jjakucyk

I'd go with "more refined and sophisticated." The color-changing aspect of Encore is cool, but it still looks like a shipping container.

The Suspension Bridge has an 11-ton weight limit, so it can't even handle full-size buses.

That's Cincinnati in a nutshell, squandered potential.

That's basically all the outer neighborhoods. Sayler Park, Riverside, West Price Hill, Westwood, Mt. Airy, College Hill, Winton Place, Carthage, Hartwell, Bond Hill, Roselawn, Pleasant Ridge, Kennedy Heights, Madisonville, Mt. Lookout, Mt. Washington, California.

Sounds about right to me. Restaurants have extensive and complicated HVAC, with makeup air units and large exhaust fans as well as the normal heating and air conditioning package units. Having those on the roof directly above the spaces served is the cheapest, and it's the easiest to install and service too. However, that rendering shows just how big a hole in the mass of the block this puny building creates. Plus, if I was living in any of those buildings overlooking this, I might be happier on the one hand to have a better view of the park, but then not so happy to be looking at greasy exhaust fans that are blowing kitchen smoke at my windows. This should be 3-4 stories, and while it is more complicated and expensive to properly fire separate a restaurant from the spaces above, it's not like there aren't still tons of examples.

Also any old-school DSL services just can't compete anymore. My parents live in a semi-rural area served by Spectrum cable, but Dad still wants his POTS landline, in part because the cable does go out, and their electricity goes out a lot due to tree branches and the occasional hurricane. They also still use flip phones, sigh. They've had a phone/internet bundle with CenturyLink/Embarq for well over a decade, spending close to $100/month for the phone and 1.5mbit internet. They can get Spectrum's 200+mbit plan, but Dad still elected to go with a new CenturyLink bundle that drops the $0.10/minute long-distance rate (I can't believe that's still a thing) and gets them I think 15mbit internet for about $85/month. That's still a ripoff if you ask me, but at least it's better than before. I doubt they can push much more data over those copper lines though, due to the spread-out development pattern and physical limits of the technology. Unless a company like this invests in fiber, like Cincinnati Bell, they're likely to just wither away.

I don't think they expected to get a lot of business from the immediate area. It's convenient for the warehousing and distributing operations, and I guess there's an argument that it makes it more convenient for clients from Columbus or Dayton (think IKEA). Still, the disadvantage is that it is also very inconvenient for the local city crowd. Downtown to Mason is a miserable trip anywhere near rush hour, and it's not really good for lunch presentations either since it takes so long to get there and back even with no traffic. So I think it's more that they underestimated the inconvenience of the location for their local clients and specifiers, who as @GCrites80s said, are not going to go super out of the way for something like this. Marsh Building Products decoupled their showroom from their Loveland warehouse very quickly and moved it to Montgomery, which is also now moving a little closer to Kenwood, while the warehouse remains out in Loveland. I think it's also the case that they want to be closer to their core clients in Indian Hill, Madeira, Hyde Park, Mt. Lookout, and Montgomery. They get more value out of the showroom for those folks, and their architects, than they do from having their operations all under one roof out on the exurban fringe near the builders/developers throwing up tract houses who aren't using Marvin Windows or Wolf/Sub-Zero appliances anyway.

Hmm that's interesting. The main showroom was remodeled in 2014-2015, and the kitchen vignettes were refreshed and changed out in 2016-2017 (I did a fair bit of the design and construction documentation work on that part). They must be getting a ton of pushback against their remote Mason location if they're moving so soon after such major work. Granted, they can take a lot of the cabinets and other installs with them to the new location, but it's not a trivial amount of work to fit it in and rearrange everything. The article says they're moving the distribution center too, so maybe that forced their hand, and I'm curious what prompted that. Whatever the reason, there'd be little point in maintaining the showroom and pretty standard office space attached to a big empty warehouse.

It's a veritable ballet of backhoes, bulldozers, bobcats, and conveyor belts.

Because we built our cities with massively wide streets, even before automobiles, which is not conducive to high density and walking, even with tall buildings. https://newworldeconomics.com/toledo-spain-or-toledo-ohio/

You don't install ticket vending machines on the streetcar. You install ticket validation machines on the streetcar, which are about the size of a paper towel dispenser, and all they do is put a timestamp on the ticket when you insert it. You still buy the ticket(s) from a vending machine, or a store, or wherever, but you validate it when you get on the vehicle. You can't do fare collection in the streetcar like you do on a bus, because the driver is isolated behind a closed door. Besides, the point of the streetcar with its multiple doors is for fast boarding and deboarding, and not holding up the driver collecting fares.

Did you even read what I wrote?

I'm pretty sure there's a couple of priority/preemption signals that are already in place but disabled or the drivers aren't allowed to use them.

Using the machines (whether with cash or credit card) is the best way to guarantee you miss your car, even if it's still three blocks away when you start. The last two days I've walked by some of the stops, a worker had the machines opened up for service with the guts spilled out (so more than just loading and unloading cash). What do you do then? The apps are the only real option for tracking since there's no schedule and frequency is poor. An animated map of cars on the route at each stop would be nice, but it doesn't do you much good if you're a minute late and missed the last one.

I would not be surprised if it's been mostly rewired over time. Houses like this have lots of sub-panels scattered around so you don't have to do so many home-runs of wires. With the various bathroom and other remodels, that's probably been corrected to some extent. There's also tons of empty wall cavities that make pulling wire easier. Sally had a foreman from Dallman & Bohl General Contractors there on a nearly daily basis fixing up stuff, and they don't do anything shoddy. Still, I do see some ungrounded outlets scattered around so it's probably not comprehensive. At this time period, houses were built with both electric and gas light fixtures, sometimes (but rarely) both combined into a single fixture. This ensured that if one went out, the other could still light the space. Those old gas lines aren't too difficult to cap off, but sometimes they're just left live but unused.

Oh my, that's Sally Wilson's house. I did schematic plans for redoing that kitchen and family room at my last job, but obviously she never pursued it. There's a massive chimney between the two rooms, and although it's at the back of the house, removing it was a red flag for the historic conservation board, since it is an important contributing structure to the East Walnut Hills historic district. I think her husband's grandfather built the house, designed by Elzner & Anderson who also designed the Ingalls Building. The original blue prints from back then say "Wilson Residence." The house was in a trust for maintenance and to try to keep the family from selling it off, as is my recollection, so I'm surprised to see this. It looks like they found a way to dump it, but Sally died five years ago, so it's probably taken this long to get it lawyered. Yeah that kitchen and adjacent room are awful, but the rest of the bathrooms and laundry were completely remodeled in the last 10-15 years, and the house in general is impeccably maintained. There's a pool in back, but it blocks access to the detached garage in the rear, which is kind of weird. If the kitchen/family room situation can be resolved, it's an outstanding house.

You mean the bike lanes that stop just north of Hopple Street. I got into an argument with someone at the city about the bumpouts because they fly in the face of the city's bike plan. The response was basically, "the city is under no obligation to follow the plan."

Doesn't every house?

I would argue that the name of the street in this case is more important than who it's named after. The street-name is a bigger part of the city's history than the person-name it came from. If that makes sense.

Here's a good example of what I'm seeing in the areas I'm looking. Basically, you either get something like this, which I would not consider livable, https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/34222016_zpid or a flipper+ buys it and turns it into this https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/3464-Wabash-Ave-Cincinnati-OH-45207/34218637_zpid/ "durable laminate wood-like floor."

That's true for more desirable neighborhoods. Mt. Adams was and I think still is a classic example, wherein you have a choice between a slipshod paint job with new carpet, or a $3M custom build, and nothing in between. However, in more up-and-coming neighborhoods, a coat of paint won't do when the place has been let go for so long. Flippers in those markets aren't buying houses that need structural repair or major utility work. They're buying the house that was stripped of copper and fixtures after grandma died 10 years ago and was left to deteriorate while the family argued over the inheritance. They finally sell for $70K, the flipper then slaps 1/4" drywall over all the old plaster after rewiring and new plastic piping, replaces the doors with hollow-core Lowe's specials, just paints over all the old trim, puts down "wood-look" vinyl over the beat up hardwood floors (this one makes me super sad), paints the exterior, installs a new furnace, new Ikea kitchen and baths, and then lists it for $199K after spending $80K on the reno. Call it flip+ if you want, but it leads to houses that look nice in the real estate listings, but really don't hold up to any level of scrutiny. This isn't a true renovation either, it's kind of a halfway step. I'm working on a full gut remodel of a small 2-bedroom house in Newport, and that's looking to be a $250-300K job even with pretty basic fixtures, finishes, and barely any exterior modifications.

I'd love to find a house that's lived in but just needs a bit of work here and there. Unfortunately the only options seem to be overpriced crap flip jobs, or a dumpster fire that needs a total gut rehab. That can easily take a year while you need to live and pay rent somewhere else, whereas remodeling a bathroom or even the kitchen along with some cosmetic updates around the rest of the house can be done piecemeal while you live there. There's just not much middle ground. So between those choices the flip is much less hassle, but then you have to pay for that profit margin too, and you settle for what they picked.

What was it before? Parkhaus went from $110 to $125 for the all-access monthly permit.

^ Except Dutch's and Keystone are in East Hyde Park, so they have nothing to do with the square. Dutch's surprises me, but Keystone was kind of weird as it's a two-story building and a big outdoor space in front. There's only one building between the two, so I wonder if someone is trying to scoop up that whole block for a redevelopment.

That's kind of what it feels like to me. As others have pointed out, if we try to expunge McMicken, why not all the founding fathers, Columbus, etc.? He's just an easy target because he's a relatively unknown local guy. But that similar anti-German hysteria also meant that one Mr. Mueller couldn't name the street in his own subdivision after his own family name. That's some serious WTF stuff there. He got around it by naming the street Relleum Avenue instead, Mueller spelled backwards. Anyway, this isn't like all the Confederate statues, most of which were made in the early 20th century as Jim Crow laws ramped up. If a street was named McMicken as a modern pro-slavery resurgence movement, or by removing an abolitionist street name, then I think it would be a different story. As it is, I'm not in favor especially since McMicken is such a long street. I don't like that most of Eastern Avenue was renamed to Riverside Drive, nor that Winton Place was renamed to Spring Grove Village. It's all kind of kitschy and cutsey-ifying.