Cleveland

Cleveland sits on the southern shore of Lake Erie, at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River in northeastern Ohio. The lake and the river — plus the Ohio & Erie Canal that once linked Lake Erie to the Ohio River — made it a transfer point where iron ore shipped across the Great Lakes met coal from Appalachia, fueling a great steel and manufacturing boom. The Cuyahoga winds through an industrial flats district below the downtown bluffs.

The lakefront and the river shaped the city, whose heavy industry once made the Cuyahoga so polluted it famously caught fire, helping spark the modern environmental movement. The surrounding country is the flat-to-rolling lake plain of northern Ohio. A center of medicine and culture today, Cleveland anchors a metro of about two million on Lake Erie.

• Ohio
  The Buckeye State, between the lake and the river located in