The statue of President Abraham Lincoln outside what was the Cleveland Board of Education Building. Completed in 1931, the Beaux Arts style building is undergoing renovations and will soon open as the Cleveland Drury Plaza Hotel. Lincoln overlooks Cleveland’s Mall A, at the entrance to what is actually the front of the building, though the main entrance has traditionally been on East Sixth Street.

The statue was created by Realist sculptor Max Kalish, who was born in Lithuania, emigrated with his parents when he was a young child and left school at 15 to study under a scholarship at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Three panels on the statue’s base hold the text of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. A plaque reads that the statue is a gift of the school children of Greater Cleveland, who paid for it with penny donations in 1932.

– Thomas Mulloy