GPS City GuideClevelandCleveland Mall

Stop 15 of 30 · Cleveland audio walking tour

Cleveland Mall

Downtown Cleveland · 1903 · City Beautiful civic plan

What you'll hear here: about 90 seconds of narration about Cleveland Mall, and how it fits Downtown Cleveland, written to be listened to on the spot rather than read at home.

Daniel Burnham helped conceive the 1903 Group Plan that gave downtown Cleveland, Ohio, this landscaped park, the Cleveland Mall. One of the most complete examples of City Beautiful design in the United States, this historic park is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Mall was conceived as part of the 1903 Group Plan by Daniel Burnham, John Carrère, and Arnold Brunner as a vast public space intended to be flanked by the city’s major civic and governmental buildings, all executed in a neoclassical style.

Over the following three decades many of those buildings rose: the Metzenbaum Courthouse (1910), the Cuyahoga County Courthouse (1912), Cleveland City Hall (1916), the Public Auditorium (1922), the Cleveland Public Library main building (1925), and the Cleveland Public Schools Board of Education building (1931). In the spirit of the City Beautiful movement, formerly seedy areas were transformed into a "magnificent civic center," which was meant to be crowned by the Union Terminal at the north end of the mall on the shores of Lake Erie. Today the Mall sits amid both those historic neoclassical buildings and later landmarks - Key Tower, the Global Center for Health Innovation, the Hilton Cleveland Downtown Hotel, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

Key Tower, the Federal Reserve Bank, and other landmarks now frame this historic civic green for you.

Where it is

Coordinates
41.50303, -81.69414
Area
Downtown Cleveland
Era
1903 · City Beautiful civic plan
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Three stops free. No account needed. The audio plays itself as you walk.