They called it Little Hungary, and for half a century it earned the name. From the 1890s into the 1950s, if you stepped off the streetcar at East 89th and Buckeye Road in southeast Cleveland, you walked into a Magyar city the size of a small county capital. Goulash and stuffed cabbage in the steam off the deli windows. Czardas drifting out of taverns on Saturday night. And bells from a limestone twin-towered church that, by some 1920s counts, served the second-largest Hungarian population on Earth, after Budapest itself.
The community is gone from Buckeye Road now. The bells still ring.
Buckeye-Shaker, The Place
Buckeye-Shaker is a stitched-together neighbourhood on Cleveland’s east side, roughly four miles southeast of downtown. Its old western half is Buckeye proper, strung along Buckeye Road as it rises from East 79th up to East 130th. Its eastern half is Shaker Square, the 1929 Colonial Revival shopping plaza laid out by the Van Sweringen brothers at the foot of their interurban line to Shaker Heights.
The housing is mostly century-old wood-frame doubles and brick four-suites, built fast for steelworkers and foundry hands. The RTA Blue and Green lines still rattle through Shaker Square the way the Van Sweringens drew them. Buckeye Road is the spine. Everything Hungarian in Cleveland was once measured off that one street.
How Cleveland Became Hungarian
Before the Hungarians
Cleveland’s east side in the 1850s was farmland and orchard. The Buckeye area first drew German and Bohemian families who came for the new factories at the bottom of the hill near the Cuyahoga industrial flats. They built modest Lutheran and Catholic congregations along what was then called South Woodland Avenue.
By the 1880s the German wave was already moving outward. The factories kept hiring, the housing turned over, and into that opening came a different language entirely.
The Hungarians Arrive
The first Magyar workers reached Cleveland’s east side in the early 1880s, recruited or word-of-mouthed into the foundries and rolling mills. The two anchor employers were the Cleveland Malleable Iron Company and the Eberhard Manufacturing Company, both within walking distance of South Woodland Avenue. A man could rent a room, walk to a shift, send money home, and bring a brother across the next year.
In late 1892 the community got its church. Father Charles Boehm, the first officially designated Hungarian Catholic priest in the United States, arrived on December 1 of that year and within months had a wood-frame parish standing at the corner of South Woodland and Bismarck Street, now Buckeye Road and East 90th. The cornerstone of St. Elizabeth of Hungary went down on June 4, 1893. It was the first Hungarian Catholic parish in America, and the address has never moved.
The Reformed community arrived in parallel. The First Hungarian Reformed Church organised on May 3, 1891, with Rev. Gustav Juranyi and sixty charter members, and by 1904 had built a stone sanctuary at 2850 East 79th Street. Cleveland was the first North American city to host a Hungarian Reformed congregation, a Hungarian Roman Catholic parish, and a Hungarian Greek Catholic parish, all founded within a year of each other.
Cleveland at Its Hungarian Peak
By the 1920 federal census, more than 42,000 Cleveland residents listed the Kingdom of Hungary as their birthplace. A decade later the Buckeye Road neighbourhood alone held roughly 40,000 people, of whom about 35,000 were Hungarian. The local Magyar press began calling it the American Debrecen, after Hungary’s second city.
Daily life sat on the street itself. Buckeye Road, particularly the upper stretch from East 116th onward, ran a continuous tape of Hungarian shops: more than ten grocers and butchers, six clothiers, six real-estate offices, hardware stores, bakeries, pharmacies, barber shops, and taverns on most corners. The restaurants did chicken paprikash and toltott kaposzta to order. The Gypsy Cellar and Settlers’ restaurant drew downtown diners in from the Terminal Tower.
The community had its own civic architecture: mutual-aid societies, gymnastic clubs, Hungarian-language newspapers, a credit union, scout troops, and an annual cycle of weddings and saint’s days that pulled the whole neighbourhood through the parish gates. The Hungarian Cultural Garden in Rockefeller Park, dedicated in 1934 with a bas-relief of Franz Liszt and formally completed in 1938, gave the community a public face on Cleveland’s grand boulevard.
Then in October 1956 came an unexpected second wave. The Hungarian Revolution sent roughly 38,000 refugees across the American border, and Cleveland’s existing community moved fast to absorb them. Between 1950 and 1960 more than 4,000 Hungarian-born arrivals settled directly into the Buckeye neighbourhood. Another 2,000 went straight to Parma. The cafes filled with people who had crossed the Andau bridge.
The Change
The change had already begun before the 1956 refugees touched down. By the mid-1950s younger Hungarian-Americans were buying houses in Parma, Garfield Heights, Maple Heights, and out along the Cleveland Heights line. Postwar wages, the GI Bill, and the new ranch subdivisions outside the city limits pulled them off the old block one family at a time.
The 1960s accelerated everything. White flight, the broader pattern across northern industrial cities, hollowed out Buckeye Road through the decade. By the end of the 1970s most of the original Hungarian residents had moved. By 2000 only a handful remained on the street itself. The neighbourhood that grew up around them was, and still is, predominantly Black.
The Hungarian institutions stayed put. The bells stayed put. The parish, the Reformed church, the funeral home, the museum, the cultural garden, the radio hour: every one of them outlasted the community that built them.
The Landmarks of Hungarian Cleveland
St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church, 9016 Buckeye Road. The first Hungarian nationality parish in America, founded December 1892 by Father Charles Boehm. The current limestone building, designed by Cleveland architect Emile Uhlrich and modelled on Sant’Agnese in Agone in Rome, was begun in 1918 and completed in 1922. Twin bell towers, a rose window, Italian Baroque Revival. National Register of Historic Places since 1976. In 2023 Bishop Edward Malesic designated it a shrine for the traditional Latin Mass, now operated by the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest.
First Hungarian Reformed Church of Cleveland, 2850 East 79th Street. Organised in May 1891 by Rev. Gustav Juranyi and sixty founding members, the oldest Hungarian Reformed congregation in North America. The current stone church, designed by architect Paul Matzinger, was dedicated on Memorial Day 1904. Hungarian-language services still happen on a regular schedule.
The Hungarian Cultural Garden, Martin Luther King Jr. Drive at Rockefeller Park. One of the original Cleveland Cultural Gardens, opened with the dedication of a Franz Liszt bas-relief on October 21, 1934 and formally completed on July 10, 1938. The garden honours figures the cultural-gardens charter would permit, meaning artists and writers rather than soldiers and statesmen: Bartok, Ady, Madach, Liszt, and the Case Western literary critic Joseph Remenyi. Renovated and rededicated repeatedly through the decades.
Balaton Restaurant, formerly 13133 Shaker Square. Opened in 1964 on Buckeye Road as a strictly Hungarian dining room, taken over in 1996 by chef Krisztina Ponti, her husband George, and her sister Erika Johnson, and relocated to Shaker Square in 1998. For two decades the Square’s anchor restaurant. Closed during the pandemic, reopened in Bainbridge Township in 2023. The Shaker Square room is gone, but the chicken paprikash recipe is still in the kitchen, just twenty miles further east.
Cleveland Hungarian Heritage Museum, Galleria at Erieview, 1301 East 9th Street. Founded in 1985 by a small group of Hungarian-Americans determined that the Buckeye-Shaker story would not vanish with the neighbourhood. First housed at St. Elizabeth’s, then briefly at Richmond Mall, the museum settled into its current downtown Galleria space on March 15, 2003. Costume, folk art, fine art, and the visual archive of a community that once filled a hill.
The Cleveland Hungarian Scout Festival, held in late summer each year. Now in its 69th year, the festival is the closest thing the diaspora has to a single annual gathering. For decades it ran in or near Buckeye-Shaker. Today it moves between venues in Parma, anchored at German Central Park, where the Hungarian community now mostly lives.
The Hungarian Hour on WCSB 89.3 FM. Cleveland’s surviving Hungarian-language broadcast, on the air every Saturday from 11 a.m. to 12.30 p.m., hosted by Elizabeth Papp Taylor and Walt Mahovich. It plays the music American-born Hungarians grew up with at the kitchen table, plus new music from Budapest, plus community announcements. A radio station is now what the corner deli used to be.
Where the Cleveland Hungarians Came From
Most of the first wave were not from Budapest. They came from the broader patchwork of Greater Hungary, the pre-1920 kingdom that included present-day Slovakia, large stretches of Romania, the northern Vojvodina region of Serbia, parts of Croatia, and what is now Sub-Carpathian Ukraine. Magyars left from each of these places, often village by village, for the rolling mills on the Cuyahoga.
Hungarian-speakers from Felvidek, the northern uplands that became Slovakia after the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, were heavily represented in the Reformed congregations. Transylvanian Magyars, from places like Cluj, Targu Mures, and the Szekely villages of the eastern Carpathians, arrived in steady numbers from the 1890s onward and again, in larger waves, after the post-Trianon and post-1956 displacements. There were Vojvodina Magyars from Subotica and Novi Sad. And there were urban arrivals from Budapest, Debrecen, Szeged, and Pecs, often more skilled, often Jewish, often working in trades rather than foundries.
The religious mix mirrored the geography. Hungarian Roman Catholics from the western and central regions. Hungarian Reformed (Calvinist) from the east and from the Slovak uplands. Hungarian Lutherans and Greek Catholics in smaller numbers. A significant Hungarian Jewish presence, particularly in the postwar arrivals, many of them survivors who reached Cleveland in the late 1940s.
Buckeye-Shaker Today
Drive Buckeye Road today and the Hungarian street is gone. The shops are different, the language on the signs is different, and the neighbourhood is predominantly Black, a community that built its own civic life over the second half of the 20th century and into this one. That story is its own, and it is not this article’s story.
What remains, on the same physical street, are the anchors. St. Elizabeth’s stands intact at 9016 Buckeye, Latin Mass on Sundays, twin towers visible from the freeway. The First Hungarian Reformed building still occupies its East 79th corner. And on Saturday mornings, when the festival is on at German Central Park out in Parma, the parking lot fills with cars driven in from Cleveland Heights, Mentor, Strongsville, and Brunswick. Most Hungarian-Americans in greater Cleveland now arrive by car rather than by walking down a hill.
The shift from Cleveland to Parma is the real story of the second half of the century. Parma now has the largest Hungarian-American population of any single American city by some measures, and the Cleveland Hungarian Scout Festival has anchored there for years. The Cleveland Hungarian Heritage Museum still sits downtown in the Galleria, but its audience drives in from the western and southern suburbs. The community survived. It moved.
If a Cleveland Hungarian under fifty has any memory of Buckeye Road, it is borrowed: a grandmother’s photograph, a story about a wedding at St. Elizabeth’s, a paprikash recipe written in pencil on the back of a parish bulletin. The bells, on the right Sunday, still carry up the hill.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Hungarians settle in Cleveland’s Buckeye-Shaker?
Hungarians settled in Cleveland’s Buckeye-Shaker in the 1880s because of the foundries and rolling mills at the bottom of the hill, particularly the Cleveland Malleable Iron Company and the Eberhard Manufacturing Company, which were hiring unskilled and semi-skilled immigrant labour. Cheap housing along Buckeye Road and the founding of St. Elizabeth of Hungary parish in 1892 turned the area into a chain-migration anchor that pulled Magyars from across Greater Hungary into the same square mile.
Are there still Hungarians in Buckeye-Shaker today?
Almost none live in the neighbourhood itself. Most of the Hungarian-American community moved to Parma and other Cleveland suburbs between the 1950s and 1970s, and Buckeye Road is now predominantly Black. The Hungarian institutions on Buckeye, however, have endured: St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church and the First Hungarian Reformed Church both still operate at their original addresses.
What are the most famous Hungarian landmarks in Cleveland?
The most famous Hungarian landmarks in Cleveland are St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church at 9016 Buckeye Road, the First Hungarian Reformed Church at 2850 East 79th Street, the Hungarian Cultural Garden in Rockefeller Park, and the Cleveland Hungarian Heritage Museum in the Galleria at Erieview downtown. Balaton Restaurant, an institution at Shaker Square from 1998 to 2020, relocated to Bainbridge Township in 2023.
Where in Hungary did the Cleveland Hungarians come from?
The Cleveland Hungarians came from across Greater Hungary, the pre-1920 kingdom that spanned today’s Hungary, Slovakia, Romania (especially Transylvania), Serbia (Vojvodina), Croatia, and Sub-Carpathian Ukraine. Significant numbers arrived from Felvidek (the northern uplands that became Slovakia), from Transylvanian Magyar towns like Cluj and Targu Mures, and from the cities of Budapest, Debrecen, Szeged, and Pecs.
When did Hungarians first arrive in Cleveland?
Hungarians first arrived in Cleveland in the early 1880s, drawn by jobs in the east side foundries and machine shops. The community grew rapidly through the 1890s and reached its peak between the 1920s and 1950s, when Cleveland was, by some counts, the second-largest Hungarian city in the world after Budapest. A second major wave arrived after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
If your family’s story passed through Buckeye-Shaker, or any of the places the Magyars made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey: from a village in Felvidek or Transylvania, to a parish on Buckeye Road, to wherever you are now.