P.J. O’Rourke remembers his home town:
My hometown, Toledo, Ohio, is one of those junkyards of American capitalism, a deindustrialized old industrial city. The population has declined from 383,818 in 1970 to 316,851 today. The unemployment rate is 10.4 percent. Jeeps are still made there, but most Toledo factories are gone — Auto-Lite, Willys-Overland, Champion Spark Plug, the glass plants of Owens-Illinois and Libbey-Owens-Ford. Toledo Scales aren’t made in Toledo anymore.
Downtown, the department stores are closed, as are most of the shops, theaters, restaurants, and bars. The city’s center looks plucked. Half the buildings have been razed. Toledo is a failure.
Actually, Toledo always was a failure. Incorporated in 1837, with a fancy name for what had been called the Great Black Swamp, Toledo was a land scam. A canal joining the Ohio River to Lake Erie was supposed to have its terminus there. The scam collapsed that very year, in the Panic of 1837, when Andrew Jackson ended easy land-buying credit. The canal did open, but not until 1845, by which time railroads had taken over shipping.
Toledo tried to be a rail hub. In 1860 it had six railroads. They were all short-line operations, each with a different track gauge and none connected to long-haul routes. Toledo’s Erie and Kalamazoo Rail Road never reached Kalamazoo.
