AlexfromSouth wrote: ↑Wed Jan 24, 2018 8:45 am
Okay, like who? Specific crews or neighbourghoods? Were they conbected to the italian mob in CL
Croatians began arriving in Cleveland during the Civil War.
And as American Steel & Wire, Patterson-Sargent Paint Co. and other factories grew, so did the Croatian community, opening its own Roman Catholic church, St. Paul, on Easter Sunday 1904 in the heart of the ethnic neighborhood, East 40th Street and St. Clair Avenue.
The area bustled with working-class families squeezed into rentals because many bankers refused to lend money to immigrants.
By the time World War II began to rage -- spurring thousands more Croatians to seek safety in Cleveland -- the frugal parishioners at St. Paul didn't need the banks.
They had saved up enough money to open a credit union of their own.
The concept was simple: Church members pooled their resources into a nonprofit financial cooperative that could make personal loans and offer other banking services to members.
Croatians would decide who got loans. And because they believed most in their community were hardworking and honest, many could get mortgages or business loans based on little else but trust.
Next door to St. Paul Catholic Church on E. 40th St., on the right, is the Old School House Center building, where the collapsed Croation Credit Union got its start in Cleveland.
The credit union opened in 1943 and quickly changed lives.
At first, Croatians bought houses and businesses around the church. But as many white Clevelanders fled the city in the 1960s and 1970s, Croatians followed, moving farther east, until many settled in Lake County.