Playhouse Square: From Ruin to the Nation's Second Stage

In downtown Cleveland, on a single block of Euclid Avenue, stands the largest performing arts complex in the United States outside of New York's Lincoln Center. It almost became a parking garage.

Playhouse Square was born in a burst of nineteen twenties optimism. Real estate developer Joseph Laronge opened the State and Ohio theaters in February of nineteen twenty-one. By November of nineteen twenty-two the Palace had joined them, and within a few years the block held five theaters, all ornate, all lavish, all competing for the dollars of a city at the peak of its industrial prosperity. On a single evening you could choose between grand opera, vaudeville, a first-run film, and a touring Broadway production within a hundred yards.

The Depression dented the business but did not break it. Television did more damage. Suburbanization finished the job. One by one the theaters went dark, and by nineteen sixty-nine all four main houses had shuttered. The wrecking ball was a real possibility.

Then the Junior League of Cleveland intervened. In the nineteen seventies the organization formed the Playhouse Square Foundation, rallied community support, and began the process of restoration. The Ohio Theatre reopened in July of nineteen eighty-two. The State and Palace followed. The restoration became the largest theater restoration project in the world.

Today twelve performance spaces draw more than one million visitors a year to the district, contributing three hundred fifty-nine million dollars in annual economic impact. Cleveland, a city that has spent decades defending itself against decline narratives, takes particular pride in this block. The theaters it almost demolished now anchor a downtown revival that nobody in nineteen sixty-eight could have imagined.