The Sixth City: How Cleveland Built America's Future — and Why We Carry the Name

By Edward Jacak, Owner of Sixth City Technologies, LLC and lifelong Clevelander

A historical foundation for Sixth City AI · Sixth City Technologies, LLC

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The Moment a City Earned a Name

I have lived around Cleveland long enough to know that people from here do not need a marketing department to tell them what the city is. We already know. Cleveland is proud, complicated, practical, scarred, hard-working, stubborn, a mosaic, melting pot and a lot more important to the American story than people outside Northeast Ohio usually understand.

That is why the name Sixth City matters.

For one decade, Cleveland, Ohio was the sixth-largest city in the United States. That was not a slogan somebody dreamed up in a conference room. It was counted. When the United States Census Bureau finished the 1910 count, Cleveland had 560,663 residents and had passed Baltimore, Maryland to become the sixth-largest city in the country (census.gov, case.edu, en.wikipedia.org). The margin was almost comically narrow — only 2,178 people separated Cleveland from Baltimore’s 558,485 (en.wikipedia.org, physics.bu.edu) — but the meaning was much larger than the margin.

That number told the country something Cleveland already knew about itself. This was no longer just a lakefront city with factories. This was one of the engines of modern America.

Out of that moment came one of the most durable civic brands Cleveland ever had: “Cleveland, Sixth City.” It appeared on postcards, letterheads, railroad maps, guidebooks, commercial forms, and city booster material. More than a century later, the population rank is long gone, but the phrase still works because it was never really only about rank. In my mind, it stands for a kind of Cleveland character: industrial, inventive, hard-working, ambitious, and unwilling to quit just because the national story moved somewhere else. We may not be first, but we’re memorable; and we matter.

That is the spirit Sixth City Technologies, LLC and Sixth City AI are trying to carry forward. This history is not nostalgia for its own sake. It is the foundation for why the name still fits: Cleveland was once one of the places where America learned how to build the physical future. Now we have to help people and businesses adapt to the digital and AI future with the same practical, grounded, get-it-done attitude.

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Before the Name: Geography Built the Crucible

To understand Cleveland, you have to start with the map.

The city was founded in the spring of 1796 as a surveying project led by General Moses Cleaveland on behalf of the Connecticut Land Company (case.edu). The land was part of the Western Reserve, the large tract claimed by Connecticut after the American Revolution (case.edu). Cleaveland placed the settlement at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, where it empties into Lake Erie, and that decision set the whole future in motion. Even the name has a practical story behind it: Cleaveland’s surname came from Yorkshire, England, where “Cleaveland” referred to an estate shaped by cleves or clefts in the land, before the spelling changed and the first “a” disappeared (case.edu).

For the first few decades, Cleveland was not yet the Cleveland people later imagined. It was a small agricultural and trading village. As late as 1820, its industry was limited to a handful of iron shops, wagon makers, shoemakers, and saddle makers (ohiohistory.org). The truth is, Cleveland’s rise was not magic. It was geography (nestled on the train routes connecting New York and Chicago) plus infrastructure and the luck of timing.

The Ohio and Erie Canal, completed in 1832, changed the equation by linking the Great Lakes to the Ohio River, and through that route, to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico (clevelandohio.gov, ohiohistory.org). Suddenly Cleveland, and for that matter Akron, were no longer sitting at the edge of anything. It was sitting in the middle of a transportation system.

Then the materials arrived. Iron ore came by lake freighter from the upper Great Lakes. Coal came from the Appalachian region to the south by rail and canal. Those two inputs met at Cleveland’s harbor (ohiohistory.org). That is the kind of thing operators notice: the right materials, the right logistics, the right location, and the right moment. By 1860, that combination had helped turn Cleveland from an agrarian village into one of the premier centers of American industrialization (ohiohistory.org).

The crucible was lit. The Sixth City was not born yet, but the conditions were already there.

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The Climb: A Demographic Masterclass (1840–1910)

Cleveland earned the Sixth City title the hard way. It grew into it.

In 1840, Cleveland had only 6,071 residents and ranked 67th in the nation (physics.bu.edu). After the canal and the railroads changed the city’s economic role, people came because work was here. By 1860, the population had reached 43,417. By 1880, it was 160,146, and Cleveland had climbed to 11th largest in the country (physics.bu.edu).

That growth was powered by people. Immigrants came from Ireland, Southern Europe, and Eastern Europe to work in the steel mills, machine shops, factories, shipping operations, and related industries. African American migrants from the rural South also began arriving, building communities that would grow substantially during the Great Migration (en.wikipedia.org). Cleveland was not built by one kind of person. It was built by workers, builders, founders, families, migrants, and immigrants who came here because there was opportunity and because the city needed what they could do.

The decisive shift came between 1900 and 1910. In the 1900 census, Cleveland ranked seventh with 381,768 residents, behind Baltimore and Boston (en.wikipedia.org, physics.bu.edu, infoplease.com). Then Cleveland exploded. Between 1900 and 1910, the city’s population grew by 46.9%. Baltimore, by comparison, grew by only 9.7%. When the numbers were certified, Cleveland had passed Baltimore and taken sixth place (en.wikipedia.org, physics.bu.edu). Being second-generation American-born, with a last name from Poland — a name that passed through the Ellis Island gateway in 1910 — my Grandfather, Frank Jacak, was among the many that settled down in Cleveland.

That was not just growth. That was momentum.

Cuyahoga County also reached 1,376.7 persons per square mile, the highest population density of any county in Ohio (usa.ipums.org). The city was crowded, loud, productive, and alive. It was not a polished place pretending to be important. It was important because things were being made, moved, refined, invented, and shipped.

The 1910 Landscape: America’s Ten Largest Cities

The table below shows how competitive the urban hierarchy was when Cleveland broke into the top six. It also shows why the moment mattered: America was reshuffling itself, and Cleveland was moving faster than almost everyone around it (physics.bu.edu, en.wikipedia.org, demographia.com).

1910 Rank	City	1890	1900	1910	1920	1900–1910 Growth
1	New York, NY	1,515,301	3,437,202	4,766,883	5,620,048	38.7%
2	Chicago, IL	1,109,850	1,698,575	2,185,283	2,701,705	28.7%
3	Philadelphia, PA	1,046,964	1,293,697	1,549,008	1,823,779	19.7%
4	St. Louis, MO	451,770	575,238	687,029	772,897	19.4%
5	Boston, MA	448,477	560,892	670,585	748,060	19.6%
6	Cleveland, OH	261,353	381,768	560,663	796,841	46.9%
7	Baltimore, MD	434,439	508,957	558,485	733,826	9.7%
8	Pittsburgh, PA	238,617	321,616	533,905	588,343	66.0%
9	Detroit, MI	205,876	285,704	465,766	993,078	63.0%
10	Buffalo, NY	255,664	352,387	423,715	506,775	20.2%

Figures drawn from decennial U.S. Census records, 1890–1920; New York’s 1890 figure reflects pre-consolidation boundaries (en.wikipedia.org, physics.bu.edu, census.gov).

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”In Sixth Place”: The Press, the Pride, and the Branding Masterstroke

Cleveland did not quietly accept sixth place. It made something out of it.

On September 24, 1910, The Plain Dealer published an editorial titled “In Sixth Place” that captured the city’s confidence at that moment. The line that still jumps off the page is this: “The young giant on Lake Erie has just commenced to grow” (marksouther.org). The editorial did not treat sixth place as the finish line. It treated it as proof of concept. Clevelanders were already talking about passing Boston and St. Louis, reaching toward Philadelphia, and hitting a million people by 1920 (case.edu, marksouther.org). A later boast captured the mood: “Not a single city has passed Cleveland in the population race in fifty years” (marksouther.org).

That confidence may sound big now, but it was not empty. Cleveland had the numbers, the factories, the population growth, the infrastructure, and the ambition to back it up.

The Chamber’s Campaign — Decentralized Marketing, a Century Early

The Cleveland Chamber of Commerce understood what had happened. The city had a brief window to turn a census result into a brand, and it moved.

In July 1911, the Chamber launched a coordinated campaign around “Cleveland, Sixth City.” Historian J. Mark Souther dates the launch to July 3, 1911, with reporting in The Plain Dealer on July 4 (marksouther.org). The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History preserves the core instruction: the Chamber asked local businesspeople to use the phrase “Cleveland, Sixth City” in their correspondence and on all their commercial printed forms (case.edu).

From a modern marketing standpoint, that was smart. It was not just an ad buy. It was a network strategy. The Chamber turned the city’s business community into the distribution channel. Letterheads, invoices, forms, envelopes, maps, postcards, and promotional material became carriers for the same civic message.

The visual identity connected naturally to the city flag. Designed by Susan Hepburn and adopted on October 21, 1895, the Cleveland flag used a red, white, and blue vertical triband, with a central shield showing an anvil, hammer, and wheel for industry and manufacturing and an anchor, windlass, and oars for the city’s Great Lakes identity (cleflag.org, en.wikipedia.org). Its motto, “Progress & Prosperity,” fit the Sixth City moment perfectly. The flag’s red “C” and inset six-pointed star were widely read as connected to the nickname and the city’s civic ambition (cleflag.org, en.wikipedia.org).

The Postcard as Propaganda

In the 1910s, postcards were not quaint. They were a communications network. They were social media before social media.

The Chamber made sure Cleveland postcards carried the Sixth City emblem (marksouther.org). Scenes of the Hotel Statler, Euclid Avenue, the Ohio Canal, the Cuyahoga County Court House, Public Square, and other civic landmarks carried the same message out of town and into mailboxes across the country (case.edu, marksouther.org, scholarscompass.vcu.edu, commons.wikimedia.org, clevelandmemory.org). Every visitor, salesman, traveler, and family member who mailed one helped broadcast Cleveland’s rise.

The campaign moved beyond postcards. The Chamber’s Transportation Committee issued a “Cleveland, sixth city: railroad and industrial map” in 1913 (oldmapsonline.org, nrs.harvard.edu). The Mohr Map Company published a 1917 street map titled “City of Cleveland, Sixth City and Suburbs” (curtiswrightmaps.com). Businesses adopted the name, including 6th City Wire Works, and Souther notes that “a number of Cleveland entrepreneurs adopted the name for their businesses, and many clung to the name long after the city lost its population rank” (marksouther.org).

Even immigrants arriving in Cleveland encountered the name. The Cleveland Immigration League and the City Immigration Bureau, established in 1913, published The Immigrant’s Guide to Cleveland, Ohio: Sixth City (case.edu, books.google.com, katalog.ub.uni-heidelberg.de). One catalog lists an edition in 1914 and another in 1917, so the exact edition history still deserves care, but the larger point is clear: “Sixth City” was not just a boast for insiders. It was how Cleveland introduced itself to new arrivals.

National writers noticed, too. In Tom L. Johnson’s posthumously published memoir, Cleveland appears as the “sixth city in size in the United States” (clevelandmemory.org). In Edward Hungerford’s 1913 book The Personality of American Cities, the Cleveland chapter is simply titled “The Sixth City.” Hungerford argued that Great Lakes traffic had “made her the Sixth City” and said the name “sounds more like the Twentieth Century” (gutenberg.org, archive.org, loc.gov).

That last phrase is important. To people watching Cleveland in 1913, the city did not sound old. It sounded like the future.

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The Engines of Greatness: A City of Diversified Industries

The branding worked because the reality underneath it was real.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Cleveland had earned the title “The City of Diversified Industries” (tile.loc.gov). That matters because Cleveland was not a one-note industrial city. Pittsburgh was steel. Detroit became cars. Cleveland was broader. It made steel, machines, chemicals, automobiles, paints, engines, valves, batteries, electrical equipment, and a long list of specialized industrial products.

By 1930, Greater Cleveland was being described as the nation’s “15th industrial state,” leading the country in 210 of the 333 federally recognized manufacturing categories (tile.loc.gov). That is not just civic pride. That is industrial depth. Cleveland did not only make things. It made the things that helped other places make things.

The Iron and Steel Crucible

Iron and steel were the foundation (ohiohistory.org, us.ternium.com). Lake Erie gave Cleveland access to iron ore by freighter. Rail and canal routes brought coal from the south. Those inputs came together in the Cuyahoga Valley and around the harbor, creating the base for an enormous manufacturing economy.

That steel did not just leave town. It shaped the city. The Terminal Tower, completed in 1930, rose 52 stories and became the second-tallest building in the world outside New York City, a Cleveland landmark built from the same industrial muscle the city was known for (us.ternium.com). The Hope Memorial Bridge, originally the Lorain–Carnegie Bridge, with its Art Deco “Guardians of Traffic,” still tells the same story in stone and steel: this was a city built around movement, machinery, transportation, and civic ambition (us.ternium.com).

Rockefeller and the Birth of the Modern Corporation

Cleveland also gave the country one of the defining business stories of the modern era.

In 1870, John D. Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company of Ohio in Cleveland (en.wikipedia.org). What happened next reshaped American capitalism. The Library of Congress notes that in the first three months of 1872 alone, Rockefeller bought out, shut down, or bankrupted 22 of his 26 Cleveland competitors (loc.gov). The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History says he “built or purchased almost all of Cleveland’s refining capacity in the 1870s and made the city the center of the American refining industry” (case.edu).

The Library of Congress states that by the late 1880s, Standard Oil controlled 90% of American refineries, while Encyclopaedia Britannica dates a 90–95% command of U.S. refining to around 1880 (loc.gov, britannica.com). Rockefeller moved the headquarters to New York in 1885, but the operating model — consolidation, logistics, scale, vertical control, and modern corporate power — was shaped here on the banks of the Cuyahoga.

This is one of the complicated parts of the Cleveland story. It is not all romantic. It is not all clean. But it is undeniably consequential.

Millionaires’ Row

The money showed up on Euclid Avenue, known as “Millionaires’ Row” and called the “Showplace of America” by Baedeker’s travel guide, with some comparing it to the Champs-Élysées (en.wikipedia.org, clevelandhistorical.org, jstor.org). The names tied to that street tell you what kind of city Cleveland was becoming: Rockefeller, arc-light inventor Charles F. Brush, iron-ore and shipping magnate Samuel Mather, and political power broker Marcus Hanna.

It was a street of wealth, but it was also a visible sign of what Cleveland’s industrial economy had produced.

The First Automotive Capital

One of the facts that still surprises people is that before Detroit became Detroit, Cleveland had a serious claim on the automobile future.

Cleveland’s expertise in metallurgy, precision machining, carriage-making, and industrial supply made it a natural early auto center. In 1898, Cleveland’s Alexander Winton, a Scottish immigrant, sold what is widely cited as the first standard American-made gasoline automobile, helping launch the domestic retail auto economy (en.wikipedia.org, case.edu). The curator of the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum has noted that “Cleveland turned out the most automobiles in America between 1896 and 1907” (sbnonline.com).

By the 1909 manufacturing census, automobile production was Cleveland’s third-largest industry, with 32 factories, more than 7,000 workers, and almost $21 million in output (case.edu). Cleveland was not locked into one propulsion bet. White Motor Company built steam cars before pivoting to heavy trucks. Baker Motor Vehicle Company produced electric cars such as the 1904 Baker Newport and 1906 Baker Imperial, clean and quiet decades before the modern electric-vehicle conversation (en.wikipedia.org, wrhs.org, clevelandhistorical.org). On the gasoline side, Winton, Peerless, Stearns, Chandler, and Jordan built premium cars that were respected nationally. The Western Reserve Historical Society preserves examples from that era, including the 1901 Tri-Moto Crescent, 1902 American Gas Roundabout, 1903 Hoffman General Utility car, and 1905 Franklin Tonneau (wrhs.org).

Between 1898 and 1932, Cleveland was the second-largest center of the American automotive industry (case.edu, tile.loc.gov). But Cleveland and Detroit made different strategic bets. Detroit, especially under Henry Ford, built the mass-market, low-cost assembly-line model. Cleveland leaned toward premium, high-cost, low-volume vehicles (case.edu). When the American middle class demanded affordable cars, Detroit’s model won.

The Strategic Pivot to the Supply Chain

Cleveland did something important after that. It adapted.

Instead of trying to beat Detroit at finished-car mass production, Cleveland became indispensable to Detroit’s supply chain (case.edu). By the 1910s and 1920s, the city was central to automotive components, advanced metallurgy, and chemical additives. By the 1920s, roughly 70% of all steel manufactured in Cleveland was destined for automotive production (case.edu). Cleveland also helped the industry move from wood carriage frames to all-steel bodies, with facilities like the Fisher Body plant on Coit Road, opened in 1922 to supply General Motors (case.edu).

The deeper you look, the more you see Cleveland inside the automobile. Claud H. Foster developed the hydraulic shock absorber and the Gabriel horn here, improving vehicle safety and stability (case.edu, en.wikipedia.org). Charles E. Thompson built an engine-valve business beginning in 1904 that became Thompson Products and later helped form TRW (case.edu). Torbensen Gear & Axle Company relocated to Cleveland in 1915 and became the foundation of Eaton Corporation (case.edu). Lubrizol, founded by Case School of Applied Science graduates in 1928, pioneered motor-oil additives. Willard Storage Battery Company became a major player in automotive electrical storage (case.edu).

Detroit assembled the cars. Cleveland helped make them work.

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A Culture of Pioneering Innovation

The Sixth City was never just a place of hard labor. It was a working laboratory.

The technological firsts and early innovations tied to Cleveland and Ohio during this era are impressive (en.wikipedia.org, bricksave.com, artsandculture.google.com). Some of the broader “first” claims should be handled carefully because local innovation history can get messy, but the Cleveland-based contributions around Charles Brush, Sherwin-Williams, The Arcade, and Alexander Winton are strong.

Year	Innovation / Civic First	Innovator / Entity	Broader Impact
1879	Public electric arc-lighting demonstration	Charles F. Brush	A paradigm shift in urban infrastructure, public safety, and nighttime commerce
1880	Standardized formula paints	Sherwin-Williams Co.	Revolutionized mass-market chemical manufacturing and construction
1890	One of America’s first indoor shopping arcades	The Arcade	Pioneered modern retail architecture and concentrated commerce
1891	Early gasoline-powered American automobile	John William Lambert (Ohio)	Helped lay groundwork for the domestic combustion-vehicle industry
1896	Early X-ray imaging work	Dayton C. Miller	Advanced diagnostic medical imaging
1898	First standard U.S. commercial automobile sale	Alexander Winton	Initiated the retail automotive economy and dealership model
1901	Automobile steering wheel	Alexander Winton	Standardized vehicle control away from the rudimentary tiller
1905	Pioneering blood-transfusion and shock research	Dr. George Crile	Transformed surgical medicine and trauma care
1910	Automobile hydraulic shock absorber	Claud H. Foster	Dramatically improved high-speed stability and ride comfort
1914	Electric traffic signal	Euclid Ave. & E. 105th St.	Reshaped municipal traffic management in the motor age
1933	Creation of Superman	Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster	Birthed the modern comic-book superhero archetype

In 1879, Charles F. Brush lit Public Square, then Monumental Park, with one of the first practical outdoor electric arc-lighting demonstrations in the country (en.wikipedia.org, artsandculture.google.com). That was not a small thing. It showed what cities could become when nighttime was no longer a hard stop for commerce, movement, and public life.

In 1880, Sherwin-Williams pioneered standardized formula paints, turning what had been a more inconsistent product into something that could be manufactured, distributed, and trusted at scale (en.wikipedia.org). In 1914, Cleveland installed an electric traffic signal at Euclid Avenue and East 105th Street, a basic but profound piece of infrastructure for the automobile age (en.wikipedia.org, bricksave.com). And in 1933, two Cleveland high-school students, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, created Superman, giving American culture one of its defining modern myths (en.wikipedia.org, bricksave.com).

That range matters. The Sixth City story is not only smoke stacks. It is lighting, coatings, retail architecture, medical work, traffic control, automotive engineering, and popular culture. Cleveland was solving problems that modern life created.

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The Civic Soul: Progressive Politics, Beautiful Cities, and a Mosaic of People

A city is not only its economy. Cleveland’s Sixth City era also produced political reform, civic planning, cultural ambition, and a complicated human mosaic.

The Tom L. Johnson Era

From 1901 to 1909, Cleveland politics were shaped by Mayor Tom L. Johnson, a former business tycoon who became a major figure of the Progressive Era (resources.ohiohistory.org). Johnson campaigned on home rule, a 3-cent streetcar fare, and just taxation, pushed professional city government, and supported municipal ownership of public utilities (case.edu).

His support came heavily from working-class west side communities, especially fast-growing German and Irish neighborhoods. The wealthy east side remained a Republican stronghold, sometimes described as a “Republican Gibraltar” (resources.ohiohistory.org). This was not polite civic consensus. Cleveland’s politics reflected class, ethnicity, labor, transportation, money, and power. The Cleveland Streetcar Strike of 1899 had already exposed major tensions between organized labor and corporate transit monopolies (en.wikipedia.org, resources.ohiohistory.org).

The Group Plan and the City Beautiful

Johnson’s reform energy helped produce one of Cleveland’s most important civic planning achievements: the 1903 Group Plan, designed by Daniel Burnham, John Carrère, and Arnold Brunner (case.edu). The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History describes it as “probably the earliest and most complete civic-center plan for a major city outside of Washington, DC” (case.edu).

The Group Plan mattered because it was a statement of ambition. Cleveland was not content to be only a place where things were made. It wanted a civic center that looked like it belonged to a major American city. One surviving Group Plan image is captioned “The New City Hall, Cleveland, Sixth City” (clevelandmemory.org). That phrase captures the larger point: Cleveland was counting its people, but it was also trying to build a city worthy of them.

A Flowering of Culture

The industrial fortunes of Cleveland also funded cultural institutions that still shape the city.

The Cleveland Museum of Art, founded in 1913 and opened in 1916, became one of the great art museums in the country (clevelandart.org, en.wikipedia.org). The Cleveland Orchestra, founded in 1918 and giving its first concert that December, became one of the world’s major orchestras (clevelandorchestra.com, en.wikipedia.org). These institutions were not accidents. They reflected a belief that a city this large, rich, and ambitious should have national stature in art and music as well as steel, oil, machinery, and shipping.

The Human Mosaic

The Sixth City was built by immigrants. From the mid-1870s to World War I, Cleveland welcomed large numbers of Poles, Russian Jews, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenians, Croatians, Italians, Greeks, and many others. Foreign-born newcomers are estimated to have accounted for about 40% of the city’s population growth between 1900 and 1910 (case.edu). By 1920, the foreign-born made up 30% of the city proper, and when second-generation residents are included, roughly two-thirds of Clevelanders were of foreign birth or parentage (en.wikipedia.org).

That changed the city block by block. Cleveland’s Hungarian population became so significant that the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History calls the city “the American Debrecen … the city with the second largest population of Hungarians, outside of Hungary, after Budapest” (case.edu). The population grew from 9,558 in 1900 to 43,134 in 1920, concentrated around the Buckeye Road “Little Hungary” neighborhood (case.edu).

The Great Migration also brought tens of thousands of African Americans from the rural South, reshaping the city’s demographics while Black Clevelanders faced severe housing discrimination and redlining (en.wikipedia.org). Even so, they built durable civic, cultural, and social institutions. In 1946, businessman Fleet Slaughter founded the Sixth City Golf Club, one of the country’s early Black golfing associations, centered at Highland Park (case.edu, clevelandohio.gov). The name also appeared in less visible community spaces; by the 1960s, places such as the Sixth City Sauna & Steam Baths served as early gathering spaces for Cleveland’s LGBTQ+ community (case.edu).

That is why I do not think of “Sixth City” as only a Chamber of Commerce slogan. Over time, it became a shared civic identity. Different communities carried it in different ways, but the name belonged to Cleveland.

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Fifth City, Sixth City: The Peak and the Name That Stuck

Cleveland’s momentum did not stop in 1910.

When the 1920 census was counted, Cleveland had grown another 42.1% to 796,841 people. That pushed the city past Boston and St. Louis and made Cleveland the fifth-largest city in the United States, behind only New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit (en.wikipedia.org, physics.bu.edu, census.gov). It was the only census in which Cleveland reached the top five.

Naturally, the Chamber tried to update the brand. For a short time in the early 1920s, “Fifth City” campaigns appeared (case.edu, cleflag.org). But the name did not last. When Los Angeles passed Cleveland in 1930, Cleveland returned to sixth, a rank it still legitimately held through the 1930 census, when the population was 900,429, and the 1940 census, when it was 878,336 (census.gov). The city’s population peaked at 914,808 in 1950, even as Baltimore retook sixth place and Cleveland moved to seventh (physics.bu.edu, census.gov, en.wikipedia.org).

The practical question is obvious: why did “Sixth City” survive when “Fifth City” was technically better?

In my mind, the answer is that “Sixth City” was the breakthrough. It was the moment Cleveland crossed the line into the elite tier and knew it. The 1911 campaign had already put the number six everywhere: postcards, forms, maps, letterheads, and the imagination of the city. By the time Cleveland became fifth, the emotional work had already been done.

Historian J. Mark Souther makes the point well. “Fifth City” was a short 1920s blip, while Cleveland was the “Sixth City” for one decade and then again for another twenty years, long enough to become “an imagined place that’s within living memory” (marksouther.org). Cleveland entrepreneurs kept using the name long after the rankings changed, first upward and later downward (marksouther.org, case.edu).

Cleveland’s Population and Rank, by Decade

The full arc — rise, peak, and decline — is below (physics.bu.edu, census.gov, en.wikipedia.org, planning.clevelandohio.gov).

Census Year	Population	National Rank	Note
1890	261,353	10
1900	381,768	7
1910	560,663	6	”Sixth City”
1920	796,841	5	”Fifth City” — the all-time peak rank
1930	900,429	6	Sixth City, restored
1940	878,336	6
1950	914,808	7	All-time population peak
1970	750,903	10	Last appearance in the top ten
1980	573,822	18
2020	372,624	54

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After the War: Decline, Reckoning, and an Unbreakable Toughness

The Cleveland story cannot stop at the peak. If we only tell the heroic industrial version, we miss the part that explains the city’s character today.

After 1950, Cleveland entered a long and painful period of population loss and economic dislocation (visual.clevelandhistory.org). Some of the same infrastructure that made the city powerful — rail lines, dense factories, waterfront mills, older industrial plants — became harder to sustain in the post-war economy. The interstate highway system and regional utility expansion helped fuel suburban growth, while middle-class families and manufacturers moved outward into surrounding counties (cleflag.org). That movement gutted the city’s tax base while leaving Cleveland responsible for infrastructure built for a much larger city (visual.clevelandhistory.org).

At the same time, the global economy shifted. Cleveland’s heavy industries faced major competition from Japanese and European steelmakers and automakers (case.edu). Many local plants had been running since the 1910s and 1920s and were dealing with aging equipment, management issues, labor conflict, and changing economics. By the late 1970s and 1980s, collapses in basic steel, motor-vehicle equipment, and metalworking produced job losses, plant closures, and visible urban decline (case.edu, en.wikipedia.org).

Then there was the environmental reckoning. In June 1969, the badly polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire, becoming a national symbol of industrial decay. But the truth is more complicated and more Cleveland than that. The fire was humiliating, but it also helped catalyze the modern American environmental movement, influencing the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Water Act (en.wikipedia.org, case.edu). The river that embarrassed the country helped push the country to clean itself up.

By 1990, Cleveland’s population had fallen to 505,616, roughly where it had been at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the city ranked 23rd nationally (physics.bu.edu, visual.clevelandhistory.org). By 2020, Cleveland had 372,624 residents and ranked 54th among U.S. cities (planning.clevelandohio.gov). Clevelanders did not pretend that decline did not happen. The city documented it, lived through it, laughed darkly about it, and kept going. American Splendor (2003), adapted from Harvey Pekar’s underground comic, captured ordinary Clevelanders moving through a rusted post-industrial world with humor, intelligence, frustration, and stubborn dignity (rustbeltstudies.org).

This is part of why the name still matters to me. Cleveland pride is not the easy pride of a city that only knows winning. It is the harder pride of a city that has had to face loss, disinvestment, jokes, mistakes, corruption, pollution, and bad national narratives and still find a way to build again.

That toughness is part of the inheritance too.

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The Renaissance: Reclaiming the Moniker

Modern Cleveland did not become great again by trying to recreate the 1920s. It began finding a different operating model.

Instead of depending on the same old mass-production economy, Cleveland shifted toward a more diversified, knowledge-based economy and stabilized as a strong mid-size city (clevelandohio.gov). The newer pillars are education and healthcare — the “eds and meds.” Institutions tied to the wealth and ambition of the earlier era, including Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic, became global leaders in biomedical research and medical innovation (en.wikipedia.org).

Downtown also changed. The I.M. Pei-designed Rock and Roll Hall of Fame rose on the lakefront. Stadiums and arenas anchored parts of the urban core. Historic spaces such as The Arcade were preserved. Downtown Cleveland became the largest residential downtown in Ohio, drawing young professionals back into neighborhoods that had been written off during the era of suburban flight (en.wikipedia.org, static1.squarespace.com, reddit.com).

At the same time, Clevelanders started looking at the industrial past differently. The grit, machinery, smoke, bridges, factories, warehouses, and old civic imagery stopped being only symbols of decline. They became evidence of a city that knew how to build, adapt, and make things that mattered.

That is where the return of Sixth City becomes interesting. More than a century after the Chamber put it on postcards, the name has come back among businesses and civic efforts that want to signal hard work, resilience, local roots, and forward motion (marksouther.org). The modern roster includes:

• CLE Clothing Co. produces “Cleveland, Sixth City” apparel that blends vintage motorsport style with civic identity (cleclothingco.com).
• Sixth City Distribution is a craft-beer wholesaler founded in Cleveland in 2016 (brewbound.com, sixthcitydist.com).
• Sixth City Cycles is a bicycle and houseplant shop in Old Brooklyn (thisiscleveland.com, signalcleveland.org).
• Sixth City Sailor’s Club is a nautical-themed bar and restaurant on Euclid Avenue downtown (clevelandmagazine.com, wkyc.com).
• Sixth City Beverage Group / Craft Soda Co. is a small-batch soda maker (honey.com, columbusunderground.com).
• Sixth City Marketing is a Cleveland digital-marketing agency operating since 2010 (sixthcitymarketing.com).
• Sixth City Spirits is a Northeast Ohio mobile bartending service (sixthcityspirits.com).

The revival also shows up in civic symbolism. The 2025 People’s Flag of Cleveland explains its six-pointed star as a reference to the city’s historic nickname, and the design went live across the region in 2025 (cleflag.org, clevelandmagazine.com).

That is the right way to understand the phrase now. “Sixth City” is not a claim that Cleveland is currently sixth in population. It is a claim to lineage. It says we come from a place that has built things, broken things, fixed things, invented things, lost things, and kept going.

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The Sixth City Today: Why We Carry the Name

For me, the most natural modern home for the Sixth City legacy has always been that of “modern age technologies.”

That may sound like a jump if you only think of Cleveland as an industrial city, but it is not. Cleveland’s nineteenth and twentieth centuries were defined by transition: canals to railroads, steam to electricity, raw materials to advanced components, physical labor to mechanized production. The 1910s were an era of physical automation: assembly systems, hydraulic components, electric infrastructure, traffic signals, and modern industrial processes (en.wikipedia.org).

The 2020s are defined by another kind of automation: cognitive automation through artificial intelligence. Instead of automating only the movement of steel, parts, vehicles, and goods, we are now automating parts of thinking, writing, analysis, workflow, customer service, research, decision support, and business process.

That is where Sixth City Technologies, LLC, Sixth City AI, and Sixth City Tech fit (sixthcityai.com, sixthcitytechnologies.com, sixthcitytech.com). These are Cleveland-rooted businesses built around practical technology adoption, not hype for its own sake. In the same broader modern ecosystem, companies like Sixth City Marketing and Sixth City Innovations are helping businesses with digital visibility, lead generation, and growth instead of steel, oil, and auto components (sixthcitymarketing.com, sixthcityinnovations.com).

By carrying the name, we are drawing a philosophical line back to people like Charles Brush, Claud Foster, Alexander Winton, and John D. Rockefeller. That does not mean pretending we are them. It means recognizing the pattern. Cleveland’s best builders took intimidating, emerging technologies and made them practical. They turned electricity, chemical coatings, combustion engines, vehicle components, industrial logistics, and transportation systems into working tools for real business and real life.

That is the same basic job now with AI.

The work of Sixth City AI is to make artificial intelligence practical, understandable, and useful for real organizations. Not magic. Not theater. Not vague future talk. Practical adoption. Training. Process design. AI readiness. Legacy data and system thinking. Human adoption. Helping businesses understand where AI belongs, where it does not belong, and what needs to change so people can actually use it well.

That is why the name works. It grounds a fast-moving, abstract technology in a Cleveland identity built around applied innovation, Midwestern practicality, industrial reliability, and real-world consequences. AI should not be treated as a toy for Silicon Valley labs or a buzzword for consultants. It is becoming business infrastructure. The question is whether companies will adopt it thoughtfully, prepare their people, and use it in ways that create value instead of chaos.

The old Sixth City was not about population rank alone. It was about habits: learn early, build seriously, solve real problems, specialize where it matters, and refuse to quit when the market changes.

When Edward Hungerford wrote in 1913 that “the Sixth City sounds more like the Twentieth Century,” he was describing a city that felt like the future. More than a hundred years later, I believe the name can still do that work. Not because Cleveland is trying to be what it was in 1910, but because the old spirit is still useful for the next transition.

That is why we carry the name.

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A Note on Sources and Method

This draft keeps the source discipline from the original research intact. I am comfortable using the story, but I do not want to overstate the history or turn Cleveland pride into unsupported mythology. A few caveats matter:

• Population figures are city-limit (urban-place) counts. Rankings reflect municipal boundaries at each census; annexation and consolidation affect comparability across decades (per census.gov methodology).
• The absolute first printed use of “Sixth City” is unconfirmed. The evidence overwhelmingly supports a 1910–1911 origin — census result, then newspaper celebration, then the Chamber of Commerce campaign — but pinning down the single earliest occurrence would require direct review of Plain Dealer archives and Chamber records not fully open online. Quotations from the September 1910 and July 1911 Plain Dealer items here are preserved via case.edu and marksouther.org rather than from direct scans of the originals (plaindealer.com as the original publisher).
• No standalone “Sixth City” magazine has been confirmed. Documented branding includes Chamber promotional booklets, the ubiquitous postcard/advertising logo, the 1913 railroad-and-industrial map, the 1917 Mohr map, a souvenir book, and a national book chapter (Hungerford, 1913) — but not a confirmed periodical literally titled The Sixth City. Describe it as a campaign and promotional materials.
• The “City of Light” arc-light framing rests on weaker sourcing. Anchor the 1879 milestone to Charles Brush and Public Square rather than overstating a “first in the world” or formal nickname claim.
• Source tiers. Authoritative and primary sources (case.edu, census.gov, loc.gov, tile.loc.gov, clevelandhistorical.org, clevelandmemory.org, planning.clevelandohio.gov, marksouther.org, gutenberg.org, archive.org, and the institutional sites listed below) anchor the factual claims. Reference and aggregator sources are used for corroboration only.

Full Source List (Fully Qualified Domain Names)

Authoritative & primary

• census.gov — U.S. Census Bureau historical population tables
• case.edu — Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Case Western Reserve University
• loc.gov — Library of Congress (Standard Oil; Hungerford; booster literature)
• tile.loc.gov — Library of Congress (Cleveland industrial materials)
• britannica.com — Encyclopaedia Britannica (Standard Oil refining-control figures)
• clevelandohio.gov — City of Cleveland (history & facts; Sixth City Golf Club)
• planning.clevelandohio.gov — City of Cleveland Planning Commission (2020 rank)
• clevelandhistorical.org — Cleveland Historical / Center for Public History + Digital Humanities
• clevelandmemory.org — Cleveland Memory Project (Group Plan / City Hall image; Tom L. Johnson memoir)
• clevelandart.org — The Cleveland Museum of Art (founding/opening dates)
• clevelandorchestra.com — The Cleveland Orchestra (founding/first concert)
• ohiohistory.org — Ohio History Connection (early industry; Ohio publications bibliography)
• resources.ohiohistory.org — Ohio History Connection (Tom L. Johnson; politics)
• marksouther.org — Historian J. Mark Souther, author of Believing in Cleveland
• gutenberg.org — Project Gutenberg (Hungerford, The Personality of American Cities, 1913)
• archive.org — Internet Archive (Hungerford, 1913)
• usa.ipums.org — IPUMS USA (county density data)
• nrs.harvard.edu — Harvard Library (1913 Chamber railroad/industrial map record)
• oldmapsonline.org — OldMapsOnline (1913 Chamber map)
• scholarscompass.vcu.edu — VCU Scholars Compass (1914 courthouse postcard)
• commons.wikimedia.org — Wikimedia Commons (Public Square postcard)
• books.google.com — Google Books (Immigrant’s Guide to Cleveland, Ohio: Sixth City)
• katalog.ub.uni-heidelberg.de — Heidelberg University catalog (Immigrant’s Guide edition record)
• wrhs.org — Western Reserve Historical Society (early automobile collection)
• us.ternium.com — Ternium (Terminal Tower; Hope Memorial Bridge steel heritage)
• cleflag.org — Cleveland flag history (1895 flag; six-pointed star; 2025 People’s Flag)
• jstor.org — JSTOR Daily (Millionaires’ Row architecture)
• visual.clevelandhistory.org — Cleveland Historical visual archive (decline-era demographics)
• rustbeltstudies.org — Rust Belt studies (American Splendor; Harvey Pekar)
• sbnonline.com — Smart Business (Rockefeller legacy; Cleveland auto history)
• plaindealer.com — The Plain Dealer (original publisher of the 1910–1911 editorials)

Reference & encyclopedic

• en.wikipedia.org — Cleveland; Demographics of Cleveland; 1910 U.S. Census; most populous cities by decade
• bu.edu / physics.bu.edu — Boston University historical city-population dataset
• demographia.com — Historical urban population data
• infoplease.com — Historical census ranking data
• biggestuscities.com — Historical census ranking data
• bricksave.com — Cleveland innovation history
• artsandculture.google.com — Google Arts & Culture (Brush; civic history)

Modern “Sixth City” businesses & civic revival

• sixthcityai.com — Sixth City AI (subject company)
• sixthcitytechnologies.com — Sixth City Technologies, LLC (subject company)
• sixthcitytech.com — Sixth City Tech (subject company)
• sixthcitymarketing.com — Sixth City Marketing
• sixthcityinnovations.com — Sixth City Innovations
• sixthcitydist.com — Sixth City Distribution
• sixthcityspirits.com — Sixth City Spirits
• cleclothingco.com — CLE Clothing Co. (“Cleveland, Sixth City” apparel)
• curtiswrightmaps.com — Curtis Wright Maps (1917 Mohr “Sixth City” map)
• brewbound.com — Beverage-industry news (Sixth City Distribution)
• thisiscleveland.com — Destination Cleveland (Sixth City Cycles)
• signalcleveland.org — Signal Cleveland (Sixth City Cycles)
• clevelandmagazine.com — Cleveland Magazine (Sixth City Sailor’s Club; People’s Flag)
• wkyc.com — WKYC (Sixth City Sailor’s Club)
• honey.com — Sixth City Beverage / Craft Soda
• columbusunderground.com — Columbus Underground (Sixth City Craft Soda)
• static1.squarespace.com — Downtown Cleveland residential growth data
• reddit.com — Community discussion (modern Cleveland revival)
• github.com — Sixth City AI / Technologies repository references
• aisuperior.com — AI directory listing (Sixth City AI)

Corroborating only (lower confidence — not cited as primary authorities)

• partyshopmaine.com
• communityliteracy.org
• grokipedia.com

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Compiled as a historical foundation for the “Why We Chose the Name” page. Figures and quotations should be presented as historically careful: “Sixth City” refers to Cleveland’s rise to become the sixth-largest city in America in the early twentieth century — a nickname that came to symbolize the city’s industrial strength, civic ambition, and enduring spirit of reinvention.

Related Sixth City AI naming context

For Edward Jacak’s explanation of how this history connects to the company name and modern technology work, read Why Technology Is the Natural Modern Home for the Sixth City Legacy.