The Other Blossom Center
May 10, 2006

CLEVELAND, OH - Rockefeller Park's Cultural Gardens Comprise a Unique City Asset. So Why Do So Few Stop To Smell the Roses?

Free Times By Michael Gill

George Parras doesn't tell it like a once-upon-a-time kind of story, but still: The king of Azerbaijan came to Cleveland a few years ago to visit one of our famous hospitals. While he lay in bed, his ambassador had some time to familiarize himself with the city. No doubt he visited the art museum and Severance Hall. But what seems to have made the most lasting impression was a walk in Rockefeller Park, with its cultural gardens.

Indeed, to stroll the meandering paths for the first time is to discover a kind of world peace in the heart of the city. That, and a bit of litter.

But in the shade of trees both common and exotic, the cultures that made Cleveland an industrial powerhouse in the early 20th century honored their highest achievements with formal gardens there. The Italians, the Jews, the Greeks, the Slovaks, the Irish, the Germans and more than a dozen others. With support from the federal jobs program, they worked with the city and landscape architects to build amphitheaters into the hillsides, patios on the plateaus, and fountains and staircases of stone in the quiet nooks. They erected monuments to poets, composers and philosophers.

These days the gardens are used for wedding photos on Saturdays in the spring, but far more people drive through unaware than actually stop. What they miss is that even through the occasional gritty glitter of a broken 40-ounce bottle, or the discarded evidence of sex and fast food, the Rockefeller Park cultural gardens remain a serpentine trail of dignified shapes, ennobled by the wildness of the landscape and endowed with the cultural history of ethnic Cleveland.

The Azerbaijani ambassador was apparently taken by all this. He wanted his country to be a part of it, so he asked who was in charge and was sent to Parras, executive director of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens Federation.

"He didn't care that it's an urban park that has seen better days," Parras said. "He's full of enthusiasm for what it is and could be."

So, in a fairy tale example of what can happen when people from outside the city take an interest in Cleveland's assets, Parras helped the visitor identify a site for an Azerbaijani cultural garden — the first sponsored by the investment of a foreign country. They plan a futuristic design featuring sculpture by New York-based artist Kahn Gasimov. At the moment the plan is being prepared for the City of Cleveland's architectural review process. And so what was already recognized by one scholar from Indiana University as unique "even if we include Washington, D.C. itself," and by another from University of Alabama as "utterly unique in the world," continues to grow.

LOIS MOSS ISN'T hoping to inspire foreign nationals to discover and invest in Cleveland's cultural gardens. She just wants to give people the chance to walk through them, or bike along Martin Luther King Boulevard without the noise and stress that traffic brings. And maybe while they're at it, detour for a picnic or a bit of music.

The concept — which she calls Walk and Roll — initially came from Moss's friend, Bobbi Reichtel, a vice president with Neighborhood Progress, a community development corporation. The idea is to close MLK to motorized traffic from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays in August and make the park a destination rather than a thoroughfare. She's working with the Famicos Foundation as a fiscal agent. Launching the project and running it for the first year will cost about $30,000, if it's on budget. She's had positive feedback from Cleveland City Council members Sabra Pierce Scott and Kevin Conwell, and input from a host of city departments and non-profit stakeholders. This week she expects the Cleveland Foundation's Civic Innovation Lab to announce a grant for $10,000 to get the project underway.

That will be enough to build a Web site and begin to promote the idea, but it's a long way from drawing recreational walkers and cyclists into the heart of Glenville, and inspiring them to dally in the romantic sites so many of us have only driven past. There are details to work out, like how the experiment would impact the flow of traffic to University Circle institutions. [If Moss receives letters of support from UCI institutions, the Civic Innovation Lab will increase the funding to $30,000 which will be used to hire security ambassadors, pay performers, rent equipment and trash pickup.]

But working out those details could have tremendous positive impact in the gardens and surrounding neighborhoods. In the way that the Cuyahoga Valley could, with a completed Towpath Trail, become a defining and unifying thread for the region, Rockefeller Park — with its cultural salad of gardens — could rekindle interest in neighborhoods on both sides of Doan Brook.

If only more people would get out of their cars.

STANDING BY A SIGN for a proposed African-American cultural garden, Valerie Coats reminisces about walking through Rockefeller Park to get to school — just her and a girlfriend, safe enough by themselves at the age of 8. She says back in the '60s, if you had a nice dress for Easter, the cultural gardens was the place to show it off.

But times change. The road — then called Liberty Boulevard — was widened to four lanes. People used to drag race, and the park got more dangerous. In the '80s the city went through a recession, and for a decade, the water was shut off in the fountains. Volunteer labor in the ethnic groups that maintain the gardens became more scarce. The gardens were suffering from outmigration just like the rest of the city.

The four-acre site for an African-American cultural garden was dedicated in 1997. An architectural firm has been chosen to design it, and there are drawings of terraces dramatically cut into the side of the Doan Brook gully. But with a budget goal of $1.3 million, fundraising is still underway.

Parras says planning for several other gardens is also in the works — more examples of culture driving financial and social investment in the city. He's begun discussion with a Native-American group, which has had a dedicated site since the '70s. A Latvian group, supported by a tiny community in Cleveland, is planning to spend more than $50,000 building its garden site. A Serbian garden is in the fundraising stage with support from Plain Dealer publisher Alex Machaskee. In two years supporters of an Indian cultural garden have raised almost $250,000 for their effort. When that is complete, the number of developed gardens will reach 22. Parras says the city has worked with the Cultural Gardens Federation to identify 11 additional sites for future use to the north of St. Clair.

Conventional wisdom has it that if the park is underutilized these days compared to when Valerie Coats was a little girl, it's because there's not enough parking. But Moss believes the idea to close MLK to traffic on Sundays will bring people to the neighborhood on two wheels or on public transit, and help them appreciate the place at a slower pace.

She says funders perceive that the idea could draw fire from University Circle institutions concerned about traffic flow and other impacts, and so they are waiting for one or more of those institutions to sign on before funding the remainder. But if Moss' vision even approaches reality, it's hard to imagine a less expensive and more inspiring project in the city. She hopes the effort will add to neighborhood pride, engender clean-up efforts, and maybe even help meet the fundraising goals of the African-American and other nascent gardens — gardens with a pedigree that no Northeast Ohio exurban paradise will ever have. For a city that hopes to capitalize on its assets, it's hard to imagine a more natural fit.

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