Culture gardens and how! After a day browsing through City of Cleveland Archives, reading about carriage registrations (they used to register carriages just like we now have to register our cars), and city petitions and resolutions, I took a spin up MLK Drive through Rockefeller Park.
In my research, I’d read something about a German Culture Garden in this park, a green belt that channels on either side of Doan Brook all the way down to Lake Erie. I imagined the German Culture Garden as the only one. But cruising along at 40 mph, I spotted a Lithuanian one, a Czech one, Chinese and Romanian and Italian and Greek gardens, and I’m sure there were more. The German Culture Garden is hidden away under a canopy of giant basswood trees.
There stand a larger-than-life, bronze Goethe and Schiller, arm in arm on a granite pedestal, well out of reach. The pedestal has quotes about freedom and brotherhood carved into it. Since it was a gorgeous spring day, I drove on down to the lakefront and sat on enormous rocks and listened to the waves lap the shore.
Then I hopped back into rush hour traffic. A traffic brook of the 21st century.