AKRON, Ohio — For much of the last three decades, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company served as this city’s signature global brand. The world’s third-largest tire manufacturer, with $21 billion in revenue last year, was founded here in 1898 and stayed put even as B. F. Goodrich, Firestone and General Tire, its biggest competitors, closed their Akron plants and left in the 1980s.

In a word, Goodyear is devoted to this 188-year-old northeastern Ohio city. On May 13, in a step intended to sink deeper roots, the company’s top executives gathered in the city’s east end to formally open a 639,000-square-foot, seven-story, $160 million world headquarters for Goodyear, by far the largest office building ever constructed in Akron.

During the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Richard J. Kramer, Goodyear’s chairman and chief executive, noted the building’s advanced communications capacity, energy efficiency and other high-tech features. He described how the seven-story building, which is connected to the company’s 860,000-square-foot Innovation Center that was renovated at a cost of $30 million, enabled the company’s professional and research staff to collaborate more easily.

But the most important facet of the new building, he said, is its location. “We’re proud,” he said, raising a closed hand. “We’re very proud to be the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company of Akron, Ohio.”

“It’s an important time in this city’s history,” said Jennifer A. Thomas, Akron program director for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, one of the city’s leading philanthropic organizations. “Goodyear is a global technology company as much as they are a tire company, and they are committed to Akron. They represent a foundation, among others, of a new kind of economy that is developing here.”

Akron, founded in 1825 as a center of waterborne commerce along the 40-foot wide Ohio and Erie Canal, knows something about era-defining transitions. Agriculture became such a mainstay in the mid-19th century that the small grain companies that merged to form Quaker Oats were started here. Quaker Oats operated a mill downtown until 1970.

Most of the city’s development, though, centered on making tires for America’s trucks and cars. From the time Benjamin Franklin Goodrich opened the city’s first rubber factory in 1871 until the 1980s, the rank smell of heated rubber was this city’s unmistakable industrial scent. The black dust of tire manufacturing hung over four separate mammoth tire manufacturing works, and a constellation of smaller plants.

Akron was a gritty and polluted city that employed 58,000 rubber industry workers in 1930. In 1960, the city’s population peaked at 290,351, according to the census. Even as late as 1980, according to a study by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, Akron’s tire and rubber industry employed 26,000 people. But by the end of the decade, Goodyear was the only big rubber company left in Akron.

Today there is scant tire manufacturing in the city. B. F. Goodrich merged its operations with Uniroyal in 1986 and shut its three-million-square-foot Akron plant. Bridgestone, the Japanese company that bought Firestone in 1988, manufactures tires for Indy-class racing cars in a corner of its largely empty 1.3 million-square-foot plant on Akron’s south end. Goodyear makes tires for Nascar races in a portion of its campus here.

Just like the other industrial cities of the Midwest that formed the Rust Belt, the end of tire manufacturing, and the loss of over 20,000 jobs, was the start of a long period of civic trauma that sent the city’s population sliding. Last year, according to the census, the number of city residents dropped below 199,000, the lowest in a century.

Akron, though, is far from dead. Even as three tire companies departed, and Goodyear shrank its manufacturing operations, they left behind expansive campuses close to the city center that contained a collection of stalwart manufacturing buildings made of red brick and reinforced concrete that could be modernized to serve 21st century markets.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/realestate/commercial/akron-shakes-off-some-rust-with-goodyear-tires-help.html?partner=rss&emc=rss