Cleveland Culture

Cleveland’s institutions were endowed during the industrial boom and outlasted the money that built them.

The art museum

Founded in 1913 and opened in 1916 with a charter specifying that it be free to the public forever, a condition still honoured. The collection runs to over 60,000 works with exceptional Asian, Egyptian, medieval and Impressionist holdings, in a neoclassical building with a glazed atrium added in 2012.

The orchestra

Founded in 1918 and built by George Szell into one of the most precise ensembles anywhere; it remains among the handful of American orchestras spoken of in the same breath as Berlin and Vienna, and its home at Severance Hall is a small Art Deco jewel.

Rock and roll

The disc jockey Alan Freed popularised the term on Cleveland radio in the early 1950s and staged what is generally called the first rock concert here in 1952. The Hall of Fame followed the campaign that argument won.

Theatre

Playhouse Square restored five 1920s theatres from demolition and is now the largest such district outside New York.

Comedy and writing

Cleveland has an outsized comic lineage, from Bob Hope’s childhood here to a run of stand-ups and writers who have used the city as material. Superman was created here too, by two Glenville high school students in the 1930s, and the neighbourhood marks it.

Food and neighbourhoods

Polish, Hungarian, Slovenian and Italian traditions persist in the food as much as anywhere: pierogi sold by the dozen, Hungarian pastry shops, Slovenian sausage, and the corned beef sandwiches of the old Jewish delicatessens. The West Side Market, trading since 1912 under its vaulted hall, is where all of it is still sold side by side.