DREW'S DIME MUSEUM Frank Drew, a protégé of impresario PT Barnum, opened what may have been Cleveland’s only dime museum in 1884. Born in New York on 30 June 1852, Drew was an actor and circus performer; cousin of theater legend John Drew, Jr., and uncle of acting greats John, Ethel, and Lionel Barrymore. Drew’s father (also named Frank) was an actor who often performed at Cleveland’s Park Theater (see LYCEUM THEATER) on Public Square
Drew the Younger left the Barnum organization in 1881 to open his first dime museum in Providence, RI. Three years later he moved to Cleveland and opened Drew’s Dime Museum at 189 Superior St., just east of Bank St., around the corner from the Academy of Music. Dime museums in Columbus, OH, and Indianapolis, IN, would follow.
From the outside, Drew’s Cleveland museum was unengaging—no garish images of albinos, giants, little people, or monsters with the body of a monkey and the tail of a fish. Inside, however, the third-floor space was ever so “PT.” At various times, visitors might observe a two-headed cow, The Elastic Skin Man, The Footless Song-and-Dance Man, a troupe of Australian Boomerang Throwers, or Jo-Jo The Dog-Faced Man. Drew also featured blackface (minstrel) acts, trained animals (generally old, toothless, and tired), and a variety of entertainers from early vaudeville. Periodically, he would attract tonier crowds with plays, concerts, lectures, and other forms of what PT Barnum had once dubbed "Edutainment."
Drew closed his museum in late 1889, and became manager of the Star Theater. (opened two years earlier as the Columbia Theater and now the site of PNC Center). In 1903, he assumed management of the Cleveland’s COLONIAL THEATER (E. 9th and Superior Sts.). He later relocated to St. Petersburg, FL, dying there in 1949.
Christopher Roy