07/21/02

Manufacturing is out. Creativity is in. And nothing is more creative than the arts.

With the large arts industry that is already here, Cleveland should have the tools it needs to begin working on its new economy. But there's a problem: Before music, theater, dance, art and design can work at top capacity to change Cleveland's financial future, Cleveland has to change its old-think approach to the way it lives, looks and works.

The business community has already realized that technology and scientific research are vital to reinvigorating the region's economy. Efforts are under way to strengthen enterprise in biotechnology and medicine.

But experts in economic development, arts management, education and tourism think that the arts have long been undervalued as an economic resource. Because the arts in other cities have attracted new businesses, an educated work force and increased tourism, these experts strongly believe that Cleveland's prosperity may depend not just on high-tech business, but also on how well its arts are nurtured, marketed and allowed to reshape the city.

Encouraging the arts has had a stunning economic effect in a wide range of places. North Adams, Mass., once a crumbling industrial town, risked letting the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art move into an abandoned factory and has seen itself transformed by a new tourist industry. Karlsruhe, Germany, has done even better, founding an electronic art-media center in 1997 that has sent the economy soaring with high-paying high-technology jobs.

And Seattle, one of the nation's most desirable cities despite recent dot-com failures, was inspired by its 1962 World's Fair to build an arts industry that has helped capture the imagination of a young, creative work force.

In city after city where artists are encouraged to move into affordable neighborhoods, they improve the areas' look and atmosphere. Businesses, clubs and restaurants follow, and a street life develops, attracting visitors and talented, educated people who want to live and work there. The economy and the city's reputation grow.

The way civic leaders see it, Cleveland needs that kind of transformation.

Many of the city's students and young workers can't develop careers here because Cleveland's dull image doesn't attract enough activity in their chosen fields. Isolated neighborhoods and marooned campuses discourage their efforts to form collaborations and a sense of community.

Worse, perhaps, some of Cleveland's attempts to make itself enticing are so outmoded that hip, in-demand workers are writing the city off as clueless.

Frustrated by these obstacles, many bright young Clevelanders are leaving for livelier places where they can work and play more enjoyably.

"A more vibrant downtown" is what Beth Dubber hopes to find if she ever moves back here.

The 30-year-old photographer, a Lakewood native, moved recently to New York City.

"I felt there was just a lot more opportunity outside of Cleveland," she said.

She's not alone.

The 2000 census found that, during the 1990s, this area lost young workers at more than twice the national rate, including 19 percent of those age 25-34 and 14 percent of those age 20-24.

In that decade, Cleveland also lost 11 big-business headquarters, the only top-20 American city to lose more than one. To those, now add TRW.

Pittsburgh shares many of Cleveland's problems. But it has been working hard to exploit its arts potential, reinventing its downtown and culture to attract entrepreneurs, consumers and visitors. In 2000, Pittsburgh drew nearly 2 million more tourists than Cleveland did in the same year.

That growth could happen here, too. But experience in other cities shows that Cleveland's government and businesses must stop thinking of the arts as a money pit and acknowledge the important roles - including the economic role - they play in the success of a community.

Consider the difference: The city of Seattle spends over $7 million on the arts. Cleveland spends less than $100,000.

"We'll all have to step up" to help champion culture, said City Councilman Joe Cimperman. "No one is going to support public funding for the arts unless they realize it's in their best interests."

The arts could do more than just help increase business.

They are crucial to a creative loosening up, a new adventurousness that Cleveland must embrace to enrich its quality of life and raise its national profile. But that change in mindset should make the city more attractive to high-tech businesses and their work forces.

How can change begin? Interviews over two months with more than 65 people in the arts, government, education and business in Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Seattle suggest four strategies that could help the arts help Cleveland:

Create an arts council. A council would give louder public voice to arts concerns, encourage teamwork and oversee programs that aid the arts.

Plan the city. Involving artists and designers in shaping Cleveland's physical structure would make the city more efficient, beautiful, exciting and unified.

Develop varied money sources. The arts' financial health depends on it.

Educate the public. Telling the world about Cleveland's arts would boost tourism. Schooling our children in the arts would help them become confident people and capable workers, as well as enthusiastic, supportive audiences.

Eventually, beautified waterfronts and special cold-weather events may add to Cleveland's year-round appeal. But Cleveland doesn't have to have travelogue vistas to change its future.

"Our mountains, our golden beaches are the arts community," said Thomas Schorgl, president of the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture.

Arts organizations here already generate more than $1 billion in economic activity, a CPAC study found. They employ 3,700 full-time workers and create lucrative free-lance work in electronic media that could turn into lasting jobs.

The value of cultural activity in boosting opportunity and quality of life has become so widely accepted that the National Governors Association Center issued a brief called "The Impact of Arts Education on Workforce Preparation." It noted that the arts help students develop the skills needed to compete for new knowledge-based jobs.

Such facts mean that Cleveland is overdue for an attitude change - and across the area, the arts stand ready for this revolution. Outfitted with impact studies, master plans and a budding willingness to work together, Cleveland's arts groups want to be welcomed into the civic planning process already shared by government and business.

The Arts Summit, hosted by Cleveland City Council on May 15, may have been the signal that cultural groups hoped for.

"If not now, then maybe never," said Kathleen Cerveny, senior program officer of the Cleveland Foundation.

Cleveland had better hope it's now. And if it is, there are decisions to be made.

"Is this community going to spend its money on areas that have a future or spend it on industries that don't?" said Chris Carmody, head of Cleveland's film commission.

How Clevelanders answer that question and others will determine what tools the arts and the community will have to fix up Cleveland. The process represents an important test of the city's ability to reimagine itself.

"This city has to think big," said Peter Hackett, Cleveland Play House artistic director. "They have to say, 'We can do this.' "

A council for the arts

Walter Grodzik knows Seattle. He has spent the last few years earning his doctorate in theater at the University of Washington and, at 47, has found his first university teaching job.

But he was born and raised a Clevelander.

Grodzik used to lead a cutting-edge, Tremont-area stage company called the Working Theatre. It folded in the mid-1990s after three seasons, in spite of a niche audience and success with critics, because it didn't have enough money to pay Grodzik a salary. With no money to live on, Grodzik was forced to close the company.

"If I could have hung on to that poverty level for three more years, the Working Theatre would be an established theater now. But how was I going to live?" he said.

Foundations generally don't provide start-up money for small groups, choosing instead to support projects undertaken by more established institutions.

But if Cleveland had had an arts council, Grodzik and the Working Theatre might still be around.

Arts councils can provide that kind of start-up service, said CPAC's Schorgl. To support what he calls the "whole ecosystem" of arts groups, many councils use money from government budgets or special tax levies to give grants or commission works.

But even when a council doesn't offer grants, it acts as a crucial resource center, providing information and programs to help artists function better professionally. Most important, it speaks for the arts with a voice of authority.

That public voice is the first thing Cleveland must get if it wants its arts industry to prosper. If that happens, the arts also may get the seat they deserve at the planning table along with business and government.

They have one in Seattle, thanks to city and county arts commissions and the Corporate Council for the Arts, which raises corporate money for arts groups and acts as a liaison between the arts and business communities.

Having those connections has helped the arts immensely, said Corporate Council President Peter Donnelly.

"We're at the table when civic discussions are happening," Don nelly said. "When you have an orga nization like this, your calls get an swered."

Cleveland isn't there yet, but it has the seeds of an arts council.

Five years ago, the Cleveland and Gund foundations helped set up CPAC, commis sioning it to do an economic-impact study and develop a plan for cultural growth. The study found that Northeast Ohio arts generated $1.3 billion in business in 1997. CPAC's arts-growth plan was completed two years ago.

Though the region has yet to act on most of the plan's findings, the research done by CPAC has quietly turned it into the local center for arts information, a role enhanced by the Arts Summit, which Schorgl and his staff helped organize.

But CPAC is not an official arts council, and its relationship with the public and the arts community remains uncertain.

No local government has given the organization its imprimatur, although Cleveland Mayor Jane Campbell sees it, rather than a city cultural department, as the answer to the arts' needs.

"It seems to me that that's the vehicle we should use," she said of Schorgl's organization. "It doesn't make sense to re-create the same thing over again."

If an official council doesn't materialize soon, Cleveland's arts groups could try to put aside their rivalries and follow Pittsburgh's example by banding together to serve their own interests.

The recently formed Greater Pittsburgh Arts Alliance is an organization of, by and for that city's arts groups and represents a great step forward in collaboration.

The competition among those groups used to be sharp. In fact, Pittsburgh was once like Cleveland, where "there is a real territorial sense," said Larry Nehring, Cleveland Shakespeare Festival artistic director.

"But I think it's because the resources haven't been there, so when someone gets a piece of the pie, they fight to keep it," he said.

Working together better could make a difference to Cleveland's arts groups. Much of Seattle's arts success can be traced back decades to a simple sharing of the Seattle Repertory Theatre's mailing list with a new stage group called ACT.

"It was the best thing we ever did," said Donnelly, who was artistic director of Seattle Rep at the time. "Collaboration and cooperation were really the key to it all."

Planning Cleveland

Certainly, collaboration has been the key to the remarkable way Seattle looks. The city was born with the luck of natural beauty. But it's the way Seattle has used design and art to enhance nature and shape its man-made environment that makes the city so exuberantly attractive.

A place of constant drizzle, Seattle used to be a hardscrabble, unlovely town. Now, with government, business and the arts collaborating, most of its waterfront is designed for beauty and public use. Renovation has reclaimed many districts. People live downtown in linked neighborhoods.

Handsome storefronts, lively clubs and inviting plazas draw people into the streets, creating a festive atmosphere.

There's a sense of something happening.

Art helped change Seattle - not just indoor art, but also outdoor art. Since the World's Fair, public art and design have become such a part of Seattle life that they seem to have soaked into the collective consciousness along with the rain.

"The focus of the program has been on how art creates community," said Barbara Goldstein, director of the Seattle Arts Commission's public-art program.

With 1 percent of every Seattle public construction budget going to artwork, people have come to expect that art.

"It's physically become ingrained in the way the city does work," Goldstein said.

Art is everywhere - under highway overpasses, embedded in sidewalks. The inventive work and the open-mindedness it represents act like a magnet, attracting free-spirited people who have flocked to Seattle to work. The average age there is 33.

The way Seattle looks says everything about what kind of city it is. What does Cleveland's appearance say? Alas:

The West Side? "It's your worst acid trip of urban design over the last 20 years," said James Levin, executive director of Cleveland Public Theatre.

Cleveland State University? "1970s early-county-jail style," said CSU President Michael Schwartz.

The heart of the city? "That sense of place that needs to occur in downtown . . . we don't have much of that here," said Playhouse Square Foundation CEO Art Falco.

Throughout Cleveland, physically and psychologically, "there's just some spark that's not here," said theater artist Rasheryl McCreary.

Without that vibrancy, Cleveland may decline.

In the May issue of the Washington Monthly, economic expert Richard Florida wrote that industrial cities such as Cleveland cling to old-style conformist attitudes, causing creative people to go elsewhere.

"Places that succeed in attracting and retaining creative class people prosper; those that fail, don't," he said.

Florida, professor of regional economic development at Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon University, defines "creative class" as the growing group of educated, highly paid original thinkers who work in a range of fields.

These people value imagination and diversity, and they like the outdoors, nightlife, unique architecture and arts, he said.

Popular cities are teeming with these people. Cleveland is losing them.

Florida maintains that Cleveland, Pittsburgh and like cities have made a mistake in spending millions on sports stadiums, which he says the creative class doesn't care about, and attracting chain stores, which he says they don't patronize.

Instead, these cities should foster arts, recreation, restored neighborhoods and tolerance.

Cleveland actually has tried to foster the arts in terms of buildings, from Playhouse Square's restored theaters to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum's I.M. Pei-designed structure.

These places do draw tourists. But the area needs more than isolated ventures to create a lasting buzz. It's what goes on in and around the buildings that makes the difference.

The street scene is important. Unfortunately, said former Great Lakes Theater Festival artistic director James Bundy, "You can go to a show in Playhouse Square and never set foot on a sidewalk in Cleveland" because of the attached parking garage.

Yet there's hope for the city. Lillian Kuri, director of Cleveland Public Art, said she thinks Cleveland needs a Seattle-style, percent-for-art plan for public construction.

She hopes to present legislation to City Council at the first of the year. City planner Chris Ronayne believes affordable housing and improvements to Euclid Avenue will help, too.

He also thinks that one of the best things his office can do is get out of the way.

"This is sort of a heavy-regulation town. People say no a lot," he said. "Let people say yes. We need to let more happen, and that's just changing the code."

Ronayne thinks the answer lies in better neighborhoods. So does James Levin, who has teamed his Cleveland Public Theatre with nearby arts groups and the Detroit-Shoreway Community Development Organization to form the West Side Arts Consortium of Cleveland. Besides lobbying for state money to improve facilities, the members will coordinate events and marketing plans to woo businesses and residents to the neighborhood.

Jeff Ramsey, assistant director of the Detroit-Shoreway Community Development Organization, said the arts may already have helped. Since 1990, Detroit-Shoreway has enjoyed more than $20 million in new business investments and, from 1998 to 2000, the third-highest increase in residential property values in Cuyahoga County.

Combining business, residential and recreational activities in a city builds population density and energy. But Cleveland has few mixed-use neighborhoods.

"This has a huge impact on everything, because the film and arts businesses are collaborative," said the film commission's Carmody. "If you can't find an easy opportunity to get together with like interests and businesses, then you are drawn to cities" that have that.

Cleveland's new live-work ordinance will help. It allows abandoned buildings, such as the old Tower Press building on Superior Avenue downtown, to be renovated as affordable places for artists to rent both apartments and studio work space.

But the Seattle-area King County Arts Commission had an even bigger idea for Cleveland: "Do something original," said manager Jim Kelly. "Build the first zone that combines the creativity of the high-tech sector with the creativity of the arts sector."

And build it between University Circle and downtown to connect two city centers with a hotbed of technological, residential and recreational activity, Kelly said.

"You want to be 21st-century- �friendly," he said.

Money sources

An arts council, good civic design and teamwork could aid Cleveland, sources say. But when it comes to carrying out ideas, nothing helps like money.

"The issue of money is not new," said Thomas Morris, executive director of the Cleveland Orchestra. "Cleveland stands rather uniquely in not having any city support for the arts."

Cleveland's poor public sup- �port for culture becomes a larger sore point for arts groups the longer it goes unaddressed. It's not just the money: Public funding represents a vote of confidence that the arts industry can't seem to get from its hometown.

Both the approval and the money are wanted.

Because Cleveland has a history of giving by foundations, corporations and individuals, government here has not filled the arts-funding role that governments in other cities have filled.

Private sources remain vital. But by themselves, they can no longer answer the rising costs of the arts. Around the nation, the arts have discovered that their security and survival demand a three-way support system of earned income, private money and public support.

"We don't have a tripod here," said the Cleveland Foundation's Cerveny. "We have two legs, and we're teetering."

In Seattle, the arts commission is a city department with an annual operating budget of $3 million from 20 percent of an admissions tax and a $2 million capital budget for building projects paid by the city's percent-for-art program in public construction. Pittsburgh arts are supported by a share of a regional 1 percent sales tax that brings them about $7 million annually, mainly in grants for operating expenses.

In both cities, public money has made a big difference.

"That has probably been one of the most important things that has happened for the Pittsburgh-Allegheny County community," said Janet Sarbaugh, arts program director of the Heinz Foundation.

In Cleveland, almost no public money goes to the arts. The rock hall gets 1.5 percent of the county bed tax. The remaining 98.5 percent, about $2.6 million, goes to the Convention & Visitors Bureau of Greater Cleveland.

The film commission gets some money from the city economic-development department and from Cuyahoga County. The county also gives to Playhouse Square for building restoration and to the Cleveland Orchestra for its annual Fourth of July concert in Public Square. And that's pretty much it.

The arts get no business incentives, such as low-interest loans, either, even though - unlike regular business people who work for their own enrichment - the leaders of not-for-profit arts groups aren't trying to get wealthy. They're trying to provide what they see as an essential service. They don't want to starve doing it, yet even an arts group with a respectable $1.2 million annual budget can't offer its employees an enticing wage.

"We're struggling here in our 19th year as much as we were in our fourth year," said Cleveland Public Theatre's Levin. "The highest salary at CPT is $52,000 a year. The lowest is $16,000, which is basically poverty level."

Does the city of Cleveland recognize the arts as an economic force to be nurtured? Dennis Eckart, president and CEO of the Greater Cleveland Growth Association, thinks not. "We're not thinking about that [age] 18-25 market," he said. "We're really hot on that 55-70 market."

The Cleveland Institute of Art does have young people and the city's future in mind. In 2000, the art institute created a department called T.I.M.E. (Technology and Integrated Media Environment) to educate artists in cutting-edge electronic technologies. The idea is not just to train artists, but also to create an industry by offering student services to businesses that need products or Web sites designed.

T.I.M.E. Department Chairman Jurgen Faust said he has seen the economic success of such a high-tech program in Karlsruhe, Germany. And so far, the T.I.M.E. business-resource program is working in Cleveland, he said.

"We started the program two years ago, and [already] I don't have enough students to answer the requests," Faust said.

Still, Cleveland's young, talented people continue to drift away. Even arts groups figure into the job problem.

Without enough theaters hiring local actors, for instance, many performers end up having to leave.

Midsized organizations tend to hire the most local talent. They also produce most of the unique, locally created work that makes a place appealing to the creative class. Disturbingly, as a 1999 RAND Corp. report on the performing arts showed, it's the midsized groups that are in the most trouble in America - companies the size of the Great Lakes Theater Festival and CPT that often lack good facilities and endowments.

Cities can't afford to lose them. And Cleveland already has lost its ballet company.

"We accept undercapitalized arts organizations in a way we would never accept undercapitalized businesses. And then you get marginal performance from them," said Bundy, who left Great Lakes Theater Festival this month to head the Yale School of Drama.

What Cleveland needs is a public funding system, he said. But the prospect for that isn't rosy.

"I don't want everyone to get their hopes pinned on the city," said Mayor Campbell, noting the city's shrunken budget.

She said that the city may be able to help the arts in other ways, such as work force investment programs.

Despite that advice, many are willing to push to get public funding for the arts. To succeed, they'll have to help the public understand the good that the arts do.

"The first thing we have to do is wake people up to what's already here," Councilman Cimperman said.

Educating the public

How much are we doing now to promote Cleveland's arts?

At the Seattle airport recently, a ticket agent asked a traveler's destination. When the agent heard "Cleveland," she smiled sympathetically and said, "Like that's really where you wanted to go, right?"

If the rest of America still thinks of Cleveland as a chore, then the answer to the promotion question must be, "Not nearly enough."

As Karamu House director Gerry McClamy said, Cleveland is "the biggest arts-and-culture secret in the country."

The Convention & Visitors Bureau of Greater Cleveland is trying to get the word out. It sends materials marketing cultural events to other cities and shares a promotional Web site, ArtsinOhio.com, with Cincinnati and Columbus.

But Cleveland doesn't have a special office of cultural tourism within its bureau, as do Pittsburgh and Seattle. David Nolan, president of the Convention & Visitors Bureau, bristled at the idea of creating a cultural tourism office, asking why anyone would assume that it's the bureau's job to market the arts.

"The worst thing we could do" is to create a cultural tourism office because others have it, without doing a study first, he said.

However it's done, marketing the arts to tourists is vital. So is marketing them to Greater Clevelanders, as arts organizations need a broad base of community support to thrive.

But no information-sharing investment has a better return than the one Cleveland and its cultural community can make in the arts education of children.

Participation and instruction in the arts improve children's grades, test scores and attitudes. A study by the Arts Education Partnership and the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities found that all children, especially disadvantaged children, perform better in school when the arts are included in their curricula.

No one has to convince Barbara Byrd-Bennett of that. The head of Cleveland's schools has begun restoring arts programs that, as in other districts nationwide, had been sacrificed to budget cuts. Under her stewardship, the schools' central arts fund has grown from $100,000 in 1999-2000 to $1 million in 2001-02.

It isn't the test scores she cares about most, though. It's what the arts can do for kids as people. Without the arts, "we just don't feel good about ourselves," she said.

Bill Wade learned that first hand. After dancing here professionally for six years during the '80s, he was offered a teaching job at the Cleveland School of the Arts.

At first, he taught movement to boys in grades four through six. But one day after school, when he was practicing his dancing, he looked up to find some high school boys from his homeroom watching him. Wade invited them in.

"The next thing I know, they're behind me, trying to learn this stuff," he said. "Some of these guys were the troublemakers."

With the principal's blessing, Wade started meeting them once a week to work on "guy energy" dance. After a while, an administrator pulled him aside. "She said, 'You know, these boys' grades are starting to come up.' "

The school group, later named The YARD (Youth at Risk Dancing), has gone on to great success, including recognition from the White House for its positive effect on inner-city students.

Dance works because kids need to learn in ways that jibe with their own tastes and impulses, including their need for physical activity, Wade said.

"You open up the modern-dance world to them, and it transforms them from the inside out," he said.

That's the same way in which Cleveland needs to be transformed from a city trapped by its past to one that embraces something new and better. If people here have the will to help, the arts have the value, economic power and energy to bring about that change.

"Is it going to be difficult? Is it going to be scary? Sure," said CPAC's Schorgl. "Is it doable? Yes."