What Kristen Fragassi remembers the most about the day she heard of People’s Flag of Cleveland is how unsettled she felt. Like most springs, she was in Florida. It was March 2025, and Fragassi recalls the urge to return to Ohio early.
“It was kind of like, ‘Oh, hell no,’” Fragassi said. “Once I saw they were getting a lot of media attention, I thought, ‘I’ve got a story to tell.’”
That story was of her great-great grandmother Susan Hepburn Beach, who as a 22-year-old designed Cleveland’s official city flag in 1895.
Over the past year, with the help of a small team, Fragassi has publicized the backstory of Cleveland’s official flag. She created a website. She and her team gave away 377 flags, a fifth of those to elected officials. And for the first time in two decades, Cleveland’s flag flew atop the Terminal Tower.
Fragassi’s team also last week debuted a retrospective of her great-great grandmother and the story of the flag design on the third floor of the Cleveland Public Library. The exhibit draws from 20 binders’ worth of archival material including sketches, letters, news clippings, flag variations and Hepburn’s artwork.
“This flag is historical, it’s timeless, it is relevant today just as it was back in 1895 for an industrial city,” Fragassi said, flanked by ball caps with flags on the front and tables of flag-inspired sugar cookies. “It’s a love letter to the hard-working immigrants that came to this country.”
People’s flags—those designed and voted on in unofficial elections—have popped up in recent years in cities including Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Chicago, mostly as on-the-ground cultural sidekicks to official icons flying on the flagpoles of government buildings.
The same effort played out recently in Cleveland, after a cohort of Northeast Ohioans decided the city deserved a more modern design. A competition ensued and last March 11,000 votes were cast on the finalists. The winning submission came from Shan Rodich, a graphic artist based in Aurora. The design is quite minimalist: blue cutting into red with a C encompassing a white star.
More than 2,000 People’s Flags have been sold, at $25 a piece, in the past year, its main organizer, Brian Lachman, said. A good percentage of its profits have gone to nonprofits like the Greater Cleveland Food Bank and Cleveland’s LGBT Center.
It’s a result that Lachman wants to keep centerstage. The People’s Flag isn’t meant to supercede Cleveland’s original but to act as a fresh symbol and a charitable act. Both flags, Lachman argues, can coexist.
“I think at the end of the day, it’s really up to the community and the people to what they find impactful and what they connect with,” he told Scene. “And I think that’s what we’re both kind of doing right now.”
Juan Collado Diaz, who is working with Kristen Fragassi, isn’t perturbed. Thursday’s ceremony at CPL garnered support from seven members of City Council, two City Hall officials and Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne. No proposals to make the People’s Flag official, he noted, have been filed.
Which is where Collado Diaz’s work comes into play.
“Our flag just has a PR problem,” he said, wearing a black suit with a flag pin. “The flag was not promoted. I mean, we’re literally delivering two new flags to City Hall because they’re so old and torn apart.”
And the old design? City boundaries matter, both sides acknowledged. Almost to the point that one’s zip code took precedence in their arguments over the aesthetics of the flag itself.
“This project wasn’t put together by a Clevelander,” Collado Diaz said. “It was put together by someone whose only tie to Cleveland is selling food to restaurants.” (Lachman lives in Cleveland Heights.)
Lachman shrugged his shoulders. “Cleveland pride extends past the Cleveland city limits,” he said.
At the exhibit opening on Thursday, Fragassi and her PR team walked around flag-strewn high tables as other checked out Hepburn’s artwork or Plain Dealer clippings.
One of those observers was André Cato, a 51-year-old from Glenville, and his friend Amy Jacobs. Both felt the original design, even 131 years later, was fitting enough to represent the Cleveland of today.
“Honestly, I think everyone should take pride in their city,” Jacobs, who moved to Cleveland from Boston, told Scene. “But to actually think we need to start over? I don’t know.”
And the People’s Flag?
“Man, it’s a total hack-a-thon,” Cato said nearby, laughing. “I mean, what in the Chicago Cubs is going on here?”
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Correction, June 16, 2026 6:24 pm: Scene incorrectly added Chicago to the list of cities with people's flags.
