Suvarna Garge (Editor)

Cleveland Cultural Gardens

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NRHP Reference #
  
05000382

Added to NRHP
  
2005

Phone
  
+1 440-446-1466

Cleveland Cultural Gardens

Location
  
along both sides of Doan Brook and on both East Blvd and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. Mainly between Lake Erie and Wade Park Avenue. All but one within Rockefeller Park.

Built
  
1926 through 2011 and still building

Address
  
750 E 88th St, Cleveland, OH 44108, USA

Hours
  
Closed now Monday9AM–9PMTuesday9AM–9PMWednesday9AM–9PMThursday9AM–9PMFriday9AM–9PMSaturday9AM–9PMSunday9AM–9PM

Architectural styles
  
Neoclassicism, Art Deco, Landscape architecture

Similar
  
Hungarian Cultural Garden, Hebrew Cultural Garden, Serbian Cultural Garden, Wade Oval, Cleveland Botanical Garden

The cleveland cultural gardens july 2011 part 1


The Cleveland Cultural Gardens are a collection of public gardens located in Rockefeller Park in Cleveland, Ohio. The gardens are situated along East Boulevard & Martin Luther King Jr. Drive within the 276 acre of wooded parkland on the city's East Side. In total, there are 31 distinct gardens, each commemorating a different ethnic group whose immigrants have contributed to the heritage of the United States over the centuries, as well as Cleveland.

Contents

Cleveland cultural gardens one world day parade ceremony


History

Twenty-seven individual gardens, and growing. Each presents the culture of their respective nation through cultural figures and icons in a variety of materials. Each Garden's landscaping suggests the particular country or nationality for which it is named.

Conceived in 1916 to feature literary figures and then modified as time went on. The first garden, named in honor of William Shakespeare, was British. Leo Weidenthal, a Jew, started a tradition when he planted the first ethnic garden called the Hebrew Garden in 1926. The original purpose was to get nationality groups working with each other and learning more about each other’s culture at a time when most of the nationalities lived in self-imposed ghettos, self-developed to facilitate the transition from immigrant status, with little or no English language skills, to functional Americans.

Highly successful from the start, the project had almost universal political, media and civic support that only grew as time went on. This became critical when the original plan to have each nationality group fund its own Garden ran into the Depression’s economic wall. However, the City came to the project’s rescue by channeling Federal money and manpower (Works Progress Administration) into building thirteen of the original fifteen Gardens, after the first two were finished.

The number of Gardens continue to increase as new immigrant groups to the region fund their own Garden, a source of great pride.

The Gardens

  • British Garden (1916)
  • Hebrew Garden (1926)
  • German Garden (1929)
  • Italian Garden (1930)
  • Slovak Garden (1932)
  • Slovenian Garden (1932)
  • Hungarian Garden (1934)
  • Polish Garden (1934)
  • American Garden (1935)
  • Czech Garden (1935)
  • American Legion Peace Gardens (1936)
  • Lithuanian Garden (1936)
  • Irish Garden (1939)
  • Rusin Garden (1939)
  • Greek Garden (1940)
  • Ukrainian Garden (1940)
  • Finnish Garden (1958)
  • Estonian Garden (1966)
  • Romanian Garden (1967)
  • African-American Garden (1977)
  • Chinese Garden (1985)
  • India Garden (2005)
  • Latvian Garden (2006)
  • Azerbaijan Garden (2008)
  • Serbian Garden (2008)
  • Croatian Garden (2009)
  • Armenian Garden (2010)
  • Syrian Garden (2011)
  • Albanian Garden (2012)
  • References

    Cleveland Cultural Gardens Wikipedia