BigDipper 80

It's not really that uncommon. "Hingetown" in Cleveland is ostensibly still part of Ohio City but is really just a transition area between OC and Detroit-Shoreway. My sub-neighborhood, Wright-Dunbar, technically also spans two neighborhoods, with the area north of West Third Street being a part of Wolf Creek and the area south of West Third being a part of Five Points.

The branding problem with Cincinnati chili is that it's pretty much only nationally known for looking like excrement.

I used to work for Bicycle and they were trying their hardest to get people to play cards. They've got an app out that they advertise heavily on their products and they did a Play More Cards event for a few years at Japps, but it never really seemed to catch on. That said, they're still pumping out plenty of new cards all the time.

^Don't forget Washington Park! It's really the only one of its kind in the region, being a truly urban park. I'd agree that Cincinnati has the best "city parks", but Cleveland and Dayton both have some excellent metroparks and nature preserves. Those are a somewhat different type of park, of course.

^I don't mean for this to sound snarky whatsoever, but have you visited Piston Society before? Its target market has never seemed to be the stereotypical hardened leather-clad chopper-riding "biker" and more toward the sport-bike fans.

I've never understood this event, in particular. I mean, I don't generally understand the appeal of American-style street festivals as it is, but Taste has always seemed like an excuse to over-pay for a tiny plate of food. At least Oktoberfest has some sort of a theme, but even Oktoberfest is the exact same thing as just about every other street festival in the country, just with more lederhosen and oom-pah bands.

I suspect that Cincinnati's neighborhoods on the far east and west sides are less dense than people seem to acknowledge, as well. Westwood and West Price Hill have a bunch of sprawly cul-de-sac subdivisions, as is Mount Washington and most of Hyde Park, Mount Lookout, Clifton north of Ludlow, and North Avondale. The parts of the city that are "Great Lakes city density" (we're calling downtown/most of Uptown "east coast built form" for the sake of this argument) are relatively small patches of land adjacent to Norwood. Namely, Bond Hill, western Oakley, and northern Hyde Park. So yeah, Cincinnati's core is built up very dense, but there is also plenty of pseudo-suburban car-oriented development within the city, as well.

I don't know how many of you are familiar with All Columbus Data, but he does a good job of doing various statistical things on Columbus population data. One of his blog posts from a while ago just looks at from a pure number of people living in a circle X miles from City Hall, Columbus moves up the list pretty quickly as you move further out, which would suggest that while the immediate downtown core is pretty light on population, the metro as a whole is pretty consistently dense, whereas a lot of the older metros have a denser core but their density drops off a lot more rapidly than Columbus does. Here's the rest of the post: http://allcolumbusdata.com/?p=1079 He's got lot of other cool stuff like analysis of the change in the C's downtown populations over the years: It's an interesting blog, I'd recommend it.

Columbus is probably currently more “consistently” populated than Cincinnati or certainly Cleveland as well, I’d think. Yeah Franklinton is still a mess and parts of Olde Towne East and King-Lincoln are somewhat empty but for the most part it’s a fairly “occupied” city. The other C’s have a dense built form (although German Village and pretty much anything else along High is fairly comparable in built density to most Cleveland neighborhoods), but Cincy and Cleveland have some shockingly empty neighborhoods. Especially eastern Cleveland.

I think there's an interesting point in the fact that unlike Detroit and St. Louis, Cleveland has comparatively little swaths of urban prairie. I would definitely agree that "strategic infill and updating of housing stock" would be the most desirable but it's definitely tricky from a sociology perspective to get people to trickle back into these places when they're surrounded by blight and "bad influences" in all directions.

KJP[/member], do you think it would be more advantageous to selectively renovate and teardown/rebuild specific homes throughout the city and organically try to update housing stock that way, or does Cleveland need to go neo-urban renewal on these failed neighborhoods, clearcut the whole area, and then hand it off for cheap to a developer to do with it as he pleases? Obviously a lot of the former has been happening on the west side, and even more obviously the latter didn't work out too well the last time we tried it with Central, but I honestly am not sure how else to convince people to move to the east side without returning it to nature and trying again.

I'm still floored at how quickly downtown Youngstown has gone from being left for dead to being such a lively place. For a city that fell as hard as it did, this is all incredibly impressive.

I think another thing that has to be considered is whether or how easily that research can be spun off into the local economy. Case obviously does a lot of impressive things, but I have a feeling much of what they do is very high-up or theoretical, whereas over at Carnegie-Mellon you have a greater emphasis on robotics and programming, which can more readily be translated into startups or used to attract companies like Uber or Google. There's a similar effect with the University of Dayton Research Institute, which draws a lot of research dollars, but because most of the work they do is DoD related, other than providing jobs through the Institute or at Wright-Patt, there isn't much opportunity to take that tech and use it locally at a start-up, for instance. Cincinnati's ability to keep people in the metro is almost entirely related to the incredibly strong ties to regional businesses that UC has. Most of the research is benefiting places like GE Aviation and the like, and of course most of the students end up co-oping with one of the big regional firms, which ends up helping to keep talent.

I hope all those apartments come with Crave Case delivery chutes!

I may have mentioned this elsewhere at some point, but I've always thought it was somewhat interesting/unique how Cleveland's sprawl dynamics played out in their traditionally-wealthy suburbs relative to other cities in the state. Down in Dayton, the "nicest" neighborhoods all border the city of Oakwood, with that city essentially helping keep the bordering Dayton neighborhoods relatively stable. This dynamic doesn't quite play out the same in Cincinnati, but most of the wealthiest neighborhoods have a very strong demarcation line between them and any less-desirable area. That is, the blight tends to not creep over the "line in the sand". In Cleveland, it seems, the blight of the collapsing inner-cities ends up sucking the life out of the adjacent "nice" communities, as seen along the borders of CH and Shaker. I don't have a good answer on why it plays out like this.

This one's for taestell[/member] : Dave’s Juke Joint – It’s Happening Again! In 2016 Dave Chappelle hosted an amazing event in a barn, on a farm in Yellow Springs. Inspired by music born in the juke joints of Americas Deep South, Chappelle’s modern day Juke Joint takes you on a trip thru his personal playlist which includes tunes ranging from Coltrane to Nirvana. More below: http://www.mostmetro.com/music/daves-juke-joint-its-happening-again.html

^I have that same qualm with the Miami where it runs through Dayton. The current riverbank is just floodplain filled with weeds and a grassy levee. I know it's hard to sculpt these things but it would be great if Ohio's urban rivers could get properly landscaped, somehow. I know it's tricky with the Miami and Scioto/Olentangy since they regularly flood, but there has to be some precedent somewhere we could copy.

^Not to stray off topic too much, but I'm always amazed at just how many individual storefronts there were (and are, in larger cities) pre-WWII. When your meat guy and your shoe guy and your china shop guy are all off selling their one niche thing, you end up taking up a lot of space. It would be physically impossible to adapt all this retail space to what actually sells these days (ie mostly prepared food)!

These people need to go down to Atlanta for a couple of days and see that you can in fact build a 40-floor condo tower a block from some two-story houses without the world coming to an end.

I guess the question becomes, how do you go about doing that? I feel like it's hard unless it's specifically baked into the branding in every single way. I doubt most people know Wendy's is a Columbus thing, but everyone knows In-N-Out is a Los Angeles thing. Or alternatively, everyone knows that Skyline is a Cincy thing because their whole identity is about being a Cincy thing. Which in that particular case probably hurts it a little bit in terms of trying to outsource its popularity to new locations.

^I've been saying this for a while now. I know some folks in Indianapolis who thought Bakersfield was an Indy-exclusive restaurant until I told them otherwise. I get it, and good for them for having a successful business model, but it definitely creates the impression of "OTR has all the same stuff as everywhere else". But I personally think it was pretty clear from the get-go that building a restaurant empire was the end game for a lot of these companies in OTR. Their branding was all too slick for just one-off establishments.

Is there enough space to squeeze in roundabouts? I think the better solution would be to just reconfigure either end of the square so that the whole thing functions as a roundabout so that you can get rid of the left turn lanes and lights, but it would lead to significant increases if you're trying to turn left from Linwood to Delta. Alternatively, you could probably do something where you reconfigure the square entirely and just put a large plaza on the western (or eastern) side where there is currently roadway, and have Linwood meet at Delta with simple T-intersections. Excuse the poor-quality Paint doodle, but I'm thinking something like this:

If not for the river flooding issue (and the inevitable outcry about there not being enough parking), putting a new convention center underneath The Banks would have been a win-win. If I were in charge, I'd move the whole thing to where the PBS building is at Ezzard Charles and Central Parkway. You could pretty much sprawl the thing all the way from Music Hall to City Hall if you really wanted to. Maybe find a way to incorporate residential and hotels on top of the thing with some mixed-use stuff along Central to help soften the huge wedge it would put between OTR/CBD and the West End. Or shoehorn it in as part of the casino and build a new garage elsewhere.

Yeah I'd be willing to bet that outside the one or two "marquee conventions", most midsize cities that have a good convention game are that way because they're a central hub for the region, not because the city is more amenable to tourism.