Cleveland History Center to celebrate the Year of the Motorcycle with pair of exhibits

CLEVELAND, Ohio — If you consider yourself a motorcycle enthusiast and appreciate vintage cruisers, custom choppers and cool hogs, you’ll find plenty to gawk at when the Cleveland History Center launches “The Year of the Motorcycle” with a pair of exhibits starting in August.

The first, “A Century of the American Motorcycle,” comes from the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum in Birmingham, Alabama. The Cleveland History Center, home to the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum, describes the collection of over 30 motorcycles as an “extensive look into the technical and esthetic development of American motorcycles in particular, from the 1905 Indian Single, to the 1907 Merkel Light, on through the Twentieth Century, right up to the 2018 Motus MST.”

The exhibit will be supplemented by a series of special events including lectures, club tours and other gatherings. The show will open on August 19 and run through March 22. Tickets to the grand opening, $20-$25, are available at cletix.com.

The second exhibit, “Open Road: The Lure of Motorcycling in Ohio,” opens in April and runs into September 2022. The display, sourced from private collections and museums, will focus on Ohio’s fascination with motorcycles and include bikes made in Europe, Great Britain and Asia.

“These motorcycles represent real rarities, seldom seen by the public, some with histories involving round-the-world adventure or wheel-to-wheel competition,” the museum says in a release.

Like the earlier exhibit, the show will be accompanied by special programming.

The Cleveland History Center is located at 10825 East Blvd. in University Circle Admission ranges from $6 to $12.