XXV. A City of Culture

The intermixture in Cleveland of the genteel strain of New England aristocracy with the nationalities of Central Europe gave the city a new brand of conservatism that is unmistakably evident in the proper way of life that prevails and the city’s careful pace. But those two breeds, once a world apart, are close together on the common ground of an abiding devotion to culture. Their coalition in support of the arts has given Cleveland a cultural strength that is almost unique in America.

The fine arts, generally reserved as the side amusement of dilettantes in most metropolitan centers of the United States, are the subject of lively mass interest and civic concern in the big town on Lake Erie. When, for example, the Metropolitan Opera Company of New York comes to Cleveland in the springtime, as it has more or less regularly since 1899, it performs in the cavernous Public Auditorium before single audiences numbering more than eight thousand persons. There are nights when the Met outdraws the Indians playing a short distance away in the downtown Municipal Stadium.

Cleveland is the spa where the Metropolitan Opera Company traditionally comes to get well. The receipts taken in at the Public Hall box office, even during the lean Depression years, have proven a powerful nostrum, sufficient to eliminate the quaver in the throats of hungry tenors and to restore the flesh tone to the skin of the Met’s front-office officials.

It is said, in what undoubtedly is an apocryphal story, that when some critics questioned the acoustics in the great auditorium, one of the opera representatives volunteered to test the hall’s sound qualities at different points of vantage during a performance. When it was all over, he returned smilingly to the office and pronounced the acoustics to be astonishingly good.

“Why,” he marveled, “I went into the far reaches of the balcony, just as far away from the stage as I could get and just as high as I could go; so far away, in fact, that the stage was almost out of Sight, and so high up that occasional clouds drifting past obscured my vision entirely. Even so, the rustle of the money and the clinking of coins at the distant ticket windows came through just as clear as could be.”

During the week of grand opera, Cleveland annually goes on a big culture binge. Special trains, planes, and buses converge on the city from all over Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Michigan, and the music-lovers have a field day. So also, it goes without saying, does Society.

Cleveland is the quiet refuge of fantastically large fortunes whose custodians have been schooled in circumspect, conservative ways so that they are not immediately detectable when they walk the streets or visit public places. These people of wealth have attained a maximum degree of anonymity which is broken wide open during the grand opera season. Then the horseshoe circle in Public Hall comes alive with the glitter and glow of precious stones, the soft ripple of ermine and mink, the persistent rustle of satin and silk-all in combination providing rather a dazzling show in themselves.

In a less spectacular way, but more consistently, the social set is on view at Severance Hall, the stately Romanesque building in University Circle which houses the famous Cleveland Orchestra. The building, gift of John L. Severance, provides a suitably elegant setting for an orchestra which is acknowledged to be among the world’s greatest. That reputation for musical excellence which the Cleveland Orchestra has built-especially under the leadership of conductor George Szell-was further enhanced in the summer of 1965 during a highly successful tour of the Soviet Union, and such critical music centers as Warsaw, Paris, Prague, and London.

The tour, sponsored by the American State Department, brought most of the European critics to their feet in appreciation of the great orchestra. They were virtually unanimous and almost giddy in their acclaim of the Clevelanders. Almost all of them seemed to be astonished that such a superb and sensitive musical instrument could emerge out of the materialistic society of America-especially from a city in the industrial heartland.

Typical of the stories recounting the triumphant tour was the following United Press International story of June 23, 1965:

CLEVELAND MUSICIANS FLY TO AMSTERDAM
AFTER CAPTIVATING LONDON
By Michael Kraft

LONDON-(UPI)-The Cleveland Orchestra flew to Amsterdam from the captivated capital of Britain today for the last stop on its triumphant European tour.

“Another conquered capital” was happy George Szell’s description of London after enthusiastic audiences and critics cheered the Cleveland Orchestra for its two concerts here.

The newspaper Guardian said today that “the technical excellence of the Cleveland Orchestra has been warmly and rightly praised by one and all. Last night’s concert in the Royal Festival Hall confirmed these congratulatory impressions.”

As they did after Monday night’s concert, the critics praised Conductor Szell’s approach.

The Financial Times, which carries extensive coverage of the alts, said, “The character of the orchestra is somehow that of Cleveland itself, the most cultivated of American cities.”

High recognition, indeed, from a distant, respected arbiter of things cultural! When the Financial Times of London singles out Cleveland and unqualifiedly acknowledges it to be “the most cultivated of American cities,” the distinction is not a minor one. It is entirely possible, furthermore, that this precious compliment even may be a statement of complete truth.

Singular evidence of the interest that Clevelanders have in the symphony orchestra was the way in which they welcomed home their conquering musicians at the end of that memorable 1965 tour. Air travelers passing through the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport on the night of June 26 must have been intrigued and puzzled by the civic uproar. Nearly six thousand persons filled the terminal. They carried banners, waved placards, blew horns, whirled rackety noisemakers, and capered joyously about as the Pan American World Airways jetliner taxied to the gate where floodlights, television cameras, reporters, and a welcoming civic delegation headed by Mayor Ralph Locher awaited.

Triumphant homecomings of this kind are not uncommon in America, but they usually are reserved for athletes, beauty queens, and champion baton twirlers.

An onlooker who identified himself as a resident of Bayonne, New Jersey, approached a reporter and wondered aloud over the airport rally.

“Is it possible,” he asked, “that the Indians have clinched the American League pennant this early in the season?”

The reporter assured him that his wild speculation was far wide of the mark; that the enthusiastic Clevelanders were there to welcome home the city’s orchestra.

The man from Bayonne did not readily believe the story.

“You have to be kidding,” he said. “All this for a bunch of fiddlers?”

The Cleveland Orchestra traces its beginning to 1915. On December 11 of that year, Conductor Nikolai Sokoloff led a fifty-seven-man symphony in its first concert, held in Grays Armory on Bolivar Road and Prospect Avenue. It represented the second major attempt to found an orchestra in Cleveland. Earlier, in 1895. a pioneer group of forty musicians tried to gain a foothold in the community, and struggled manfully through two lackluster seasons before conceding defeat. The major force in the revival of the orchestra dream after World War I was Mrs. Adella Prentiss Hughes, a truly remarkable patroness of the arts in Cleveland.

The Russian-born Sokoloff continued as director of the Cleveland Orchestra until 1933, when he resigned to become national director of the federal government’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) music project. The highlight of his Cleveland career undoubtedly came on the night of February 5, 1931, with the concert that officially opened the palatial Severance Hall at 11001 Euclid Avenue. Less than thirteen years after it was begun, the Cleveland Orchestra found itself with a permanent home of monumental dimensions, thanks to the generosity of John L. Severance, who provided the $2,500,000 for its construction.

Artur Rodzinski succeeded Sokoloff as director of the orchestra and remained in the post until 1943. Erich Leinsdorf then held the baton briefly, yielding it in 1946 to Szell, who was an immediate hit in Cleveland. He is generally credited with having raised the Cleveland Orchestra to its leading position in the world of music, and the people of the city like winners. The kind of loyalty and civic pride they demonstrate in a cultural institution is, as the man from Bayonne hinted, more commonly reserved for sports in American cities.

Make no mistake: Clevelanders are ferociously sports-minded. Their devotion to the baseball Indians and the football Browns is beyond question, as attendance records through the years attest. But their devotion and enthusiasm carries over into the arts, and sometimes so informally as to shake the artists. A prime example is to be found in an incident which occurred during a concert by the Cleveland Orchestra on the Mall during the Great Lakes Exposition of 1937. Guest conductor of the orchestra for this outdoor concert was the concert pianist, Jose Iturbi.

The concert was to be broadcast over the nationwide facilities of the Columbia Broadcasting System, and so it was carefully timed. At the precise moment, Iturbi raised bis baton and the orchestra began to play. About two golden minutes later, Iturbi brought his stick down sharply and the great orchestra stopped, right in the middle of a line, so to speak. The announcer of the CBS outlet in Cleveland, WGAR, was a young man named Maurice Condon, and bis powers of improvisation were put to the test while officials scurried about, desperately trying to find out why Iturbi had stopped conducting and had stalked off the band shell stage.

The maestro finally explained his precipitate action. While he had been leading the orchestra through the opening bars of its first number, he was horrified to observe any number of Cleveland music-lovers in the Mall audience gnawing away at hot dogs while they lolled in the sunshine and reveled in good music. They were, in fact, enjoying themselves just as they would at a baseball game or a football game, but Iturbi did not approve of the combination of good music and hot dogs. He would not conduct until the hot dog eaters made their choice between their stomachs and the aesthetic food he was trying to feed them. Mr. Iturbi did not understand his audience or he would have understood that these people were paying good music the highest possible compliment in their power. They had given the orchestra an informal parity with baseball and football.

This same fine appreciation, if not the same informality, is apportioned by Clevelanders in generous doses to all branches of the fine arts. Their support is reflected in the high quality of culture that prevails in the city. The Cleveland Museum of Art, for example, was only fifty years old in 1966; yet it held indisputable position as a treasure-house of art second in America only to New York’s Metropolitan Museum.

The Art Museum is a pillared temple of neo-classic Georgia marble design whose classic lines are mirrored in the peaceful waters of Wade Park Lagoon, which separates it from Euclid Avenue. It is the rarest jewel in the famed University Circle area of the East Side. Like the Cleveland Orchestra, whose Severance Hall home is close by, the museum is almost wholly the product of an enlightened philanthropy. Thanks to the generosity of wealthy Cleveland families, it is one of the richest institutions of its kind anywhere. Its endowed wealth is estimated at around one hundred million dollars, and its annual income, from investments, is pegged close to three million dollars.

The fateful decade that represented the gestation period of the museum began in 1881. In that year, a well-to-do Clevelander named Hinman B. Hurlbut included in his will a bequest to be used in building a museum in the city. The following year, Jeptha Homer Wade died and left a beautiful, forested tract of land to the city for use as a park. It was accepted and named, appropriately, Wade Park. The will specified, however, that four acres of the land should be held in reserve for a civic use to be determined.

Jeptha H. Wade was a self-made man who had begun life as an artist. He detoured into a business career which was highlighted by his achievement in putting together the Western Union Telegraph Company. Ten years after his death, his grandson, also named Jeptha H. Wade, specified that the four-acre plot of land should be the site of an art museum.

In the intervening years of 1889 and 1890 two other wealthy Clevelanders, John Huntington and Horace Kelley, had died and left money to he used for a museum. In 1913 all these bequests came together to create the institution. The magnificent building was financed by the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust and the Horace Kelley Art Foundation. The Hinman B. Hurlbut Fund was put aside as an endowment.

Even as the mighty museum was under construction, art-conscious Clevelanders made important gifts to it. The first-a group of Italian primitive paintings-came from Delia E. Holden, wife of the plain Dealer publisher and mining magnate, Liberty E. Holden. Shortly there-after, Mr. and Mrs. John L. Severance contributed an outstanding collection of arms and armor, while Mr. Severance’s sister, Mrs. Dudley P. Allen, donated the eight large tapestries depicting the story of Dido and Aeneas which decorate the famous armor court.

The new museum opened its doors on June 6, 1916. The story of its first fifty years is one of continuous growth in wealth, prestige, and popularity. While the original building stands unchanged, a new connecting building at its rear was built in 1957, more than doubling the size of the early museum. Gifts from the leading families of the city meanwhile continued to keep pace with the physical growth of the institution. Among the prominent benefactors have been Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Thrall King and Mr. and Mrs. Edward B. Greene. The most spectacular of all the contributions to the modern museum, however, were those from a grandnephew of the famous Senator Mark Hanna, Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., who during his lifetime turned generous chunks of the family’s iron, coal, and shipping fortune over to a variety of Cleveland institutions, principally Western Reserve University, University Hospitals, and the Museum of Art. He reached his philanthropic heights in 1957 with his last bequest to the museum-an endowment of some twenty million dollars plus his own private art collection whose worth was estimated at $1,400,000.

This bequest by Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., in the words of the Plain Dealer art critic, Miss Helen Borsick, provided “a fabulous new lease on greatness for the museum just before it sprouted a new wing to house its growing reputation and collections…

“In an amazingly short time, as museums go,” wrote Miss Borsick, “it has become one of the country’s richest and best. Nowhere is there to be found a place of greater educational interest, good taste, excellence and beauty combined, dedicated to the finest expressions of the creativity of man.”

The center of Cleveland’s culture, University Circle, is a vaguely defined area just beyond the busy East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue uptown area. It has been called, with reason, “the American Parnassus.” Within its 488 acres of city land is probably the most intensive grouping of cultural institutions in the United States-some thirty-four centers of culture and learning. They include the Museum of Art, Severance Hall, the Cleveland Institute bf Music, the Cleveland Institute of Art, the Fine Arts Garden, the Western Reserve Historical Society, the Museum of Natural Science, University Hospitals, and two great universities, Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve University.

The value of University Circle’s buildings has been placed in the area of one billion dollars, but that figure is continually being revised upward as development continues. A long-range plan, under way since 1960, calls for the expenditure of $175 million in the immediate future for further improvements calculated to make this entire area one of the nation’s showplaces.

The cultural magnet in the heart of the Circle unquestionably is the existence there, side-by-side, of the two great universities-a situation that must be regarded as the happy product of circumstances and a rivalry that existed between two important Cleveland families many years ago.

Leonard Case, Jr., Son of a pioneer Cleveland resident who had made a fortune in real estate, bequeathed property for the establishment and endowment of the Case School of Applied Science at the time of his death in 1880. Case felt there was a community need for an institution for the training of scientists, engineers, and other expert technicians. In that same year, another wealthy Clevelander, Amasa Stone, a railroad builder and industrialist, induced Western Reserve College in Hudson, twenty miles to the southeast, to move to Cleveland-to a site next door to the proposed Case Schooll Reserve had been a Hudson institution since 1826, but Stone’s offer overpowered its loyalty to the little town. The lure was $500,000 from the industrialist- $150,000 to be used for the erection of college buildings and $350,000 more as a permanent endowment fund. The offer was contingent upon the fulfillment of three conditions: 1. that the college be removed to Cleveland; z. that citizens of Cleveland provide suitable grounds for its campus, and 3. that the name should be changed to Adelbert College of Western Reserve University. (The new name was to memorialize the philanthropist’s son, Adelbert Stone, who had died while a student at Yale University.)

Among the Clevelanders who chipped in to provide a site for Western Reserve were Jeptha H. Wade, Captain Alva Bradley, a shipping and real estate tycoon, and Truman P. Handy, dean of Cleveland bankers. They bought the Holden property in what was then called the East End, directly adjacent to the Case site. It is said that this placement of Reserve, cheek by jowl with the technical institution, was no accident; that a sharp rivalry existed between the Case and Stone families and it, more than anything else, influenced Reserve’s location. For whatever significance it may hold, the Amasa Stone Chapel on the W.R.U. campus has a tower which is adorned on three sides with some happy, frolicking cherubim and seraphim. The fourth side-that which faces the Case campus-is decorated, however, with a set of ferocious-looking, glaring, slavering gargoyles.

Once there was a spirited rivalry between these two neighboring institutions and their student bodies. It reached its peak in the annual football game, a rather one-sided series dominated by Reserve. Even that competitive fervor is dying as the two universities continue to expand and to coalesce as they grow. It is almost impossible, physically, to tell where Western Reserve ends and Case Tech begins. Their campuses have overlapped and meshed together. Clevelanders do not doubt but that in time the two institutions will merge to form one of the truly formidable universities of the nation. Talks leading toward that goal have been under way over the years and already have borne fruit. In late 1966, a special committee headed by Henry T. Heald, former president of the Ford Foundation, concluded that past collaboration of the two universities had yielded academically desirable results and recommended that the neighboring institutions federate under a single governing board of trustees, a single president, and a chancellor. The report urged that this change be effected before June 30, 1967.

The W.R.U. board of trustees and their counterparts at Case Tech voted to follow the recommendation in early January of 1967. President John S. Millis of Western Reserve earlier had asked that his name be removed from consideration for the presidency of the federated institutions, but said that he would be willing to serve in any other capacity. It was clearly indicated that the young (forty-six) president of Case Tech, Dr. Robert Morse, would be named president of Case Western Reserve University-the unlikely name suggested for the merged schools-and that Dr. Millis would become chancellor. The new university would have a combined enrollment of about 10,500 (W.R.U., 8700; Case Tech, 1800) and physical assets appraised at more than two hundred million dollars.

In the same cultural explosion of the 1880s that gave birth to Case and Western Reserve, the Cleveland Catholic Diocese and the Society of Jesus cooperated in the founding of St. Ignatius College on the near West Side, at West 30th Street and Carroll Avenue. The new institution opened its doors in 1886 with combined high school and college facilities. In May 1923 the name of St. Ignatius College was dropped in favor of Cleveland University, but this proved to be a short-lived substitution. Again, in September of the same year, the name was changed to John Carroll University in honor of the first Roman
Catholic bishop in America. (The name of St. Ignatius was retained for the high school, however.) John Carroll remained a West Side institution until 1935, when it moved to a new campus at North Park and Miramar Drive in University Heights on the East Side.

The Jesuits’ brief use of the name Cleveland University did not represent the first time the city’s name had been incorporated into the name of an institution of higher learning. Nor was the suburb of University Heights the original user of that name. In 1850 another community called University Heights had been established on a promontory jutting out into the Cuyahoga River Valley immediately south and west of today’s downtown area. It was given that name in anticipation of an institution called Cleveland University which was established there. Reverend Asa Mahan, who bad been president of Oberlin College, was named president of the new university, and William Slade, later the governor of Vermont, served as secretary-treasurer.

Cleveland University struggled to win a foothold in the city for several years before it finally collapsed. University Heights then became known as Lincoln Heights before it eventually lost its identity as a separate entity and was swallowed by the expanding city. The old street names remain, and those such as Literary Avenue, Professor Street, College Avenue, and University Road are the cause of puzzlement among strangers driving through the old neighborhood today.

The name of Cleveland College was revived again in 1925 to identify a downtown college founded to promote higher education among adults. Newton D. Baker, former mayor and secretary of war, was one of the organizers of the institution which, while an independent corporation, affiliated itself with Western Reserve University. The experiment was a smashing success, eventually taking over the old Chamber of Commerce Building on Public Square and reaching a peak enrollment of nearly ten thousand students. After World War II, however, Western Reserve officials, for reasons of their own, decided to close the downtown college. Some of the faculty and student body were absorbed by the main campus.

It may be that the launching of this state university one day will be counted as one of the most significant happenings in Cleveland’s modern history. The twenty-two-story skyscraper home of Fenn College at East 24th Street and Euclid Avenue and two smaller buildings of the college established the campus of the new state university in the heart of the city. The future development of Cleveland State inevitably will alter the face and character of the entire central city.

Officials anticipated an enrollment of some thirty thousand students at CSU within fifteen years, and their plans called for the expenditure of two hundred million dollars on a 135-acre campus between Euclid and Superior avenues. That area today is, in the main, a dreary sweep of old stores, shops, and other obsolete buildings. This lifeless, unattractive collection is to be cleared to make way for a grassy, forested campus setting for a complex of bright new university buildings. It is a prospect applauded by most Clevelanders, who foresee not only the elimination of one of the worst sections of blight in the downtown area, but also a transfusion of young blood calculated to give new life to the entire central area of the city.

The most common complaint against downtown urban renewal programs in most American cities has been that while the destruction of old streets and ramshackle neighborhoods beautifies, the renewal effort also tends to sterilize. It is all very well to replace eyesores with monumental buildings and splashing fountains, but these lifeless objects do not attract people downtown at night. Renewal too often has meant depopulation. Not even the construction of a few high-rise apartment buildings is enough to return life to the center of the renovated city.

Cleveland thinks it has found the best solution to the problem in the placement downtown of Cleveland State University and still another new institution of higher learning, Cuyahoga Community College. The latter, the first junior college in Ohio, was started in 1964 and found immediate acceptance of its two-year curriculum. Within two years, it had an enrollment of more than nine thousand students. CCC also will have its permanent campus downtown-a forty-acre campus at East 30th Street and Woodland Avenue, within the St. Vincent Urban Renewal Area, a former slum neighborhood. Initial construction plans called for $22.5 million worth of college buildings. (The junior college also has a 130-acre “branch” campus on the site of the former Crile Veterans’ Hospital in suburban Parma and Parma Heights.)

All told, there will be approximately fifty thousand students enrolled in the CSU and CCC student bodies in downtown Cleveland by 1980. With so many young people downtown, there can’t be any question where the action will be. Many of the students will be around-the-clock campus dwellers and with so many thousands of young persons living in the heart of the city, it is possible to predict major changes in the atmosphere, tempo, and appearance of the central area.

Culture has been a major enlivening factor in Cleveland. An out-standing example of how a single cultural activity can contribute substantially to a community’s joie de vivre is provided by the internationally known Cleveland Play House, the nation’s first professional resident theater.

The Play House got off to a faltering beginning in 1915 with the encouragement of a small group of theater-lovers who were at odds with the stereotyped productions of the day. Cleveland, however, was slow to accept an experimental theater and the organization seemed to be ready for the big deathbed scene at the end of 1920, when there was a sudden last-minute rescue that saved the day most dramatically. It was a reorganization that brought in Frederic McConnell of Pittsburgh as the full-time director with “a clear hand and a clear field.” He was given two professional assistants, K. Elmo Lowe, associate director, and the late Max Eisenstat. McConnell stayed on the job for thirty-eight years and provided the Play House with his special guiding genius during its critically important formative period. He retired in 1958 to the post of consulting director and his long-time associate, K. Elmo Lowe, succeeded him as executive director.

During the interim years, the Cleveland Play House firmly established its reputation as one of the world’s leading professional resident theaters and, probably more important, it securely won the affection and patronage of Clevelanders. Now it has a complex of facilities and a staff of seventy-five professional actors, directors, designers, and other such talents needed to keep its three theaters going. The Play House actually has two buildings to house those three theaters, shop facilities, messing rooms, and administrative offices.

Mr. and Mrs. Francis E. Drury donated the land at 2040 East 86th Street where the main building of the Play House was built in 1927. It is a structure of Romanesque design and contains two theaters parallel to each other wbich share shop facilities, dressing rooms, and offices. The larger of the two theaters, named the Drury Theater, seats 530 persons. The companion theater, which accommodates 160 playgoers, was called the Brooks Theater after the first president of the Play House, Charles S. Brooks, one of the dreamers who made the Play House a reality.

During the middle 1940s, the Play House acquired a former church building on East 77th Street and Euclid, not far from its main building. The old church, an impressive structure, was converted into the large Euclid-77th Theater, which seats 560 persons and which represents a Significant departure from conventional theater design. There is no proscenium arch, and the open, semicircular stage projects out into the high-banked, fan-shaped auditorium. Director McConnell conceived the general plan of the theater, and it was a successful innovation that brought him praise from expert observers. But McConnell was wise enough to know, as he once said, “It is the human structure that counts most.”

“Daily at the Play House,” he pointed out, “scores of paid actors, designers, directors, technicians and administrative personnel are busy on a strenuous program of performing and preparing a series of plays. In an average day there is a public performance in each of the three theaters; three other plays are in rehearsal and scenic preparation, and there is the usual quota of meetings, conferences, auditions, study; planning, script reading and research with-thrown in as a fillip-rumor and gossip, laughter and tears.” Box office receipts (including season ticket sales) cover go per cent of the operating costs of this remarkable theater enterprise. The Play House Fund, consisting of contributions from interested Clevelanders, foundations, and other organizations, supplies the necessary financial aid for maintenance and operations.

The official stated policy of the Play House is “to leave show business as such to the commercial profit-making enterprises already set up for that purpose and to keep the routine entertainment piece to a minimum.” In its brief history, the resident theater has presented the finest plays of all time; a list that by 1966 had totaled some eight hundred productions from the Greek classics to outstanding contemporary works.

Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times once wrote of the Cleveland Play House:

“Cleveland is lucky with its Play House, where the staff is not afraid of work, ideas or entertainment. A Gotham theatergoer may be pardoned for looking a little enviously at a working institution like the Cleveland Play House where the drama is continuously cultivated as an art.”

Ben Hecht was another who had words of praise for the resident theater. “The Cleveland Play House,” he said, “well may be the only future possible for the American theater. I’m sure that our next generation will see a hundred such animated drama centers as the Play House, and what a boon for tomorrow’s playwrights and actors that would be!”

As eventful as the Play House’s past has been, and as impressive its accomplishments, all appears to have been prologue to more dramatic developments ahead. Plans are under way for a new, larger Play House Center whose theaters and auxiliary facilities will be the most modern in the United States. It will be placed, most likely, in the downtown area-probably within the Cleveland State University area- to make it more accessible to playgoers from all sections of the city. There it would be in proximity to the city’s major legitimate theater, the Hanna Theater, and the cluster of motion picture theaters, night clubs, and restaurants in Playhouse Square on upper Euclid Avenue. The prospect of the move into the central city is one that pleases most Clevelanders mightily. They are personally concerned by such things. Clevelanders, as I mentioned previously, take their culture seriously.