Country United States County Cuyahoga County Time zone EST (UTC-5) Hispanic population 1.2% Population 12,107 (2000) | State Ohio City Cleveland ZIP Codes 44104, 44115 Black population 92.3% Area code 216 | |
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Restaurants CSU Parking Services, Bombay Chaat, Elements Bistro, Hungry Hut, Tom Paige Catering Co Hotels University Hotel and Suites, Comfort Inn Downtown, 1800 Euclid Hospitalit | ||
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. 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. 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 Post-World War II number exceeding 69,000. Today, Central has less than one-fifth of its 1950 population, and is demographically a largely homogeneous poverty-stricken, African-American neighborhood.
Contents
Map of Central, Cleveland, OH, USA
The neighborhood features several schools including East Technical High School.
History
Central, until just after World War II was arguably the retail capital in the city of Cleveland. 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. Between 1910 and 1920, the African American population of Cleveland increased by 400% to 34,451, the majority settling in Central.
Public housing
The onset of the Great Depression was the impetus for a trend that began in Central in the 1930s, and continued through the early 1990s. 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). 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. 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.