Cleveland is a culturally diverse city on the shores of Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes, in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, USA. Recreational, cultural and educational opportunities are abundant throughout Northeast Ohio. You'll find world-class museums, cultural events, professional sports, and amusement parks.
Photos: Wikimedia Commons contributors.
The following are districts of the city of Cleveland. For the Cleveland Metropolitan area see Cuyahoga County.
Cleveland is named after Moses Cleaveland, a veteran of the American War of Independence and distant relative of U.S. President Grover Cleveland, who surveyed the area and founded the city in 1796. Cleveland is the urban center of Northeast Ohio, with 363,000 people in 2020. It is the center of the 15th largest combined metropolitan area in the United States. From 1890 until 1970, Cleveland was ranked as one of the 10 largest cities in the U.S. Like most U.S. cities, Cleveland began to lose population to suburban areas in the 1960s and 1970s.
Cleveland might be one of the easiest cities in the world to navigate. There are almost no one-way streets, because the city was planned to have "European Avenues" (which resulted in the foresight to make them broad enough for vehicular transportation that couldn't have been imagined in the late 1700s). Traffic is generally not a problem relative to other major U.S. metro areas. Throughout the downtown area, purple signs direct visitors to let you know where you are and what district you are in. The streets that run north-south are numbered, except for Ontario Street (the north-south street bisecting Public Square).
Most attractions in Cleveland are Downtown. These include the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and the Cleveland Botanical Gardens, all in and around the University Circle neighborhood. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame & Museum, Great Lakes Science Center, and the Steamship William G. Mather Maritime Museum, are all on the lakefront. Churches: Particularly visit the Tremont district in West Side (where the movie The Deer Hunter was filmed) and the Church Square district along Euclid Avenue between Downtown and University Circle (where you can see a broad sampling of houses of prayer, many of which are used by their second or third generations of faith).
Enjoy a game with the world's best sports fans. Cleveland is home to the second longest span of sold out baseball games (5 consecutive seasons in the late 1990s), the largest American League baseball attendance (72,086 on 8/9/1981) and the birthplace of Monday Night Football (9/21/1970). But given its storied sports past coupled with its weathered but dedicated fan base (ESPN named Cleveland the "Most Tortured Sports City"), terms like The Drive, The Fumble, The Shot, The Move, The Decision, 2 More Outs will ring in the ears of Cleveland sports fans for generations to come.
Cleveland is host to a wide variety of restaurants and is culinarily much more diverse than an outsider might suspect in the Midwest drawing on large enclaves of ethnic neighborhoods and immigration (Ohio City, Slavic Village, Parma, Hough, Little Italy, Chinatown and others). Certainly, Eastern European food and Soul food are big in a city where Hungarians, Slavs, Poles, Czechs, Bohemians and Southern African Americans were drawn to the steel and automotive industries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; however, recent emigres have spiced up the mix, adding many more influences including Indian, Chinese, Southeast Asian, Puerto Rican and Central American, Middle Eastern and Mediterra…
There are plenty of bars in Cleveland - most are located Downtown. However, many are closed on Sundays and some have reduced hours or are closed on Mondays. 1 Great Lakes Brewing Company. The restaurant is in the Ohio City district of Cleveland. The microbrews are available at many bars, restaurants, grocery stores, and even gas stations. The restaurant has gunshots in its walls from Eliot Ness, the former Cleveland Chief of Police, and the FBI man who busted the mob in the early 20th century. (updated Nov 2018)
When driving at night in the city, stay in your car along major urban corridors (like Euclid, Chester and Carnegie Avenues heading east and Detroit and Lorain Avenues heading west). At night, you may want to avoid inner city neighborhoods and the City of East Cleveland in its entirety. Many of the city's so-called "rough" neighborhoods are on the east side. However, tourists in general wouldn't have any reason to visit these neighborhoods, and University Circle on the east side, where all the city's main cultural institutions are, is safe.
Guide content from Wikivoyage contributors (CC BY-SA) — abridged; the full article has much more.
Top-rated tours and tickets from €51 — book ahead for the popular ones.
Tours and tickets provided by Viator (a Tripadvisor company). Some links earn Stayonomy a commission.
In Jul, Cleveland typically sees ~27°C daytime highs and 13 rainy days.
Cheapest destinations travellers searched recently — refreshed daily.
Flight prices are real fares travellers found in the last 48 hours, refreshed daily — the booking site confirms the final price. Train, bus and ferry fares are shown on the operators' booking sites. Weather data by Open-Meteo; exchange rates: ECB reference. Data updated 2026-07-22. Some links earn Stayonomy a commission at no cost to you.