Hubless in Cleveland? Don't blame God

December 05, 2010  The Plain Dealer

A look back at our history tells us that Cleveland, since its beginning, has been a hub, of one kind or another. That is what has made Cleveland, Cleveland. The great city that it has been and may still be.

The cold, unsentimental, bean-counter-type words of the new president of the nation's largest airline, to be called "United," reminded our town's business leaders that "God does not come from on high and grant you hub status."

Hello! I think he was telling us something that is fundamental in the city's long and proud history.

Hubs are, and always have been, the creation of smart planners and businessmen who see profit in their eyes. A place to make money.

For Cleveland and most rust belt cities, it has been and continues to be location, location, location. It was our lake, our river, our canal, the railroads that made our town. And for many years, most of them in my lifetime, we were indeed the best location in the nation -- even before the Illuminating Co. discovered that fact for its advertising campaigns. And before the phrase became something of a joke.

Location made Cleveland a heavy industry mecca and with it the law firms, the public relations companies, the accountants and the retail trade to support them. And the captains of those industries created some of the most magnificent residential neighborhoods in the Western hemisphere.

It was geography that brought steamships that carried ore and steel and passengers and automobiles. That put us on the main lines of the New York Central, the Nickel Plate and the Pennsylvania railroads. That gave one of the most magnificent rail terminals in the Western world. We were indeed in the right place at the right time.

Even the old United Airlines during the immediate postwar (1950s), jet-less era picked Cleveland as a hub because it sat midway between New York and Chicago. In those days, it served the company's needs.

Hubless or not, I still like Cleveland as a delightful, civilized, robust, mid-sized, 21st-century American city. We have water. Lots of it. And we're at the "hub" of four of the nation's most heavily traveled interstate highways. And we continue to reap the rich cultural rewards of the legacy of our 19th- and 20th-century industrial giants.

I can remember traveling to Detroit on the magnificent D and C ships and to Buffalo on the B and C. To Cedar Point by steamship. Watching in awe as hundreds of autos were unloaded at the warehouse at East 55th Street and then shipped on by train. The ore boats that clogged the busy, but dirty, Cuyahoga River. Admiring the belching stacks that maintained a bronze-tinted haze over our industrial valley on the river.

There are exceptions to the location rule, of course -- such as Atlanta, which made itself a 20th-century travel mecca and financial center in spite of being located in the middle of nowhere, you might say; and the cities in Texas that made it pretty much on oil.

But even for them, rest assured, God likely had nothing to do with it.