The Immigrants Who Built the Flats

At the turn of the twentieth century, Cleveland was the most ethnically concentrated industrial city in America. The steel mills and oil refineries in the valley of the Cuyahoga River, in the neighborhood the city called the Flats, needed workers. Europe provided them in numbers that are still difficult to comprehend.

The Slovenians arrived in such quantities that Cleveland ranked among the largest Slovenian cities in the world, behind only Ljubljana and Trieste. The Hungarians arrived in such numbers that Cleveland was often said to hold more Hungarians than any city outside Hungary. The Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Croatians, the Serbians, the Ukrainians, the Greeks, the Lithuanians came by the tens of thousands. Between eighteen seventy and nineteen thirty, the city grew from about ninety thousand people to about nine hundred thousand, and the growth was almost entirely immigrant.

They settled in ward-organized ethnic enclaves, east side and west side, each organized around a parish church that held Mass in the language of the old country. The Slovenians had Saint Vitus on the east side. The Poles had their church on Broadway Avenue. The Hungarians had theirs. Each ward had its saloons, its mutual aid society, its foreign-language newspaper. The city council was a map of European immigration: a councillor's last name told you which neighborhood they represented.

The work was foundry work, mill work, refinery work. It was dangerous and poorly paid and largely non-union until the nineteen thirties. The workers lived close enough to the plants that they could walk to the shift, which was expected because they could not afford anything else.

What they built, over the course of that sixty-year run, was the physical and industrial infrastructure of a major American city. The steel and the oil and the manufactured goods that moved through Cleveland's port and across its rail lines were made by people whose names the city largely forgot as soon as they stopped being useful.