The City Club of Cleveland announced Monday that it will be moving from its current space on the second floor at 850 Euclid Avenue to the first floor of a former retail building at 1317 Euclid Avenue, fronting Playhouse Square.
Founded in 1912, the City Club of Cleveland is one of the country’s oldest free speech forums, and has held public conversations and debates for the last 110 years.
The retail architecture of the new space, such as the large windows at the front of the building, will help further the City Club's mission, according to the organization's Chief Executive Officer Dan Moulthrop.
“Being on first, on the first floor in a space that has all of these glass windows to me speaks to the possibilities of access for the entire community and the possibilities of transparency and conversation,” he said.
An important feature of the new location, Moulthrop said, is its street-level access.
“We're going to be creating kind of this retail, civic engagement experience,” he said. “This opportunity to step right off the sidewalk or right off the HealthLine and right into civic dialog, right into this space of convening conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.”
The City Club will take advantage of these features, Moulthrop said, and use them to make a statement on the importance of community engagement and the accessibility residents have to public discourse.
“These civic conversations really, truly do belong to everybody. They are not something that's just for the elite … they're not exclusive,” he said. “We are going to strive to ensure that this place communicates a sense of belonging to everybody in our community.”
The building will require some renovations, Moulthrop said, which the City Club is raising funds for now. They plan to include an auditorium that will hold 330 people at banquet-style seating, a lobby right off the entrance and the technology required for digital distribution of the forums.
The City Club began looking for a new space in Playhouse Square before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the pandemic halted that process, Moulthrop said it was fairly easy to pick up where they left off.
“Playhouse Square has been a partner on all sorts of things for us and for me and … parts of other organizations that I work with,” he said, “so it wasn't hard … to restart those conversations.”
The 850 Euclid Avenue space is the City Club’s fifth building, and has been the free speech forum’s home for the last four decades. Though the space has served them well, Moulthrop said he is looking forward to the City Club’s future.
“It has been a tremendously important home for us, and Playhouse Square is going to be an excellent home for us as well,” he said. “We always want to celebrate our past, and we will always celebrate our past, and look forward to creating the best future that we can.”
Editor's note: Ideastream Public Media is a broadcast partner of the City Club.
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