The Challenge
About 3 years ago radio comedian Willie Cunningham disparaged the Cincinnati neighborhood of Over the Rhine, told listener & blogger & photographer Gordon Bombay that he was nuts to think the neighborhood could improve. Cunningham challenged Bombay (about 6:15) to go down to the area & report on what he saw. He did and reported it here. Cunningham remained silent.
3 years & 1 month later have made a bit of a difference. Now Cunningham, endorsing Hamilton County Sheriff hopeful Sean Donovan, is singing the praises of the progress being made in the neighborhood.
Now the question arises, how important is the endorsement of a guy who is pretty much the living embodiment of Krusty the Clown.

96% of My City Was Gone !

This pretty video was created for a CEOs for Cities event in Cincinnati by Lauren Edward, Andrea Sisson, Peter Ohs, Zach Beutler & Drew Klein.
It's nice ~but~ what happened to the other 96% of the city?
-----------------------
Now this is how you sell a city….

Is This the Best DAAP Can Do ?
When I heard UC art students, Steve Hilton,Joshua Smith and Jake Ogelsby, had been busted for graffiti, I thought, hey, maybe they did some good work? nope - just the typical brain dead tagging you'd expect from some dumbass kid.
sheesh....

WKRC story here

The Auburnaires - 12/30 MOTR

Iconic Cincinnati band, the Auburnaires will reassemble Friday, Dec. 30 at MOTR, 1345 Main St in triangular OTR with Los Honchos.

What do these guys have in common?
Ace Hardware, Clifton
Ace Hardware, Northside
Adrian Durbin Florist
Algin Office Equipment
Ambar India
American Apparel
American Heritage Flooring
Amol India
Antonelli Institute of Art
Apna India
Aquarius Star
Aronoff Center
Arby's
Arlin's
Baba Budan's
Bacall's
Bagel Brothers
Below Zero Lounge
Biagio's Bistro
The Blue Jay
Bruegger's Bagels
Cadillac Ranch
Campus Cyclery
Chameleon
Check Smart
Chicago Gyro
China Kitchen
Chipotle
Cincinnati Main Library
Clifton library
Clifton Natural Foods
Clifton Post office
Clifton Wines
College Hill Coffee
The Comet
Contemporary Arts Center
CVS
Darou Salam
Donato's Pizza
Ellanet
Esquire Theatre
Extreme Fashions
Good Samaritan Hospital
Goodie's Barbecue
Graeter's
Grammer's
Greg's Antiques
The Grove
Habaneros
Hamilton County Court House
Happen
Harry's Bar & Pizza
Hazel Glas
Honey
Javier's ~ or whatever it's called now
Jeff Ruby's Steakhouse
Jerusalem Restaurant
KFC/Taco Hell
Kilamanjaro
KoSho
La Rosa's
Lenhardt's
Mac's Pizza
Main Event
Mediterranean Foods
Melt
Mishiella's
Mixx
MOTR Pub
Murphy's Pub
Nada
Naru
National City Bank
Nicholson's
Northside Bar
North Side Bank & Trust
Northside library
Northside Tavern
NorthSlice
NVision
NYPD
Ohio Book Store
Ohio Check Cashers
Olive's
Park & Vine
Park Chili
Penn Station
Picnic & Pantry
PNC Bank
Proud Rooster
Richter & Phillips
Rohs Street Cafe
Schaeper's Pharmacy
Schwartz's Point
Shadeau Breads
Shake It Records
Shell Gas
Sidewinder Coffee
Sitwell's Coffee House
Skyline
Some Clothing Store in Clifton
Some Jewelry Store in Clifton
Starbucks's
Subway
Sophia's
Take the Cake
The Tax Place
Taylor Jameson
Thai Cafe
Thai Express
Tink's
Toko Baru
U.C.
White Castle

Yep, if you want a burrito, a coffee, listen to jazz, rock, bluegrass or maybe just get a master's degree - it's all available on Metro's RT 17.
~ and, yeah, I know the list isn't complete….

3CDC v. Neighborhoods ?
A recent article in SoapBox describes how some enterprising guys built up a following an Northside's Take the Cake and decided to launch out on their own with an Italian trattoria, A Tavola. With the following they had built up, they naturally went shopping for a space in Northside. 3CDC got involved & sold the new business on a space in OTR's booming Gateway Quarter.
So How do the neighborhoods of Cincinnati compete with the money & organization of a local juggernaut like 3CDC?
Sure, the neighborhoods have business associations, but they are like college student protestors compared to 3CDC's Xe. I'm all for a healthy city center and Northside needs another restaurant like it needs a hole in it's collective head but is the lopsided competition in the greater city's best interest?

The Reason We Absolutely Should NOT Build a Streetcar in Cincinnati !

The Altar of the Twelve Gods was built by hippies about 2,500 years ago & marked the center of Athens. Now it is covered by IPAS rail lines and as upgrades progress, elitist archaeologists want to pause construction to study what has been unearthed. This is expected to have a negative impact on commuting OU students.
The northern part of the proposed streetcar route has a vast network of underground temples dedicated to The Sausage Queen that were built thousands of years ago by nomadic Indo Germanic tribes and have all sorts of strange curses on them that could invite plague and worse if new tracks are laid into the roadbed.
Stop the madness NOW !

OTR in a Nutshell

Just finished Mike Morgan's Over the Rhine: When Beer Was King.
This book, in conjunction with Zane Miller's Changing Plans for America's Inner Cities: Cincinnati's Over-The-Rhine and twentieth-century urbanism will give you a real understanding of how Over the Rhine got to be what it is today & hopefully can shed some light on how to make it live again. Yeah, I know there's more books on the hood but these 2 will go a long way in familiarizing yourself with the subject. Miller's book is out of print but available at libraries & through online book stores but the prices are kinda high nowadays. Morgan's book is brand new & available from all the usual outlets. Morgan's book dedicates almost 2 pages to historic Emmert Grain.
Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners of the American has some goodies about her "Mowhawk Country Home", too.

Creepy Crap for a Halloween Weekend

Not only will you have a chance to shamble your zombie stuff at the Cincinnati Zombie Walk downtown tonight with an after party at the Mockbee, you can also pedal your zombie stuff in a Zombie Ride from Wesleyan Cemetery to Newport 10/29/10.
The Cincinnati Shakespeare Company will be staging Dracula Friday & Saturday at 7:30 & Sunday at 2.
This is the stage version John Carradine made famous.
Haunted Queen City walking tours Friaay & Saturday starting every hour from 7:30 - 9:30
Rally for Sanity Midwest Adjunct will be on Fountain Square from noon to 3PM
State of the Matter will continue in Northside from noon to 3 on Saturday.
The Enemy Within: Terror in America 1776 to Today all weekend & beyond at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center 11 - 5

Bicycle Hatred at Findlay Market

Findlay Market makes great use of their shiny bike racks by using the space for garbage cans.
ok. They have bike racks at each end of the cross shaped market. This north end bike rack was the only one that was blocked. All the racks had at least 1 bike.
still....

Queen City Gothic
My latest book report....
Queen City Gothic, by J.T. Townsend, tells the stories of a number of unsolved murders in Cincinnati going back to a series of possibly related murders of young women in Cumminsville (Northside) in the early 1900s. The stories are told in chronological order up to the last case involving several murders in 1971. The author tells each story, gives a summary & then tells the story again as a sort of dramatization. I am only reading the stories. I am not thrilled with Townsend's writing style, tho easy to read & some of his locations don't seem exactly right - well, the ones in Northside at least. The really great thing about this book is the detailed bibliography. If you decide to go to the library & look up the newspaper articles, you are all set.
I am skipping some of the stories & only reading the ones that occur in neighborhoods I am interested in. I am probably screwing myself but the chapters are pretty short & it's real easy to just pick up & read for short periods of time. Not to be dismissive, but it might be a good bathroom book.
What Townsend does really well, however, is giving the reader an idea of people's attitudes, police attitudes & policies and a glimpse of the society of Cincinnati & it's neighborhoods at the time.
Brushing off safety issues because only "fallen" women were being targeted. How people are afraid when a white guy is suspected but people go totally berserk when a black guy is the suspect. The commonality of, if not pedophilia, the really obviously inappropriate behavior of adult men towards little girls & the fact that some of the little girls were actually promoting it. Descriptions of the old neighborhoods, like Mohawk & what is now called the Brewery District which was still very well populated & not destitute but still had the maze of tunnels under the streets & old breweries that would bedevil police investigators. Talking about a Cumminsville that still had a train going through the middle of the community. People ready to lynch one another & people leaving their houses & apartments unlocked if not wide open.
It's not a great book but it has some good shit in it. If you are into Cincinnati history, it's worth picking up.
& seriously, the bibliography is a goldmine.

A Tour of OTR With Johnny Cash
and Eli Wallach


Friday would have been Johnny Cash's 78th birthday. I celebrated the guy's life watching The Pride of Jesse Hallam, a made for TV movie filmed on location in Cincinnati around 1980. I have babbled here about watching old movies & TV just to watch the backgrounds before. Route 66 is super duper megacool. A film called Wanda, shot in Pennsylvania around 1970, is another gem. This movie is fairly low budget & the disk is made from a pretty crappy print. It's out of print but is available from second hand dealers (cheap).
It's filmed in OTR (Eli Wallach has a stand at Findlay Market), Hyde Park, Clifton, Mt Lookout, Downtown & the riverfront. Some places have changed considerably, some look exactly the same. I moved to Cincinnati a couple years after the movie was made. The scenes around Findlay Market show a market with a very different vibe than what is there today. It had a much more "old world" thing going on.
It's not a great movie, it's ok & the backgrounds are a lot of fun.

Why Downtown & OTR Needs Streetcars

Over the Rhine was developed before we had cars. People weren't as spread out in their lifestyles back then. Christian Moerlein had a house with an office next door and a plant across the street. No 2 hour commutes for that boy. The guys who worked in his brewery & bottling plants all lived nearby and walked or took streetcars to and from work. The area was a mix of residential, retail, services, manufacturing & whatnot. Residents were a mix of workers & merchants, owners and renters.
Over time, for one reason or another, people left the area. As people began to buy cars and use them as a primary form of transportation, areas like OTR became lees and less attractive.
Today, people are getting into the idea of the old walkable neighborhoods. Well, without the stinky factories and with air conditioning, private bathrooms and laundry facilities. Younger people are not as interested in cars as my generation was.
To make the area viable again, we need to make it work the way it was designed to. A downtown Cincinnati without a streetcar is like a three legged race horse.
To make the OTR area work in a car-centric way would ruin it's appeal since you would need to tear down about half the buildings to build parking lots and parking garages. It would no longer be a walking neighborhood. The people who would revitalize the area would lose interest.
Will people still be interested in an area like OTR in the future ? In 50 - 100 years ? Dunno. Ray Bradbury wrote a story where everybody teleported everywhere. But people are interested now & we should ride the wave.

Over the Rhine
The Most Dangerous Neighborhood in the USA

Danger lurks EVERYWHERE.
In case you were wondering what the most dangerous neighborhood in the USA looked like, I offer a few galleries of the awful community. Be forewarned, the blood, carnage and overall inhumanity might e a bit much for the more timid reader.
Cincy Images
Grasscat
Queen City Discovery (at night !)
Sometimes blind number crunching just doesn't get i.....

Before the bastards at Habitat for Humanity got their mitts on the property(:-)), this is what 2535/7 McMicken looked like.
Well, not all the time. This was early one February morning.
I used to walk down to a doughnut store on Central Parkway for coffee, a doughnut and a paper on Sunday mornings. They had a "No Smoking" section there. It was a stool with a sign over it that said "No Smoking Section" & had an arrow pointing straight down. After they closed, I would go to a corner pony keg I think was called the M&M. It was also the headquarters for Fudpucker Airlines. It was at the corner of McMicken and Marshall (M&M). The owners, an elderly couple, liked to engage people in discussions ranging from sports to politics and, a favorite of the gentleman, WWII aviation. Eventually, they retired and sold the store.
I took this picture one winter morning when everything had been coated with ice overnight and then the temperature started to rise and everything was foggy and noisy with the sound of the dripping, melting ice. My crappy little image made with a crappy little camera really doesn't do it justice but a lot of the image is just the memory, anyway.
It doesn't mean shit to a tree.

Baymiller Bridge R.I.P.
The pedestrian bridge over Central Parkway at Baymiller is slated for demolition this weekend. The bridge has connected Central and McMicken for decades.
This demolition was instigated by the citizens of the West End to curtail loitering and vice activity. Walking over the bridge there is plenty of evidence to these accusations. The discarded condoms, drug and alcohol containers and paraphernalia and general litter are all evidence of this behavior.
This demolition is shortsighted to the development of these areas, however, because a strong point for them is their pedestrian accessibility. Destroying this pedestrian conduit is, to a great degree, cutting off the nose to spite the face.
On the other hand, with the upcoming development of CityLink, it's demolition will probably be of greater benefit to the residents of Over the Rhine and CUF.
Some pics from the bridge.
Looking east from the bridge towards McMicken
Looking south over Central Parkway
Same view circa 1940 (Hamilton Co Library)