Click the round markers to see information about each of Akron’s 24 neighborhoods. You can also view the accessible version of this interactive content here. Credit: Reegan Davis Saunders / Signal Akron
“Where do you live?”
In Akron, there can be more than one answer to that question. Those who live in the Sherbondy Hill neighborhood might just say they live on the west side. Residents who straddle the border of Coventry Crossing and Firestone Park might say the latter because it’s the more familiar of the two neighborhoods. And then there are those who live in Akron’s High Hampton neighborhood but have Cuyahoga Falls mailing addresses.
“I’ve actually come across people who lived in Akron that didn’t know they lived in Akron,” said Jason Segedy, former planning director for the City of Akron.
Segedy knows a lot about Akron and its 24 neighborhoods. He even created some of them, including the aforementioned Coventry Crossing and High Hampton. Segedy led the city’s planning department for seven and a half years, taking on the role in January 2016, the same time Mayor Dan Horrigan was sworn in. Segedy immediately got to work on an ambitious project: redrawing Akron’s neighborhood map.
There isn’t a formal schedule for updating the map. As Segedy and the planning department began reviewing the state of the city, they decided to review the map as well. “The thing that prompted us to take a fresh look was, [the map] was kind of old, over a decade and a half since the last time it had been looked at,” he said.
It’s worth noting that officially, the neighborhood map is just a piece of paper. It doesn’t have any legal status, and it doesn’t influence funding or planning decisions. As Segedy explained, its importance is much more personal.
“What I’ve found over the years, and I think this is true of almost every city that’s large enough to have neighborhoods, is it’s something I think people are inherently interested in. Even a city the size of Akron is really as much a collection of smaller places as it is a larger whole,” he said. “I think it’s important to residents to have the city’s documents reflect or acknowledge what people generally perceive to be the neighborhoods.”
The map was created in 2000, the year Akron celebrated its 175th anniversary. David Lieberth helped draw the original map, along with then-Planning Director Warren Woolford.
Lieberth is well-known in Akron for his involvement in civic affairs and his interest in local history. (“I joined the historical society as a high school junior,” he said with a chuckle.) A lawyer by trade, Lieberth served as the city’s deputy mayor for 10 years and is president of the Akron History Center, which is set to open in March. He’s a longtime resident of the Highland Square neighborhood.
How Akron neighborhoods came to be
Before 2000, there had never been any boundaries for Akron’s neighborhoods, at least not officially. As Lieberth explained, people knew they lived in Highland Square or Goodyear Heights or Firestone Park. It was his job to figure out what those neighborhoods looked like on a map.
“The general philosophy in setting boundaries was a commonality of interests,” Lieberth said. “What part of Highland Square do people really think of themselves as being in Highland Square, for example? How far on Market Street could you go before it clearly wasn’t Highland Square anymore and it started to be downtown?”
For several months beginning in late 1999, the group pored over a map of the city. The boundaries of well-known neighborhoods were established easily enough. Lieberth said what the group didn’t know, they made up. Newer neighborhoods like Chapel Hill and Rolling Acres, names drawn from the large shopping malls in the area, soon appeared on the map. When they finished, they had 21 clearly defined neighborhoods. The map was accompanied by a magazine that outlined the boundaries and histories of each neighborhood.
Lieberth said the public disagreed with some of the boundaries.
“‘I don’t think I live in Northwest Akron. I think I live in Merriman Valley,’ [responses] like that. People had always thought they lived somewhere else,” he said. “But the idea of the first map was to get a book out. It was very utilitarian. We wanted to identify Akron neighborhoods in a way they hadn’t been identified before.”
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Neighborhood number grows, names change
With his 2017 redesign, Segedy bumped it to 24 neighborhoods. New additions included Coventry Crossing, High Hampton, Merriman Hills and West Hill. The former Rolling Acres neighborhood – named after the now-closed shopping mall – was absorbed into Kenmore. Elizabeth Park Valley became Cascade Valley, and Lane-Wooster became Sherbondy Hill.
In the case of Cascade Valley, Segedy said Elizabeth Park was the name of a public housing project that had since been torn down and replaced with Cascade Village, hence the name change.
The Lane-Wooster neighborhood was named for Wooster Avenue (now Vernon Odom Boulevard) and Samuel Lane, who ran four local newspapers and served twice as county sheriff and once as mayor in the late 19th Century. However, Segedy said that after talking to residents, he learned that they weren’t really calling the neighborhood Lane-Wooster.
“If you ask[ed] them where they live, I think a common response would be just to say, ‘I live on the west side.’ But that area is a little bit different geographically from the neighborhood on the map that we call West Akron,” he said.
Sherbondy Hill isn’t a new name. The neighborhood was known as that before it became Lane-Wooster. The name harkens back to Melcher Sherbondy, who purchased 368 acres in the area around 1816.
“Our goal was, if we started getting feedback that people didn’t feel like the neighborhood was called that or wanted the neighborhood to be changed to a different name, we were very open to that,” Segedy said of Sherbondy Hill.
“I can’t really speak to whether people wholeheartedly embraced it, but it seemed like people did start using that name, or at least didn’t hate it. Because that neighborhood has had a lot of disinvestment over the years, I think that is a contributing factor of where it didn’t really even have much of a widely used name to begin with. We felt like giving it a new name could help people have something to embrace or rally around a little bit.”
The public weighs in
Unlike the group that made the 2000 map, Segedy did seek public input.
“We had put out some calls for residents to go online and to draw what they perceived their neighborhood to be and then to give it a name,” Segedy said. “They were welcome to draw just their neighborhood, or if they wanted they could mark up the entire map with as many neighborhoods as they felt existed.”
He continued, “It was helpful to us to have that extra layer of input. In many cases, it corresponded pretty closely to what we had drafted, but there were cases where, based on the input from that map, we adjusted some boundaries. … With a lot of public input, it’s hard to know when you’ve had enough or how many people you actually reached. I can’t remember the exact number of responses we got, but it was definitely in the dozens.”
Segedy said that, overall, people reacted well to the new map, but he acknowledges the matter of telling people where they live is ripe for disagreements. Many of the comments he received were from residents who believed the neighborhoods were drawn too large.
One resident mentioned the area behind Ken Stewart’s Grille, which includes White Pond Drive, Frank Boulevard, Ayers Avenue and South Pershing Avenue in West Akron. It was originally a subdivision called Kemppel Village. She thought the area should be its own neighborhood. Currently, it’s part of Wallhaven.
“I encouraged her, ‘Please continue to call your neighborhood whatever you think it should be called.’ Some parts of the city have more of those areas that have a name that residents will call them,” Segedy said. “We were kind of like, ‘We don’t want to have 100 really small neighborhoods.’ So there were some judgment calls on, ‘How detailed do we get?’”
Strong feelings associated with neighborhood names
Fran Wilson, a community activist and former candidate for Akron City Council, said some of the neighborhoods on Akron’s map aren’t necessarily what people would call their communities.
“A neighborhood is less the boundaries that [surround] it and more the relationship[s] that connect it. When I look at the city neighborhood map, and a lot of neighborhood maps that I’ve seen over the years as a community organizer, I think a lot of them are disconnected from the actual neighborhood, and they’re just trying to communicate a broader narrative,” Wilson said. “I think a true neighborhood map would be more like a heat map of how people identify in their specific areas.”
Wilson, who lives in the West Hill neighborhood, does have some advice for future Akron map designers. “Defining a neighborhood is a very loose and complicated thing, and I would ask the old grandmas that have lived here forever,” they said.
Segedy understands the strong feelings people have about their neighborhoods. A lifelong resident of Akron who calls the Wallhaven neighborhood home, Segedy has written extensively on urban development and edited “The Akron Anthology,” a collection of pieces from Akron writers.
“I realize that neighborhoods are in the eye of the beholder,” he said. “Although the city took a stab at ‘Here’s where we think the neighborhoods are and what they’re called,’ we always looked at it as, people can be and should be free to have their own definitions.”
Like many cities, Akron is the sum of its parts, and many of its neighborhoods have rich histories – from Goodyear Heights’ and Firestone Park’s beginnings as communities for rubber industry employees and their families to Highland Square’s vibrant LGBTQ+ community to downtown’s role as the setting of the 1851 Ohio Women’s Rights Convention where Sojourner Truth gave her famous “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech.
This shared history, Lieberth explained, connects people, not only to their neighborhoods but to the people they share it with.
“There’s a certain amount of pride there,” he said. “They remember going to the libraries in each of those neighborhoods. They went to school in each of those neighborhoods. They played ball in each of those neighborhoods. For them, it’s a bonding experience, to some extent.”