Cultural Gardens – Cleveland OH

Description

“The Gardens were developed as a joint effort between Cleveland’s ethnic communities, the City of Cleveland and the Federal Government – namely the Work Progress Administration. This is one of the aspects that sets this park aside as a historically significant place; it is a living memorial to the role WPA played in the recent US history and to the notion of multi nationalism that was surfacing at the time.” [1]

“As early as 1935, the city of Cleveland began to subsidize their construction and also endorsed requests to the Works Progress Administration for garden construction. Eventually, the WPA funded much of the labor deployed in building the chain, financing approximately $650,000, or more than half of the estimated total expenditures between 1926 and 1950.” [2]

“Fifteen other gardens followed honoring the German, Italian, Slovak, Yugoslav, Hungarian, Polish, American, Czech, American Legion, Lithuanian, Carpatho Rusin, Irish, Greek and Ukrainian cultures, many with the assistance of the WPA funding.” [3]