Sunday, October 14, 2001
Middletown finds its way
Industrial town grapples with change
By James McNair
The Cincinnati Enquirer
a MIDDLETOWN �
It's Sunday-morning quiet downtown on Main Street. Stoplights change for cars
nowhere in sight. The Sorg Paper mill, shut more than a year ago, stands
solemnly like a penitentiary wall at the west edge of town. Ben Ligon's 76
Service is servicing nothing.
What makes the scene
so contradictory is that this is a Friday, not a Sunday. Banks, government
offices and stores are open. But the real Main Street, with businesses teeming
with customers, is 10 miles away �
at the city's lone link to Interstate 75.
Mr. Ligon, a wiry 66, doesn't seem to mind the lulls between
doing oil changes. The gas pumps are long gone, and his two bays are empty, as
is the Snack-Rite machine inside the propped-open front door. Still, Mr. Ligon
stays open from 8 to 5 and works Saturdays.
�It's just something to get
away from home,� he
shrugged.
Many cities and towns
share the dilemma of stagnant downtowns and suburban flight. Middletown,
though, has a more fundamental problem at its doorstep: Trying to make itself
over as a diversified business center after a century of dependence on steel
and paper.
The effort stems
partly from the recognition that Middletown, perched squarely between Cincinnati
and Dayton, has a future as a regional business hub and commuter haven. But
there's another factor beyond the city's control: The continuing unraveling of
its primordial manufacturing sector.
In May 2000, Sorg
Paper called an end to a 148-year run and laid off its last 200 employees.
Square D, an electrical devices maker, is dislodging 250 workers through the
phased shutdown of its 101-year-old Middletown operations. And AK Steel � the successor to
Middletown's longtime corporate benefactor, Armco � has said that a slumping steel market and new
environmental-compliance mandates could force it to halt raw steel production
and eliminate 2,000 local jobs.
The upheaval in
manufacturing goes back several decades and has made Middletown less
self-contained and less certain of its identity. More and more, natives are
going elsewhere for work.
�The aim of most of my
classmates in 1951 was to get a car and get a job at Armco,� said City Council member
Fred Sennet. �But today,
it's tough to keep a kid in town because there are fewer jobs in the steel
mills and paper mills. It's tough to keep his parents in town.�
To this day, the city
of 51,000 owes its economic vibrancy to steel, paper, airplane parts and other
assembly-line industries. AK Steel, Middletown's biggest employer with 4,000
local workers, is the steel industry's most profitable producer. More than a
dozen factories chug away in the unglitzy business of making corrugated boxes,
industrial toilet paper and other paper goods.
�There are a lot of businesses
in Middletown that don't get a lot of play,�
said Larry W
Jobs abundant
If there's anything
wrong with being a factory town in 2001, it isn't readily discernible.
The unemployment rate
for the Hamilton-Middletown market was a nearly invisible 3.3 percent in
August, a big improvement over the 7 percent of 1993. Plant workers at AK Steel
earn an average of $60,000 a year. AK's Web site advertises jobs starting at
$45,000 with all the benefits one would expect of a Fortune 500 company.
Middletown has come a
long way in toning down its blue-collar image. With its borders now stretching
to I-75 and into Warren County, the economy includes a greater base of
retailing, service industries and construction.
As of August, 16.7
percent of Middletown-Hamilton's nonagricultural work force toiled in
manufacturing, down from 20 percent in 1993, according to the U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics. At the same time, manufacturing accounted for 18.6 percent of
the state's work force, 19.1 percent of Dayton-Springfield's. Cincinnati was at
15.3 percent.
City income tax
collections also shed light on the shift away from manufacturing. Business and
industry contributed 7 percent of income tax receipts in 2000, down from 11.6
percent in 1989. The rest comes from individuals and sole proprietorships.
Andy Haney, president
of Local 2258 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said the
Square D closing will send even more residents out of town for work.
�I would say that's going to
happen because Middletown is not really that big a place,� Mr. Haney said. �Other than AK Steel, it's
going to be hard to find a job in town right now with the kind of wages and
benefits we make here.�
Hourly workers at
Square D earn an average of $35,000 to $40,000 a year, he said, and about three
quarters of them live in the city. For every worker who finds employment where
the local income tax rate is the same or higher, Middletown will lose a trickle
of revenue.
Two Middletowns
Middletown's growth
to the east and I-75, meantime, has essentially created two Middletowns, one
with the factories and dormant downtown, the other with the mall, restaurants
and middle-class subdivisions. The differences will be even more pronounced in
a matter of years.
Both Bishop Fenwick
High School and Middletown Regional Hospital plan to relocate toward the I-75
corridor. The moves would boost Fenwick's draw as a regional school and enhance
the 310-bed hospital's ability to serve a broader market.
�The population outside of
Middletown proper has been growing at double-digit rates,� said Larry James, vice
president and chief marketing officer for Middletown Regional Health Systems. �We want to make ourselves
more accessible as possible to patients from those areas.�
With the hospital
alone spending $125 million and moving 1,500 employees, the city aims to move
in lock step. Plans call for the annexation of nearly 400 acres near I-75,
including what would become the hospital and Fenwick sites.
Somehow, downtown
boosters are optimistic.
Central Avenue, the
town's historic shopping venue, is being disinterred from a mall structure that
entombed the street in 1973. A commercial disappointment, the City Centre mall
wound up costing the city $500,000 a year to heat and cool. The price tag to
renovate the four-block downtown sector: $13 million.
Earl Back, a retired
iron worker who has lived 60 years in Middletown, is skeptical that downtown
will ever amount to much. So is Mr. Ligon, the service-station owner. To him,
the abandoned Sorg Paper plant is a huge liability.
�They need to tear it down and
put a casino in there,�
Mr. Ligon said.
Leaving the past
Like many Rust Belt
burgs, Middletown is learning how to wean itself of old, patriarchal
industries.
For about a century,
the city practically owed its existence to the factories who employed its
ablest men and created a flotilla of local contractors and suppliers.
Paul Sorg, one of the
richest men in America in the late 1800s, was Middletown's biggest employer and
benefactor as the owner of a tobacco plant, the paper mill and a hotel. He also
built the city's opera house, where locals can treat themselves to classics
such as Babes in Toyland and Bizet's Carmen. Sorg's 35-room Romanesque mansion
still anchors a row of elegant Victorian homes.
George Verity took it
to the next level. His American Rolling Mill Co. began steel-making operations
in 1901 and made the city a nucleus of world trade. Armco helped bankroll the
construction of public buildings, schools, parks, swimming pools and community
centers. It sponsored countless events and civic initiatives.
In 1961, Armco
employed more than 50,000 people in 139 countries. In Middletown, its payroll
approached 8,000. To many generations, it was said, Middletown was Armco.
�You name anything in town,
and Armco and its employees had something to do with it,� said Mr. Sennet, the city councilman. �You wanted to get a school
levy passed, they'd get the troops out. They built the Armco Recreation Center
in the south end of town. They had a hand in expanding the hospital. They sat
on boards. Every group that was worth anything in town was created by Armco.�
Today, the
relationship between the city and the company is more arm's length.
Through a series of
ownership changes, Armco became AK Steel. Maintaining an active philanthropy,
AK accounts for about $500,000 in corporate and employee United Way giving
every year and it pledged $500,000 to Middletown Regional Hospital last year
for a cardiac emergency room. It threw a 100th anniversary party for 40,000
people last year. It committed $250,000 toward the construction of soccer
fields and other facilities at Jacot Park.
Not company town
But industrial
leadership and profitability �
and pleasing shareholders �
are what make AK tick.
�We recognize as the largest
employer in town that we play an important role in the economic engine of the
area,� said AK spokesman
Alan McCoy. �We choose
to play an appropriate role in civic direction. We're involved, but not hired
to drive. We don't intend to run this town; we intend to run this company.�
AK Steel also
operates in a much different regulatory environment than Armco did.
A year ago, the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency filed suit against AK Steel, accusing it of
air, water and solid-waste pollution. It didn't come as news to residents of
the Oneida neighborhood on AK's southern perimeter. They say soot from AK
smokestacks coats their cars and homes. Not only that, they say, it stinks.
�The siding on my home is
practically ruined,�
said Raymond Agee, a retiree who lives on Navaho Street. "I've taken to
washing it by hand with an SOS pad. You can't just take a hose and wash it off.
I was raised in this neighborhood, and it was never this bad.�
Clark Thompson, whose
house on Seneca Street is less than a mile from the nearest AK mill, said he
wears a respirator when he mows his lawn or blows leaves. He said his
air-conditioning intake filters are black.
�Basically, if you live in or
around AK you expect some odors, some minor fallout or soot, but it's clearly
gotten increasingly unbearable in the past five years,� said Mr. Thompson, general manager of a
specialty machine company in Middletown. �People
in Middletown realize that AK Steel is vital and don't want it to suffer, but
they have to be held accountable.�
AK asserts that, if
anything, it has eliminated emissions substantially over the years. If the
court sides with the EPA, the company could have to pay million of dollars in
fines. Either way, the government is getting stricter in governing steel mill
pollution, and AK Steel is looking at spending $80 million to comply.
Mr. Wood, of the
Middletown Economic Development Corp., said he knows of no instances of
companies spurning Middletown because of foul air. Still, in the organization's
promotional brochure, little mention is made of the town's lifeline from steel.
The brochure contains not a single picture of the sprawling AK Steel plant.
It also sidesteps the
city's underperforming public schools and nagging crime rate.
According to the Ohio
Department of Education, Middletown schools failed to reach the bar on 17 of
the state's 27 performance standards in the 1999-2000 school year, mostly
proficiency test scores. Meanwhile, FBI statistics show the city racked up 64.3
serious crimes per 1,000 residents in 1999, or 50 percent higher than the urban
Ohio and national average, yet lower than Hamilton's 78.3 per 1,000 and
Dayton's 95.1 per 1,000.
On the upswing
But city elders
believe Middletown's fortunes are on the upswing. Sam Ashworth, executive
director of the Middletown Historical Society, said he would like to see the
city use its industrial heritage as a springboard to the future.
"I think � and I hope � that the future brings some
higher-tech sort of organizations to the area,�
Mr. Ashworth said. �I
can see that happening with Butler County and I do think that Middletown is in
a good position for that.�
Seizing on the city's
geography, Mr. Wood has resorted to pillaging companies from Cincinnati and
Dayton. His agency's radio spots, touting Middletown as �the heart of Southwest Ohio,� beckon on stations in those
cities.
�We're sitting in the middle
of 2.8 million people, and there are businesses that can strategically serve
their customers better from here,�
Mr. Wood said.
Several companies
have made the move, he said. One was Terminix International, which closed
offices in Cincinnati and Dayton and consolidated its 60 employees in
Middletown, said branch manager David Joles. The company provides commercial
pest control in a 120-mile area from Northern Kentucky to Wapakoneta, Ohio.
Subdivisions appear
Home buyers are buying
into the concept, too. Along I-75 on Middletown's amoeba-like eastern edge,
subdivisions are springing up on what used to be farmland. Homes priced at
$200,000 are marketed to urban professionals who want more space.
�Middletown's greatest asset
is its location,� said
John Sawyer, a home builder and owner of Sawyer Realtors in Middletown. �The wife might work in Dayton
and the husband in Cincinnati. You can be in Fountain Square in 40 minutes from
Middletown, easy.�
New residents might be
surprised by the amenities of their new home. Middletown has a symphony
orchestra and a fine arts center, a championship golf course and a branch
campus of Miami University. On the first weekend of October, it again hosted
its Middfest International, a celebration of the culture and food of a
different country every year, this time that of Greece.
�There
are still people in Cincinnati and Dayton who perceive us as being a grimy and
industrial town,� Mr.
Sawyer said. �It isn't.�