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They may not have provided local service, but they were part of the long-distance backbone? AT&T still owned about 1/3 of the shares of Cincinnati Bell before the breakup, so it's not like they had no stake in the company.

Could it just be that there's a fried street lighting circuit? Nobody reports burned out or malfunctioning street lights, so they can be left unfixed for months or years at a time. It's not as if there aren't lights on Walnut up there.

The north/south streets were simply extensions of the existing grid layout from downtown. However the east/west streets were built haphazardly as larger parcels were subdivided and sold off at different times for different size lots depending on demand. You can see in this 1819 map how the subdivisions already started to have different overall plans and cross street layouts.

I may have mentioned this before but I know someone who did a parking feasibility study for the building's base. Apparently it is technically possible, but it's very inefficient layout-wise. We really do need to get over this obsession with parking. Downtown is in this bad position where parking is scarce enough that most office workers need monthly permits to ensure they can get a spot at all. That discourages alternate modes because the monthly parking pass is now a sunk cost. However, parking is still just cheap and plentiful enough that it's better trade off than taking the bus, and employers are more likely to expect that you have a car available to take to meetings or whatever. I know that sounds contradictory, but let me put it like this. If parking were more available and cheaper, then it would be easier to take the bus or bike to work most of the time, and only drive and park at daily rates when you know you have to. That's unlikely to be a downtown worth going to, however. Conversely, if we were talking Chicago or New York levels of parking, then the default expectation is that you're not driving and parking downtown, you're taking transit or using other means. Those other modes have to grow to fill the need for everyone rather than just those who have no alternative. As it is we're in this weird middle ground with the worst of both worlds and the benefits of neither. So the cry is always "moar parking!"

^ That's not what grade-separated means.

The thing to be careful about when eliminating ramps is what the DOT does to the ones that remain. I can see closing 5th Street leading to pressure to widen Pike and finish the MLK disaster. On the Ohio side, ODOT went crazy with that MLK interchange where we now have 10-lane surface streets for really no good reason. Hopple is the classic example, they just had to inject so much more capacity to compensate for the loss of the Bates and Central Parkway ramps, I guess.

There's no connection issues between downtown Cincinnati and downtown Covington (or Newport). Direct highway access to downtown Covington is perhaps another factor, but unless evidence is provided to the contrary, the simplification of ramps and exits that came with Ft. Washington Way and the push to eliminate the 5th Street/KY-8 exit in Covington is little more than typical traffic engineering practice of eliminating closely-spaced exits, partial interchanges, incomplete movements, weaving, and confusing lane adds/drops. You could just as easily make the argument that there's a conspiracy to hobble Jack Casino because there's no direct way to get there from I-75 northbound (you either have to get off at 2nd Street by Paul Brown Stadium and then traverse the entirety of downtown, or go all the way up to the I-71 and Reading/Florence exit and turn around). It's simply a matter of difficult terrain, tight geometries, and too much other stuff going on to make yet another ramp/exit feasible.

Well, that IS technically correct (the best kind of correct).

It's not a sacrifice worth making after the fact, it's not like this was part of the original project. Plus it's those Kroger employees that really need to be the ones on the street more than anyone else. Both their HQ and the new building have their own internal parking garages, so they're total silos. They shouldn't be encouraging even more internal circulation and lack of engagement with their surroundings. That's one reason their urban stores have been so bad around here, they don't "get it" because they're not getting out enough.

Who aren't on the sidewalks as it is. No point in siphoning off even more for no good reason. Maybe if Kroger improved their own streetscape and made the walk inviting, this wouldn't be an issue. Their HQ presents a lot of blank wall to both Court Street and Central Parkway, fix THAT.

^ Is that the one that smells like slightly rancid raspberry syrup?

Such as: https://goo.gl/maps/CgJFmMrRMEJ2

Fixed that for ya. ?

It was built as the Jones the Florist HQ, hence the cooler. They moved out in 2003 or 2004 after JoLynn Gustin sold the company to David Fisher and family. https://www.jonestheflorist.com/about-us

No, not it doesn't. It's up there with burnt popcorn. We get whiffs of it around 3:00 if we leave the windows open.

Charleston too. There's maybe a mile or so of late-19th and early-20th century bungalow neighborhoods before they go post-war (Savannah does at least have a decent Victorian neighborhood to the south of the historic core, but not in any other direction). These being small towns for much of their history, they get suburban VERY fast. Raleigh is very much like this. Just a half dozen blocks from the State Capitol and you'd think you were in Fairfax or Deer Park. Barely a mile out and it might as well be Turpin Hills or Madeira.

Right, so does that make it a worthwhile endeavor? Anything can be pure and simple, but that doesn't automatically make it good. At least admitting that it's ugly is a step in the right direction. To the layperson, it's just ugly, and all the pontification simply reinforces the notion that architects have their heads up their asses. All the tactile purity doesn't change the fact that it's ugly, poorly functional, and a thermal disaster. The line between faux-historic and revival or authentic vernacular is very much a matter of opinion and unlikely to ever be objective. I do want to reiterate, as I have in the past, that the buildings of OTR are revival styles in and of themselves. They're mostly ItalianATE, or Federal STYLE. Yes they are built more like their actual historical counterparts than today's building are built like them, but in Renaissance Italy they weren't making cornices of pressed tin, roofs of tar and rosin paper, or windows with 10 feet of glass. I would argue that so long as the execution is good, both in the design and the materials, that lifts a building out of faux territory. Make the cornice brackets out of polyurethane, they can look just as good as wood ones, but you won't find off-the-shelf ones with the right design or proportions. Tall windows cost more than short, as do tall ceilings, but that's marginal in the grand scheme of things. Vinyl Gilkey windows aren't going to fly, but fiberglass absolutely can, they don't have to be all-wood single-pane. If the brick is veneer, again that's fine. What I want to see is some tighter mortar joints, they've gotten way too big, but it saves a couple rows of bricks, ugh. This is where I think the real problem is. Every...last...little...minor...thing...imaginable is squeezed to the bleeding edge of cheap. We should be using Hardie siding instead of wood, but we get viny crap instead. I mentioned windows before. Joists get spaced a little farther apart so they can use two or three less. Brackets get shrunk down or not used at all. Overhangs are scrapped because they require more trim. It's not that doing a decent building will cost 2x or 3x as much as a cheap one, it's the push to wring out that last 5-10% where a project goes from decent to an embarrassment. Two examples I've worked on come to mind. One got a whole new cornice rebuilt from scratch, about 20 feet long. That cost on the order of $7,500 to build, which sounds like a lot, but that was only 1% of the entire construction budget. Money well spent if you ask me. If we had to go through an extensive value-engineering process however, it would have been significantly cut back to compensate for so many other fixed costs, and who knows what the result would be. There's never a magic-bullet item that can "fix" the budget, so everything has to get put through the wringer. Another project, the Kingsgate Marriott actually, was something I worked on in my first ever architecture job. They were in the process of value-engineering, and I was just a first year college student. One particular item I "presided" over was the elevator penthouses. They're just brick "rooms" on top of the roof that house the elevator motor and other stuff. As originally designed, they had a 4-inch recess on each side to give them some articulation like the rest of the building. That recess was reduced to 1" or maybe even 1/2" in order to eliminate the steel lintels holding the brick above. That's a few hundred dollars worth of steel for a multi-million dollar project, but hey, everything's fair game right? Even at the time I knew it was BS, but they did it. Today they'd probably eliminate the brick altogether and do corrugated metal or something. My point is that this is the level of scrutiny we're dealing with. It's not trimming the design fat, it's cutting to the bone.

The Avondale riots were in 1967 and 1968 so they predated this by a few years. Of course that doesn't mean smaller incidents didn't happen later.

I wish I could remember. I want to say it came up in conversation when we were under consideration for doing the condo project. Supposedly the pastor was shuffled around to different churches to try to keep it on the DL. If his name can be found out it could be cross-referenced with other churches. I found an obscure reference to the church having been "heavily damaged by firebombs" in August of 1970 in a Xenia newspaper, https://newspaperarchive.com/xenia-daily-gazette-jan-01-1971-p-1/ whereas the fire that destroyed the sanctuary and much of the rest of the church was early in the morning New Year's Day 1971.

Condos were built behind it. The original church was burned down by an arsonist pastor, but the old front entry and bell tower were incorporated into a new church. That new church was demolished recently to build the condos, leaving the old entry and tower standing by itself.

The thing about the Secretary of the Interior's standards is that they are fundamentally in conflict. The central premise is that new buildings (and additions) should be "of their time" but also "compatible" with their surroundings (contextual), or in effect "of their place." The thing is, you can't really do both, because much modern design is non-contextual or even anti-contextual. There's a razor-thin intersection between them on the spectrum of design, and there are some examples out there that work, but more often than not you get the watered-down architectural equivalent of a crossover SUV that's neither a good car nor a good truck. The standards first came out of the National Historic Preservation Act of the 1960s when architecture was highly influenced by International Style modernists. The "of their time" language in the standards comes directly from modernist doctrine. In part this was to distance the movement from the vernacular, which is precisely what a lot of historical buildings are examples of. Sure at the most blunt level the standards say that new buildings shouldn't be made to look old through the addition of fake patina or accelerated aging, but it allows neither contrasting modernism nor truly authentic reproduction either. What we generally see are modernist designs beaten into more traditional forms, especially through the insistence that all windows are punched openings, or we get cheaply done half-assed attempts at vaguely historical cartoon buildings. Regarding massing, the old SCPA is a brilliant example of how to do a monumental building. It is out of scale with its surroundings, but only for its lack of granularity. Its height is not even 2x its surroundings which is really not a big deal. The important thing to understand is that as a monumental public building, its design attention was ramped up to the maximum, and it was given a prominent location occupying an entire block. These "art object" type structures are the ones that get the full block, the podium, and the setbacks, but they're also held to the highest standards of design and beauty.

The commercial district was unusually dense compared to the surrounding neighborhood because McMillan was the crosstown streetcar route, and Peeble's Corner was the main transfer point. All east side routes (East Walnut Hills, Evanston, Norwood, Pleasant Ridge, Kennedy Heights, Hyde Park, Oakley, Mt. Lookout, Madisonville, and the former Cincinnati, Milford & Blanchester to Milford; with the exception of East End, Columbia-Tusculum, and Linwood) went through Peeble's Corner. At least 10 lines crossed McMillan (more if you count actual routes that branched farther out) so anyone needing to go from one neighborhood to another would be transferring somewhere along there and stopping by shops in the meantime. It was more like an extension of downtown than a neighborhood business district. When Columbia Parkway was built in 1938 it siphoned off so much traffic from those east side streetcar routes that Peeble's Corner started to collapse. The dissolution of the streetcar system itself 10 years later made McMillan and Taft a crosstown automobile corridor, not conducive in the slightest to pedestrian-oriented shopping. Were it not for that crosstown streetcar route, McMillan would have been more nodal in its commercial development. It wasn't a continuous commercial strip even in the past. McMillan and Highland was another major transfer point, but until 10-15 years ago there were houses on that corner where CP Cincy is today. Since Reading Road doesn't intersect McMillan directly, the stretch between there and I-71 was more of an industrial zone. Near Ohio Avenue it used to be more residential, and even between I-71 and Gilbert it was never fully commercial. Heck, major radial corridors like Reading, Gilbert, Vine, Glenway/Warsaw, and Montgomery never had unbroken commercial development. In the days of walking and transit the stores were small enough that the market could be saturated with a handful of commercial buildings along a single street. Apartments and townhouses filled in the rest of the space and added customers and foot traffic while being convenient to the streetcar stops. Now you need so much parking and only single-story buildings that it can take up a whole corridor because of the lower density, and nobody wants to live in the middle of that.

Dope’s dumplings are good, because they don’t overdo the thickness of the wrapping. I like their miso ramen too, which has a nice mix of ingredients, as it should. I don’t think they’re doing themselves any favors with all this switching around. It takes a while to build a clientelle and that just can’t happen when the restaurant changes every year. Lalo was never a favorite, but a bunch of us liked Neuf. When Lalo replaced Neuf and eliminated the Chinese dishes, we stopped going because the new items on the menu just weren’t very good. While they may hope that they regain people who wrote off the last rebrand, I bet they lose just as many who don’t like the new concept.

It’s one thing to set up a pickup area in your own parking lot on your own property bit doing something at the Monroe lot would require lugging the delivery carts down sidewalks and crosswalks, and crossing Walnut and streetcar tracks. I have to imagine there’s legal issues going off-premises for such things even if it is just to cross the street.

Reser had a satellite store on Vine but the rent made it unfeasible. Does the shop in Gateway sell or work on regular bikes or just ebikes and segways?