Location. Planning District 2 is located on Cleveland’s near west side. It is roughly rectangular in shape and covers 16.3 square miles. The District is bounded on the north by Lake Erie, on the east by the Cuyahoga River Valley, on the south by Brookpark Road and the City of Parma, and on the west by the City of Brooklyn and a variety of streets in the vicinity of West 73 rd and West 85 th Streets. District 2 comprises seven neighborhoods (or “Statistical Planning Areas”): Detroit-Shoreway, Ohio City, Tremont, Stockyards, Clark-Fulton, Brooklyn Centre and Old Brooklyn. The District includes all of City Council Wards 14, 15, and 16, the majority of Ward 17, those portions of Ward 13 located west of the Cuyahoga River, and a small sliver of Ward 18 encompassing Edgewater State Park. The West Shoreway and Interstates 90, 71 & 480 provide excellent east-west movements and State Route 176 (“Jennings Freeway”) facilitates north-south movements along the west rim of the Cuyahoga Valley.
Population. In 2000, the neighborhoods that comprise District 2 had a total population of 100,181. Approximately 73% of the population was white and 11% African-American. Another 11% of the population identified themselves as “Other”. The highest concentration of Hispanics in the City lives on the near west side in District 2. In total 21% of the district population identified themselves as Hispanic, ranging from 40% in Clark-Fulton to 6% in Old Brooklyn. Generally incomes and home ownership rates are higher in the southern part of the district in Old Brooklyn and Brooklyn Centre. Neighborhoods near Downtown however, like Ohio City and Tremont, have recently experienced a great deal of housing renovation and construction attracting new residents with incomes that are much higher than long-time residents.
Development Patterns. The District’s pattern of physical development has been greatly influenced by its topography. Many of the main east-west streets, such as Detroit and Lorain Avenues, were upgrades of the original native-american trails that followed beach ridges of ancient lakes which were deeper than Lake Erie. These streets became main commercial corridors. The lakefront and valleys of the Cuyahoga River, Walworth Run (now culverted underground) and Big Creek provided the railroads with flat or gently sloping land to run their tracks. Subsequently industrial districts, which needed access to the railroads to move their goods, developed along these rail corridors. In some places the natural features were capitalized on to establish parks. Edgewater and Brookside Parks occupy substantial portions of the lakefront and Big Creek valley. The northern half of the district is located on what is known as the Lake Plain. Once part of the lake bottom, this land is relatively level and allowed for easy development of residential neighborhoods in a grid pattern.
The advent of the Interstate Highway System, built between the late-1950s and the mid-1970s, had a major impact on many of the District’s neighborhoods. The construction of Interstates 71 and 90, radically altered traditional development and commuting patterns and also cut off neighborhoods like Ohio City and Tremont and Clark-Fulton and Brooklyn Centre from one another. The construction of the Cleveland Memorial Shoreway in the early 1940s also cut off the nearby Detroit-Shoreway and Ohio City neighborhoods from easy access to the lakefront.
District 2 Neighborhood links:
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