Page 553 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

522 Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

Haymaker Parkway, a four-lane road located between the KSU Campus
and Downtown Kent, served to create a cultural and physical barrier between
the campus and the downtown. One side of Haymaker was access to campus,
and at the other side was the Kent central business district, without much
interaction between the two. Haymaker was designated as a limited access
highway by the Ohio Department of Transportation. The few available
crosswalks were inconvenient and far apart. Traffic tended to speed on this
four-lane road, so crossing at places other than those few designated cross-
walks was taking your life in your hands.
Even if Haymaker did not present a physical and cultural barrier, there was
not much for the students to do in the downtown area, other than to meet
friends at local bars or eat at one of the few student-friendly restaurants.
Students admitted that they did not feel welcomed by local shopkeepers, who
they felt watched them closely, anticipating shoplifting. Kent’s merchants and
service providers did not take advantage of the “captive” resource literally in
their backyard; in fact, they often treated them with disdain.
Another sore point, creating resentment among some Kent leaders, was
that KSU faculty and administrators choose not to live, or shop, in the city.
Several “up-scale” lakefront developments in the adjacent township were
preferred. Kent’s housing stock largely reflected the city’s blue-collar roots, so
the type of housing sought by professional families was not easy to find within
the city limits.
Townegown relationships were further eroded on May 4, 1970. An anti-
Vietnam war student demonstration on the college green, following student
riots in downtown Kent 2 days earlier, erupted in violence. The Ohio National
Guard, sent to Kent to quell the riots, shot 13 unarmed students, killing 4.
The New York Times summed up the relationship between the city and the
university as follows:

Though it is home to the second largest campus in Ohio’s state university system
by enrollment, this small Cuyahoga River city spent much of the last four decades
neglecting, if not deliberately retreating from, its history as a college town and
its place in the annals of the Vietnam War era.
Schneider (2013).
Kent’s residents have long supported the importance of a healthy
environment. It is one of the few cities with not one, but two environmental
entities. In 1970, residents created the Kent Environmental Council (https://
kentenvironment.org), and in 1995, the city established the Kent Environ-
mental Commission (http://www.kentohio.org/dep/enviro_com.asp). The
citizen-run Kent Environmental Council initiated the city’s first recycling
program in 1970, and from 1979 to 1989 it became the first comprehensive
and self-supporting recycling program in Ohio. The Kent Environmental