Centennial Celebrations
There are lots of happenings in 2016, celebrating 100 years of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens. Head over the Cleveland Cultural Gardens Federation’s website for more schedules, which I will also publish here.
Here’s a short list.
On April 8, 2016 there will be a Centennial Gala marking the exact 100th anniversary dedication day of the British Garden, originally a Shakespeare Garden (look for a great post here on the history of Shakespeare Gardens to celebrate.)
The Summer of 2016 will feature multiple events, including a Concert Series. Many individual gardens are planning centennial activities. Look for events throughout all of the gardens including the usual highlight of opera in the Italian Garden. Look for a 99 Red Balloons in the German Cultural Garden on June 30: In a playful honor to year 99 – not to mention the anti-war, anti-Wall 1983 German pop song by Nena – there will be a red balloon release in the German garden at 11:30 a.m., according to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer.
There will even be a John Barry Day event in the Irish Garden held in September. Commodore John Barry is credited with being the “father of the United States Navy,” and his life is celebrated by the Irish diaspora worldwide. In Cleveland, John Barry Day was first held in the Irish Garden in 1945, when then-mayor Thomas Burke declared September 16, 1945 to be John Barry day in honor of the 200th anniversary (of the year) of his birth. Annual celebrations followed through at least the early 1960s. In 1992, the United States Congress officially designated every September 13th as “Commodore John Barry Day.” Among other places, monuments to John Barry can be found outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia (a commemorative statue presented to the City of Philadelphia by the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick) and in the town center of Wexford, Ireland, the place of Barry’s birth. The United States donated the statue to Ireland in 1956, and John F. Kennedy laid a wreath at the memorial seven years later, and gave a rousing speech that revealed the way the complex intersections of the Cold War, immigrants’ narratives, and of course American national identity were being refashioned in the 1950s and early 1960s–remade in ways that reverberated through the Cultural Gardens until the end of the Cold War in 1989.
US President John Kennedy laying a wreath at the Barry Memorial in Wexford, Ireland in 1956.
Of course, One World Day, which began on the on August 28, 2016 will mark the conclusion of the centennial celebrations. First held as part of the Sesquicentennial Celebration of Cleveland in 1946, One World Day has become a yearly ritual in the city whose attendance has waxed and waned with the ups and downs of the city and the Gardens.
For my part, I will write a series of short features throughout the year, not unlike this one, about elements of the Gardens’ history, drawing from the archives to tell stories that connect the Gardens to the world. Take John Barry Day, for example. Celebrated It will keep me motivated in the final run to completing my long-delayed book on gardens as memory landscapes in American cities.