As the Ohio-Erie Canal, built between 1828 and 1832, neared completion, many in Cleveland contracted "canal fever" and began to believe that their town's strategic location on the Great Lakes and along the new canal made it destined to become a

An important world trade center.

One of those who invested in this belief was James S. Clarke, a former Cuyahoga County Sheriff who was one of Cleveland's largest real estate speculators in the 1830s.

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In 1831, Clark, Richard Hilliard (a wealthy dry goods merchant), and Edmund Clark (an insurance agent and banker) formed a partnership in Cleveland Township, just south of the village of Cleveland.

Purchased 50 acres of land.

The land is the southern part of a peninsula surrounded on three sides by the Cuyahoga River, just south of the first bend in the river.

On this land, then known as Case's Point (but today it is part of the condominium we know as Ox Bow Bend or Columbus Road Peninsula), the partnership planned a development called "Cleveland Center" in 1833

, the project features streets named after foreign countries, England, France, Germany, China and Russia, radiating out from a center called Gravity Place, a fitting name, they believe, for a future center of world trade and commerce

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The land was ideally located to the south of the new canal drainage basin, where Great Lakes vessels sailing along the Cuyahoga River were expected to drop anchor to receive or transship cargo, or to wait for canal vessels.

Lots sold well in the early years of the new development, and soon a small village appeared in the center of Cleveland.

Commission merchants' offices, warehouses, and docks were built on the west side of the development, primarily on Merwin Street, where a few years later a young John D. Rockefeller found his first job as an accounting clerk

work.

On the east side of the development, a residential area formed around Columbus Street (today's Columbus Road), the main thoroughfare running north and south of the center.

Soon working-class immigrants from Ireland and Germany were living there, and in 1838 they built the first Roman Catholic church in Cleveland, St. Mary's Church, on the property.

In the 1830s, Clark spurred the development of central Cleveland with the construction of the Columbus Street Bridge in 1835, Cleveland's first permanent bridge across the Cuyahoga River, and Williville Square in 1836.

Another project developed by Clark and others, Willieville is located on land across the river from Cleveland Center and is connected to it by the Columbus Street Bridge.

Despite the optimism and advocacy of James Clark and the promising beginnings of the decade of the 1830s, Cleveland Center, which was incorporated into Cleveland in 1835, did not become a center of international trade and commerce.

Instead, the Panic of 1837 sparked a national economic crisis that ended Cleveland's "canal fever" and destroyed James S. Clark.

After the economy recovered, it was the Cleveland, Columbus & Cincinnati Railroad (CC&C) that arrived in central Cleveland, not international trade merchants.

In 1851, the CC&C purchased 12 acres of land at the south end of the center, almost a quarter of the entire development, and built an engine ring there and other maintenance and repair facilities for its trains.

The arrival of railroads here and elsewhere in Cleveland during this era coincided with the city's early industrial growth, and in subsequent years some of the industrial buildings in central Cleveland went up on or near the railroad tracks.

Sometimes the construction of these buildings required that portions of the street radiating from the gravity field be vacated, which over the years destroyed the beauty and symmetry of the original street plan.

The residential areas on the east side of the development were also affected by the railroad and intensive industrial development.

By 1880, St. Mary's Church had closed its doors and many of the former parishioners had moved out of the apartments. Sometime in the late 19th century, the place lost its prestige as it became simply part of an industrial area.

When Cleveland experienced deindustrialization in the mid-twentieth century, Cleveland Center, like other tenements, had been in decay for decades as a place of mostly shuttered factories and empty warehouses.

This situation began to reverse in the 1970s, when the tenements experienced a rebirth as urban entertainment areas.

Cleveland Center, in this early period of its rebirth, was not home to many entertainment venues, which tended to be located to the north, closer to the lake.

However, in the early 2000s, some of the acres south of the center were repurposed for recreational use, becoming the home of the Commodore Club Pier, the Cleveland Rowing Foundation, and Cleveland Metropolitan Park. These lands were formerly owned by the CC&C Railroad and its successors.

Owned by the owner, there is a skate park and a riverside restaurant called Mervyn Pier.