The Glenville neighborhood was founded in 1870 as an independent village. Until 1904, it also included the now adjacent lakeside village of Bratenahl, Ohio. Bratenahl departed from Glenville during the city of Cleveland's annexation of Glenville in 1904.[3] In its early years, Glenville had been a small village, serving mainly as a resort community to Cleveland's upper-middle class residents. It was also home to the Glenville Race Track (harness racing) and the Cleveland Country Club.[4] Following World War I, developers invested in Glenville with the rapid construction of single and multi-family homes throughout the Cleveland neighborhood, turning the once quiet village into a bustling inner city neighborhood.
From a period beginning shortly after its annexation in 1904 and into the 1950s, Glenville was predominantly a Jewish neighborhood with a small African American population.[4]
At its peak, Jews made up over 90% of Glenville's residents.[5] The neighborhood's large Jewish influence during the time of its development was most notable along E.105th street, where dozens of Jewish owned stores, bakeries, kosher butchers, and other businesses lined the street. Several synagogues were built throughout the neighborhood, most of which are used today as African American churches.[6] By the mid 1950s, the neighborhood's Jewish population began to relocate from Glenville to adjacent eastern suburbs.[7] Similarly to surrounding inner city neighborhoods, Glenville rapidly turned into an African-American neighborhood.
In the 1960s, racial integration saw an accompanying civil unrest in the neighborhood, which reached its climax in the 1968 Glenville Shootout. Like much of the violence associated with civil unrest during the Civil Rights Movement in other major US cities as well as in the adjacent Hough neighborhood, racial tensions were a catalyst for an ensuing demographic shift.[4]
Today, Glenville is predominantly African-American. While having been so for over a half century - being one of Cleveland's most visible examples of poverty, crime and urban decay - Glenville has in the early 21st century gained more positive national media attention, particularly in its high school football team, which has rapidly become one of the better known preparatory programs in Ohio as well as the nation.[8][9]
Glenville is bordered on the northwest by Gordon Park (part of the Cleveland Lakefront State Park district)[10] and on the entirety of its immediate western edge by the winding Rockefeller Park. Built on land donated to the city by John D. Rockefeller in 1897, the wooded 276 acres, through which a section of Martin Luther King Boulevard runs, is known for its historic greenhouse and the Cultural Gardens, and is the largest park located completely within the City of Cleveland limits.[11]
Michney, Todd M. (2017). Surrogate Suburbs: Black Upward Mobility and Neighborhood Change in Cleveland, 1900–1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN978-1469631943.
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