The come-back city of the Great Lakes — the West Side Market, pierogi belt food culture, world-class museums, and the reinvented Tremont restaurant scene
Cleveland is the largest city on the south shore of Lake Erie and one of the great American industrial cities in the middle of an improbable cultural and culinary renaissance. The city's industrial heritage (Standard Oil, Republic Steel, the steel and iron ore trade via the Cuyahoga River) created a diverse immigrant population in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Slovenians, Ukrainians, Italians, and Germans all established dense neighbourhood communities that remain partially intact in areas like Slavic Village, Little Italy (Murray Hill), and Trem…
Cleveland was incorporated in 1836 and grew exponentially from the 1860s as the centre of the US iron and steel industry — John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil in Cleveland in 1870. The city was one of the five largest in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. De-industrialisation from the 1950s onward was severe — the Cuyahoga River famously caught fire in 1969 (from industrial pollution), which catalysed the US environmental movement and the Clean Water Act of 1972. Cleveland has been losing population since 1950 and is now roughly half the size of its peak, but the city's c…