Cleveland's Playhouse Square an innovative model for funding performing arts venues

Cleveland's Playhouse Square is not only one of the countries greatest concentration of theaters, it offers an innovative model for funding, as described by the Wall Street Journal:

'Arts and culture is losing its market share of philanthropy," according to the latest National Arts Index, published by Americans for the Arts. But several Cleveland performing-arts and public-media organizations are in better shape than their counterparts around the country because they are part of PlayhouseSquare, a unique business model in downtown Cleveland.

After New York's Lincoln Center, PlayhouseSquare is the second-largest performing arts center in the country by audience capacity. Home to 10 performance spaces with a total of more than 9,000 seats, it attracts more than a million visitors to its approximately 1,000 performing-arts events annually.

"In the late '60s, five wonderful theaters that were built in the '20s as vaudeville houses were closing, one by one," Art Falco, PlayhouseSquare's president and CEO, said in a recent interview. "Ray Shepardson, who worked for the Cleveland public-school system, stumbled into the lobby of one, the State Theater, looking for a place to hold a meeting. He knew nothing about theaters or urban renewal, but thought it would be a crime to tear that theater down." His early efforts to save these theaters led to the creation of the nonprofit Playhouse Square Foundation.

What makes PlayhouseSquare unique is that it not only renovated and manages the performance spaces—including the five historic theaters (the Ohio, the Palace, the State, the Allen and the Hanna) that otherwise would have been bulldozed for parking lots—but it also created a local development corporation that owns more than 1.6 million square feet of office and retail space inhabited by more than 3,000 workers in five buildings; developed the 205-room Wyndham Cleveland Hotel; and manages an additional million square feet of real estate throughout the Cleveland metropolitan area.

Its budget of more than $60 million puts it ahead of the better-endowed Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Museum of Art. Two-thirds of PlayhouseSquare's annual budget supports the performing arts. One-third is reinvested in its real-estate ventures.

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