There’s a rumor that the Cleveland Museum of Art may be re-opening next month but we can’t find this on their website, so consider it just a rumor, OK?
But when it closed on March 14, that wasn’t the first time it shut its doors to the public. Just two years after its triumphant 1916 opening (which it celebrated four years ago with multiple events including a Cleveland Orchestra concert in front of its south entrance overlooking the lagoon), it closed for three weeks in the fall of 2018 during the Spanish flu epidemic.
CMA’s Donor and Member Communications Manager Bentley Boyd has written an article on its blog, talking about that first closure, at a time when Cleveland had twice the population it has now but had only 1,000 hospital beds.
“The virus hit a city that had no Cleveland Clinic yet, and it was a time when not every American doctor believed in germ theory,” writes Boyd. “A lack of information also hampered action against the virus: wartime censors blocked early reports of the virus’s spread in Europe in overcrowded and unclean military camps.”
Soldiers returning from those camps that fall brought the disease back to the U.S. and by late September quarantines had begun. Cleveland mayor Harry Davis ordered churches, night schools, dance halls and theaters closed on October 10, with museums, libraries, bowling alleys and pool halls shortly thereafter. Boyd tells us how the museum, then as now, continued its work behind the scenes. Even then, he tells us, there was pressure to reopen, and officials caved, causing a wave of deaths into 1919, with Cleveland experiencing a higher death rate than New York City or Chicago.
Read more, including how the museum bounced back from its closure and the impact of opening in the middle of a major war, here.
cma-thinker/the-first-time-the-museum-closed
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