🇺🇸 United States · Midwest and Great Lakes
Cleveland, on the shore of Lake Erie in the state of Ohio, is a classic city of the American industrial belt that has managed to reinvent itself around culture, music and health care. Once a powerhouse of steel, oil and manufacturing, today it is known above all for being home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a magnet for music lovers from all over the world, and for its excellent cultural offering, much of it concentrated in the University Circle district.
For the traveler, Cleveland combines musical icons, first-rate museums and a renewed urban life. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in a striking I. M. Pei building by the lake, celebrates the history of rock; the Cleveland Museum of Art, free to enter, is one of the best in the country; and neighborhoods like Ohio City, with its historic West Side Market, or the Flats along the Cuyahoga River, give you the pulse of a city on the rise for food and beer.
This guide walks you through the essentials of Cleveland with a practical eye: the must-see Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the great free museums of University Circle, Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River, the historic market, the food scene and how to get around a city that is easy to navigate and where much of the cultural offering costs nothing to enter.
Founded in 1796 by the surveyor Moses Cleaveland on the shore of Lake Erie, the city grew thanks to the Ohio canal and, above all, to the heavy industry of the 19th century: it was here that John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil, and steel and manufacturing turned it into one of the country's great industrial cities. After the decline of the 20th century, Cleveland reinvented itself around culture, music (home of the Rock Hall) and health care (the prestigious Cleveland Clinic). The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Midwest's 'swing state': land of the Hopewell and Adena mound builders and of the Shawnee, a great industrial power of steel and rubber, birthplace of seven presidents and of astronauts such as Neil Armstrong, with Cleveland on the shore of Lake Erie.
Read the history of Ohio →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In the summer of 1796, a surveyor from Connecticut named Moses Cleaveland landed at the mouth of a swampy river on the shore of Lake Erie, drove in a few stakes and gave his surname to a handful of lots almost nobody wanted. Not even he imagined that this unhealthy mudflat would end up being the city that saw the birth of the greatest oil empire in history, that would watch its own river burn and that, a century and a half later, would be crowned the birthplace of rock and roll. Curiously, Cleaveland himself went back to Connecticut and never again set foot in the place that bears his name.
Moses Cleaveland was leading an expedition of the Connecticut Land Company, tasked with surveying and settling the lands known as the Western Reserve, on the southern shore of Lake Erie. The settlement, laid out at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, took its founder's surname. Tradition says the spelling lost a letter ('a') around 1831 so that the name 'Cleveland' would fit in the masthead of a local newspaper, the Cleveland Advertiser.
In its first decades, Cleveland was a small, modest frontier village, slow to grow partly because of the unhealthy conditions of the swampy ground by the river. The great push came in 1832 with the opening of the Ohio and Erie Canal, which connected Lake Erie with the Ohio River and, through it, with the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. That turned Cleveland into a strategic trading hub for moving goods between the Great Lakes and the interior of the country.
The city's position, at the crossing of water routes and, later, railways, put it in the ideal spot to receive the raw materials of the Midwest (iron ore from the Lake Superior region and coal from the Appalachians) that would fuel its future industrial might.
In the second half of the 19th century, Cleveland became one of the great industrial powers of the United States. Its access to iron ore and coal made it an important center of steel production and heavy manufacturing. But the most famous episode in its economic history was the birth of the oil empire: in 1870, John D. Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company in Cleveland, which would come to control almost the entire oil industry of the country and make Rockefeller one of the richest men in history.
The industrial boom drew enormous waves of European immigrants: Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Slovenes and many others, along with African American migrants from the South, who gave Cleveland a remarkable ethnic diversity, still visible in its neighborhoods, its churches, its food and markets like the West Side Market. The city grew at dizzying speed until, by the early 20th century, it was one of the largest and most prosperous in the United States.
That industrial wealth financed great cultural institutions (such as the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Orchestra) and elegant avenues. The city was a cradle of innovation and, in the first half of the 20th century, a byword for American manufacturing power, with the Cuyahoga River and the Lake Erie port as the axes of its intense industrial activity.
Like many cities of the industrial belt (the Rust Belt), Cleveland suffered a severe decline from the middle of the 20th century: deindustrialization, job losses, suburbanization and population flight emptied much of the city and wrecked its economy. One symbol of that crisis was the dire pollution of the Cuyahoga River, which caught fire on several occasions; the 1969 fire made national headlines and became an emblem of environmental damage, driving the birth of federal clean water laws and of the environmental movement in the United States.
After difficult decades, Cleveland set about reinventing itself around culture, music, health care and urban regeneration. A decisive milestone was the city's selection as the site of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, opened in 1995 in an I. M. Pei building by the lake, in recognition of Cleveland's historic role in spreading rock and roll. The museum became a tourist magnet and a new calling card for the city.
Health care became another pillar: the prestigious Cleveland Clinic, a world-famous medical center, is today one of the city's biggest employers and draws. Add to that the revitalization of neighborhoods like Ohio City and Tremont, a rising food and beer scene, the recovered Cuyahoga River and the cultural offering of University Circle. Cleveland thus embodies the story of an old industrial city looking for a new future around culture and services.
Cleveland's connection with rock and roll is no accident: it was here that the term caught on. In the early 1950s, DJ Alan Freed hosted a show on local radio station WJW that broadcast African American rhythm and blues to a young, mixed audience, and he is credited with popularizing the expression 'rock and roll' for that music. In 1952, Freed organized the Moondog Coronation Ball in the city, considered by many the first great rock and roll concert in history, which ended up overwhelmed by the crowd. That legacy was the decisive argument for Cleveland winning the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the 1980s, against other candidate cities.
Cleveland's identity was also forged around sport and a fan base as passionate as it is long-suffering. For decades, the local teams starred in a long title drought that became almost part of the city's folklore. The wait ended memorably in 2016, when the Cleveland Cavaliers, led by LeBron James —born in nearby Akron—, won the NBA championship by coming back from a finals series that looked lost, in what was experienced as a collective catharsis. The city also has a historic baseball team (the Guardians, formerly the Indians) and the Browns in football, whose followings are part of Cleveland's resilient character.
Music and sport sum up the city's spirit well: the ability to reinvent itself and to turn its history —industrial, cultural and popular— into a source of pride and identity in the face of hardship.