The Slovak Cultural Garden covers three acres across two levels, stretching from East Boulevard to Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. At its heart is a sandstone terrace that opens onto an oval-shaped lawn. The garden was built with support from the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression.
Slovaks began immigrating to Cleveland in the late 1870s, first settling around E. 9th Street near the Cuyahoga River. Because modern Slovakia was established in 1993, many earlier immigrants were identified by the countries that governed the region at the time (Austria-Hungary before World War I and Czechoslovakia after). By 1918, an estimated 35,000 Slovak immigrants lived in Cleveland, growing to about 48,000 in Greater Cleveland by 1970.