judgment of coming back but hardly Paris.  Never been off the highway in Akron, but they did produce LeBron. The River Cuyahoga might be able to flow a half million CFM into Lake Erie, and it's got a reputation for some pretty scenery and ledges in it's upper reaches, so impressive they were made a National Park, but it's hardly a world class waterway. What made if famous beyond Ohio was this:

This is a picture of the Cuyahoga someplace I am pretty sure in Cleveland, on fire in 1952. It caught on fire some 13 times between 1868 and 1969 it is reported, about every 7 years it sounds like, and who knows how many minor fires were snuffed out that didn't make the broadsheets.