Cleveland, OH: Cleveland History Center Revisit

The only other museum I visited during my trip to Cleveland was the Cleveland History Center, also located in Cleveland’s University Circle (museum and university district), and also strictly enforcing mask wearing. I went to visit this with my mother the day before I left, when I was already stressing about the flight, the Covid test, and having to say goodbye to everyone (complete with the inevitable guilt trips about living so far away), so visiting a museum was actually a very nice distraction for a couple of hours. The Cleveland History Center, formerly the Western Reserve Historical Society and Crawford Auto Aviation Museum (you can see why they changed their name) is up there with the Cleveland Museum of Art in terms of my most visited museums in Cleveland. I went to the art museum loads in my teens and twenties because it was free and a good way to spend a Sunday afternoon, but I went way more to WRHS as a kid because it had something for everyone. Not to play into gender stereotypes, but it typically would be my father, grandpa, and brother looking at the cars, whilst me, my mother, and grandma checked out the fashion gallery and the 1911 Hay-McKinney Mansion, which is attached to the museum. Except for the car collection and the mansion, which weren’t open during our visit, the Cleveland History Center primarily hosts temporary exhibitions, all included in the $15 admission price, along with unlimited rides on the carousel (yes, a museum with a carousel inside! Shame it wasn’t there when I was a kid, or I’d have loved this place even more).

 

Because we’re both interested in historic fashion, we started with the Chisholm-Halle Costume Wing, which was home to “Amanda Wicker: Black Fashion Design in Cleveland” at the time of our visit. Amanda Wicker was a Black fashion designer who moved to Cleveland in 1924, where she lived until her death in 1987, and was very active in supporting the Black community, both by working with groups like NAACP and the National Urban League, and by mentoring Black women who were interested in fashion design. There were only fifteen outfits in this exhibition, so it was a bit more spread out than usual, but the clothes here were gorgeous. I loved the dress with the fur shrug and the wedding dress, which had a beautiful collar.

  

The next couple of galleries were a bit confusing, because they weren’t obviously a part of any of the exhibitions, but they were also different than the things that were there the last time I visited. I assume they were just a rotating display from the museum’s permanent collections, but a bit of context might have been nice. At any rate, it was a display of hats from now-defunct area department stores and paintings by local artists, though this didn’t seem to be a part of the Cleveland artists exhibition that was in its own gallery quite a distance away, so who knows? I especially liked the painting of the West Side Market, done shortly before it opened in 1912.

  

We did go to see “Honoring Our Past: The Golden Age of Cleveland Art 1900-1945” next, which I had read about in The Plain Dealer before our visit. I’m kind of obsessed with all the art deco posters of Cleveland made to advertise various air shows and the Great Lakes Exposition back in Cleveland’s heyday in the 1930s, which the museum has hanging above their car/plane collection, so I guess I was hoping for more of that sort of thing, but that was not what I got. Instead, it was art by people who lived in Cleveland, but not necessarily images of Cleveland, which meant a lot of it was fairly meh landscapes. However, there were a few pieces I did like, especially Margaret Bourke White’s photograph of the Goodyear Blimp Hangar. I love her photography – I have her photo of the Terminal Tower whilst it was still under construction hanging on my wall at home.

 

There were also quite a few pieces here by William Sommer, who lived near to where my parents live, in the Brandywine Valley of Ohio (not to be confused with the more famous Brandywine Valley in Pennsylvania), and we enjoyed trying to see if any of his landscapes matched up to areas we knew, but I think they would be unremarkable if you weren’t familiar with the area. I did like the art deco tea set though (not by William Sommer).

 

“Women and Politics: Empowered to Vote, Empowered to Lead” was a small exhibition about the women’s rights movement in Cleveland. There were some great artefacts here, particularly the fab outfit worn by local women’s rights activist Mertice Laffer to a suffrage parade in 1914 (below), the collection of first lady dolls, and the homemade banners. There was an old-school voting machine on display as well, which honestly would have confused the crap out of me if I had to use it. I can see why it came with an instruction manual for first time voters! Honestly, I’ve never voted in person in America, so I don’t even know what the system is, but judging by the overseas voter ballots I have to fill out, I get the impression it’s more complicated than in the UK (I was still in anarchist “the whole system is evil and I’m not taking part in it” mode when I moved to the UK thirteen years ago, so I didn’t actually vote for the first time until I was well into my 20s, and it’s always been by postal ballot for US elections. I have voted in person in British elections since becoming a citizen in 2016, however).

 

Because the auto museum section is currently undergoing renovation, the only other exhibition here I hadn’t already seen was on motorcycles, but my interest level in those is pretty damn low, so I didn’t really take pictures. How great is that Cleveland Car poster though? Finally, even though I get pretty bad motion sickness, I knew my mother wanted to ride the carousel, so I agreed to go on once with her. The carousel is from Euclid Beach Amusement Park, a beloved Cleveland institution that went out of business long before I was born, but my grandparents had a book about it that I used to read all the time, and it’s exactly the sort of old-timey amusement park I wish I could have visited. I guess the carousel is the closest I’ll get, and I love that the interior is decorated with illustrations of Cleveland landmarks (I ended up right next to the Garfield Monument in Lake View Cemetery, one of my favourite places in Cleveland, though it wasn’t at all intentional because I picked my spot based solely on the horse I wanted). It wasn’t moving all that fast, so it wouldn’t have been that bad had some creepily overzealous employee (or volunteer?) who approached my mother and I before we got on to bore us with facts about the carousel that were already on the signage, not been standing alongside the gate leering at me for the entire ride, so that I had to studiously look away from him at the mirror next to me which meant I felt a bit sicker than I would have otherwise, but I was basically fine. Just a little woozy. Creeper then proceeded to follow us off the ride and start trying to tell us even more about the collections, and when we finally lost him (or so we thought), he reappeared one final time, when my mother for some reason felt compelled to tell him my whole life story, so I sincerely hope he doesn’t turn up on my doorstep in London. Ugh.

 

Other than the creepy volunteer or whatever he was, this was a fun visit, and a good way to spend my final day in Cleveland for a while. This is another museum in Cleveland I’d definitely recommend visiting – we haven’t got too many of them, but the ones we do have are mostly pretty decent!

Cleveland, OH: Temporary Exhibitions @ the CMA

Christmas tree at the Cleveland Museum of Art

So, I was able to make it to the US for Christmas in the end, though both the US and UK governments seemingly conspired to make it as stressful as possible by requiring testing before and after arrival on both ends, yet simultaneously having a shortage of tests that made this almost impossible (only for the UK to scrap the requirement for testing before entering the UK about a week after I got back). The US was by far the worst – Marcus and I spent several stressful days searching high and low for a test (we had brought some NHS ones with us, and I’m glad we did, because I was obsessively testing the whole time I was there, but those aren’t valid for travel) and eventually just ended up testing at the airport right before our flights back to the UK, because that was the only place that still had tests, at the hefty price of $95 each. And considering how stressed I get before a flight anyway, the combination of flight plus waiting to see if I would even be allowed to board said flight almost killed me. My stomach was a disaster that day – I don’t think I would have even physically been able to make it to the airport without the help of my friends Imodium and Pepto Bismol. All was well in the end, but jeez, maybe make sure that tests are actually available first before requiring people to take them.

My brother’s adorable dog.

I know that I’m the one who chose to travel during a pandemic, so I only have myself to blame, but this was the first time I’ve left the UK in two years. I hadn’t seen any of my family or American friends since Christmas 2019 (though I know many people are in the same boat, or worse off!)  – and Omicron wasn’t yet a thing at the time I booked my flight, so at time of booking, I felt the benefits outweighed the risks. And even though it was super stressful, I loved getting to meet up with a couple of close friends, spend lots of time with my brother, and most importantly, finally meet my “niece” (my brother’s dog) who is so sweet and adorable – I’m definitely going to miss her!

 

Anyway, because I was pretty paranoid about getting Covid whilst I was there and not being allowed back in the UK, I didn’t do a whole lot on this trip other than see family and friends, but one place I did feel comfortable going was the Cleveland Museum of Art, which was rigorously enforcing mask-wearing (unlike almost anywhere else…). The CMA is one of my favourite museums, so I always like to see what’s new when I’m in Cleveland. On this occasion, they had one major special exhibition that was charging an admission fee, and a few other free temporary exhibitions (in addition to the extensive permanent collection, which is always free). Since I wasn’t super interested in the paid exhibition (it was about a statue of Krishna the museum had restored), I opted to just check out the free ones.

 

The first was “Collecting Dreams: Odilon Redon”. I’ve really only heard of Redon from the Lewis Barnavelt book series by John Bellairs. Lewis’s neighbour, Mrs. Zimmerman, is a witch obsessed with the colour purple, and in every book, you get to hear about another purple painting on her walls, allegedly all gifted to her by famous painters when she was living in Europe in the early part of the 20th century (the books are set in the 1940s-50s). One of these paintings was a purple dragon by Redon, so I got the impression that he was probably into the metaphysical, and this exhibition confirmed it.

Redon used a number of different materials to make his art, including pastels, oil, and charcoals (he went through different phases with each) and my favourites by far were the charcoals, which were inspired by both fairy tales and his own dreams, and were splendidly weird and creepy. Apparently, the CMA has one of the largest collections of his works outside of France, and I’m all for it. Good stuff!

 

I also wanted to see “Ashcan School Prints”, so we headed there next. I wasn’t really familiar with the Ashcan School before visiting, but after hearing they were urban realists who depicted major American cities from 1900-1940, I was completely sold. This exhibition contained more pieces than the Redon exhibition, and I particularly loved the lithographs by Mabel Dwight of people at an aquarium and the various lithographs of flappers going about their business in the city. We seemed to have caught it just in time, as it closed shortly after Christmas, but you can still view a few of the pieces on their website.

 

We also saw Derrick Adams’ “LOOKS”, which only contained nine paintings depicting various wigs, but it was very bright and colourful. And after seeing the fabulous Peru exhibition at the BM, I had to check out the ancient Andean textiles they had on display here, which were not quite as well preserved as the ones at the BM, but were still great (yep, more severed heads!). I also loved the Peruvian animal figurines in the same gallery.

  

Finally, we saw “Fashioning Identity: Mola Textiles of Panama”. I have to confess that at first glance, I thought they were all abstract patterns, which is not really my thing, and was about to walk away, but then I looked closer and realised that each piece actually had animals and people cleverly hidden in the design, so I had to take the time to peruse the exhibition. Helpfully, the museum even provided instructions on how to look at a mola, so people don’t accidentally miss the best parts like I almost did. Mola blouses have been made since the early 20th century by the Guna women of Panama, and were used as a symbol of independence during the Guna Revolution of 1925. They’re really fascinating, and worth a closer look! I think the exhibition has now ended, but you can view quite a few of them on CMA’s website.

 

I always enjoy a visit to the CMA, and I’m glad I got to see it on this trip. We also swung by Lake View Cemetery so I could get yet another photo of the always spooky Haserot Angel, and went to my old favourite East Coast Custard (which I ended up visiting three times on this trip – I really cannot get enough frozen custard!), so it was definitely worthwhile going out to the east side. A bit more Cleveland coming next week.

Cleveland, OH: Grays Armory

Grays Armory is meant to be one of the most haunted buildings in Cleveland (right up there with Franklin Castle, which is not open to the public), and it’s certainly one of the coolest looking ones. Even though I grew up in Cleveland and went downtown with reasonable frequency (considering there’s not actually much to do in downtown Cleveland), I don’t recall ever seeing this building before. It is open to the public for tours on the first Wednesday of every month from 10-4, which happened to coincide with my recent visit to see my family, so my mother and I decided to check it out (though we were not optimistic about actually seeing any paranormal activity).

 

We managed to find metered parking on the street behind the Armory (we were short on quarters, so we paid for an hour, which was cutting it close – I’d probably pay for at least an hour and a half to be on the safe side) and headed in, only to be greeted by one of the biggest dogs I’ve ever seen (picture does not give sense of scale). I can sometimes be a bit scared of big dogs, so walking in to see one the size of a wolf waiting for me was initially a little intimidating, but he was very friendly, and I was happy to give him all the pats once we’d gotten better acquainted and I realised he was a total sweetheart. Tours normally cost $8 per person, but the day we visited was free for some reason (though we did leave a donation at the end).

 

We were initially the only visitors, but after waiting a few minutes with no one else turning up, the guide was happy to start the tour (a couple came in about a third of the way through, and she offered to recap for them at the end, but they just left immediately after the tour finished). Since I was keen to see the building, I thought we’d start walking around it right away, but most of the “tour” was actually just a talk delivered in the reception room (which also served as the ladies’ waiting room back in the day before ladies were allowed to join), which was fine, just not what I was expecting, so the whole time we were sitting there I was anxious that we wouldn’t actually have time to see the rest of the building.

 

I didn’t really know anything about the Armory going in, and the poster behind our guide was a little misleading because of its incorrect punctuation, which read “Gray’s Armory,” so I reasonably assumed it was named after someone called Gray. Nope. It should actually be Grays’ Armory, or Grays Armory (as they call themselves on their website), because it is named after the Cleveland Grays, one of America’s oldest militias, and it is America’s oldest independent armory. I’m not really down with the whole militia thing, especially given what it’s become today (weirdos with a million guns living in compounds in Idaho), but I can concede that there probably was some need for law and order in the days before a police force when Cleveland was essentially frontier. The Grays were founded in 1837 and the current building dates to 1893, its two earlier incarnations having burnt down. This building actually partially burnt as well, but the thick stone walls saved the front portion of the building where the reception room was located. I guess after the third burning, they finally learned to stop using fire in a building where gunpowder was housed, or they just stopped housing gunpowder there.

 

Given the armory’s reputation as super haunted, I would have assumed some people died in the fire, but apparently no one did (which is good news, but not great for alleged paranormal activity!). So maybe the whole haunting idea stems more from the fact that some of these men did serve in the American Civil War, where undoubtedly some of them died, and maybe they returned to this building in the afterlife. The Grays were named after the colour of their uniforms, so you can imagine that caused some confusion in the Civil War, what with being a Northern unit and all! They were pretty quickly switched to the standard Union blue, and veterans of the war were subsequently allowed to wear a blue uniform to militia related events, including standing guard over Lincoln’s coffin, which they did when it passed through Cleveland on the funeral train and was laid out in Public Square. They were meant to take part in the Spanish-American War, but by the time they completed training, the war was basically over. And the US government got rid of independent militias in 1903, so that was the end of the Grays as a fighting unit.

 

However, the Grays still exist as a social and historical organisation, which women are allowed to join (the tour guide gave us a bit of a hard sell, but since I don’t even live in Cleveland (and am not much for clubs), I declined), and they still have their original uniforms, which is pretty bad ass! When we were finally allowed to leave the reception room, one of the rooms our guide took us to see was the uniform room, which had been ingeniously designed with flip down seats in front of each locker, and air vents at the top to keep things ventilated (not great for keeping out clothes moths, but I don’t think they’re as much of an issue in the US as they are in Britain). They also still have some of their original bearskin hats, which look very similar to what the Queen’s Guard wear in the UK. The guide mentioned that the type of bear they’re made from is now endangered, so they will fortunately be switching to a synthetic version when they need replacing.

 

I’d like to really emphasise the social part of the organisation, because when the militiamen weren’t off fighting, they just seemed to party. The Armory, although it did house weapons, was basically a big clubhouse, and I get the impression the men just hung out upstairs drinking and smoking. Women were allowed to attend certain events here, and the large drill hall was the perfect space for dances and performances by the Cleveland Orchestra. It has housed a 1930 pipe organ since 1969 when Warner Brothers decided to donate it, so they still put on concerts using it, as well as hosting lectures and “haunted evenings,” none of which took place during my visit to Cleveland, sadly.

 

We were eventually allowed up to the first floor as well, which had some uber masculine wood panelled rooms, one of which is meant to be haunted by a cigar smoking former member (the only ghost mentioned by the tour guide). I don’t know about all that (definitely didn’t smell any cigar smoke, and to be fair, the guide pointed out that a smoke smell likely seeps out of the walls when it gets hot outside, so she wasn’t exactly credulous either, which I appreciate. I like to learn about ghosts, but people who take them seriously are a bit much), but there was a splendid little collection of taxidermy, including a furry deer butt, and a goat in a sailor hat.

 

Unfortunately, the second floor is currently closed for restoration, so that ended our tour. Considering it was free, I think it was really pretty informative – though there were a few incorrect facts (general historical ones – I don’t know enough about the Grays to know if that information was accurate) and of course the irritating punctuation mistakes throughout the signage (at least get your own name right!), it was definitely interesting to learn about this lesser-known piece of Cleveland’s history, and the building was of course fantastic. I can’t say if it’s actually haunted (probably not, since ghosts aren’t real), but it sure looks haunted, and that’s really all I care about. I will say that there are various Haunted Cleveland tours that will take you in here, but they are about ten times the price of the Armory’s tour (when it’s not free), and they have pretty crap reviews, so I think this is your best way in to the building, and at least this way you know the money is going to preservation. 3/5 for the Armory tour. As I said at the start, you can’t go inside Franklin Castle, which is meant to be even more haunted (if ghosts existed), but it is nearby (Ohio Cityish, past the West Side Market), so if you want to grab a shot of the exterior whilst you’re downtown, it is definitely doable. You can see my photo of it below. Spooky!

Cleveland, OH: “Medieval Monsters” @ the CMA

I think this week is less of a stretch than last week in keeping with the Halloween theme of October. C’mon, monsters?! Scary! But obviously the Cleveland Museum of Art doesn’t agree with me, because this exhibition closed well before Halloween, on 6th October. So you can’t visit it now, but I couldn’t have blogged about it in time anyway because I didn’t see it myself until the week before it closed, what with not living in Cleveland (frankly, I was glad I got to see it at all, after longingly watching CMA post about it for months on Instagram).

 

“Medieval Monsters: Terrors, Aliens, Wonders” was a free exhibition, as is the museum itself, but good luck finding parking nearby other than in the museum’s $10 lot (and public transport in Cleveland? Forget it!), but I can’t really begrudge them that income before it is such an excellent museum. However, they could have had better signage, because it took me ages to figure out where this exhibition was (I could only find paper maps, when a big mounted map somewhere would be much more eco-friendly), and I couldn’t even find a member of staff to ask. Eventually I realised it was downstairs, opposite the main special exhibition that you have to pay for (on Michelangelo at the time of my visit. I skipped it).

 

As you may have guessed from the title, the exhibition was divided into three sections: Terrors, which was meant to be about how monsters “enhanced the auras of those in power,” though I seem to recall it being primarily about saints and the ways in which they were tortured to death (admittedly, many of those pictures and manuscripts were originally owned by various kings and queens, hence the power I guess); Aliens, which was about marginalised groups in medieval European society; and Wonders, which was more in the vein of teratology, and included fabulous beasts and anomalous (and imaginary) humans.

 

The museum had also produced a rather fabulous free Field Guide to Medieval Monsters, which included images of all the monsters featured in the exhibition, with a brief description of each. This included some of my old favourites like Blemmyae (the supposed race of headless people with faces on their chests) and the Hellmouth (literally a mouth that was meant to be the entrance to hell); and others I’d seen but never knew the names of, like Gryllus (a human head on horse-like legs. Different from a centaur, because Gryllus is just a head sitting right on top of legs, no body) and the Ziphius (meant to be a horrible sea monster, but he’s grumpy and adorable! I want one as a pet. Please go look at him via the link at the start of this paragraph).

 

Even considering that much of the art was religious in nature – which is not normally my thing – because it was for the most part so weird and gory, this ending up being so my type of exhibition. There was thoughtful text in each room describing how the idea of monsters shaped the medieval world, and covering serious themes like mental illness and xenophobia, but I have to admit that I was mainly in it for the illuminated manuscripts and the promise of marginalia, and that is what has stuck with me the most when it came time to write this post. Though I probably shouldn’t, I find many medieval pictures depicting the martyrdom of saints completely hilarious, and my favourite here was the piece above left depicting St. Bartholomew keeping his chin up with a jolly grin whilst being flayed alive (and clearly the medieval church had a sense of humour just as sick as mine, because he is the patron saint of tanners, leather workers and butchers. Talk about black humour).

 

There was also some charming marginalia here, including my personal favourite, a man mooning some sort of ceremony (I forgot which) with his thumb up his butt to indicate disrespect (in case the mooning wasn’t disrespectful enough). Not quite as good as a butt trumpet, but close enough!

 

I also loved all the beasts – even the real ones like elephants and crocodiles appeared to have been drawn by someone who had never seen such things in person, and I find the naive nature of their illustrations endlessly charming. This exhibition was an absolute joy to look at, and I’m sorry you won’t be able to see it too, but I hope my (poor quality) images at least gave you a sense of what was there. My only complaint was that the postcards in the gift shop didn’t feature the best of the monsters, but I know having custom postcards made is always a bit of a gamble, so I can’t bitch too much. 4/5.

 

Whilst I was here, in addition to visiting my favourite Henri Rousseau (Fight between a Tiger and a Buffalo) and Jacques-Louis David (Cupid and Psyche) paintings, I also popped in to see their “Color and Comfort: Swedish Modern Design” exhibition, which was in one of the small galleries upstairs. Based on the name, I was expecting something IKEA-esque, but it was so much better than that. This was actually about textile design, and though it was a bit light on signage (perhaps because it had been put together by grad students at Case), the fabrics themselves were absolutely lovely, as you can hopefully see from the images below. It only took me about ten minutes to view, but it’s worth the detour if you’re here anyway. Good old CMA!

 

 

Cleveland, OH: “The Jazz Age” @ the Cleveland Museum of Art

Yes, I’m still on Ohio posts, but this is the last one, for now (though I am getting so tired of London that I’m very seriously debating moving back to the US in the next year or two (yes, even with stupid awful Trump there, sigh), and editing this post made me homesick). I love the Cleveland Museum of Art, and I love 1920s fashion, so I knew I had to make sure to see this exhibition whilst I was back home. “The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s,” ran from September 30, 2017 – January 14, 2018 – I visited Cleveland in the fall, and it started right around the time I left, so I’m glad I was able to catch it this time around before it finished, especially because it was so popular that tickets were selling out most days.

  

I actually contemplated booking advance tickets, but they charged a booking fee, and when I looked at the website, it looked like all the time slots for the remainder of the day were still available, so we risked it. And the gamble paid off, probably because it was midday on a weekday before most people had started their Christmas vacation.  Admission was a hefty $15 (which is why I didn’t want to pay a booking fee on top of it) and parking was another $10, though that was because we couldn’t be bothered to drive around looking for a spot, and just used the museum lot (there’s often metred parking around University Circle, which is just a couple of bucks). Although I hadn’t been to a special exhibition at the CMA in years, I remember always really enjoying them when I was younger, so my hopes were high.

  

And fortunately, I wasn’t disappointed this time around either. The exhibition was held in the basement galleries of the museum, which I don’t think I had even seen since their major remodel, and they’re actually really nice.  And big!  I lost track of how many rooms we walked through. And it wasn’t just clothing – there was furniture, art, textiles, jewellery – even household objects like perfume bottles and cocktail shakers – really, anything that encapsulated the style of the period was here. (The bowl above was commissioned by Eleanor Roosevelt for FDR’s gubernatorial inauguration. And how gorgeous is that dress?! I love the goat chandelier too!)

  

I liked that we were allowed to take photographs, and that the exhibition wasn’t at all crowded by London standards (though maybe by Cleveland ones, because I really hate crowds, but people there seem to get even more fed up with a crowd than I do). It was busy to be sure, but the exhibition space was large enough that we could spread out and I didn’t have to queue to read anything, which is always a plus, because there was a decent amount to read in here (I do wish that some of the clothing had more information, but the descriptions of the furniture and art were pretty detailed).

  

This is one of those exhibitions where I want to show you all the things, because they were all so damn fabulous and displayed so beautifully. They had a lot of pieces by the Rose Iron Works, which was based in Cleveland, including this “Muse with Violin” screen. They were all on loan from the Rose Iron Works collections, which makes me wonder if there’s a secret room full of these pieces somewhere that I could go and look at.

  

I love skyscrapers built in the 1920s and ’30s (the Terminal Tower is my favourite skyscraper ever, although it is admittedly Beaux-Arts rather than art deco), so I loved the skyscraper motif on many of the pieces, like that mural and the skyscraper book desk (the desk is pretty ugly, I will concede, but I would still have it on account of how many books I could cram in that thing).

  

Another motif was methods of transport, because people were fascinated by all the new technologies. I’m not a big car or plane person, but I would absolutely carry either of those adorable purses, and oh my god, that Zeppelin cocktail set is amazing. There was also a chair with a WWI plane embroidered in the back (you can glimpse it just to the left of the yellow dress in the photo above the third paragraph).

  

There were of course a lot of cocktail sets disguised as things, like the owl shaker, above, and even more interestingly, there was a perfume set made to look like a bar set (above right), where you could mix the scents just like a cocktail to produce your own perfume (I don’t even wear perfume (or drink cocktails more than a couple of times a year, for that matter), but I kind of want this).

  

To be honest, the jewellery, whilst gorgeous, was less interesting to me than many of the other objects, and was certainly difficult to photograph (shiny + behind glass is not a great combo), so I hope you enjoy this selection of fans and cigarette holders instead (I especially love the fan with the stars and moon on it, which is of course the hardest one to see, because it’s shiny).

  

A lot of the furniture was admittedly not really to my taste (ugh, avocado green!), but it was still neat to look at, even if I wouldn’t want it in my house (I wanted pretty much everything else though (as you can probably tell). Especially that bathing suit).

 

This quilt represented the quilter’s hope of how Hoover was going to end the Depression (sorry to burst your bubble lady, but it ain’t gonna happen), with people of many different professions all looking towards Uncle Sam, who strolls in at last in the bottom right square with a big barrel of “Legal Beer.” (“Beer. Now there’s a temporary solution.”)

   

I want to keep showing you things, but we’ll be here all day, so suffice it to say it was a wonderful exhibition, with a good amount of explanation about the trends and themes of the era, and obviously fantastic objects on display, though I’ll downgrade it a teeny bit because it was so expensive, and I wanted to see more clothes! 4/5. I also REALLY wanted to buy that hat in the gift shop at the end, but it was like $95, so I had to let it go. I think it suited me though (since first writing this post, I have given into temptation and purchased an elaborately beaded flapper dress for myself (seriously, it must weigh at least ten pounds) that I will probably never be brave enough to wear anywhere. I need to start going to fancier places I guess, and then I could justify buying the hat too).

  

There was also a free temporary exhibition of Depression-era photography in a gallery upstairs which we stopped to see (I love old photos), and it was a good counterpart to the excesses of the Jazz Age exhibition, since it more accurately represented what most people’s lives were like towards the end of that era. We were meeting friends nearby later that evening, and had originally planned on going back home for a few hours in between, but then I discovered the new interactive gallery at the art museum (I think it had been there on my last visit, but it was busier then so I didn’t get to try anything out). Well, there went those plans, because we ended up spending almost two hours in there, which worked out well because it meant by the time we grabbed dinner, it was time to meet my friends, and we saved ourselves a drive home and back again.

  

They had a bunch of different stations which all seemed to have slightly different games on them, and because there were only a handful of other people there, we were able to try them all. They had computers that scanned your face to track your reaction to different works of art, and others that followed your eyes to see how you looked at a piece of art, which you could compare to how other visitors looked at the same piece.

  

There were also games where you had to decide what various objects in a painting were meant to represent, and an activity where you got to mash up your face with a painting (by the way, I’m super jealous of people in America who can use that face match thing in the Google Arts and Culture app, and I’m really annoyed that it’s not in the UK). As you can probably tell from the above photos though, the most fun game of all was Match a Pose, which is just what it sounds (and looks like), with points given for how accurately you matched the painting. This was pretty much the best thing ever, and I spent way, way too much time doing this, but all the games were great. Go at a quiet time and play them all, you won’t be disappointed!  I love the Cleveland Museum of Art anyway (as I said at the start), and by adding so much interactivity to an art museum, they’ve made the experience practically perfect (if they lowered the price of parking, it would be very close to perfection indeed).

 

 

Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art Redux

Because I went back to Ohio for a few weeks over Christmas (and now I’ll have that stupid Back to Ohio (actually called “My City is Gone” apparently) Pretenders song stuck in my head all day), I wrote and scheduled a whole bunch of posts in advance because I knew I’d be too busy eating doughnuts, ice cream, and pancakes, and hanging out with my brother to want to do much writing while I was there.  As a result, I haven’t really written anything in about a month, and I’m finding it really hard to get back into the swing of things (and this damn jet lag (which I should probably just call insomnia at this point) isn’t helping).  So I thought I’d start by revisiting what used to be my favourite Cleveland museum: the Cleveland Museum of Art.

  

I first wrote about the CMA in my first month of blogging, nearly four years ago now, shortly after they had finished their extensive remodelling project, and unfortunately at that point I was so attached to the old museum that I didn’t really give the new museum a fair chance. I also think that many of the galleries had yet to re-open then, so I wasn’t experiencing the museum at its fullest potential.  Well, this was my first trip to the CMA since that last ill-fated one, and I’m happy to report that it feels like a museum I can love again!  It doesn’t hurt that the CMA is still one of only a few free museums in Cleveland, though they do get you with the $10 minimum parking fee in their garage (yikes! Try to find a metered spot on the street if you can, because I think those are only a couple bucks), and they charge for major special exhibitions, but there were none on at the time of my visit.

  

The main reason I was inspired to go back was that the museum was hosting a small exhibit on early portrait photography that sounded interesting (I confess I was hoping they’d have some of those creepy Victorian death photographs, but no such luck), but the exhibit was hidden away in the  middle of the second floor galleries, which meant I got to do a lot of exploring before I found my way there.  And look, I found one of my favourite paintings on the way (that I bitched about not being able to find last time): Cupid and Psyche, by Jacques-Louis David (above left).  And that excellent saucy portrait of George Washington by Charles Wilson Peale that I also know well and love (above previous paragraph).  And the three Van Gogh paintings the museum owns (my favourite is the tree one shown above right).  It was glorious, like finding long-lost friends.

  

I am also very glad that the museum seems to be ordered in a manner that makes sense again.  I think when I visited four years ago, only about half the galleries were actually open, so they only had some of the collection’s highlights on display, and they weren’t really arranged in any particular order.  Happily, the paintings are now sorted chronologically, by country of origin, and by genre again, which makes it easy to find paintings that I know are there and want to see, like the handsome fellow on the left, above (Jean Terford David, painted by Thomas Sully.  I believe his wife’s portrait is also there, but the poor woman is kind of unremarkable next to Jean’s strong jawline and dreamy tousled hair). The only exception to this was Henri Rousseau’s Fight between a Tiger and a Buffalo, which I love, but wasn’t in any of the places I expected to find it.  However, thanks to the free wifi the museum now offers, I was able to search for it on my phone, and discover that it wasn’t currently on display.  Annoying, because I really wanted to see it, but still better than me aimlessly wandering in search of it (or I guess I could have gone old-school and just asked someone working there, but if I can avoid human contact, all the better).  You will also notice that unlike at the hideous (except the armoury) Wallace Collection that I wrote about a couple weeks ago, the paintings are attractively displayed against plain walls painted in soothing solid colours, which makes them a pleasure to look at.  (The painting on the above right in Mary Spain’s Girl with Birds, but I was so busy looking at the cat that I scarcely noticed the birds.)

  

And the CMA genuinely does have a first-rate collection.  You’ll notice the Picasso and the Velazquez above, but they’ve also got Monets, Manets, Gauguins, Toulouse-Lautrecs…basically all the big names, as well as an extensive collection of top-notch American paintings, like Ryder’s The Racetrack (Death on a Pale Horse) shown below left, and the portrait of Nathaniel Olds by Jeptha Wade that I included in the last CMA post, but had to include again because I love it so much (below right).

  

I did eventually find my way to the portrait photography display that I had come to see in the first place, though ironically, it was pretty much the only place in the museum that photography wasn’t allowed.  It was only one room, but it was pretty interesting, mainly because I enjoy photographs of Victorians that prove that they weren’t always as stuffy as we sometimes imagine them to be, especially all the posed “joke” photographs that were apparently popular at the time, including one of a couple guys pretending to rob their friend, and another of men pretending to fight.

  

There was also a small temporary display on Catholic vestments (more copes and chasubles, woot?), which I suppose was fine, but after seeing the incredible pieces of medieval English embroidery at the V&A, boring floral embroidery really paled by comparison.

  

The final temporary display I saw was in the aptly named “Focus Gallery” and revolved around the 14th century Gothic table fountain (above left).  Apparently, table fountains (basically automata that spouted water at the dining table in various clever ways) were very common amongst the wealthy in medieval Europe, but eventually almost all of them disappeared, and the one now in Cleveland is believed to be the most complete surviving example.  And splendid it is too, full of dragons, and little grotesque figures that play instruments and spout water.  I presume it’s too fragile to actually see it in action, but they made a video of what it should look like when it runs, and the fact that it wasn’t in motion allowed me to study all the charming little paintings around its sides in detail.  Delightful.  I also liked the less elaborate castle themed fountain (above right).

  

Because Cleveland is only a medium sized city, they don’t really have the resources to have separate museums for archeology and antiquities and all that kind of stuff, so it all gets lumped together at the CMA.  Although my description probably makes it sound like some poky local museum, which it is definitely not.  It’s a big museum, and everything is beautifully and professionally presented.  My whole point is that this is also the place to come in the CLE if you also want to see armour, or Ancient Egyptian stuff and other ancient artefacts.  There’s lots of very old Asian and Islamic art too!

  

And the Christian religious art might not be in the creepy old gallery I used to love anymore, but it it still full of disturbing pieces (and some funny ones, like ol’ St. George above, who appears to be sprouting some sort of potato from his head).  That throne puts me in mind of Mr. Burns’s “chair” at Springfield University (which I would totally have in my flat, by the way).

  

At some point Marcus decided he was going to photograph all the lions, only a couple of which I’ve included here (they have a surprising amount of lion-themed art), but I liked his thinking – I think picking one theme and focusing on objects relating to it is a good way to gain a new perspective on museums you’ve been to before, or just keep them interesting (I know the head on the left is not a lion, but it is a splendidly derpy face, so I couldn’t not include it, and it was in the same gallery as the lion on the right).

  

The museum also had a few new technological/interactive things that I don’t recall seeing before, like a giant wall where you could select objects from the museum’s collections, and learn more about them, and some kind of motion wall thing that I noticed children jumping up and down in front of.  There were also quite a few touchscreens in “Gallery One,” which highlights some of the museum’s best pieces, and gives you a chance to discover more about the meanings behind them, and the historical periods in which they were created.  I think it’s a neat idea, even though the execution wasn’t quite as attention-grabbing as I would have liked.

 

I think there were a few small galleries we didn’t have the chance to see, but I feel like I got to experience most of the museum, and have a much better appreciation of what the big remodel has done for the CMA.  Although the historic 1916 exterior is still hidden within the atrium, you do get excellent views of it from inside the atrium (you frequently have to go out on the balconies to move between galleries, so you get lots of chances to admire it) and it is a gorgeous space.  I can imagine that with Cleveland’s long and crappy winters that it is also nice to have a place to walk around and get some sunlight without trekking through ice and slush.  I have indeed completely revised my previous opinion, and can say that the remodelling process, though very irritating in the last few years I was actually living in Cleveland and wasn’t able to visit the Art Museum, was a good thing in the long run, and the museum has eventually emerged all the better for it.  4.5/5, and unquestionably the most spectacular museum Cleveland has to offer.

Cleveland, OH: The Dittrick Museum of Medical History

  

I can’t believe I waited this long to visit the Dittrick Museum (or this long to post about it!  I went here in September, and I’m already back in NE Ohio again for the holidays!).  I mean, I lived in Cleveland for the first 23 years of my life, I love medical history, I spent a fair amount of time hanging around the other museums in University Circle, and I almost went to school at Case Western Reserve University (twice!  I was accepted both as an undergrad, and into their History of STEM Ph.D programme, but stupidly turned down both), so there is absolutely no reason I shouldn’t have been there before.  But I guess all that doesn’t matter, now that I’ve finally remedied the situation.

  

The Dittrick Museum is located inside the Allen Memorial Medical Library on Case’s campus; I recommend parking in the University Hospital visitor’s garage a short distance away, because they offer free parking for the first two hours (more than enough time to see the museum) and the metered spots on Euclid Road are usually all full.  Once you find your way inside the building, it’s a little confusing, because the main staircase takes you up to the library on the second floor, with no apparent way to get up to the third floor.  So you need to take the shaky, slightly unsafe looking lift on the far left side of the ground floor up to the 3rd floor, as directed in the lift.  (We did find a staircase once we got up there that led to the toilets, but I’m not sure how you accessed it from the ground floor.  I think it went straight down to the basement.)  The museum is free, and though university professors have their offices in the hallways all around the museum, no one is actually working at it, so you can look around without anyone breathing down your neck, which is nice.

  

The museum is actually larger than I expected, with a number of different galleries/areas.  The centrepiece of the collection is undoubtedly the museum of contraception, of which more later, but they also have a number of exhibits about local and general medical history.  There was also a temporary exhibition, which was about childbirth (to tie in with the whole contraception/women’s health thing), which includes some fine (albeit a bit full-on) anatomical models.  I have to say, some of the childbirth implements there, especially the historical dilators (although the display informed me that they still use them in modern medicine; they’re just made from softer materials) made me very glad that I live in an age where the option not to have children exists.

  

Case Western has a very well-renowned medical school, and many fairly prominent doctors have trained in the Cleveland area.  One of the most famous was George Washington Crile, a surgeon who performed the first operation using a direct blood transfusion, and was one of the founders of the Cleveland Clinic. (Cleveland used to also be home to Crile Military Hospital, as I found out from one of my grandpa’s letters.  However, Crile didn’t actually work there as it opened a year after he died, it was just named after him.)  There’s a wax model of his hand in here, perhaps to show the fine touch that made him a gifted surgeon.  A more notorious doctor who trained in Cleveland was the creepy Dr. Crippen, of alleged wife-murdering fame.  Even though his eyes scare the crap out of me, I still think that’s pretty cool.

 

The museum discussed a variety of medical topics like anaesthesia, dentistry, and polio (complete with an infant sized iron lung), but with a special Northeast Ohio focus that as a former Clevelander, I found most interesting.

  

The Museum of Contraception was located in the back section of the main room, and this too was pretty damned interesting.  Ohio is generally nowadays more known for trying to restrict women’s reproductive rights, so it was nice to come to this bastion of common sense and freedom of choice.  The collection was started by Percy Skuy, former president of Ortho Pharmeceutical (appropriately enough, since they make Ortho-Tri-Cyclen and other birth control pills), and has received so many donations that it’s doubled in size since its arrival in the museum, to include over 1100 objects.

  

It contains information on birth control throughout history (some of the early attempts being not only ineffective, but distinctly unpleasant, shades of the childbirth section again), the attempts of campaigners to educate women on effective methods of contraception, and how they faced extreme opposition, especially from the horrible shit-stain of a man, Anthony Comstock, who was responsible for the ridiculous Comstock Law that allowed distributors of anything deemed “lewd” (birth control among them) to be successfully prosecuted.  Seriously, he was the worst, and someone eventually clubbed him over the head, but it wasn’t enough to kill him (more’s the pity).

  

This gallery also includes some delightful contraception related art, like a display of IUDs (or maybe that was just a normal display, but it looked cool), a pearl ship given to Margaret Sanger by the Japanese people in thanks for her efforts to make birth control available to all, and an American flag containing stars made out of birth control pills, which is also available as a free postcard from a table in the middle of the museum.

  

There’s a little balcony area up some stairs at the side of the museum, containing a collection of medical instruments.  While not quite as interesting as the contraception stuff, I did enjoy looking at the range of early stethoscopes, tongue depressors, and other instruments.

  

But that wasn’t all!  In addition to a small room at the back currently (well, at the time of my visit) housing a collection of anatomical drawings, there were also cases lining the walls on the outside of the museum, and these contained some of the most fascinating and hilarious artefacts of the whole collection.  Part of the display was about how you would have been treated if you’d been sick in various eras in history, and obviously the historical treatments weren’t pleasant (that enema plate though! If I owned it, and if I was the type to host dinner parties, I would so serve people something chocolately off of it, just to be gross.  Maybe like a warm chocolate fondant, or a brownie pudding.  Mmmmm).

  

But there was also a case on forensics, and displays on the Cleveland smallpox epidemic of 1902, which was not something I knew much about, and was definitely keen to read up on, what with my love of infectious disease and all.  Cleveland also had a diphtheria problem, and there was information on that too.  Undoubtedly one of my favourite objects, just for nostalgia’s sake, was Juno the Transparent Woman, pictured at the start of the post.  Apparently she was built in Germany in the 1940s, and has resided in Cleveland since 1950, but I remember her still being a big deal when I was a kid in the ’80s and early ’90s (at least to me).  She used to live at the Cleveland Health Museum, which was my favourite museum in my youth, and perhaps where I got my love of medical history (they had fetuses in jars, a giant tooth you could climb through, and put on a special Where’s Waldo event one year that was really fun), where she stood in a darkened room, and told visitors all about her internal organs, lighting up each one as she talked about it.  The Health Museum eventually got pretty lame, due to lack of attendance I guess, and closed in 2006, so Juno was moved here, and I was glad to see her.

  

There’s also a small display of venereal disease posters on the ground floor, which I only noticed because a torrential downpour had started when we were in the museum, and we were waiting for it to die down.  Overall, the museum was much better than I had anticipated, and made me kind of angry at myself for not doing that Ph.D, as I likely would have had the opportunity to do some work on it (but then I’d still be living in Clevo, so perhaps it’s for the best).  There were a surprising number of cool artefacts, a tonne of signage, and the museum of contraception was very neat indeed.  Cleveland really doesn’t have that many free museums, other than the Art Museum, so I’m extremely glad this exists, and wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone visiting Cleveland with any interest in medicine.  I’m just ashamed it took me so long to follow my own advice.  4/5.  And if you’re in the area, you’re also very near to Little Italy (Get the gnocchi al burro at Trattoria), and Lake View Cemetery, and are only a hop, skip, and a jump (though it admittedly involves a drive down the long and horrible Mayfield Road) from East Coast Custard (best frozen custard in NE Ohio, possibly the world).

  

 

 

Cleveland, OH: The Western Reserve Historical Society

  

So it’s come to this.  I wanted to visit all sorts of places I haven’t been yet in Ohio when I was back home this holiday season, particularly the Dittrick Medical Museum, but with decorating, and shopping, and making pierogi and cookies, and other Christmas related activities, I just ran out of time, and only managed two museum/historic home visits.  One of these was the Western Reserve Historical Society.  I have talked quite a lot of crap on the old WRHS in this blog, mainly because of the really really terrible internship I did at Hale Farm, and yet here I am visiting their “history center.”  Surprisingly, I have mostly nice things to say about the revamped museum.  So let’s get stuck in, shall we?

  

Residents of Northeast Ohio will know that the “Western Reserve” part of the name refers to some of the land that would become Ohio; just after the American Revolution, before it became a state, it was officially part of the western lands reserved for Connecticut because they were upset at having to cede part of their original territory to Pennsylvania.  Well, obviously that didn’t quite pan out – Ohio became its own entity, but there were a lot of settlers from Connecticut there initially, and the term Western Reserve is mainly used nowadays for historical institutions or to give some of the hoity toitier suburbs around these parts, like Hudson, a sense of history and that New England connection.  But I digress…the museum building doesn’t only house the Society’s historical collections; it also features the Crawford Automobile Collection, which is nationally renowned for the range and quality of its cars.  This is the main reason why I came here quite often with my family when I was younger; clinging stubbornly to gender stereotypes, my grandpa, father, and brother would go look at the cars whilst we ladies admired the dresses in the Chisholm-Halle costume wing (though I was quite tomboyish in many ways as a child, cars didn’t interest me in the least).

  

The WRHS is located in Cleveland’s University Circle, which is sort of the museum district, as it’s also home to the Natural History Museum, the Art Museum, the Botanical Gardens, and Case-Western Reserve University.  Admission is currently $10, and includes two rides on the carousel (of which more later) and the option to take a free tour of the Hay-McKinney Mansion.  The entrance hall of the museum is essentially unchanged from how I remember it, and includes a giant glowing Chief Wahoo (the undeniably racist mascot of the Cleveland Indians.  There is a sign next to him that mentions how controversial he is, and like it or not, he is admittedly a pretty big part of Cleveland history, so I get why he’s there) and a large horse-based mural that covers one of the walls in its entirety.  Because I visited just before Christmas, they also had a couple displays from the old department stores downtown, wherein some of the creepiest elves I’ve ever seen moved their heads around and made toys (to be fair, Higbee’s was still around when I was very young, and I do remember going shopping downtown with my grandma and peering excitedly in their windows, exactly like Ralphie does in A Christmas Story (which was filmed in Higbee’s), so they can’t have been all that traumatising).

  

The museum also had a temporary exhibit up about the LGBT community in Cleveland, which included a lovely dress by a transgender designer, and some disturbing articles about hate crimes against LGBT individuals back in the ’80s (I mean, the fact that the articles were there wasn’t disturbing, but the crimes described in them sure were).  Moving on from there, I headed into the old section of the museum (I believe that entire section of the building was once part of the Hay-McKinney mansion, but most of it now serves as galleries, which means they have a lovely Gilded Age atmosphere, abounding with huge vases and interesting portraits) to check out the good old Chisholm-Halle costume wing.  They had an exhibition on called “In Grand Style: Fashions from the 1870s-1930s,” which I guess is meant to showcase Cleveland’s golden age, before all the industrialists packed up and left town.  To that effect, it had dresses relating to two of Ohio’s presidents – the blue one, above, belonged to Lucretia Garfield, wife of the ill-fated James, and the tan/peachy one was worn by a guest to the equally ill-fated McKinley’s inaugural ball.

  

As always, the Edwardian fashions were probably my favourite since I like the more tailored, menswear inspired look that was popular at the time, but there was also a dress I liked (shown right, above) produced by a fashion society of which Eleanor Roosevelt (surprisingly) was a founding member, I guess because their primary goal was to make attractive fashion available and affordable to people of all classes.

  

The room next to it was full of random bits and bobs, including magazine advertisements for various local clothing companies, a promotional spinning top from the Taft presidential campaign, and bizarrely, one of those basins that they use to wash people’s hair in hospitals, but I was most drawn to the sketches of the old industrial side of Cleveland.  I love pictures that relate to Cleveland’s past, especially if they include the Terminal Tower, which remains my favourite skyscraper ever.  There was also more Garfield memorabilia in the form of a safe that once held papers relating to farm business at Lawnfield (which sounds like a must-see object, doesn’t it?).

  

I inwardly groaned when I saw that the next room was all about the 1964 Browns, because I couldn’t care less about sports, and particularly about football.  I guess maybe it was commemorating the only season in which the Browns may have actually performed semi-decently, but I didn’t really look at enough of the stuff in here to find out.

  

It didn’t much matter in the end, because the next display was all about Cleveland design, like the groovy retro dishes seen above (I swear one of the sets was called the Brookpark or something equally Clevelandy, but I forgot to grab a picture of that one so I can’t remember exactly what it was), and was thus more to my liking.  I found out that the Tow Motor company, where my grandpa used to work, was founded in the year he was born, 1915, which was kind of neat.

  

There was also a display relating to the Taylor Chair company, which used to be based in Bedford, apparently by this railroad trestle that I used to hide out under and drink with my friends as a teenager, which was not something I was aware of on those occasions when I was chugging down Woodchuck (and subsequently puking in the bushes, because Woodchuck is way too damn sweet).  I made sure to relay to anyone who would listen (meaning my mother, basically), that people who make chair legs are called bodgers, which I learned a long time ago courtesy of the Wycombe Museum.

 

I kind of feel like at this point I’m just naming individual objects in there (which is what I normally do anyway though), which might make it sound like they have more stuff in the museum than they actually do.  But yeah, there’s a room with miniature trains in it, and a pretty baller portrait of Lincoln, as you can see.  And an equally impressive statue of the excellently named Oliver Hazard Perry, who was the hero of the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812 (shown at start of post).

  

I’m rambling on so much that it’s probably for the best that I didn’t have time to visit the Hay-McKinney House, but I’ve been in there plenty of times before, so I can tell you that it’s a fairly standard Edwardian home tour, wherein they whip out old-timey cooking and cleaning devices so you can marvel at how huge and inefficient they were.  Fine, but nothing special, although I believe they do make some effort to decorate for the holidays and such.  They also have a new children’s area in the rooms next to the mansion with lots of interactive crap, which again, I didn’t bother with.  However, I will take the trouble to tell you about the picture on the right, which is the earliest known painting of Public Square, dating to 1837, when everything was all green and looked like a quaint village (shame they couldn’t have preserved any of the buildings from that time, though as I’ve said before, I am very partial to the Terminal Tower and the Soldiers and Sailors Monument that surround the modern Public Square).

  

Alright, finally on to the Crawford Auto/Aviation section.  As much as I dislike long flights, I think antique planes are kind of cool, and Cleveland has a pretty illustrious history in that field, as the National Air Races were held here throughout the 30s and 40s, so they had a couple of the old racing planes, as well as lots of cool banners and other promotional materials from the Air Races.

  

I’ve never learned how to drive, despite living in a very non-public transport friendly area until I was 23, so as I’ve said before, cars hold no particular interest for me.  However, although I couldn’t tell you what kind they are, I do like the ones from the 1910s and 20s that were big enough to be homes away from home (none of which are pictured here because my phone is crap and I couldn’t zoom out enough to get a whole car in frame, that’s how big they are (but I got a new phone for Christmas, so I might be able to produce slightly better pics in the future!)); some of them even had full-size lanterns stuck on the outside and those nice plush leather interiors (note to self: if I ever get married, I totally want to cruise up to my wedding in one of those).

 

For those who may be interested in that sort of thing, they have some stainless steel cars, including the DeLorean shown above.  What they do not have, at least at the moment, is the Street of Yesteryear, which used to be the only way I could survive the car section without dying of boredom.  As Streets of Yesteryear go, it was a fairly modest affair, but I still loved it, especially as most of the other people in there were solely concerned with the cars, and I had free run of those cobblestone streets.  I could still see it just sitting there, all alone and unloved, for all they tried to hide it behind posters, but a sign claimed that they will restore and re-open it, so I just have to hope that happens sooner rather than later, and that they don’t destroy too much of its charm.

Last, but certainly not least, is that carousel (or carrousel, as they curiously spell it) that I mentioned at the start.  Euclid Beach was a famous Cleveland amusement park of yore, and the WRHS has gotten their hands on the 1910 carousel, which they’ve beautifully restored.  As I said, you get two free rides with admission, but I unfortunately didn’t use either of them because I am very prone to motion sickness, and I was feeling rather poorly that day anyway, having been up all night with stomach issues, so I didn’t want to risk it, especially as I was going out to lunch right after.  It looked like a blast though, so I’d like to revisit on a day when I’m feeling normalish and just hope I don’t hurl.

Overall, I think I have to say I was impressed with the most part with the renovation of this museum.  Though they still have too many posters, which made some of the displays kind of confusing, at least they have some actual artefacts in there now, instead of just all posters in some of the galleries, as it was in the recent past.  None of the exhibits were up to the calibre of the ones I saw there in their heyday (Eliot Ness and the Torso Murders, for example), but they weren’t terrible either, especially if you don’t hate football as much as I do. And the Chisholm-Halle wing is always very nicely laid out, so I can’t complain at all about that.  3.5/5, which I’m willing to bump up half a point when they bring back the Street of Yesteryear, definitely not anywhere near as bad as I was expecting!  Maybe this is the beginning of a new and improved relationship between me and the WRHS?  (I stand strong in my distaste for Hale Farm though!)

 

 

 

Mentor, OH: Lawnfield (Home of James A Garfield)

 

I promised you more about James Garfield in my Teddy Roosevelt post, and here ’tis!  I grew up probably equidistant between the McKinley Memorial and Garfield’s estate, and yet hadn’t managed to visit either until after I moved to London and was back home visiting (isn’t that always the way?).  So this was my first visit to Lawnfield, although I’ve been to the Garfield Monument inside Lake View Cemetery many times.  The main thing putting me off visiting Lawnfield in the past was the fact that it was run by the Western Reserve Historical Society, since I’ve never been overly impressed by them (long story, involving an ill-fated internship and the general decline of their museum over the years). However, a while back, Lawnfield was taken over by the National Park Service; as my experiences with the NPS have generally been quite positive, I was finally willing to check it out.

  

Lawnfield is currently closed for the winter season, but will reopen in the spring of 2015, at which time my pricing information and tour times may no longer be accurate. When I visited, it was only $5 for the museum and a tour of the house, and tours seemed to run at least once an hour, or whenever they got enough people together for one.  The next tour wasn’t due to start for 20 minutes, so the ranger put on a video about Garfield’s life for us to watch in the meantime, which talked a lot about his faith, his education, his role in the Civil War, and his relationship with his wife, Lucretia (basically, he held off marrying her for ages because he didn’t want to commit, although I think he should have been glad to snag her as she was well-educated and quite pretty, and he was average looking at best and seemed like kind of a drip).  He lived a fairly average, albeit blameless life, and was picked for the presidency primarily because of his bland inoffensiveness – when no one could agree upon a Republican candidate, he was turned to as the least objectionable option.  After finishing the video, we headed off on our ranger-led tour along with another couple who had just arrived.

  

The Garfields bought the property in 1876, and James was assassinated in 1881, so he didn’t spend a whole lot of time here, but they still managed to enlarge the house from a 9 room farm house into a 20+ room veritable mansion within his lifetime.  The family lived in Hiram before this, but Lake County was gerrymandered in the 1870s, so by moving to Mentor, Garfield was able to place himself back into a Republican stronghold.  It was here that he led the first “front porch” campaign (later emulated by McKinley), where he would give speeches on his front porch to reporters and members of the public who camped out on the lawn.  The interior of Lawnfield was fairly unassuming, which reflected Garfield’s modest background, but everything was furnished prettily and it came across as a place where people actually lived, rather than some kind of imposing, Rockefeller-esque monstrosity.

  

The ranger had plenty of amusing anecdotes for us.  For example, although Garfield wasn’t an only child, he was obviously his mother’s favourite, as she chose to live with him, and her entire room was decorated with pictures of him.  Seriously, every available surface was plastered with his portrait, and I didn’t see any pictures of any of her other children anywhere. This kind of made me feel bad not only for his siblings, but for Lucretia, as I could picture an awkward relationship similar to that between Sara and Eleanor Roosevelt going on.

 

I’d take a closer look at those fireplace tiles in the picture on the right if I were you, because they were painted by Lucretia and the Garfield children, and are really rather handsome (although the picture quality isn’t really good enough to pick out the detail, sorry about that).  Although their house was already large and nice, after Garfield’s death Lucretia expanded it even further, primarily for the purpose of creating a library in his memory (which is said to be the first presidential library, but lots of other presidential libraries make similar claims, and Garfield’s isn’t officially recognised as such or anything).

  

The library initially housed all his books and papers, but his papers have since been moved to the safety of the Library of Congress.  However, Lucretia did her best to protect them whilst they were in the house, creating a special vault to put them in, which had a thick, fireproof door.  Today, the vault holds a wreath sent to Garfield’s funeral by Queen Victoria, which was dipped in wax to preserve it.

 

His Congressional desk is also in this room (Garfield was in the House of Representatives prior to becoming president), and is dismayingly tiny, as Garfield was at least 6 feet tall (and rather portly too).  One wonders how he squeezed himself under it, much less used it to show off his famous displays of ambidextrousness, where he would write in ancient Greek with one hand whilst simultaneously writing in Latin with the other.

 

Much of the rest of the tour was devoted to the children’s bedrooms, which were upstairs (the Garfields had a bedroom upstairs for winter, and downstairs for summer, when it would be the coolest place in the house, though nowadays the house is air conditioned – a relief as it was 90+ degrees on the day of our tour!).  There was only one girl in the family, and she got the largest bedroom by far; really, it was almost her own personal suite.

  

The room I found most interesting, however, was Garfield’s study.  Take particular note of the chair (because I want one for myself!); it was specially designed for reading, so you would put your back against the flat side, and hang your legs over the low arm opposite.  Pretty nifty.  There was also a picture featuring the official portraits of all the presidents up to and including Garfield (he was the 20th), that had hung in the White House at one point.

  

  

There was a small museum inside the house that the ranger left us to look over for as long as we wanted.  It contained short biographies of all the Garfield children, as well as of their uncle, who was caretaker of the house for a number of years.  It also told more about the history of the house, and contained some personal objects belonging to the family.

  

Upon leaving the house, we came directly to a small outbuilding next door that served as Garfield’s campaign headquarters during the presidential election.  He even had his own personal telegraph machine so he could receive important messages, like the election results!  There’s also a windmill on the property, although there’s nothing inside anymore.  Even though the estate is very near a busy road (which was a major road even in Garfield’s day), the many trees around the property help to give it an air of seclusion (though it’s obviously nowhere near as gorgeous and private as FDR’s Hyde Park estate).

  

There was an additional small museum inside the visitor’s centre, which was our next stop.  This one had wax figures of (“come on in, come to the place where fun never ends, come on in, it’s time to party with…”) Garfield and friends with a selection of audio recordings by actors to accompany the scenes they were portraying. And there were lots of Garfield’s personal effects, plenty of hats and clothes and things.

  

The final room contained an array of objects mourning Garfield’s death (he was shot by the madman Charles Guiteau for what was essentially an imagined slight, and lingered on for two months, being “fed” by enemas for a large part of that time.  It was the misguided care of his doctors (dehydration from the enemas, plus the main problem of infection where they had decided to probe his wound with dirty fingers) that was probably more responsible for his death than the actual bullet.  If they had left well enough alone, he might have survived.  Recommended reading: Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard (yes, another excellent Millard book, I really wish she’d write some more!)).  Sad though it was, his death helped to unite the nation, precisely because it was so lingering and unfortunate.  The items on display included a letter of condolence from Queen Victoria to Lucretia, which I have to believe was heartfelt, as Victoria was certainly familiar with the pain of losing a beloved husband unexpectedly.

  

I also think the gift shop was very good, probably better than the disappointing one in Hyde Park.  They had an array of books pertaining to Garfield and other presidents, postcards, magnets, and an Ohio Presidents mug, which I naturally purchased for myself (Ohio lays claim to 8 presidents, and while I would dispute some of them, like William Henry Harrison, who was a wealthy planter from Virginia who laid claim to Ohio primarily for the purposes of his “Log Cabins and Hard Cider” campaign, I still enjoy the hell out of my mug).  I was glad to finally see another piece of Ohio history, and was very happy with my experience here.  3.5/5.

I also have a couple of recommendations for you.  First, if you do go out to Mentor to visit Lawnfield, definitely stop at the East Coast Custard out here.  They have my favourite frozen custard in the world (it’s the proper kind that is creamy yet scoopable, rather than soft serve masquerading as custard), and it’s literally down the street from Lawnfield, on your way back to the highway.  Second, I also very highly recommend visiting Lake View Cemetery, where Garfield is buried (I’m including a couple pictures of his tomb so you can see how awesome it is).  It is a fascinating  and beautiful cemetery with famous people other than Garfield buried in it (like John D Rockefeller and Eliot Ness), and it has many creepy mausoleums and the spectacularly spooky Haserot Angel.  It is also right next to Cleveland’s Little Italy (because, Italian food) and is actually not that far from another East Coast Custard (just saying), and University Circle, where many museums are located.  It’s another way to appreciate this little-remembered president, especially while his house is closed for renovation.

    

 

Cleveland, Ohio: West Side Market

   

Merry Christmas Everyone!  I’m going to use the holiday as an excuse to highlight one of my favourite places in the world ( at least, one of my favourite places that is neither a museum nor a library): The West Side Market.  Growing up in Cleveland, no Christmas was complete without at least one visit to the West Side Market to stock up on essentials; from the special farmers’ cheese for pierogies (though I was always partial to potato and cheddar, which I also make every year), the holiday ham or roast (I always gave that one a miss too!), delicious breads, and of course, lots of veg for the side dishes!  My grandma would throw on her Russian style fur hat (which we all laughed at, but she was probably much warmer than the rest of us) and my grandpa donned his adorable flat cap, and off we’d go for an afternoon of leisurely shopping!  Although my grandparents are now sadly deceased, and I no longer live in Ohio, I still come home for Christmas every year, and a trip to Cleveland’s most famous market is always a must.

   

The West Side Market just celebrated its centennial last year, and the market building itself dates back that far as well.  I always love spotting its distinctive tower in the distance when driving over the Hope Bridge (which is another piece of architecture I’m very fond of), and as a result of a (small, fortunately) fire this past year, they’ve given the interior an extensive cleaning, so it’s currently less grimy than in the past, though it has managed to retain its distinctive musk (an interesting combination of raw meat, stinky cheese, coffee, and an occasional whiff of something delicious, depending on where you’re standing).  The produce vendors are all in an unheated tent-like structure outside, but the actual market hall is where all the good stuff is at!  (You may notice the much better than normal photos in this post, which are courtesy of my brother and his fancy camera!  Don’t get used to hipstery bokeh or decent picture quality around here though!)

  

The interior of the market is a jumble of stalls selling things as varied as Cambodian curries, Chinese meets hipster steamed buns, crepes, gyros, and both traditional and unusually filled pierogies, reflecting the unique ethnic makeup of the city, though the floor space is dominated by the abundance of traditional butchers hawking all manner of beef and pig parts (and lamb, and chicken, etc, etc).  Although I don’t eat meat myself, I’m not especially squeamish about looking at pig and sheep heads, which is probably necessary for surviving the market experience (could definitely do without all the gross meaty smells, but you can always linger by the coffee stall when it gets too much!).

   

Of course, though the fun of the market is in exploring all the wonderful things for yourself, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the things I like the most.  The best falafel in the world, as far as I’m concerned (and I’ve eaten LOTS of falafel) can be found at Maha’s Falafil, located in the outer left corner of the market over by the fishmongers.  Get the jumbo, you won’t regret it!  I like the enchiladas verde from Orale (though their prices are kind of steep, in my opinion) for a quick snack, and my brother never leaves without sampling a crepe from Crepes De Luxe.  The sourdough bread from Christopher’s is excellent for French toast, and I can put away a loaf of their asiago bread all too easily just by itself.  As far as sweets go (and you all know I have a real sweet tooth), I love the elaborate chocolate covered pretzel creations from Campbell’s, even though I always feel slightly ill after eating a whole one, and Vera’s bakery does proper old school coconut squares.  There’s loads of other bakeries too, so shop around and get whatever looks best that day; it’s probably all delicious!

The market is open Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, but mid-day Wednesday or Friday are usually the best times to shop, as all the vendors are open, but it’s not super crowded.  If you ever find yourself in Cleveland, please try to come experience it; most Clevelanders are extremely proud of it (and rightly so), and I don’t think anyone will leave disappointed! I hope everyone is having a marvellous Christmas, and I’ll be back with another Ohio post next week!