Cleveland City Council has apparently decided that if everyone is going to start renaming bodies of water, Cleveland might as well get in on the fun.
The council voted Monday to rename Lake Erie the “Gulf of Cleveland,” in a tongue-in-cheek move aimed squarely at President Donald Trump’s penchant for putting new names on the map.
The resolution, sponsored by Ward 4 Councilman Kris Harsh, passed 13–1 and applies to the portion of Lake Erie stretching from the easternmost to westernmost points of Cleveland’s shoreline and two miles out into the lake.
And yes, the city knows it’s a lake. That, apparently, is the point.
Harsh delivered a deadpan speech before the vote, explaining that Trump’s efforts to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” and Lake Ontario as “Lake America” had opened the door for Cleveland to make a little geography of its own.
“Thanks to him,” Harsh said, “I feel emboldened to take the extraordinary step of renaming Lake Erie as the Gulf of Cleveland, today.”
Then came the obvious objection.
“I can already hear some of you saying, ‘But Kris, it’s not even a gulf — it’s a lake,’” Harsh said.
His response?
“Who cares?”
That drew laughs from the chamber.
Harsh even held up a map with “Gulf of Cleveland” scrawled across the water, joking that apparently this was all it took.
“It’s now the Gulf of Cleveland,” he said.
The resolution itself leans hard into the parody. It says Cleveland refuses to be left behind in the coming “deluge” of government renamings and rebrandings and directs city departments to use the new name in official documents and city-generated maps.
The city clerk was also authorized to notify Apple, Google and other mapping companies of Cleveland’s new designation and the city’s expectation that they use it.
So far, there is no indication that the major mapping companies have actually adopted the name.
And that is where the joke becomes especially obvious.
The resolution does not actually change the geographic name of Lake Erie outside Cleveland’s municipal government. It is essentially Cleveland declaring that, within the city’s own paperwork and maps, a piece of Lake Erie shall henceforth be known as the Gulf of Cleveland.
Harsh later explained that the entire exercise took about 15 minutes and cost the city nothing.
“There’s lots of work for us to do,” he said. “But I think that at the end of the day, we live in a big country with a lot going on. And sometimes things are so ridiculous, you’ve got to just poke a little bit of fun.”
Cleveland’s council president seemed to appreciate the spectacle.
After Harsh finished his presentation, Blaine Griffin told him: “I think you have just made TikTok and YouTube’s top 10 this week with that.”
Harsh has also said the joke was meant to make a broader point about the consequences of government decisions, not simply to get a laugh.
But for now, Cleveland has accomplished something considerably less complicated: It took a perfectly good lake and declared that part of it is a gulf.
Welcome to the Gulf of Cleveland.
Watch from the 1:06:00 mark here:
