Wade Park is a park in the

University Circle University Circle is a district in the neighborhood of University on the East Side of Cleveland, Ohio. One of America's densest concentrations of cultural attractions and performing arts venues, it includes such world-class institutions as the C ...

neighborhood of

Cleveland Cleveland ( ), officially the City of Cleveland, is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located in the northeastern part of the state, it is situated along the southern shore of Lake Erie, across the U.S. ...

Ohio Ohio () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Of the fifty U.S. states, it is the 34th-largest by area, and with a population of nearly 11.8 million, is the seventh-most populous and tenth-most densely populated. The sta ...

. Wade Park today largely serves as the campus for the

Cleveland Museum of Art The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is an art museum in Cleveland, Ohio, located in the Wade Park District, in the University Circle neighborhood on the city's east side. Internationally renowned for its substantial holdings of Asian and Egyptian ...

, the

Cleveland Botanical Garden The Cleveland Botanical Garden, located in the University Circle neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States. History The garden was founded in 1930 as the Garden Center of Greater Cleveland. It was the first such organization in an Amer ...

, and the

Cleveland Museum of Natural History The Cleveland Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum located approximately five miles (8 km) east of downtown Cleveland, Ohio in University Circle, a 550-acre (220 ha) concentration of educational, cultural and medical instit ...

, as well as Wade Lagoon, which faces the Museum of Art from the south end of the park. Though not technically a historical landmark itself, the park falls within the eponymous Wade Park historical district and serves as a backdrop for most of its registered buildings. The site's early owner,

Jeptha Wade Jeptha Homer Wade (August 11, 1811 – August 9, 1890) was an American industrialist, philanthropist, and one of the founding members of Western Union Telegraph. Wade was born in Romulus, New York, the youngest of nine children of Jeptha and Sara ...

, began to develop it into a park in 1872; in 1882, he donated the 63-acre plot to the city government, which later purchased additional land to expand it. As Wade had envisioned, the park became the home of an art museum in 1916 with the opening of the Cleveland Museum of Art. The park also contains the Wade Park Fine Arts Garden, where a number of sculptures from the CMA's holdings are showcased. The bulk of this collection are located between the original 1916 main entrance to the building and the lagoon. The collection includes a large cast of Auguste Rodin's ''

The Thinker ''The Thinker'' (french: Le Penseur) is a bronze sculpture by Auguste Rodin, usually placed on a stone pedestal. The work depicts a nude male figure of heroic size sitting on a rock. He is seen leaning over, his right elbow placed on his left t ...

'', which sits atop the museum's main staircase. Partially destroyed in a 1970 bombing (allegedly by The Weathermen), the statue has been left largely unrestored both because of Rodin's personal involvement in its original casting and his own willingness to exhibit damaged versions of his works during his life. Today, the damage—which is notated on the plaque mounted at the base of the statue's pedestal—has come to define the casting as unique among the more than twenty original large castings.Bruce Christman
"Twenty-Five Years After the Bomb: Maintaining Cleveland's ''The Thinker''"
''Journal of the American Institute for Conservation'' 37 (1998): no. 2, article 2 (pp. 173 to 186) Other prominent sculptures in the garden include Gaetano Trentanove's 1904 monument to the Polish expatriate and

American Revolutionary War The American Revolutionary War (April 19, 1775 – September 3, 1783), also known as the Revolutionary War or American War of Independence, was a major war of the American Revolution. Widely considered as the war that secured the independence of t ...

-hero

Tadeusz Kościuszko Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura Kościuszko ( be, Andréj Tadévuš Banavientúra Kasciúška, en, Andrew Thaddeus Bonaventure Kosciuszko; 4 or 12 February 174615 October 1817) was a Polish military engineer, statesman, and military leader who ...

; Chester Beach's 1927 ''Fountain of the Waters'', and a 1928 bronze statuary sundial by Frank Jirouch, ''Night Passing the Earth to Day'', which sits across Wade Lagoon from the museum, near the park's entrance on Euclid Avenue. Wade Park also borders two sections of the city's larger Rockefeller Park. One lies on Wade Park's northwestern border along Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. and the other directly across University Circle to the southeast on Euclid Ave.

Attractions

*The Cleveland Museum of Art - Located at the southern entrance of the park along Euclid Avenue, the museum sits behind Wade Lagoon. *The

- Located in the northwestern corner of the park *

- Founded in 1930 as the Garden Center of Greater Cleveland, the garden, which underwent an extensive makeover in 2003, is situated on East Boulevard in the northeastern portion of the park.

References

External links

{{Authority control University Circle Parks in Cleveland