Cleveland

Port and city in northeastern Ohio, USA, on Lake Erie, at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River; seat of Cuyahoga County; population (2000 est) 478,400. Cleveland is the centre of a seven-county (including Cuyahoga, Portage, Summit, Lake, Medina, and Lorain) metropolitan area (CMSA) with a population (1990) of 2,759,800. An industrial, commercial, and transportation centre, and formerly one of the leading iron and steel producers in the USA, the city has also figured prominently in petroleum, chemicals, automobile manufacturing, and electric power. Cleveland's current industries include chemical and food processing, steel (although not on the scale seen previously), and the manufacture of electrical products and auto parts. Printing and publishing and international and Great Lakes ore shipping also figure prominently. It is also the location of dozens of corporate headquarters.

History
Cleveland thrived primarily because of its location, at first as a Great Lakes port and later as a suitable industrial site midway between the iron mines of Michigan and Minnesota and Appalachian coal sources. Moses Cleaveland laid out the city in 1796 in what was then Connecticut's Western Reserve. The introduction of lake steamers (1818) and the opening of the Erie (1825) and Ohio and Erie (1832) canals stimulated the city's growth as a trade and shipping entrepôt. Beginning in the 1850s, railroad connections consolidated the city's status. Iron ore, coal, copper, lumber, and farm products from throughout the Midwest were processed and distributed here, while John D Rockefeller established the modern petroleum industry in 1862 in what became America's oil capital, the home of Standard Oil. It was an important point on the Underground Railroad route for escaped slaves in the Civil War. Local factories turned out products including sewing machines and telescopes; General Electric, one of the nation's first utilities, was founded in the area; and six motor manufacturers were based here in the decades after 1900. The 1930s Depression, however, initiated a period in which the decline of its industrial base destroyed much of Cleveland's economic strength. Despite the opening of the St Lawrence Seaway in 1959 and an ambitious urban renewal programme, the city suffered marked population decline (from a 1950 high of 914,808) due to suburbanization and because industry moved south and west. There were racial disturbances during the 1960s, and severe unemployment. In 1967 Carl Stokes became the first black mayor of a large US city. In the 1980s, the city recovered some of its former economic position.