Join the Federation of India Communities Association this Saturday, October 2, at 5 PM, in the India Community Center, 12412 Cedar Road, Cleveland Heights; near Fairmount Blvd intersection.  Parking in Firestone lot nextdoor as well as on adjacent side streets and in the city parking lots across the street and behind the commercial buildings.

Speaker is the renown Rev. Marvin McMickle of the influential Antioch Baptist Church in Cleveland.

Additionally, a new program to support peace, person by person, will be introduced.  No more fitting a location to do this than next to Gandhi’s statue.

On Saturday, September 25, 2010, 5:00  PM, there will be a brief dedication of the newly installed bust of Czech female novelist Bozena Nemcova.  Free parking is readily available along East Blvd at the Garden’s site: 880 East Blvd.

With the return of Bozena Nemcova, the existing and original bust of composer Bedrich Smetana was returned to its original position atop the landmark wall and frieze depicting the migration of Czechs from their homeland to the United States.  Future restoration will bring back busts of educator and Sokol Gynastic societies organizer, Dr. Miroslav Tyrs, and Jan E. Purkyne, famed physiologist.

Besides the epic frieze and its four busts, the Czech Garden is noted for its statues of Thomas Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, and Jan Amos Komensky, an early (1600’s) champion of universal education. His book, Orbis Pictus, was the first to use pictures in children’s education, which he argued began in the earliest days of childhood.

Around the expansive oval drive of the Czech Garden, there are four more busts celebrating Frantisek Palacky, a historian and statesman, Anton Dvorak, the composer of the well-known “New World Symphony,” the Reverend Jendrich Simon Baar, a priest and novelist, and Karel Havlicek, writer, journalist,politician and liberal nationalist who favored universal suffrage, when few fellow liberals did, and wrote about the tougher aspects of nationalism such as economics.

The total of 8 busts (two missing) and two statues is unique in the Cultural Gardens, as is the new solar powered lighting system for the statues.

The Center for Public History + Digital Humanities (which developed and maintains www.culturalgardens.org) is very proud to announce that on September 25th, at Cleveland’s Ingenuity Festival, we will be unveiling Mobile History Cleveland, an iPhone/iPad application that allows users to capture Cleveland’s history while walking, biking, or driving the city. Complete with oral histories, images, and text stories, it will be a phenomenal tour for teaching & learning about the city’s rich history. EVEN BETTER, we will include a brief walking tour of the Cultural Gardens that we will flesh out further this autumn. Indeed, imagine your next walk through the Gardens will be informed by oral history, photographs, and stories. Over the next several months, as we explore user experiences and understand this new platform better, as well as work to extend it from iPhones to Android, which will allow us reach more than half of all smartphone users.

During the winter, we will work to build the tour of the Gardens in collaboration with interested delegations from Federation.  By next spring, EVERY visitor to the Gardens with a smartphone will have a rich array of multimedia history available to them. We hope that you will join us in getting excited about these tours and help us make them a richer community resource.

Speaking of technology and design, we are updating the design of culturalgardens.org.  Over the next month, at the request of many of you, as well as Bill Jones, we are revamping the site. We are making the content, especially photographs, more legible and easier to use. This is important for our users, whose profile differs from many folks using the web. Our readers tend to be older, somewhat less web savvy, but dedicated Internet users.  We appreciate your feedback and will continue to welcome it and incorporate it into the site. Every day, more than 100 people from all over the world come here to learn about the Gardens. We want to enhance that experience as best we can.

Finally, I should note that we are, as ever, indebted to our friend Bill Jones who uses this space to promote the Cultural Gardens and does a brilliant job at it. He is one of the best bloggers anywhere in the city.

The frequent, clean-up activities of the Irish Cultural Garden’s volunteer maintenance crew, supervised by Char Crowley, continues to make a big impact on the Garden.  The results are one of the most attractive  Gardens in the 26 Garden chain as well as an inspiration to all of the groups active in maintaining each of the 26 Cultural Gardens.  Here’s a photo of the folks who volunteered in the week prior to September 19’s One World Day.

September 11 Irish Garden Clean-up Crew