City Council Renamed Part of Lake Erie the Gulf of Cleveland. Kris Harsh Thinks People Missed the Point

Lake Ontario is now Lake America. The Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America.

And now a part of Lake Erie is the Gulf of Cleveland.

Trump’s name change spree has ticked off many, including some on Cleveland City Council, who have responded to the president’s geography-changing orders by holding down the fort locally.

At Monday night’s council session, they officially branded a sliver of our lake in Cleveland’s name. Two miles out, from the tip of Lakewood to the edge of Euclid, will now—satirically? officially? facetiously?—be known as the Gulf of Cleveland. Not just Lake Erie.

Leading the charge was Ward 4 Councilman Kris Harsh, who, in the biting tone of a Jon Stewart, spoke in front of City Council last night to defend his push for Cleveland’s own renaming ceremony.

“I feel emboldened to take the extraordinary step of renaming Lake Erie as the Gulf of Cleveland,” Harsh said, shortly before holding up a map of the city with Lake Erie crossed out with a Sharpie.

“Some people will say, ‘Kris, it’s not even a gulf, it’s a lake’! And to that I say, Who cares?” Harsh added. He said with a wink: “Words don’t matter. But the whims of powerful white men like me do.”

Kris Harsh showed off a new map of Cleveland, with the Gulf name change, at Monday’s council meeting. Credit: TV20

Google and Apple have not yet acknowledged Cleveland’s change as of Tuesday afternoon, Scene confirmed. Lately, Mapquest rose from the ashes of nostalgia to number one on Apple’s App Store after its CEO decided to keep “Lake Ontario” despite Trump’s order to rename it to “Lake America.”

Harsh isn’t alone in his satire. Councils in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and in Long Beach, California, did similar renaming pushes, serious and not, meant to mock Trump’s own. Last February, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker suggested Lake Michigan be called “Lake Illinois” in his own satirical proclamation.

“The world’s finest geographers, experts who study the Earth’s natural environment, have concluded a decades-long council,” he said at the time, “and determined that a great lake deserves to be named after a great state.”

Cleveland has not or will not be spending any money on its name change, Harsh said. Nor does he expect any image or map at City Hall to show the change except, he said, “maybe on a map in my office.”

And for those who think Harsh is wasting Council’s time, or Cleveland’s energy, he said they’re missing the point of the performance.

“The point was, yes, to poke some fun at the absurdity going on in Washington, D.C.,” he told Scene. “But also to get people to realize that things that are happening are really consequential. Like taking my resolution seriously but not the Epstein files seriously.”

If Apple and Google take it seriously?

Harsh laughed. “Yeah, they absolutely can,” he said. “That would be hilarious.”