Central, Cleveland

Central is a neighborhood on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio. Situated on the outskirts of downtown, Central is bounded roughly by East 71st Street on its east and East 22nd Street on its west, with Euclid Avenue and Woodland Avenue on its north and south respectively. The neighborhood is eponymously named for its onetime main thoroughfare, Central Avenue.^[2] With settlement beginning during the city's infancy in the early 19th century, Central is of Cleveland's oldest neighborhoods. An influx of Germans in the 1830s marked the first in several waves of immigration to what would be gateway community for many ethnic groups in the Cleveland area.^[2] The largest pre-World War I populations of Jews, Italians and African Americans living in Cleveland lived in Central, as well as communities of Czechs and Hungarians. The neighborhood population peaked at a Pre-World War II number exceeding 62,000.^[1][2] Today, Central has less than one-fifth of its 1940 population, and is demographically a largely homogenous poverty-stricken, African-American neighborhood.^[1]

History

Central, until just after World War II was arguably the retail capital in the city of Cleveland.^[2] The neighborhood remained generally poor to working class and predominately ethnic European until the beginning of World War I, when an exodus of ethnic whites, particularly Jews (many of whom relocated further east to the Glenville neighborhood). The gradual demographic shift saw Central become a commercial district that hired large numbers of African Americans, a revolutionary idea at the time.^[2] Between 1910 and 1920, the African American population of Cleveland increased by 400% to 34,451, the majority settling in Central.^[2]

Public housing

The onset of the Great Depression was the onus for a trend that began in Central in the 1930s, and continued through the early 1990s.^[5] With the advent of the Public Works Administration, the State of Ohio preceded the federal body established in the National Housing Act of 1934 by creating the nation's first public housing administration in 1933: the Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA).^[5][6] Central would become the location for Cleveland's largest concentration of public housing projects, which was a significant catalyst in the economic decline of the neighborhood.^[5] The CMHA began with the Outhwaite Homes, and the Cedar-Central projects in the 1930s. By the 1970s, the additions of Carver Park (1942) and the King-Kennedy high rises (1971) had made Central the public housing capital of Cleveland.^[7][8]

Famous residents

• Langston Hughes - Author and playwright, attended Central High School.
• Carl Stokes - 51st Mayor of Cleveland (1968–1971), first African American elected mayor of a major US City, grew up in the CMHA Outhwaite Homes.
• Louis Stokes - 15-Term US Congressman (1969–1999), brother of Carl, also grew up in the Outwaite Homes.

See also

• List of African-American neighborhoods
• Andrew and James Dall Houses

References

External links

• Media related to Central, Cleveland at Wikimedia Commons

	Downtown Cleveland	Goodrich-Kirtland Park	Hough, Cleveland
			Fairfax
		Central
	Industrial Valley	North Broadway	Kinsman

Coordinates: 41°30′N 81°40′W / 41.500°N 81.667°W / 41.500; -81.667