Severance Hall

Severance Hall is a concert hall located in the University Circle neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio. The hall has been the home of the Cleveland Orchestra since its opening on February 5, 1931. Severance Hall is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Wade Park District.HistoryPrior to the construction of Severance Hall, the Cleveland Orchestra first performed in the much smaller Grays Armory in downtown Cleveland, and then moved two miles east to the Masonic Auditorium for concerts throughout the 1920s. However, both buildings were used by other groups and for a variety of different kinds of presentations. Most famously, the Orchestra twice had to arrange alternative concert locations from Grays Armory on short notice due to a scheduling conflict with a poultry exhibition. The Orchestra's administration came to recognize the advantages that having its own hall could bring to the ensemble's performances through consistent availability of such a hall for rehearsals, radio broadcasts, and other musical purposes.After much encouragement from the orchestra's founder Adella Prentiss Hughes and its then Music Director Nikolai Sokoloff, plans for Severance Hall materialized using land offered from Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University) at $1 per year and funds from public fundraising and local philanthropists. The conceiver and biggest funder of the project was industrial magnate and philanthropist John Long Severance (8 May 1863 - 16 January 1936), who donated $1 million towards development and named the hall after his recently deceased wife Elisabeth Dewitt Severance. Despite the economic difficulties of the Great Depression, construction began in 1929 and finished in 1931.