A century ago, dozens of venues in and around Playhouse Square offered audiences the chance to experience vaudeville. Until the 1930s, performers crisscrossed the country offering audiences song, dance and comedy.
One of Cleveland’s most famous watering holes for vaudevillians was Otto Moser’s pub, adorned with hundreds of talent photos until it closed in 2018. Those photos eventually made their way to Cleveland State University’s library, where author Christopher Roy was volunteering. The Cleveland Heights native realized that the photos represented an undocumented vein of history, and they led to his book, “Mr. Moser’s Neighborhood.”
“Cleveland State helped me scan all 650 photos, the great majority of which were illegibly signed, sometimes dated, often blurred,” he said. “Interestingly, one of the most astonishing discoveries was how common vaudeville was in the era before talking pictures, and, to a large extent, silent pictures.”
Today Playhouse Square contains about a dozen performance spaces, hosting musicals, dance performances, stand-up comedians and public speakers. Vaudeville was a different animal, especially in an era where the city was more densely populated.
“God knows how many performers would arrive by train in … either the old Penn Station in the Flats or Union Station, which was on the lakefront,” he said. “They'd spend a week there doing what vaudevillians or performers in general do: Act, eat, sleep and party. It was a crowded place. By roughly the turn of the century, Cleveland had 800,000 people.”
Two Playhouse Square theaters, the Palace and the State, were built in the 1920s, just as vaudeville was declining at the hands of talkies, radio and the general burn out of travelling performers. Roy said that theaters also lost a significant chunk of their audience as racial issues festered after World War I.
“Diversity, tolerance, acceptance of foreigners went pretty much out of style,” he said. “Immigrants … were vaudeville's bread and butter. They went not just because it was fun entertainment, but because a very large percentage of any individual vaudeville show would not require an understanding of the English language. You could see an animal act, you could see a juggler, even a ventriloquist or a singer or a dancer. You don't need to speak English to enjoy somebody dancing.”
Cleveland had something the other cities didn’t: Otto Moser, who opened his pub in 1893 on East 4th Street.
“I'm inclined to think that it was [Moser’s] choice to hang the pictures that, historically speaking, differentiated his pub from hundreds and hundreds of others,” Roy said. “Directly across East 4th was Cleveland's most important vaudeville theater, the Euclid Avenue Opera House, which was just a poster child for financial gluttony: gold filigree, marble floors, gorgeous chandeliers, velvet seats. There is reputed to be, or to have been, a tunnel that ran underneath the Euclid Avenue Opera House and came up in Otto Moser's basement.”
The restaurant and its menu of basic pub food and heavy beer eventually moved to Playhouse Square, closing in 2018. Today, Moser’s legacy lives on with some of the photos displayed in Republic, which took over Moser’s space.
“He was a crotchety, jowly German who, in all likelihood, had no particular affinity for vaudeville,” Roy said. “He was, in every sense of the word, the right person in the right place at the right time.”
