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A bar chart shows that Cleveland's per capita cultural attendance in 2010 was 87 percent of the level in New York City.

(Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - Of all the factors behind the landslide Nov. 3 victory of Issue 8, which renewed Cuyahoga County's 10-year cigarette tax for the arts, the large size of the local arts audience may be one of the biggest.

Measuring the scale of that audience and comparing it to those of other cities precisely can be difficult, but a new analysis by The Plain Dealer shows that Greater Cleveland truly does bat in the big leagues in arts attendance.

A table shows in detail The Plain Dealer's analysis of Cultural Data Project statistics comparing 11 U.S. cities in per capita cultural attendance.

Using figures compiled by the Philadelphia-based Cultural Data Project on attendance at cultural events in 11 U.S. cities in 2010, The Plain Dealer found that, on a per capita basis, Greater Cleveland performs more like Boston and San Francisco than Columbus or Cincinnati.

The analysis also showed that Greater Cleveland has 87 percent of New York's per capita participation in cultural activities.

To arrive at the comparison, The Plain Dealer used self-reported attendance figures gathered by the Cultural Data Project from representative samples of cultural organizations in the 11 cities, and divided those figures by the population living within a 30-mile radius of the center of each metro.

According to that yardstick, Cleveland ranked fifth in cultural attendance among the 11 cities, which included New York, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Cleveland ranked just behind Boston, which had 87.35 percent of New York's cultural participation, and higher than San Francisco, which had 83.2 percent.

In other words, even though Cleveland is a medium-sized inland city in the industrial Great Lakes, it behaves culturally like bigger coastal cities with far greater levels of tourism.

That's striking in a county that ranks second nationally in population loss after Wayne County, Michigan.

Cleveland also outperformed cities within its region, including Columbus, which had 54 percent of New York's level of cultural activity in 2010, and Cincinnati, which had 30.2 percent.

Notably, Pittsburgh achieved a rate of cultural attendance in 2010 that was 94.4 percent of the New York level and 2 percent higher than Philadelphia's.

Nonprofit arts and cultural organizations supported by Cuyahoga Arts and Culture grants achieved attendance twice that of Cleveland's three big sports teams in 2014. Sources: Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, ESPN, baseball-reference.com

The findings buttress a recent comparison also made by The Plain Dealer showing that nonprofit cultural organizations funded through Cuyahoga County's cigarette tax generated 2.5 times more attendance in 2014 than Cleveland's three major league sports teams.

That comparison also drew on statistics compiled by the Cultural Data Project and shared through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, the agency that distributes the cigarette tax proceeds.

The figures showed that in 2014, physical attendance at nonprofit cultural events presented by organizations receiving county funding was 6.9 million.

And that figure, The Plain Dealer found, was 2.5 times more than the total attendance for the Indians, Cavaliers and Browns in 2014, which reached 2.7 million.

Arts advocates have cited such statistics as among the possible reasons for the 75.2 percent margin of victory for the renewal of Cuyahoga County's 30-cents-a-pack tax on cigarettes on Nov. 3.

And they've also opined that the arts are part of Northeast Ohio's civic DNA.

The statistics comparing arts attendance in Cleveland with those of 10 other U.S. cities appear to support such claims.

The Cultural Data Project, established in 2004 by the Pew Charitable Trusts, is the leading private, nonprofit organization collecting data on cultural organizations in the United States.

The project, which will rebrand itself as DataArts in January, gathers standardized figures on attendance, employment, payrolls, earned and contributed income, and other information from more than 14,000 cultural organizations in 12 states and the District of Columbia. And it's expanding its reach.

A map prepared for Cuyahoga Arts and Culture by Cleveland State University shows how Cleveland voters voted in various county council districts on Nov. 3 on Issue 8, which renewed the county's cigarette tax for arts and culture.

The project collects data through agreements with funders including private foundations and state and local arts agencies.

The funders agree to require grant recipients to fill out lengthy, standardized annual reports for the Cultural Data Project.

The resulting data can then be used for comparisons among cultural sectors in different metro areas.

To arrive as closely as possible at an apples-to-apples comparison in its 11-city analysis, the newspaper omitted attendance statistics for libraries and zoos from other cities, because the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo and the Cleveland Public Library are not included in the Cleveland statistics.

A crowd gathered on the downtown Mall on July 1 to hear the Cleveland Orchestra performs the "Star-Spangled Spectacular," one of the free annual events provided by cultural organizations receiving operating support through Cuyahoga County's cigarette tax for arts and culture.

Also, to arrive at an apples-to-apples comparison of population levels, the Cultural Data Project provided statistics on the number of residents within a 30-mile radius of the downtowns in the 11 cities, a more uniform way to compare population than the Metropolitan Statistical Area numbers usually used by researchers.

The Plain Dealer agreed to use only aggregated data from the Cultural Data Project, and not to cite attendance statistics for individual organizations.

It's also clear from annual reports and other sources, however, that major contributors to the attendance statistics include large organizations such as Playhouse Square, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cleveland Orchestra and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

Smaller organizations add geographic reach and diversity in programming to an arts calendar that, on any given day, includes more activity than any single person could attend.

The attendance statistics showed that in 2010, 119 nonprofit cultural organizations in Cleveland generated physical attendance of 6.5 million, measured by individual visits to performances, programs, exhibitions and events.

That figure, divided by the population of 2.3 million within a 30-mile radius, generated a ratio that could be compared to that of New York and the other cities in the analysis.

(If Metropolitan Statistical Area figures are used for the same comparisons, Cleveland surpasses all other cities in cultural attendance, and New York ranks sixth).

The overall point is that statistics gleaned through the Cultural Data Project show that while Cleveland is Browns Town and home to the Indians and Cavaliers, it is also very much an arts town.

And, as such, it's performing at a far higher level than its relatively modest size would suggest.

NOTE: The data used for the 11-city cultural attendance comparison cited in this report was provided by the Cultural Data Project, which will become DataArts effective January 2016. Any interpretation of the data is the view of The Plain Dealer. For more information on the Cultural Data Project, visit www.culturaldata.org.