Rockefeller Park Greenhouse

The greenhouse traces its origins to glasshouses given to the city by the estate of William J. Gordon, whose country seat became Gordon Park in 1894. In 1897 John D. Rockefeller deeded the land linking Gordon Park with Wade Park, and the city then planned a complex of 'city greenhouses', which opened in 1905. Its main task was to raise trees and shrubs for Cleveland's parks and boulevards, though it also supplied flowers to hospital wards. In 1913 a large new greenhouse was built to show palms, ferns and orchids to the public, among them the exotic plant collection donated by William E. Telling; in winter it even sheltered the goldfish from the Public Square pond.

Between 1937 and 1939 the New Deal's Works Progress Administration rebuilt the complex in its present form, under city horticulturist Sylvester W. Minke, who held the post from 1922 to 1957. A cactus house opened in 1946. In 1962 the Leonard C. Hanna Fund granted $300,000 for a new entrance building and a Japanese garden, completed in 1964, when the site took the name Rockefeller Park Greenhouse. The city briefly considered closing it in 1980 but decided against it, and the Friends of Greenhouse nonprofit was formed in 1991 to put it on a firmer financial footing.

The complex stands on a hilltop above the Cleveland Cultural Gardens, at the northeastern edge of Rockefeller Park between Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and East 88th Street. The 1937-1939 rebuilding placed a Palm House, now known as the Tropical Showhouse, at the centre, with six further greenhouses around it, bringing the glazed area to 35,000 square feet, roughly 3,250 m².

Inside the Palm House a central walkway divides two sunken gardens lined with tufa rock salvaged from the 1936-1937 Great Lakes Exposition: one has a waterfall, the other a statue. The entrance building dates from the Hanna Fund works of the early 1960s. Municipal sources describe the site as about one acre under glass and three to four acres of outdoor gardens, four acres in all.

The Palm House is dominated by six 30-foot royal palms taken from the Florida exhibit at the Great Lakes Exposition, surrounded by other tropical plants including citrus, banana, papaya and rubber trees and calamondin oranges. The cactus house, opened in 1946, originally displayed its plants against a painted desert backdrop. The glasshouses stage seasonal displays, notably poinsettias in December.

Outside are several theme gardens: the Japanese garden of 1964, the Betty Ott Talking Garden, designed for blind visitors and featuring a statue of Helen Keller, and the Willott Iris Garden, where hundreds of iris varieties bloom in spring and summer.

The greenhouse is at 750 East 88th Street on the northeastern edge of Rockefeller Park, and both admission and parking are free. An hour covers the glasshouses, longer with the outdoor gardens. In winter the Palm House is a warm, bright refuge; spring and summer bring out the irises and the Japanese garden, and December is the month of the poinsettias. A visit extends naturally into the Cleveland Cultural Gardens below, which honour the city's many ethnic communities, and on towards Wade Park, which adjoins Rockefeller Park to the southeast.