A Leisurely Walk around Downtown Toledo on a warm, spring evening.

Starting in the Warehouse District:

 

 

This 1905 building reopened in 2013 with 75 apartments as The Standart Lofts.

 

The anticipated Berdan Building renovation has not yet started; here is how the building will look after a proper scrubbing and refitting:

 

 

 

The Bartley Lofts. The demand for warehouse-urban lofts was not as high as hoped; this remains the only large speculative condominium project of its kind in Toledo that I know of.

 

 

 

Pythian Castle

 

 

Hylant Building

 

 

Several of the old large downtown commercial buildings are empty.

 

Lucas County Courthouse, 1897.

 

One Government Center, 1970, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, who also designed New York’s World Trade Center, and the Bank of Oklahoma Tower in Tulsa.

 

A proposal in the last week by the region’s transit agency to remove two blocks of Yamasaki’s “Jackson Boulevard”, which connected the 22-story white skyscraper to the Maumee River, is meeting with skepticism by the newspaper and the City Council.

 

Yamasaki said that the boulevard was a place of rest and rejuvenation in a crowded urban environment. They may have imaged downtown Toledo maintaining the life it had in the late 1960s, but it has become quieter ever since; in 1970 about 40,000 people worked downtown at seven Fortune 500 companies; today; one remains downtown, and about 20,000 people work here.

 

Despite considerable demolitions in some neighborhoods, Toledo is perhaps the best representation of what Detroit looked like when it was relatively intact.

 

This area is on the edge of the Cherry Street Urban Renewal Area that had some of the city’s original, charming, infrastructure that had not been substantially improved in a century when it was demolished in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

 

http://www.toledoblade.com/local/2015/04/26/Poor-decisions-accelerated-decline.html

 

 

This handsome building was LaSalle’s Department Store, occupied in 1917, and bought by Macy’s in 1923. The name lasted until 1981, and the downtown store closed in 1983, around the same time as many of the downtown stores in smaller cities.

http://departmentstoremuseum.blogspot.com/2010/05/la-salle-koch-company.html

 

 

Two downtown-adjacent neighborhoods are struggling to emerge as walkable, commercial and residential districts.

 

North of downtown, Adams Street connects the east side of downtown with the Old West End.

 

West and south of downtown is the Warehouse District, seen here, is clustered around the ‘circus’ amenities that most cities the size of Toledo must invest in, such as stadiums, convention centers, and entertainment complexes. While downtown has retained many government services and some corporate offices, there is very little retail in the many empty storefronts in the center of the city. Retail and Restaurants are beginning to open on Adams and in the Warehouse district, which serve the growing number of downtown residences and event traffic.

 

Downtown Latte has been in the Warehouse District for about 10 years, and is passing the baton to new ownership.

 

Next door, Kengo Sushi and Yakitori was fully customered. http://www.kengotoledo.com/

 

 

Toledo’s maritime connections are never far away. 

 

 

Then a quick walk around one part of the Old West End, to the northwest of downtown.

 

Scott High School reopened in 2012 after a $42 million renovation.

 

 

 

This is the Collingwood Arts Center, formerly Mary Manse College for Women (1922-1975).

 

 

The original plans for Mary Manse College:

 

http://catholictoledo.blogspot.com/2007/11/mary-manse-college.html

 

One wing and the power plant were the only sections of the original plan to be completed.

 

 

Power Plant

 

The Old West End, like other century-old neighborhoods, are filled with mature, old trees.

 

Fading light on a spectacular magnolia tree.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I walked around the back of Scott High School, just to see what the neighborhood looks like. I generally don’t like to take pictures of neighborhoods when there are people out and about, so few images.

 

There was less of this than I anticipated, and most of the visible decay looked like it was recent, and not irreversible.

 

Overall, the neighborhood was intact, lively, and lived in.

 

This could be a pleasant place to live. This part of Toledo has many large old apartment buildings, and these appear to be the most vulnerable to demolition. The single family houses, which are also enormous, are preferable to living in conditions that were necessitated by the overcrowding of industrial workers and their families when Toledo was a manufacturing center. That demand is gone, and people like their space.

 

 

Thank you for this.  We rarely get Toledo neighborhood photos so this is extra-special.

Great stuff! I was already a fan of the Lucas County Courthouse, but you made it look even more impressive. Nice neighborhood shots, too.

I did not know anything about the history of the Collingwood Art Center's history--thanks for the lesson!

so nice to see how toledo is looking these days. we rarely see nw ohio on uo -- i hope you post more often!

 

btw yamasaki also designed the conservatory of music at oberlin college, arguably its most important building as its so well known for its music program.

Someone really needs to fix up that Pythian Castle.

I think my Grandmother (RIP) used to live in the Mary Manse college. I also considered living there when I was working in Toledo. Rent back then (2008-2010 in the depths of Toledo's depression) was something like $150 a month for a dorm-style efficiency studio! That same space would be upwards of $3,000 a month in San Francisco or $2,000 a month in Oakland these days. The building is incredible inside and out. At the time, it was the largest artist commune in the Midwest. Toledo always had a huge community of artists for as far back as I can remember, and the talent level was as high as here in the Bay (though not quite Los Angeles, Toronto, or New York City). The Toledo Museum of Art utterly annihilates anything in California and the West Coast outside of Los Angeles. You don't realize the extreme value of art in that museum until you see the lower quality collections in other major cities, most much larger than Toledo. It's clear that Toledo used to be one hell of a place in its heyday. It'd be fascinating to see the city from 1870-1930 when most of its growth occurred.

 

The Old West End might be wholly unique in the United States. Nowhere else is restored Victorian housing that cheap, and it's is one of those extremely leftist places that puts San Francisco and Oakland to shame. Toledo had a lot of those types of ultra-liberals with a union bent (Republicans and even a lot of Democrats in the Bay would call them socialists). A good chunk lived in the Old West End. Some of the Toledo politics were straight out of 1960's Ann Arbor! Working in that city was almost like living in a time warp.

 

There were both good and bad aspects to this. People in Toledo are tough as hell and pretty hard-headed (labor unions, what are labor unions?), but there is a sense of community in the area that is lacking in much of the United States today. It's a really bizarre part of the country that largely eschews some of the worst social trends found in saltwater cities. Even compared to its big brother, Detroit, Toledo seems behind the times. That's not always a bad thing...

 

Toledo to me feels like the industry of Detroit, the people of Windsor, coupled with the crippling depression of Flint. Before it got decimated in the last recession, it was actually relatively intact compared to other Rust Belt cities, but today new holes are obvious. It overall looks like Detroit, but unfortunately nothing is as vibrant as Downtown Detroit. It's always tough for a secondary regional city to capture the cool of its larger sibling next door. Toledo suffers from the same second city nature you see in Oakland, Providence, Baltimore, or even Hamilton, Ontario. That's part of what keeps it from becoming something like Grand Rapids, which is more independent. Grand Rapids is the obvious nightlife and entertainment hub for Western Michigan. Grand Rapids seems to be in the best shape of any of the mid-size Rust Belt cities in the Great Lakes region. It's even nicer than Buffalo. Buffalo is a good model for Toledo, but it's lucky it's so far from Toronto and has an international border between it and the nearby world class city. That's part of the reason Buffalo has good odds of recovery. What's really tough for Toledo is it has to compete with Detroit, which has become a capital of cool again. Economically, that entire area around the Western Basin of Lake Ere got decimated. Ann Arbor is arguably the only place in the region that escaped unscathed, if only due to the University of Michigan. In a region that has lost as many people and as many jobs as Northwest Ohio/Southeast Michigan, it's tough for there to be room for two urban hubs, even though Toledo has the bones for it.

 

My hope is that Toledo can hopefully spin off some of the recent Detroit investment. It desperately needs an influx of population. It feels like it's falling further and further behind other Rust Belt cities that are starting level off like Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. The loss of Downtown Toledo's corporate base is a big reason why. The city used to have something like seven Fortune 500 companies. Today only one is left downtown and four total in the metro area. Just the addition of another Fortune 500 downtown could do wonders in a mid-size city like Toledo.

 

Milwaukee is another city Toledo should look at, but its water is much cleaner, and it looks like it's in way better shape than other Rust Belt cities (given scale and geography differences, Milwaukee is a better model for Cleveland). It also didn't lose much population. My hope is that Toledo can turn into the next Buffalo, its twin across the lake. Realistically, I know Toledo's fate is tied to Detroit's. I just hope there is room for both of them. :|