The Cleveland Foundation’s commitment to the revitalization of Cleveland’s Jazz Age theater district dates to 1973, a year after the Junior League of Cleveland, a women’s service organization, inspired by a visionary educator named Ray Shepardson, mounted a campaign to prevent two boarded-up theaters from being demolished to create parking lots. A series of grants awarded during the 1970s supported the operation of PlayhouseSquare Foundation (PSF), the public charity formed to secure the Playhouse Square theaters, and also subsidized live performances (notably, Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris) intended to draw people downtown and deepen support for the theaters’ reuse.

In 1980, the foundation made a lead grant to PSF’s first major capital campaign, a vote of confidence that helped to spur an outpouring of other contributions and funding needed to restore the Ohio, Palace and State Theatres to their former grandeur. The foundation simultaneously encouraged the city’s new ballet and opera companies and a summer Shakespeare festival to relocate to Playhouse Square.

Cleveland won an unprecedented three consecutive All-American City awards in 1986, 1987 and 1988 (when the last of the three theaters reopened), in part because of the rebirth of Playhouse Square, which by then ranked as the most ambitious theater restoration project ever undertaken in America. Having created the largest performing arts complex outside New York City, PlayhouseSquare Foundation is now able to present each year about 1,000 arts and entertainment events that draw a combined audience of one million.

In the 1990s, the Cleveland Foundation helped PSF save a fourth theater, the Allen, from demolition and contributed $750,000 in 2011 toward the theater’s remodeling into a state-of-the-art home for the Cleveland Play House. Marshaling broad-based community support, Great Lakes Theater successfully completed a $19 million campaign that renovated the last of Playhouse Square’s five historic theaters. Doors to the excitingly updated Hanna Theatre (the recipient of a significant capital grant from the Cleveland Foundation) opened in 2008.

The foundation has also been a steadfast supporter of the effort, now in its fourth decade, to redevelop the theater district itself. Its first grant to the PlayhouseSquare Foundation in 1973 underwrote a master plan for the “superblock” stretching from Carnegie and Chester Avenues between East 14th and East 18th Streets. Prepared by Cleveland architect Peter van Dijk, the plan continues to provide inspiration to this day. (The “museum of light” that van Dijk envisioned at East 14th and Euclid Avenue, for example, will soon be realized in the form of a 20-foot-tall glittering chandelier suspended over the intersection.) In addition to recognizing the intrinsic value of PSF’s dreams of attracting restaurants, hotels and shops to Playhouse Square, the foundation appreciated that a thriving theater district might spur the redevelopment of other parts of downtown. Owning and developing property would also give the PlayhouseSquare Foundation a reliable income stream.

In stretching to help PSF realize its outsized ambitions, the Cleveland Foundation built a new capacity to stimulate redevelopment efforts throughout the community. In 1977, PSF had acquired the right to purchase several key parcels in the district, including the Bulkley Building containing the Allen Theatre. With the option days away from expiring in 1982, it had become clear that a syndicate of PSF supporters would not be able to raise the purchase price. The foundation stepped forward to acquire the properties as a program-related investment. (Learn how this daring investment benefited PSF’s facilities and financial stability.)

This was only the second time the foundation had deployed principal to advance a significant redevelopment project that promised also to provide a good return on investment, but it would not be the last. When the Bulkley complex was sold in 1987, the foundation used the proceeds to create a revolving program-related investment (PRI) fund. PRI monies have since been lent at below-market rates to an array of neighborhood and downtown redevelopment projects.

Take the revival of the Hanna Building at 14th and Euclid. The office building’s proposed sale in 1999 presented PSF with the opportunity to control another potentially valuable property in the theater district. The Cleveland Foundation assembled a creative package of gap financing to help the undercapitalized PSF purchase the office building, whose occupancy had been slowly declining. Wishing to help PSF find new tenants, the foundation affirmed its satisfaction with its decision to relocate to the Hanna Building in 1984 by signing a new long-term lease. As evidenced today by the building’s busy Starbucks, market forces have been restored to the district. Indeed, a private developer is now converting the Hanna Building annex into rental apartments, realizing the last component of the vision of Playhouse Square as a desirable place to work, play and live.