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The culture of Akron, Ohio is an amalgamation of local features of the city, which was founded in Summit County in 1825.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(August 2009) |
The culture of Akron, Ohio is an amalgamation of local features of the city, which was founded in Summit County in 1825.
While the city originally had German roots, the influx of immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s brought Jewish, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Slovenian and Ukrainian food to the table: pastrami, pierogis, pizza, and sauerkraut balls. Today's restaurants also feature African, Asian, Middle-Eastern, and Mexican cuisine.
Urban farming is part of Akron's cultural landscape. The city has provided many places to grow food, and has also supported many new restaurants: Bricco, Cilantro, Crave, and Lockview. Independent grocery stores include Krieger's, Mustard Seed Market, and Seven Grain Market.
Akron has a longstanding claim to being the birthplace of the hamburger. [1] A "National Hamburger Festival" was held in the city annually for many years. [2]
Founded in 1922, the Akron Art Museum was vastly expanded in the early 2000s and now hosts international exhibitions along with its local collections.
Directly across the street from the museum is the small Nightlight Cinema, an independent enterprise. As Vogue describes it, the theater "focuses exclusively on locally produced movies, as well as obscure documentaries, foreign films, and first-run indie features (in other words—titles you’ve likely never heard of, and that’s the point)". [1]
The award-winning Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began in Akron as two separate companies, the Akron Beacon Journal and the German-language New Yorker Staats-Zeitung .
The city is the birthplace of Rita Dove, former Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.
Sojourner Truth gave her famous "Ain't I A Woman" speech in Akron at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in 1851.
The city is and has been home to award-winning writers David Auburn and Terry Pluto.
A former literary editor of Esquire , Adrienne Miller, came from the Akron suburbs; she later wrote the novel The Coast of Akron. [3]
The landmark Akron pizza shop Luigi's is the inspiration for the pizza shop Montoni's in the comic strip Funky Winkerbean , written by Akron native Tom Batiuk. [4]
In the Flaming Carrot Comics, Iron City, where the Carrot lives, was made similar to Akron and another working-stiff town, Pittsburgh.
Writer and illustrator Bill Watterson has also lived in the county.
Akron has been home to a wide variety of musical artists including:
In the late 1970s, following the international success of local band Devo, talent scouts combed the city. Soon, several compilation albums promoted the "Akron Sound", a multifaceted music scene led by the Waitresses and Rachel Sweet, and many artists of regional prominence including Tin Huey, Liam Sternberg, Bizarros, and Rubber City Rebels. [6] [7]
Other major rock musicians from the city are:
The city's music scene is chronicled and commemorated in the Akron Sound Museum, established in 2015. [8]
The Akron Art Museum has hosted free outdoor concerts every summer since 1984. [9]
Major venues for music in Akron include the Akron Civic Theatre, E.J. Thomas Hall, and Blossom Music Center. Residents and fans of alternative music still miss the Lime Spider, but continue to appreciate new bands and live poetry at Annabelle's and Paolo's.
The North Hill neighborhood was known for jazz during the early 1900s.
The city is home to basketball superstar LeBron James, and renamed part of its Main Street to "King James Way" in his honor. [1] The city hosts a Minor League Baseball team, the Akron RubberDucks, who play in Canal Park. The World Championship finals of Soap Box Derby are held annually at Derby Downs.
Hikers and bikers have long enjoyed the Ohio & Erie Canal Towpath Trail, which runs through Akron and on to Cleveland. [1]
Cleveland, officially the City of Cleveland, is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located in the northeastern part of the state, it is situated along the southern shore of Lake Erie, across the U.S. maritime border with Canada, 252 miles (406 km) northeast of Cincinnati, 143 miles (230 km) northeast of Columbus, and approximately 60 miles (97 km) west of Pennsylvania.
Funk is a music genre that originated in African American communities in the mid-1960s when musicians created a rhythmic, danceable new form of music through a mixture of various music genres that were popular among African Americans in the mid-20th century. It de-emphasizes melody and chord progressions and focuses on a strong rhythmic groove of a bassline played by an electric bassist and a drum part played by a percussionist, often at slower tempos than other popular music. Funk typically consists of a complex percussive groove with rhythm instruments playing interlocking grooves that create a "hypnotic" and "danceable" feel. Funk uses the same richly colored extended chords found in bebop jazz, such as minor chords with added sevenths and elevenths, or dominant seventh chords with altered ninths and thirteenths.
Kent State University (KSU) is a public research university in Kent, Ohio. The university also includes seven regional campuses in Northeast Ohio and additional facilities in the region and internationally. Regional campuses are located in Ashtabula, Burton, East Liverpool, Jackson Township, New Philadelphia, Salem, and Warren, Ohio, with additional facilities in Cleveland, Independence, and Twinsburg, Ohio, New York City, and Florence, Italy.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (RRHOF), sometimes simply referred to as the Rock Hall, is a museum and hall of fame located in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, United States, on the shore of Lake Erie. The museum documents the history of rock music and the artists, producers, engineers, and other notable figures and personnel who have influenced its development.
Akron is the fifth-largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Summit County. It is located on the western edge of the Glaciated Allegheny Plateau, about 40 miles (64 km) south of downtown Cleveland. At the 2020 census, the city proper had a total population of 190,469, making it the 125th largest city in the United States. The Akron metropolitan area, covering Summit and Portage counties, had an estimated population of 703,505.
Albert James "Alan" Freed was an American disc jockey. He also produced and promoted large traveling concerts with various acts, helping to spread the importance of rock and roll music throughout North America.
Timothy S. "Ripper" Owens is an American heavy metal singer who currently performs with KK's Priest, Spirits of Fire, the Three Tremors and A New Revenge. He first gained attention as the lead singer of Judas Priest and then Iced Earth. He took the nickname "Ripper" from the Judas Priest song "The Ripper" during his time in the tribute band British Steel.
Funky Winkerbean was an American comic strip by Tom Batiuk. Distributed by North America Syndicate, a division of King Features Syndicate, it appeared in more than 400 newspapers worldwide.
Michael Stanley was an American singer-songwriter, musician, radio and television personality. Both as a solo artist and with the Michael Stanley Band (MSB), his brand of heartland rock was popular in Cleveland, Ohio, and around the American Midwest in the 1970s and 1980s.
Avon Lake High School (ALHS) is a public high school located in Avon Lake, Ohio, west of Cleveland. It serves grades 9–12. It is part of the Avon Lake City School District.
Thomas Martin Batiuk is an American comic strip creator, best known for his long-running newspaper strip Funky Winkerbean.
Ruby & the Romantics was an Akron, Ohio-based American R&B group in the 1960s, composed of Ruby Nash, George Lee, Ronald Mosely, Leroy Fann and Ed Roberts.
Emmett Peter "Sonny" Geraci ("Jer-ah-see"); November 22, 1946 – February 5, 2017) was an American singer, best known as lead singer of musical groups The Outsiders and Climax.
Human Switchboard was an American punk rock band formed in Cleveland, Ohio in 1977. According to a Rolling Stone review, Human Switchboard "was of its time — mixing Velvet Underground guitar churn, Sixties garage-rock organ, rubbery Pere Ubu-like baselines, skronky sax and athletically spazzy drumming."
The Akron, OH Metropolitan Statistical Area, sometimes referred to as Greater Akron, is defined by the United States Office of Management and Budget as an area consisting of two counties, Summit and Portage, in Northeast Ohio and anchored by the city of Akron. As of the 2020 census, the MSA had a population of 702,219. The Akron MSA is also part of the larger Cleveland–Akron–Canton, OH Combined Statistical Area, which has a population of 3,633,962 people as of the 2020 census, the largest metropolitan area in Ohio.
Daniel William McCarthy is an American composer, author, conductor, professor, and black belt martial artist. He has been Professor and Chair of Music Composition and Theory Studies at The University of Akron: School of Music and held the Theodor Dreiser Distinguished Research/Creativity Award at Indiana State University School of Music. He is co-author of "Theory for Today's Musician" with Ralph Turek, published by Routledge Francis & Taylor, NYC? His career as a conductor included serving on the conducting staff of the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, four seasons as Music Director of the Interlochen Festival Orchestra, Interlochen, Michigan, as well as conducting the University of Akron Symphony Orchestra and the Terre Haute Symphony Youth Orchestra. McCarthy, a dedicated martial artist, was promoted to 3rd Degree Black Belt in Chun Ma Tae Kwon Do in May 2012. A student of Grand Master Jeon Gyeong Ho, Akron, Ohio, he pursued additional studies in Asian Weapons, American Kenpo, and Chin Na Kung Fu with Grand Master Sifu James Adkins in Traverse City, Michigan.
The Akron Sound refers to the independent music, largely new wave and punk rock, coming out of Akron, Ohio, in the late 1970s.
William Thomas Appling was a renowned American conductor, pianist, educator and arranger. As a conductor he led the William Appling Singers & Orchestra for almost twenty-five years and conducted other choirs and musical organizations, premiering new works by many American composers. As a pianist he played under the batons of conductors including Robert Shaw, Louis Lane, and Darius Milhaud, and he was the first African American to record the complete piano music of Scott Joplin. As an educator he taught at American schools and universities including Vassar College, Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Institute of Music and Western Reserve Academy. He made a number of recordings as both conductor and pianist, and his choral arrangements have been performed and recorded by such prominent ensembles as Chanticleer, Cantus and Dale Warland Singers.