The mayor’s connections were also important . One year after the fire, Carl Stokes’s brother, Louis, who represented several Cleveland neighborhoods in Congress, supported a water-pollution bill in the House and used the Cuyahoga River to defend it.

“The rape of the Cuyahoga River has not only made it useless for any purpose other than a dumping place for sewage and industrial waste,” said Representative Stokes before a congressional subcommittee , “but also has had a deleterious effect upon the ecology of one of the Great Lakes.”

The bill passed, and built legislative momentum for both the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency later that year and the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972. The Cuyahoga River fire was catalytic, the story goes, because it occurred at the “right” time.

But what about the right place?

At the end of his “pollution tour,” the day after the fire, Mayor Stokes broadened his message. “It’s a terrible reflection on the city,” he said. But when he added that “this is a longstanding condition that must be brought to an end,” he was referring not only to the river, but to Cleveland itself.

In the summer of 1969, the city was a poster child for urban blight. Hometown companies had shuttered, including Standard Oil , which had stopped refining in Cleveland in 1966 . Since 1952, 60,000 manufacturing jobs had been lost, along with 125,000 residents, as many white families departed for the suburbs. Abandoned homes lined streets teeming with garbage, which caused a citywide rat infestation . Poverty, frustration and violence flourished, especially in African-American neighborhoods such as Hou gh and Central — both on Cleveland’s east side, which just three summers prior had gone up in flames during six days of unrest.