OTR - 24 Years

A couple videos of Cincinnati's Over the Rhine neighborhood. One shot in 1990 as the videographer was stalking a young mother and one on 2014 by an obnoxious guy from Toledo.
One of the Toledoans comments that mused me was his joy over the Kroger supermarket on Vine Street that locals love to complain about to the point of not even acknowledging it's existence. He points out Toledoans would LOVE to have something like that.
The 1990 video leaves me wondering what became of the kid in the stroller...
OTR - 1990


OTR - 2014

Churches and Bicycles

Living in an older American Community, Cincinnati, Ohio, I see an issue that I want to correct but don't know how.
In the rust belt cities a crucial element of their development was the church and a significant remnant of the built environment are the churches.
With population decline and people (like myself) being less inclined to attend churches they are increasingly being abandoned or floundering.
Stand in front of First Lutheran on Race St & look around. You can see about a half dozen churches and when blocked from view, you can see even more steeples. Some of these churches are active, some abandoned, and some active churches are desperately floundering. One is being transformed into a bar.
In the Northside neighborhood of Cincinnati there are about a dozen churches but only about 3 still minister to their original denomination. One is a cookie factory, one is a home (but used to be a pickle factory, GAR HQ and, I think, a Turner HQ).
Churches minus religion are, essentially community centers but how many community centers do we need? People who do attend churches are more likely to go to mega churches located in big box hardware stores & movie theaters & such. Don't get me started on the sacred & the profane on these matters…
So, what do we do with them?
Religion is not immune to the free market & is constantly evolving to remain relevant to the evolving societies it is in. When the Protestants split off from the Catholic Church, the Catholics didn't just sit on their hands. When American Protestants flocked to the Catholic Christmas services, the Protestant churches started offering them, too. The Catholic church begrudgingly accepted divorce & now some churches are accepting same sex marriage.
I've been meaning to address this issue but it goes beyond one post. What got me to actually typing today was an announcement made by the Queen City Bike club listing their Bike Friendly Destinations. There is one church on the list. Dunno why - maybe QCB didn't reach out to the churches. But, with the rise in popularity of bicycling, maybe just reaching out to cyclists might be a way for existing churches to remain relevant, infuse some new blood & maybe thrive again.
A long time ago I ran across a group called The Out Spokin'. Yeah, corny…
They were a Christian group that did group bicycling/camping trips. They seemed almost military in their organization but they all had to rely on each other to do their chores, repairs & stuff so they built some kind of bond (kinda cultish, maybe…).
Anyway, I know chasing bicyclists isn't going to fill the pews up anytime soon but I will likely have more lame ideas to revive the churches & revitalize midwestern cities.
PS, I might be out soon to attend The Bilderberg meetings. Dunno, my invitation appears to be lost in the mail
dang...

Parks
Today marks the date for the official reopening of Washington Park in Cincinnati. Once a cemetery, it later became a popular park across from Cincinnati's Music Hall which served as an event venue & concert hall for over a hundred years. The park served for people's entertainment as well.
At one point, as the neighborhood had declined, activists established homeless shelters and a dizzying number of social services in the area as the neighborhood was deemed a haven for the homeless & destitute. This resulted in the park being overrun by loud, vulgar vagrants & beggars. The park became a public restroom & was shunned by most people.
As a wealthier population has moved into the neighborhood & the park has been closed for a year as upgrades including an underground parking garage (in an old cemetery - the mind boggles), people are hoping the park can be a more genteel place as it once was & was intended to be.
There's 2 sides to this. There's the people who want a nice place free of foul smells & pestering panhandlers as pointed out at Cincinnati Blog. Then there's the homeless advocates who would just like to have their ghetto back as reflected at The Cincinnati Beacon.
In an effort to keep the park nice, new rules have been put into place (most of which aren't that new). But do the rules go too far? There's a trend to outlaw "acts of daily living" which just sounds crazy - kinda like "free speech zones". NPR discusses the issue here.
We need to have balance. We need to be civil. The homeless advocates, in my mind, usually want the whole pie. Some of these new laws & regulations are just insane, tho. If I fall asleep in a park on a lazy Sunday afternoon, I'm illegal? You can't enjoy a glass of wine at a summer concert in the park? I can't feed the birds? I've gone on about banning amplification before here and here. This is ridiculous in the 21st century. One rule for Washington Park is "No dropping off of food or clothing". I know that has been an issue for what amount to "drive by" charities who just leave a mess after their good deeds are done. I hope they will issue permits for this kind of activity, tho.
As far as keeping the neighborhood up in the future, I think there's some good advice here by bfwissel.

Hell Town
Local noose media guys screwing up Cincinnati neighborhoods is pretty common, so I wasn't too surprised when an article about renovated homes titled From Helltown to City Home wasn't about Hell Town at all but Over the Rhine.
Granted, they are doing some nice stuff in OTR, but as we all know, Hell Town aka Ludlow Station aka Cumminsville is Northside. Read the history here if you don't believe me.
Of course there's some nice stuff going on in Northside homes, too, which is why they have a tour of homes every other year with the next one scheduled for October 2012. Maybe the Fishwrap can run the article they shelved in 2010 (not that the author works there anymore).

OTR - Highest Income Inequality Tract in America
I have read the McClatchy article, Highest income-inequality tract in America is gentrifying twice & I don't get it. It's a little weirder than Stadium tax rebate favors wealthy, which is, duh, just a fact.
FWIW, the wealth distribution should be a little smoother in OTR in time. Middle class people will follow the wealthy but pretty much nobody follows the poor. In fact, the poor have been leaving OTR for years. While the article points out the neighborhood is predominantly poor they don't do much to point out it is predominantly vacant. Anyway, I guess the Liberals© have to wail about something.

Video by CincyStreetcar Blog

Few years ago (Pete Delkus was the announcer), WCPO did one of those online/phone polls, nothing really scientific, they asked if people would be interested in living in the downtown area. The result was something like 5%. Above is a map that guestimates the WCPO viewing area. With cable it is probably larger but less tidy. The blue dot represents 5% of that area. The red dot represents about how big the downtown area is. I realize resident aren't laid out in an orderly grid but, hopefully, you get the idea.
People have argued that repopulating OTR and populating The Banks will be impossible because there are not enough people in the region to support the area. My bistro graphics prove that wrong. Toss in new residents (people are leaving Piqua and Springfield all the time) and filling the area up should be easy.
People argue that a car free lifestyle is impossible. Cincy Streetcar recently pointed out that almost half the residents currently along the route live car free. In the >3 mile long, 2 block wide path the streetcar will traverse, there is room for every type of service and shop a resident could need and with those businesses come jobs and oppourtunity for entrepreneurship. With a simple, convenient and efficient way to get around, the area would be very desirable.
Repopulating and revitalizing the city's basin is doable and necessary. The current blight in OTR damages the entire region. The empty streets make it a haven for vice crime. A streetcar is a vital factor in repopulating and revitalizing the area and changing from a drain on city resources to a contributing area of the city.

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.....

Deconcentrate the Rich
The City of Cincinnati has decided to right wrong thinking of the past and, in an effort to deghettoize neighborhoods like Over the Rhine by deconcentrating the poor through the deconcentration social services.
Wish 'em luck. I agree with the concept but don't know as legislation is the way to go.
In our current financial/economic meltdown, a big reason we are in the mess we are in is because of a concentration of great deal of wealth in a few people's hands. When these few people screw up, vast assets and people and businesses are screwed up. The gummint has decided to fix the problem by throwing money at it, (as usual). The problem here is that even more sums of money are being put into the hands of the few who screwed up in the first place. In fact, even fewer as some of the institutions have used their bailout money to acquire other institutions thereby concentrating even more assets into the hands of even fewer screw ups.
While these large companies are not monopolies (yet), it seems that breaking them up might be a better plan. Many smaller financial institutions are doing just fine with smaller, more manageable stores of assets.
Breaking the larger companies up would broaden the brain pool of managers, create jobs and foster creativity and competition.
An argument for deconcentrating the poor is that people who have made bad life choices shouldn't be reinforcing their ideas on one another and that by assimilating them into "good" neighborhoods the better life choices of those people might rub off on them. If it is supposed to work for the poor, it probably oughtta work ok for the rich, too.

What's In A Name ?
HamCo Comm, D. Pepper is asking, Should we rename The Banks ?
I think it's kind of pointless.
Losantville/Porkopolis/Cincinnati's neighborhoods take on names and identities of their own over the years. Here & there neighborhoods want to change their names and I am semi ok with that.
Winton Place recently changed it's name to Spring Grove Village because they, apparently, wanted to sound like a retirement community. Over the Rhine was called The Northern Liberties at one time.

Cool ! Grandma Lives in HELLTOWN !
Up here in scenic Ludlow Station/Cumminsville/Northside there is currently an art exhibit at the Prairie Gallery called Happy Valley or Helltown" - both of which were nicknames for Ludlow Station/Cumminsville/Northside over the years.
COASTers have suggested selling the naming rights. A typically dumb idea from people who would probably just as soon sell their parents to glue factories, but, on the other hand, if Larry Flynt bought the rights - THAT could be pretty outrageous !
There used to be a "Shantytown" down there at one time but that's probably not a good choice today (From a marketing standpoint).
Might as well let whoever moves into the Banks project or it's neighbors pick a name for themselves in 2069 or so as confuse people nowadays, tho.

Permanence or Success
Michael Earl Patton brings up an interesting idea involving public projects and their "permanence" over at the Arkham Beacon.
Streetcar advocates argue that rails in the roadway promote the idea of permanence to real estate developers, merchants and others. If you are old enough, you probably remember driving over the abandoned rails of the last streetcar systems. Then, again, even though the old streetcars are gone, many of the current bus routes are nearly the same as the old streetcar routes.
Patton goes on to discount the city's Skywalk system. It was designed to separate people from traffic, provide a shelter from the elements and to build a second story of retail and services in the same geographical footprint. Then, again, if you are old enough, you remember just going into buildings and walking up the stairs to businesses on upper floors. Another goal was to recreate and compete with the suburban mall experience downtown.
I tend to wince when I hear the streetcar argument of permanence. I think the real issue is how long does something have to work to be considered a success ? One generation ? Two ? A hundred ?
The real goal of the streetcar is to recreate/rejuvenate viable neighborhoods. If that is done and lasts 30 - 40 years but the streetcar is abandoned in 20 years, it is not too permanent but it will have been a success.
But even then, if we are talking about just the idea of permanence - if potential developers and residents actually perceive something as permanent, isn't that sufficient ?.

MELT

UrbanCincy has reported that Melt is cnsidering adding a store in the Downtown,/OTR/GQ area following the success of their grub at Park & Vine
This is just the beginning, folks. Northside is going to take over Cincinnati. In the future people will assume the name Northside is a reference to being on the north side of the Ohio River.
tch - it can't happen here.....

The International Council of Shopping Centers reports that holiday sales at mall & shopping center stores had it's worst season since 1970.
But were sales and gift giving down ?
For the most part, on my end, it wasn't. A lot of the gifts given and most appreciated were handmade by local artists, craftsmen and family members.
For some time the "shop local" mantra has been trudging along and gaining some traction.
This article from the Noose Son describes the popularity of knitting these days. In Cincinnati there are several knitting groups including CinCity Stitch and the Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library offers a knitting program at some of it's branches.
Add to that the local galleries and craft shows/fairs in Cincinnati like the annual Holiday Arts Fair in Northside early every December and The monthly open houses in Oakley and OTR, one has to ask himself how much these individuals making and selling unique items are affecting the sales at big box stores selling generic electronics and stuff.

Well, according to this article in the Fishwrap, CityLink will be putting a stop to West End redevelopment and will probably throw a wet blanket on OTR and The Brewery District's plans to improve their neighborhoods as the suburban non-denominational "churches" will suck the poor and their problems from the surrounding tri-state area and concentrate them in barracks in an old factory in the West End.
Congratulations. A delicate area that offered some hope is probably now doomed to be crowded with wandering, derelict drug addicts looking to score and to support their habits by preying on anybody who will still live in the area.
Triumph of the Ignoroids.