Brewed Fresh Daily

In 1969, the Cuyahoga River was so overrun with oil and industrial pollutants that a spark from a passing rail car ignited a blaze across the water’s surface. Firefighters extinguished the flames in less than two hours, but the image cemented in dubious city lore. Critics called Cleveland the “Mistake On The Lake.”

Things have only gotten worse from there.

For decades, city leaders have watched the city’s industrial base vanish, the population plummet and poverty grow. In recent years, they have sought to reinvent Cleveland according to 21^st century urban principles, envisioning a city built on health care, higher education, entertainment and mass transportation.

Now they have a tangible foundation. The New York Times profiles a massive reclamation project throughout the city that has ignited job growth and stoked talk of a small-scale comeback: In Cleveland, the downtown has shifted uptown.

Within a square mile of the city’s University Circle are: Case Western Reserve, Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland Institute of Music, University Hospitals, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland Orchestra, Museum of Art and Museum of Natural History.

Millions have been spent on building and renovating those civic institutions, and they’ve formed “a distinct economic microclimate that has fostered the highest growth in job numbers, income and residents,” in a city that lost 81,000 residents from 2000 to 2010, according to The Times.

An urban planner from the University Circle Inc., which helped plot the area’s development along Euclid Avenue, tells the newspaper 5,000 jobs have been added in the uptown area since 2005, and that 50,000 work there overall.

Amid an overall population loss of 17 percent in the past decade, the number of residents in the uptown area grew by 11 percent.