Central (Cleveland)

Central
Neighborhoods 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 (2000)
• Total	12,107
	12.2% decrease from 1990 Census
Demographics
• White	>5%
• Black	92.3%
• Hispanic	1.2%
• Asian	>1%
• Other	>1%
Time zone	EST (UTC-5)
• Summer (DST)	EDT (UTC-4)
ZIP Codes	44104, 44115
Area code(s)	216
Median income	$8,657
Source: 2000 U.S. Census, City Planning Commission of Cleveland

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.

The neighborhood features several schools including East Technical High School.

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.