jjakucyk

Agreed, the blank side wall of the Kroger harms the restoration potential of the buildings across the street, which is perhaps the best block of commercial buildings in the whole neighborhood.

Does anyone know about this building at Montgomery and Williams in Norwood? They did a truly exceptional job restoring the brickwork. In fact they may have completely rebuilt it. Notice that the brick under the windows is completely new, and there's some extra courses on the parapets, but you really can't tell. Yet they did bog standard aluminum storefront windows and some pretty awful glass block. That makes me sad. Still, this isn't some commercial flip job (is there even such a thing?). I'd love to know the story.

I just wish they'd look at buildings like Rhinegeist or Streitmann for design inspiration for these larger buildings. Rhinegeist is only 2 1/2 stories tall, and it's a block long. That's exactly the sort of design "problem" these new developments are trying to overcome. I guess busybody community councils don't see it that way and insist on all the needless in and out articulation that adds a lot of expense in foundations, corners, flashing, and materials, leading to the use of cheap stucco and simulated materials to try to recoup those expenses. It's basically the urban version of a McMansion. What differentiates a McMansion from an actual mansion, or simply a nice classical house is all the unnecessary articulation on the front (nested gables, projecting garage masses, bays, dormers, material changes, turrets) and the resultant train wreck of a roof line. Houses from the pre-war period have much simpler floor plates, usually just a rectangle, which allows for more resources to be devoted to details and materials. Try to design a house like that today though, and you're kicked out of the room, despite that being what a lot of people are looking for. Same here in OTR. All you really need to do to make a large project more palatable is good materials, simple effective detailing, and vertical as opposed to horizontal articulation of openings with a good sidewalk presence. If you have to break it up some, use the natural interruption in the design like main entrances, garage entries, or public places to break up the mass. Make it look like two or three buildings rather than 12. Unfortunately that doesn't read as well in renderings, and the renderings hide the crappy detailing and materials that come with the Potemkin village designs.

Yeah it's been a while, but I recall something along the lines of every north-south street could theoretically be two-way, and the only east-west streets that would be excessively difficult to convert would be 2nd/3rd and 5th/6th. 4th Street absolutely should be two-way because it goes the same direction as 3rd. Same goes for 8th Street which is a total train wreck, as it goes from one-way to two-way to one-way and back to two-way again, and it's one-way westbound like 9th Street.

Granted I haven't ridden it much or seen where the pinch points are and at what times of the day, but it seems like the big hang up are traffic signals rather than traffic itself. In that scenario, signal timing and preemption would seem to be a better solution than dedicated lanes.

When our office moves downtown in a couple months I expect to use it for occasional lunch trips to places that are too long a walk to, like Findlay Market or stuff around Fountain Square, but it has to be reliable schedule-wise to make that work when you're tight on time. I can also see doing after-work stuff, but I don't eat out for dinner or go to bars, which I assume is a big component of evening ridership. I do think overall it has nowhere to go but up. With all the political issues getting it going, many who might want to relocate to be near it have smartly waited until it was actually in operation to pull the trigger. There's a lot of lag in that, what with getting out of leases, finding the right home/apartment/office to move to, renovating, and other stuff like that. Yes some people did relocate to OTR and downtown in anticipation of the streetcar opening, but the real moves are only just starting to happen. As John Schneider has said, it's a marathon not a sprint.

I don't see that as being an issue really. The trail could diverge from the railroad right-of-way at the entrance gate to Clare Yard and then hug the hillside to the north of the yard and then come back by the storage tracks below the Mariemont Concourse. The only crossing of any sort in that situation would be at the driveway entrance. https://www.google.com/maps/d/embed?mid=1Yrml6WNhpjBbUAD4akj_zo9eYjQ&ll=39.139808345711295%2C-84.375519&z=14

It's hard for the city to do things that aren't...you know...IN the city.

True, but you're well within your right to complain that the zoning restrictions caused that building to lose its value because it was made arbitrarily non-compliant and un-modifiable. At the very least, all that zoning research shouldn't be necessary especially in this particular case where you would think, in a sane world, that you should be able to build up a house to match its neighbors. In the same vein, you would think the city would want these buildings to be revitalized rather than condemned, but the message zoning sends is "we don't want this" and the unfortunate result is not the expected "proper" redevelopment (which would cost too much) but stagnation and decay instead.

Indeed, I even called him out as being somewhat petulant because I didn't expect it from him. That said, variances are usually granted if you can prove hardship. That's not necessarily hard, but for a one-man show who doesn't have time for hearings and financial analyses and doesn't have an architect to help them out, it can easily be too much. I do fault the city for making too many properties unbuildable, and too many existing buildings non-compliant, but at the same time these aren't completely out-of-the-blue unknown factors either (admittedly they might be to the layperson), so I can't be 100% sympathetic even if I do agree it's a problem.

That's a bit over-the-top, but what strikes me is how it mirrors the existing arches on the Western Hills Viaduct at Spring Grove Avenue and Mill Creek. The arches and some of the deco lighting on the top deck are really the only worthwhile design elements of the current viaduct, save the streetcar history embedded in it which is of little concern to anyone but myself and a few others. Flourishes like the LA viaduct are what can make a "meh" project something to really be proud of, and if that was our proposed design it would be a perfect nod to history with a truly contemporary design. The cable stay design is interesting, but from what I can see it's rather utilitarian and highway-ish. Since the rendering only shows half of the viaduct's current length, I'm curious what the eastern half looks like, which I'm betting will be a bog standard concrete overpass with a nightmare of ramps to Spring Grove, I-75, and Central Parkway.

An interesting "on the ground" perspective on Northside, Cincinnati, and the overall revitalization malaise caused by zoning: https://granolashotgun.com/2016/11/08/lessons-learned/

Is there any more information (maps, renderings, etc.) besides that one in the linked article?

^ That's us. We're just moving into the 2nd floor. All the other floors are going to different tenants. I think a few others have signed on, but I'm not sure how many. After VLA Academy folded the landlord was trying to find a single tenant for the whole building, but that turned out to be too tough a sell. A very neat building regardless, formerly Sun Furniture, and way back the Bettman Dunlap Shoe Company.

Good catch, the flood boundary of the 100-year event (protected in this case by the Mill Creek dam and pumping station at the Ohio River) follows the railroad right-of-way and the 493' contour pretty much exactly. In the 1850s when much of the valley was still rural or even wild, there was probably still some pretty clear evidence of the extent of flood waters, even if just a slight change in the tree canopy and other vegetation. There could even have been Indian markers of some sort. Hillsides along the Pacific coast of Japan have stone markers hundreds of years old showing how high tsunami waters reached for instance.

Your times/distances to the bridges is only half the journey though. You have to calculate the total time to get from the west side of town to the airport (for example) not the time just to get to the bridges. To get from Covedale to the airport takes 35 minutes via Carroll Cropper or 27 minutes via Brent Spence at best.

"As this shocking graph indicates, our water consumption has doubled in the last month."

It's considered a non-contributing building. Tearing it down for a parking lot would still be a problem though. The guidelines for dealing with non-contributing buildings are at the end just before the big list: http://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/buildings/historic-conservation/local-conservation-guidelines/over-the-rhine-historic-district/

It's easier when you have permission to be there for an architecture studio project :) We measured and documented it in April 2001 (yes, during the riots), and A To Z Restaurant Equipment (or something along those lines) was just starting to work on moving his stuff out. It was all salvaged cookers, tables, refrigerators, etc. Pretty gross actually. No dog fortunately, but I got some mean poison ivy on my wrist from vines growing up the front of the building (!) that hadn't leafed out yet so it wasn't obvious what they were.

Jackson Brewery is odd because a lot of the floors were reconfigured inside, especially on the left side. There's concrete floors and even some ramps in there that you wouldn't expect when looking at it from the outside. Also, the trouble with converting it to any sort of residential, hotel, or even office use is that other than on the first floor the windows are pretty darn small. The round third floor windows are even worse, and those are at about waist height if I remember right, so the whole under-roof area is kind of a tough nut to crack. You could redo the 2nd floor window openings to be something more like the middle where they're doubled or tripled up, but that's pushing the boundaries of preservation best practices, and you'd likely have to forego any sort of tax credits if you were to do that. It's kind of a catch 22 sadly.

We will never, ever, ever get back to the high density that we had in neighborhoods like OTR and the West End when they were originally built, because living standards have changed so much. Back in those days you had an entire family living in a small apartment that is now probably occupied by 1 single person, or maybe 2. All the more reason buildings should be bigger with more units.

Jane Jacobs warned about the problem of what she called "gray areas" in cities. These are the neighborhoods that are too dense to be suburban but not dense enough for true walkability or urbanism either. Classic examples are the monolithic row house neighborhoods of Baltimore and Philadelphia. They're obviously unappealing to someone looking for space and privacy, but at the same time they're not dense enough to support retail or restaurants within reasonable walking distance (save perhaps for the occasional corner store or beauty salon). Since they were built mostly as worker housing with transit connections to downtown or nearby factories, there's no office or other business activity within easy reach either. So in those neighborhoods you still have to drive everywhere, yet you also have to put up with parking issues, nasty wide streets, noisy neighbors, and lack of space to either grow your house or for kids to play or whatever. Cincinnati doesn't really have areas quite so extreme, since outside of OTR most of our row houses are detached and have at least token setbacks from the street. Plus there aren't really large swaths of the city that are block after block after block of row houses all built at the same time, it's much more granular here. That said, many streetcar suburbs do exhibit similar characteristics, they're just not as dense as the Baltimore or Philadelphia examples, but they're equally unappealing to those looking for privacy and space or walkability. Much of Evanston, Norwood, and even Oakley have these characteristics, as does the East End, Price Hill, and the east and west sides of Newport. That doesn't mean they're not nice neighborhoods necessarily, but they don't have the critical mass to support much business by themselves, nor are they suburban either. This is the fear when low-density development is built in OTR, it makes the neighborhood businesses not neighborhood businesses but regional businesses. That means they can't rely on foot traffic alone so they need more customers to come in from elsewhere. Because of our limited transit system, that means they have to drive, and park, and that makes the neighborhood that much worse for everyone else. It also causes resistance to further development down the road because "OMG they're taking away our parking!" or else having to build really expensive garages which don't solve the traffic problems and raise the price for homes and stores, so then you get the "where's our affordable housing?" issues.

Maybe if you're riding in the middle of the lane that won't happen, but if you're nervous and staying near the curb or edge of the pavement then motorists absolutely will make unsafe close passes.

I think there was a lot of opposition from the people living on Tompkins Avenue to reopening the railroad overpass.

I want to like the idea of shared space, I really do, especially for removing all the clutter associated with standard operating procedures today (signs, poles, meters, paint, etc.), but so far I haven’t seen that it’s been done right. There’s a telling statistic from analysis done in London about Exhibition Road which states: “if vehicle flows are greater than 100 per hour, pedestrians will not use the vehicle zone as a shared space” That’s a painfully low threshold unfortunately. Above that traffic volume, cars become bullies and shove everyone else to the side. It might be doable with huge throngs of pedestrians and cyclists to keep up a better car/non-car ratio even in the face of a higher absolute number of cars, but can that be maintained 24/7/365? I doubt it. It’s because of this low traffic threshold and the fact that it does add confusion and uncertainty that even the Dutch, who first implemented the idea, are generally not bothering with it except in a few very specific places. In Britain too it’s been hit or miss, with some areas working well and others not. Looking at the context of American streets, which were built excessively wide before automobiles even existed, the problems are even worse. The only reason we have sidewalks is because it was too expensive to pave our overly wide streets from building-to-building in the days before asphalt, so building owners and later the municipal government took it upon themselves to extend porches and later sidewalks into the right-of-way to give people a place to walk that wasn't a muddy quagmire. That's the only reason. Look at very early movies and you see people walking and biking and doing all sorts of things all over the street, sidewalk or not, as long as it's dry. People didn't even look when "crossing" because there was no such thing, and nobody expected to be run down anymore than if they were stepping into a hallway from their office or hotel room. When people talk about congestion on city streets in the pre-automobile era, they're usually referring to streetcar congestion. In Cincinnati until I think the 1920s every single downtown streetcar line passed Fountain Square. Proposals to move some lines to 4th Street were met with huge opposition, as if walking one extra block was such a big hurdle. That said, by the time you got to OTR or the West End, let alone any of the hilltop communities, traffic of any sort was basically nonexistent. You'd have a streetcar go by every few minutes, maybe a wagon or bicycle, but otherwise it was super quiet. Even downtown in the middle of the day there was very little going on in the street compared to the sidewalks. http://www.shorpy.com/node/8920 http://www.shorpy.com/node/11952 http://www.shorpy.com/node/8222 (note that every street is almost completely empty) It wasn't until about 1906 or 1907 that you started seeing cars on downtown streets with regularity, and they quickly took over because the few who could afford them had all these huge mostly empty streets to play around on and park their cars with impunity during the day (in most cities leaving any vehicle parked on a street overnight was forbidden). It wasn't until later in the 1920s that downtown parking started to become an issue, and after WWII elsewhere. There's photos of my street in Hyde Park next to the Madison Road streetcar line from 1938 when it was being rebuilt, and of the nine houses only one had a driveway, let alone a garage. The best solution seems to be the “really narrow streets” or “narrow streets for people” paradigm championed by Nathan Lewis who I linked above. These are basically pre-industrial street geometries with generally no more than 20 feet from building face to building face. It’s common in medieval Europe and continues to be the standard throughout much of Japan and other Asian countries even in the suburbs. By being so narrow, these streets are naturally scaled to people walking, and the enclosure prevents motorists from driving too fast, though they’re still allowed. It’s trying to retrofit the oversized streets and intersections of industrial age cities that is more difficult because they’re already flawed pedestrian environments due to the excessive spacing, motorists feel entitled to use the space, and difficulty of getting enough pedestrians, cyclists, etc. to fill up all the extra room. This is why in post-industrial Europe where cycling is most prevalent (The Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, and to a lesser extent Germany) they reallocated space from their post-industrial hypertrophic streets to cycling and transit lanes leaving comparatively less space for only motor vehicles, even though they still have similar building-to-building widths as we do. This for instance could be any of Cincinnati's 40' main streets (Vine, Hamilton, Ludlow, McMillan, Woodburn): https://goo.gl/maps/huW5AibBzUP2 or some of the wider behemoth streets like MLK, Montgomery, Liberty, or Jefferson https://goo.gl/maps/3peC8cu8Yrm It's certainly all about priorities. In Copenhagen, when a street becomes too busy, they remove a lane, either to dedicate to better cycling infrastructure or bus lanes. The mindset is "this street is busy because it's too attractive to drivers and the alternatives aren't sufficient." Imagine a US traffic engineer with that sort of attitude.