Central, Cleveland

Central
Central
Neighborhood of Cleveland
	Originally built as the Temple B'nai Jeshurun synagogue in 1905, Shiloh Baptist Church at E.55th and Scovill Avenue is one of several listings in the Central neighborhood on the National Register of Historic Places.
Country	United States
State	Ohio
County	Cuyahoga County
City	Cleveland
Population (2020)
• Total	11,689
Demographics
• White	8%
• Black	88.9%
• Hispanic (of any race)	2.5%
• Asian and Pacific Islander	0.8%
• Mixed and Other	2.3%
Time zone	UTC-5 (EST)
• Summer (DST)	UTC-4 (EDT)
ZIP Codes	44104, 44115
Area code	216
Median income	$10,440
	Source: 2020 U.S. Census, City Planning Commission of Cleveland

Central, also known as Cedar–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 Interstate 90 on its west, with Euclid Avenue on its north and Interstate 77 and the Penn Central Railroad to the south.^[2] The neighborhood is named after its onetime main thoroughfare, Central Avenue.^[3] It is home to several schools, including East Technical High School.

History

Historical population
Year	Pop.	±%
1940	62,038	—
1950	69,665	+12.3%
1960	52,675	−24.4%
1970	27,280	−48.2%
1980	19,363	−29.0%
1990	13,788	−28.8%
2000	12,107	−12.2%
2010	12,378	+2.2%
2020	11,689	−5.6%
Source:^[4]^[5]^[1]

With its settlement beginning during the city's infancy in the early 19th century, Central is one 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.^[3] The neighborhood had large, working-class populations of Jews, Italians, and African Americans, as well as communities of Czechs, Hungarians, and Poles. The community was fairly integrated at the time, as observed by the poet Langston Hughes.^[6] By the beginning of World War I, the neighborhood's Jewish community gradually relocated further east mainly to the Glenville neighborhood. Due to the immigration restrictions of 1921 and 1924 enacted by Congress, very few new European immigrants arrived in Central and the population was replenished by a growing community of African Americans arriving from the rural South as part of the Great Migration. Between 1910 and 1920, the African American population of Cleveland increased from 8,448 to 34,451, the majority settling in Central.^[3]

With the onset of the Great Depression and the advent of the Public Works Administration (PWA), 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).^[7] Central would become the location for Cleveland's largest concentration of public housing projects.^[7] In 1937, the PWA, working with the CMHA, built two segregated housing projects in a community that had previously not known segregation: the Outhwaite Homes (for African Americans), and the Cedar-Central projects (for whites).^[6] Reflecting a national trend in other major American cities at the time, the imposition of segregated housing in Central and the redlining of the neighborhood by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation became significant catalysts in its economic decline.^[8]

Until just after World War II, Central was a major retail center in Cleveland.^[3] Its population peaked at a post-war number exceeding 69,000.^[4]^[3] Although Central still retained a significant ethnic European population until 1960, its ethnic European communities, supported by benefits from the G.I. Bill, began to gradually move out to better neighborhoods and nearby suburbs.^[3] African Americans benefited less from the G.I. Bill, but many also left for better East Side neighborhoods. These developments, combined with the loss of manufacturing jobs in Cleveland, led to a further decline in population.^[3] Today, Central is a largely African American neighborhood with less than one-fifth of its 1950 population.^[3] Its poverty rate is 68.8%, the highest in the city.^[1] In recent decades, the neighborhood has emerged as a center for urban farming in Cleveland.^[9]

Famous visitors

Soviet Russian futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky gave a poetry recitation and "proletarian culture lecture" in Central during his visit to Cleveland in 1925.^[10] The jazz orchestras of Don Redman and Fletcher Henderson also performed in the neighborhood, as did singer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson.^[10]^[11]

Famous residents

Langston Hughes - Author and playwright, attended Central High School.
Frank G. Jackson - 57th Mayor of Cleveland (2005–2021), currently lives in the Central neighborhood.
Carl Stokes - 51st Mayor of Cleveland (1968–1971), first African American mayor of a major U.S. city, grew up at Outhwaite Homes.
Louis Stokes - 15-Term US Congressman (1969–1999), brother of Carl, also grew up at Outwaite Homes.

References

^ a b c d e "Cleveland Neighborhoods and Wards: Central Neighborhood Factsheet (2021)" (PDF). The Center for Community Solutions (Cleveland). Retrieved June 3, 2022.
^ "Map of Central, Implemented by the City of Cleveland in 2012" (PDF). Northern Ohio Data and Information Service (NODIS), Levin College of Urban Affairs (Cleveland State University). Retrieved July 7, 2022.
^ a b c d e f g h "Central (Neighborhood)". The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. Case Western Reserve University. Retrieved July 14, 2011.
^ a b "2000 U.S. Census, City Planning Commission of Cleveland" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-05-16. Retrieved 2011-07-14.
^ "Census data" (PDF). planning.city.cleveland.oh.us. 2010. Retrieved 2019-07-17.
^ a b Rothstein, Richard (2017). The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright (W. W. Norton & Company). pp. 22–23. ISBN 9781631492853.
^ a b "Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority". The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. Case Western Reserve University. Retrieved July 14, 2011.
^ Eddings, Amy (November 14, 2017). "Divided by Design: Tracking Neighborhood Racial Segregation in Cleveland". WVIZ. Retrieved July 18, 2019.
^ Glausser, Anne (October 17, 2011). "New Urban Farm Joins Cleveland's Central Neighborhood". WVIZ. Retrieved July 18, 2019.
^ a b Shakarian, Pietro A. "Mayakovsky in Cleveland: A Fiery Futurist's Discovery of the Forest City". Cleveland Historical. Retrieved April 27, 2023.
^ Gilyard, Keith (2017). Louise Thompson Patterson: A Life of Struggle for Justice. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. p. 164. ISBN 978-0822369929.