Ashtabula is the biggest city in the county by a wide margin — about 18,000 people — and the only one most Ohioans outside the county can place on a map. It sits where the Ashtabula River meets Lake Erie, Route 20 runs through the middle of it, and I-90 passes just to the south. Everything about the city’s shape comes from the harbor at the north end.

For most of a century that harbor was one of the busiest iron ore receiving ports on the Great Lakes. Ore came down from Minnesota’s Mesabi Range by boat, got transferred to rail here, and went south to the steel mills. The tonnage paid for the houses, the churches and the downtown. That trade has shrunk a long way — the coal pier was idled in 2016 — but the city it built is still standing, and the harbor district has turned into the most interesting few blocks in Ashtabula County.

The Harbor

Bridge Street is the reason people drive up from Cleveland. The Ashtabula Harbor Commercial District went on the National Register in 1975 and had its boundaries pushed out again in 2010, and the stretch running down to the river is the most concentrated run of independent business in the county — restaurants, bars, antiques, gift shops, a framing shop, charter fishing, a yacht club.

At the bottom of the hill is the lift bridge. Wendell P. Brown designed it in 1925, so it has just turned a hundred. It carries State Route 531 across the river, went on the National Register in 1976, and was rebuilt in 1986 for $5.2 million. It still goes up for boat traffic, which still stops car traffic, which nobody around here complains much about.

Why So Many Restaurants

Look at the listings on this page and the food and drink category runs long: Bascule Bridge Grille, Hil-Mak Seafood, Bridge Street Tavern, Harbor Halcyon, Briquettes Smokehouse, Fitzgerald’s Wine Bar, Lago Cellars, Crow’s Nest, Purola’s Harbor Deli and more. That is not a quirk of how this directory was built. The harbor draws weekend traffic from outside the county, and a restaurant district grew up to meet it. Several of those places are within a few minutes’ walk of each other.

What the Port Built, and What Came After

Ashtabula’s industrial history runs heavier than most people expect from a town this size. A Rockwell International plant out on Route 20 made brakes for the Space Shuttle. There was a uranium extrusion plant on East 21st Street. Chemical and plastics operations clustered near the port because the port was there.

Most of that is gone or much smaller, and the city has spent the last couple of decades working out what replaces it. What is here now is a broader base: health care, retail along Route 20, the trades, small manufacturing, and a tourism economy built on the harbor and the lake that did not exist in the ore years.

Beaches and Parks

Walnut Beach sits just west of the harbor mouth, with sand, a pavilion and a long view down the lake. Lake Shore Park is on the other side — a Depression-era Public Works Administration project, still doing the job it was built for. Point Park looks straight down onto the lift bridge and the river channel, and it is where everyone takes the photograph.

Health, Schools and the Campus

Ashtabula Regional Medical Center on Lake Avenue is the county’s main hospital and the largest medical employer in the area. Kent State University’s Ashtabula campus is on Lake Road West, which means the county has a four-year university presence without anyone having to drive to Kent.

Ashtabula Area City Schools runs the public buildings, with Lakeside High School as the high school. St. John School is the Catholic K-12 option.

Two Things That Happened Here

On December 29, 1876, a Lake Shore and Michigan Southern train went through the Howe truss bridge over the Ashtabula River in a snowstorm. Of the 159 people aboard, 92 died. It was one of the worst rail disasters in American history and it changed how bridges in this country were inspected.

Before that, the Hubbard House on the lakefront was one of the last stops on the Underground Railroad. People waited in the basement for a boat across to Ontario. It is on the National Register and open as a museum, and it is the kind of thing that ought to be better known than it is.

Arts and Everyday Business

The Ashtabula Arts Center runs theater, classes and gallery space year round. The Ashtabula County YMCA is here. Rennick Meat Market, Dunham’s Sports, In The Zone Gaming and a long list of independent shops and services fill in the rest — the businesses people actually use on a Tuesday rather than a Saturday.

Find an Ashtabula Business

The listings above cover the city of Ashtabula and the surrounding area in the 44004 ZIP code. If you run a business here and you are not on this page, you can add your listing free.

More to See in Ashtabula

Four of the county’s nineteen covered bridges cross the Ashtabula River here, including Smolen-Gulf, the longest in the United States. The Harbor holds the Hubbard House, one of the few documented Underground Railroad terminus sites open to the public, along with the maritime and Finnish heritage museums. The Wine & Walleye Festival takes over Bridge Street in late July.