CLEVELAND, Ohio — Folks who oversee the Cleveland Cultural Gardens and have their sights set on making it an even more beautiful, fun-filled and educational destination can’t emphasize this enough:
“Cleveland is the only city in the world with anything of its kind.”
So reminds Sheila Murphy Crawford, the new president of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens Federation, a nonprofit nexus for the 29 established nationality-inspired gardens in sprawling Rockefeller Park and new gardens in the making there.
Bill Jones, vice president of the federation, puts it this way: “It is fair to say that many dignitaries and ambassadors travel here to see the gardens, yet many people right here in Cleveland don’t know anything about them.”
Rockefeller Park, minus the gardens, was established in 1897, when oil baron John D. Rockefeller donated 200 acres for the park named for him. The gardens, formally launched in the mid-1920s, dot about 1.5 miles of Rockefeller Park along both East Boulevard and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, from Superior Avenue to the Shoreway. The gardens are owned by the city, and organizations representing various nationalities maintain them.
A garden dedicated to Shakespeare (now the British Garden) was launched in 1916, followed by the Hebrew Garden in 1926. Those two were followed by gardens dedicated to the city’s Italian, German, Slovak, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Czech and Yugoslav populations. Other early plots include Greek, Irish, Lithuanian and Polish. Since then, the number of gardens has grown to more than two dozen.
The federation’s website, culturalgardens.org, has the most recent map of the gardens. The interactive diagram shows the location of each garden. Clicking on “News” brings up the gardens in alphabetical order. There’s more information on the site clevelandculturalgardens.org. Clicking on the particular garden brings up a design description and contents of some of the gardens.
In 2008, Plain Dealer art and architecture critic Steven Litt noted that although Rockefeller Park “was conceived as a romantic swath of greenery in the tradition of New York’s Central Park, it has been reduced primarily to a parkway for automobiles, and many of the Cultural Gardens have slid into squalor.”
But at about that same time, ethnic groups belonging to the federation were intent on bringing new life to their gardens, erecting monuments and staging public events. Says Crawford, “About five years ago, we realized we can get this going if we all work together.”
A few years ago, the American Garden was adopted by Hawken School seventh-graders, who continue to perform spring cleaning and other activities, including engaging the Rockefeller Park-area community to get involved. Coincidentally, the gardens were originally started with the help of schoolchildren who raised pennies, says Jones.
“So now we have school kids involved again,” he adds.
The Azerbaijan Garden was completed in 2008. The same year, the Italian Garden group kicked off that plot’s restoration, and so far, organizers have completed $465,000 of the $1.2 million project.
Late last year, a design was unveiled for the African-American Garden, and backers are hoping to inaugurate the spot in 2013.
Cleveland’s Albanian community is teaming up with the Asian-Indian community to erect a statue of Mother Teresa in a soon-to-be Albanian Garden, near University Circle. The late Mother Teresa was born in Albania and worked with the poor in the slums of Calcutta (now called Kolkata), India. The two groups have been working together to raise $80,000, the initial cost of landscaping and molding a 1-ton bronze statue of the nun.
Phase I of the Croatian Garden will be dedicated on Sunday. It features Croatian sculptor Joseph Turkaly’s “Immigrant Mother” statue in a heart-shaped plaza wreathed with red roses and white flowers, and benches of intensely white stone from the island of Brac in Croatia.
For the most part, the gardens don’t pop with a lot showy, colorful flowers that would likely require lots of watering, pinching back and constant care. Instead, they’re seas of green that incorporate statues, busts and plaques honoring poets, philosophers, artists, composers and writers that the ethnic groups chose to honor.
The Italian Garden is designed on two levels. The upper level begins with a walkway leading to a large Renaissance fountain that stands in front of a balustrade, from which two winding stone staircases lead down to the lower level. On the lower level, a tall wall fountain graces a courtyard with circular seating. On either side of the fountain are the faces of famous Italians Giotto, Michelangelo, Petrarca, Verdi and da Vinci.
The Irish Garden mimics the shape of a Celtic cross, with stone walks and plantings. The fountain is a replica of one in Dublin, Crawford says.
Parking, or lack thereof, has always been the biggest impediment for people who want to meander through the gardens, but that’s about to change. There’s limited parking on East Boulevard, but Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, from Chester Avenue to Interstate 90, is being repaved this summer, and with that, nearly 130 parking spaces grouped in pockets eventually will be installed. Crosswalks are also being installed along King Drive.
Crawford says the federation is striving for more activities, such as concerts featuring the music of various nationalities. And she hopes the gardens will become more of an educational destination. With busts, plaques and the like, the gardens already reveal a lot about the poets, philosophers, writers, composers and artists representing each nationality. The garden’s motto is “Our paths are our peace.”
Says Crawford, “We try to maintain that idea.”
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