Cleveland

History

In 1682, King Charles II of England ceded a large tract of land west of Pennsylvania to the colony of Connecticut that became known as the Western Reserve. In 1796, Moses Cleaveland, an executive with the Connecticut Land Company, was sent to survey the reserve with the possibility of developing it. Cleaveland arrived at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, where it empties into Lake Erie, and recognized that it would make an excellent site for a port. He laid out a plan for a small village, named the town after himself and returned to Connecticut, never again to set foot in the city that bore his name. (The "a" was dropped from the city name somewhere along the way. Popular stories hold that a newspaper writer either ran out of space or "a"s, thereby changing the name of the city permanently.)

The area turned out to be inhospitable, mainly because the Cuyahoga River was a nesting ground for mosquitoes and frequently flooded. By 1800, only seven people lived in the town Cleaveland had laid out. In 1803, Ohio became a state, the first state that never had been a colony. Growth was slow until the digging of the first stages of the Erie Canal in 1827, which opened the tiny frontier town to commerce. By 1850, the city had grown to 30 times its 1820 population. By 1860, it had become a well-established haven for new immigrants, and half its population that year was foreign born. During and following the Civil War (1861–65), Cleveland became a prosperous industrial city due to the discovery of large iron ore deposits and the establishment of the Standard Oil Company by John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937), soon to become the richest man in the world. Steel, shipping, and coal companies also flourished and created a class of rich merchants who built up the city with their wealth.

City Fact Comparison
Indicator	Cleveland	Cairo	Rome	Beijing
	(United States)	(Egypt)	(Italy)	(China)
Population of urban area¹	1,724,000	10,772,000	2,688,000	12,033,000
Date the city was founded	1796	AD 969	753 BC	723 BC
Daily costs to visit the city²
Hotel (single occupancy)	$86	$193	$172	$129
Meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner)	$40	$56	$59	$62
Incidentals (laundry, dry cleaning, etc.)	$24	$14	$15	$16
Total daily costs (hotel, meals, incidentals)	$128	$173	$246	$207
Major Newspapers³
Number of newspapers serving the city	1	13	20	11
Largest newspaper	The Plan Dealer	Akhbar El Yom/Al Akhbar	La Repubblica	Renmin Ribao
Circulation of largest newspaper	3,82,933	1,159,450	754,930	3,000,000
Date largest newspaper was established	1842	1944	1976	1948
¹United Nations population estimates for the year 2000.
²The maximum amount the U.S. Government reimburses its employees for business travel. The lodging portion of the allowance is based on the cost for a single room at a moderately-priced hotel. The meal portion is based on the costs of an average breakfast, lunch, and dinner including taxes, service charges, and customary tips. Incidental travel expenses include such things as laundry and dry cleaning.
³David Maddux, ed. Editor&Publisher International Year Book. New York: The Editor&Publisher Company, 1999.

The Great Depression of the 1930s devastated the Cleveland economy, but World War II (1939–45) revived industry, and Cleveland companies recruited new workers to fill its expanded industrial capacity from among southern blacks and white Appalachians. The middle class, however, began moving out of the city into suburbs, as was the pattern nationally, and the inner city of Cleveland began to decline. By the 1960s, much of the city had sunk into poverty, and in 1966 the primarily

Cleveland's "Rapid" links the downtown area with the airport, the eastside suburbs, and the westside suburbs. ()

black neighborhood of Hough erupted in riots that made national headlines. Three years later, the Cuyahoga River, saturated with a century of industrial pollutants, caught on fire. The image of a burning river, broadcast around the world, became an image that the city of Cleveland would find difficult to shake. Its reputation was further tarnished during the 1970s when it suffered a devastating fiscal crisis causing it to declare bankruptcy in 1976.

Beginning in the 1979, with the election of George Voinovich as mayor, Cleveland's business and civic leaders began revitalizing the downtown area, hoping to reverse the now decades-long population flight. In 1985 Standard Oil of Ohio built a new corporate headquarters building on Public Square. (The building is now known as the BP Building, after British Petroleum, the company that bought Standard Oil.). Other new buildings soon followed and The Flats area along the Cuyahoga River—the site of the river fire—was redeveloped as a district of restaurants and bars. When Michael R. White was elected mayor in 1989, the downtown rehabilitation continued. Notable is the construction of a downtown sports complex called Gateway, comprised of Jacobs Field, a baseball park for the Cleveland Indians, and Gund Arena, home court for the men's women's basketball teams, the Cleveland Cavaliers and Cleveland Rockers. Development along the lakeshore included the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum designed by I. M. Pei (1917–), the Great Lakes Science Center, and a new home football stadium for the new Cleveland Browns team in 1999.