Cleveland Cultural Gardens, Cleveland

The Cleveland Cultural Gardens are a collection of public gardens located in Rockefeller Park in Cleveland, Ohio. The gardens are situated along East Boulevard & Martin Luther King Jr. Drive within the 276 acre of wooded parkland on the city's East Side. In total, there are 31 distinct gardens, each commemorating a different ethnic group whose immigrants have contributed to the heritage of the United States over the centuries, as well as Cleveland.
Twenty-seven individual gardens, and growing. Each presents the culture of their respective nation through cultural figures and icons in a variety of materials. Each Garden's landscaping suggests the particular country or nationality for which it is named.
Conceived in 1916 to feature literary figures and then modified as time went on. The first garden, named in honor of William Shakespeare, was British. Leo Weidenthal, a Jew, started a tradition when he planted the first ethnic garden called the Hebrew Garden in 1926. The original purpose was to get nationality groups working with each other and learning more about each other’s culture at a time when most of the nationalities lived in self-imposed ghettos, self-developed to facilitate the transition from immigrant status, with little or no English language skills, to functional Americans.
Highly successful from the start, the project had almost universal political, media and civic support that only grew as time went on. This became critical when the original plan to have each nationality group fund its own Garden ran into the Depression’s economic wall. However, the City came to the project’s rescue by channeling Federal money and manpower (Works Progress Administration) into building thirteen of the original fifteen Gardens, after the first two were finished.