View full sizeThe Cleveland Botanical Garden.The Cleveland Botanical Garden in University Circle was a picture of pure, late-summer bliss Wednesday afternoon.
A couple walked hand-in-hand through the gathering shadows in the institution’s Rose Garden. An art student sketched a waterfall inside a simulated Costa Rican rain forest enclosed beneath a vast, crystalline glass enclosure. Butterflies fluttered, bees hummed and fountains burbled.
This did not look like a place that has survived a financial trauma caused by an ambitious expansion in 2003 designed by Boston architect and Cleveland native Graham Gund.
But it’s been touch and go, financially, ever since the institution finished the project. When attendance fell below predicted levels in the middle 2000s and the recession hit in 2008, it was especially vulnerable.
Allied Irish Bank, which had provided a $20 million letter of credit, suddenly asked for $10 million in two payments over 18 months to cut its exposure. To pony up, the botanical garden had to cut its relatively modest $20 million endowment in half, rendering it both less secure and more dependent on annual fundraising to balance its budget.
Since then, fortunately, the institution has come up with a solid business plan to regain its footing. It was developed by Natalie Ronayne, the institution’s director since 2007 and the wife of Chris Ronayne, director of University Circle Inc., the non-profit community development corporation for the cultural district four miles east of downtown.
The botanical garden’s plan calls for paying down the remaining $10 in debt through the annual operating budget while preserving endowment capital and raising another $20 million to pay for a new round of renovations. The goal is to boost revenue from admissions and special events, which in turn will relieve pressure on the diminished endowment.
View full sizeA reflecting pool on the terrace behind the Cleveland Botanical Garden’s 1966 building.
Meanwhile, the botanical garden aims to serve a more diverse audience by expanding its acclaimed Green Corps program, which trains and pays city high school students to care for half a dozen learning farms across Cleveland.
“We don’t call it a turnaround,” said Jeff Biggar, president of the botanical garden’s board of trustees. “It’s a business plan to move it forward — the Vision for Our Vibrant Future.”
The botanical garden appears to be on course to a happy resolution, but its experience should be a cautionary tale for other Cleveland institutions with big building projects under way or soon to be completed, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.
It’s also far from unique. A boom in cultural construction projects has led to overbuilding that triggered layoffs and cutbacks at performing arts centers and museums across the country, according to “Set in Stone,” a report released in June by the University of Chicago.
Cultural institutions often find it easier to raise millions of dollars to put up a dramatic new buildings than to pay for operating costs after the ribbon-cutting. Tempted by the allure of leaving a legacy, well-intentioned boards of trustees sometimes lead their institutions off a cliff.
That’s what happened in 2006 to HealthSpace Cleveland, formerly the Cleveland Health Museum, which closed after 70 years in business, and three years after completing a beautiful new building on Euclid Avenue at E. 93rd Street, designed by Cleveland architect Steve Bucchieri.
HealthSpace sold the new building to the Cleveland Clinic to settle debts, and saw its mission, programs and remaining endowment absorbed by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
The botanical garden never came that close to disaster, but it suffered a loss of confidence and momentum.
View full sizeThe “Glass House” at the Cleveland Botanical Garden contains two biomes devoted to the cloud forests of Costa Rica and the spiny desert of Madagascar.
“Fear seeps into the morale of an organization,” Ronayne said. “You have a sword of Damocles overhead. The ability to think creatively in a prolonged state of crisis is very difficult. You’re quick to rule things out and dismiss ideas. You’re always coming from the point of view of deficits and audits.”
The difficulty was rooted in simple math: The institution raised $50 million for its big expansion project, but actually spent $70 million, Ronayne said. It financed the $20 million difference through a complex deal that included a bond issued by Cuyahoga County, backed up with the letter of credit from Allied Irish.
The expansion, carried out under former director Brian Holley — and the trustees who backed him — quadrupled the botanical garden’s building off East Boulevard to 160,000 square feet. It made the once sleepy and faintly snooty institution suddenly look like a welcoming, premier destination.
The project included a new main facade with a handsome, convex arc of limestone and glass, a sky-lighted lobby and shop, and two spacious glass-enclosed biomes containing exhibits on the cloud forests of Costa Rica and the spiny desert of Madagascar. They’re packed with living specimens including birds, reptiles and butterflies
Prior to the expansion, the garden had also erected a fence around its 10 acres of city-owned land in Wade Oval to control entry to all the attractions including a children’s garden, a collection of themed gardens and the Western Reserve Herb Garden.
Gund’s design was crisp, contemporary and appealing for the most part, although it didn’t mix entirely well with the institution’s original 40,000-square-foot pavilion in tan-colored stone, designed in the 1960s by New York architect Geoffrey Platt.
More to the financial point, attendance drooped below predicted levels to about 140,000 a year before Ronayne succeeded Holley.
Ronayne said her job “is to deal with the cards I’ve been dealt,” and that she doesn’t want to revisit the past. Her plan for the future, which aims at boosting attendance to 175,000 a year, makes sense, and donors are buying into it. The influential Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation signaled approval quietly in February with a $500,000 grant to help the institution refashion its image and website, and to punch up its holiday season Wintershow.
Ronayne has since raised $1.2 million to convert the garden’s inefficient library into a multi-purpose room for exhibits and special events, which will drive attendance and revenue. The renovation, due for completion in November, also includes installing a stunning collection of rare books in a new, glass-enclosed space, where volumes will be visible and more accessible. Already, attendance is up to 155,000 a year, the highest count since 2003.
“I’m not saying this was a cakewalk at all,” Ronayne says, “but I’m glad people stuck with me.”
Looking ahead, the botanical garden needs to make better use of its grounds, to gradually impose a clearer sense of its own style and to provide more educational materials, including labels, on a vast and fascinating array of plants.
Today, the campus feels like a bit of a hodgepodge. For example, gardens devoted to themes such as waterfalls, shade plants and small conifers, for example, were designed and installed, and are maintained, by local landscaping companies whose names are prominently announced on signs. These gardens clash in style with one another and look like exhibits from a trade show.
As Ronayne moves ahead with her plan, she also needs to avoid marring Gund’s addition with poorly designed changes. This is especially true of a proposed new production greenhouse that would jut from the main façade designed by Gund. This job ought to be handled with extreme care by Gund or someone else of his caliber. Once you’ve bought the Mercedes, you don’t let just any mechanic work on it.
The larger lesson is that trustees of all cultural institutions need to stay loyal, and continue writing checks, if things don’t work out as they planned after a big expansion project. At the Cleveland Botanical Garden, so far, this appears to be the case.
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