By Kathleen Folkerth
When Dave Lieberth looks back at Akron 25 years ago, he sees hope was beginning to sprout downtown.
“In 1985, we had been battered by the recession and loss of jobs,” Lieberth said. “Mentally and emotionally, we were in a depression.”
In the decade preceding that, the area was faced with the closing of rubber factories and the deterioration of what had been a vibrant downtown.
“There was the closing of Polsky’s in 1985,” he said. “O’Neil’s was still open but clearly on life support. There were a lot of vacant buildings, and those that were open had adult-oriented material. People were really, truly depressed with the thought that Akron would become a ghost town.”
As president of the Summit County Historical Society, Lieberth wrote a speech as to why, despite all that, Akron should still be optimistic.
There were several things happening in the 1980s that gave Lieberth, who now is deputy mayor under Mayor Don Plusquellic, reason for optimism.
“One of the truly bright spots was the arrival of Bill Muse as president of The University of Akron,” Lieberth said. “The university at the time had this concept, this plan, and the city did as well, called Span the Tracks. It was what was going to be the savior of Akron. At that time, there was an expectation that the Polsky building might become a part of this. And there was a recognition that the university had to become a much larger part of the city’s downtown development.
“The vision was correct,” Lieberth added. “The details were wrong.”
Circumstances changed when Plusquellic took office in 1987 and talk began about lobbying to get the National Inventors Hall of Fame located in Akron.
“It really, truly became one of the first bright spots in the city,” Lieberth said of the effort to convince the National Council of Intellectual Property Law Associations to locate the museum in Akron. “The mayor threw his weight against it.”
When the idea was brought up to get 20,000 signatures on a petition, Lieberth said the community responded in droves.
“That community support was really important,” he said.
Once the decision was made to locate the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, attention turned to other ideas.
“Karl Hay said now we can build our convention center,” Lieberth recalled. [Hay, who retired from Brouse McDowell law firm and lives in West Akron, was a long-serving chairman of the Akron Summit Convention and Visitors Bureau.] “They had raised all the money for the convention center, but there was never a reason to build it.
“Suddenly, in 1987 we had the start of a building boom, which was very visible,” Lieberth said. “Suddenly, there was great hope.”
The John S. Knight Center opened in 1994 and the National Inventors Hall of Fame opened in 1995.
Once those projects got off the ground, next to get the city’s attention was the building that today is the site of Advanced Elastomer Systems (AES) on South Main Street.
“It was completely vacant,” Lieberth said. “Ideas for it had come and gone. It was a mess. The mayor took a very bold step when he decided he could invest city funds in the building to clean it up.”
The site was declared a brownfield, which made it eligible for state cleanup funds, Lieberth said.
“At the same time the mayor was preparing the building, here comes Bill Ginter from AES looking for a headquarters for this project,” Lieberth said. “He was so taken that AES occupied it as the first tenant. The developer developed that property and that was a huge step forward.”
In the years that followed, Akron saw the building of a minor-league baseball stadium, Canal Park, which opened in 1997; the multi-million dollar renovation of the Akron Civic Theatre in 2002; the creation of Lock 3 Park in 2002; the construction of a new Akron-Summit County Public Library system Main Library in 2004; and the renovation and addition to the Akron Art Museum in 2007.
Lieberth said city officials have a lot to look forward to in the years to come, such as the Austen BioInnovation Institute, a collaboration of research, education and health institutions. He’s also hoping the new National Inventors Hall of Fame Center for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Middle School, which is seeing completion of its new building downtown, will expand into a high school.
“We have rebuilt the city of Akron,” Lieberth said. “When you drive up Market Street, all of a sudden the entire landscape has changed with the university, Summa Health System, Akron General Medical Center and the tremendous construction that has occurred. We have been in the process of rebuilding Akron over these 25 years.”
