Central, 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.