A mighty swath of Akron’s industrial past is tumbling to the ground.
Wreckers are steadily chipping away at a seven-story behemoth at the old Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. complex. As of Monday, about 75% of the 600,000-square-foot plant had been demolished. cutting machine
Known as the mixing center, the brick-and-steel factory at 1080 River St. was actually a conglomerate of buildings erected more than a century ago across the tracks from Plant 1.
According to 100-year-old files discovered by University of Akron archivists John Ball and Mark Bloom in Goodyear’s company records:
Akron brothers F.A. Seiberling and C.W. Seiberling founded Goodyear in 1898 as a manufacturer of bicycle and carriage tires. To their great fortune, they arrived at the dawn of the automobile age. The rubber business took off in the early 20th century as Detroit automakers built cars on Akron tires.
Akron became the fastest-growing city in the nation. With rubber factories hiring thousands of workers, the city’s population swelled from 69,067 in 1910 to an astonishing 208,435 in 1920.
The River Street complex had myriad uses over the years but it was named the mixing center after Banbury mixers were installed there. Operated by four-person crews, the two-story, noisy machines mixed and blended rubber with additives to create various compounds. Crews turned raw materials into rubber sheets to build tires.
English-born inventor Fernley H. Banbury patented the mixer in 1916 and traveled from Connecticut to Akron to make sure that Goodyear’s machines had been properly calibrated.
Running the mixers was a filthy job. Some rubber workers considered it a punishment to be ordered to the Banbury room. The machines belched clouds of smoke and chemicals that coated everything around them, including people.
Workers covered their faces with petroleum jelly in an attempt to keep carbon black — a sooty chemical used in tire production — from clogging their pores. The microscopic particles still managed to penetrate clothing and skin, and no amount of washing seemed to remove the tiny flecks.
Generations of employees toiled at the factory. Over the decades, the River Street buildings endured economic recessions, fought world wars, weathered union strikes, survived industrial fires, suffered deadly explosions, celebrated technological advancements and witnessed changing times.
Goodyear shut down tire production in Akron except for racing and experimental tires. It opened a technical center at the former Plant 2 and tore down outdated plants.
The mixing center continued to stand. About 60 people still worked there by 2009.
In 2013, the rubber company completed its move into a $160 million world headquarters on Innovation Way, the former Martha Avenue. California developer Stuart Lichter and his company, Industrial Realty Group, transformed Goodyear’s former East Market Street headquarters into the East End, an office, retail, residential and recreational development.
The River Street plant ceased operations in 2016 and underwent a year and a half of decommissioning. Vacant since February 2018, the empty buildings attracted vandals, arsonists and other trespassers despite 24-hour security and video monitoring.
One night in March 2022, firefighters had to extinguish three blazes on the sixth floor.
A month later, Industrial Realty Group won a $6.4 million grant from the Ohio Department of Development’s Brownfield Remediation Program to prepare nine deteriorating buildings for razing on the old Goodyear campus.
Total Wrecking & Environmental of Tonawanda, New York, won the contract for the demolition. Paul Harris, general manager of the East End development, said site preparation and mobilization began last August on River Street. Verdantas in Bedford is serving as environmental consultant and project manager.
Harris expects the demolition to be completed by mid-February and the debris to be removed by late summer. The site will become a greenspace until East End decides a future use for the property.
Once a symbol of Akron’s reign as “The Rubber Capital of the World,” the former mixing center has collapsed into jagged mountains of smashed bricks, twisted steel and shattered glass.
That chapter in history has ended. A new chapter will be written.
Mark J. Price can be reached at mprice@thebeaconjournal.com
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