northsider

Any word yet on when the petitions get turned in?

why not both wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which fills up first

What a sad little man.

But Mallory beat Pepper in 2005, and I think that Pepper was trying to position himself as the "reasonable" / more conservative Democrat in that race. However, there wasn't a single hot-button issue in that election that could be seized upon for the campaigns to differentiate themselves from each other.

first floor retail built right up to the sidewalk isn't suburban. Nothing about the form of this building is suburban. This is just you not liking the architecture of the building (which is totally okay to dislike!) and grabbing onto the word "suburban" as a pejorative.

It told me I had to subscribe. :(

oh come on, Queensgate has very little residential left and is mostly commercial and light industrial and I'm sure you know this. If you were looking to grow fields of wheat in view of downtown that'd absolutely be the most logical place to do it.

Betsy Shank is a retired teacher who was at Walnut Hills for a very long time. When I student taught there she was actually one of the teachers I worked with. She was a bit abrasive but my guess is that her take on the issues is pretty good.

Agreed. Rooftop gardening/green roofs are cool things (and it'd be nice to see more buildings that have them) but the amount given from space over FWW would be a drop in the bucket of local food needs. Findlay Market and all of the local farmers' markets are a much better way of helping to support and raise awareness of local farms. It's also worth remembering that there's a lot of farming in the western part of Hamilton County and in counties that about Hamilton County. We're actually lucky in how much local produce and food is available to us.

yeah, and if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle. :-p I agree, you could make FWW into a true tunnel which would bring a lot more expense to the project. but what we were discussing was what would be appropriate for the caps as currently proposed. I'm pretty sure that making FWW a tunnel would significantly raise the price and scope of the project, and I'd really have to wonder if we couldn't spend that money in a better way elsewhere.

I have to admit, the whole "greenspace and parks on the caps!" idea is baffling to me. The traffic sound from FWW is LOUD. People do not sit in the pleasant looking seating areas that exist around FWW today in part because of the noise. The caps aren't going to completely enclose FWW, so all of that sound will still come up. and why would people go to those parks when they could go two blocks south and be at the far better Smale park? Greenspace in cities is lovely but only when it's actually used - when it's unused it actually makes areas feel less safe and welcoming. the reason to have buildings is that they are more likely to encourage foot traffic and make people forget about the giant roadway humming along beneath their feet.

^^Hear, hear! Of course, The Banks and Smale won't be completed for another, what, five years? And at that point the streetcar will be running and there will have been considerably more work done in OTR, Pendleton, and Downtown. Doing the FWW caps would be a great way to keep the momentum going. I absolutely agree that the West End is a problem that needs to be solved but I'm not sure if there's going to be enough energy/finances to tackle it in the form of public/private partnerships until The Banks is done and south of Liberty nears completion of all possible large scale redevelopments. I guess the hope is that the rising prices of OTR/Pendleton/DT real estate will encourage potential homeowners and developers to ake a look at the West End as the way to buy cheaply buy some terrific architecture in the basin. Also, th fact that it's mostly single-family houses does make it more amenable to homeowner-based remodeling...

If anything, it reminds me a bit of 50s and 60s modernism - look at the street level overhead canopy and its supports - and a little bit of Prairie School in the windows at the top, like the building at Reading & Elsinore

I appreciate your willingness to come here, but this point struck me as odd. by this reasoning, any editorial that caused people to talk would be considered "effective", no matter how incorrect its factual assumptions were or how incendiary its language was. Also, your editorial is basically charging DeB attendees with flaunting their privilege and asserting white privilege. I'd say that those assertions would have the effect of discouraging people from attending DeB, no? In any case, I'm certainly not going to stop reading UrbanCincy or your work on UC just because I disagreed with an opinion piece of yours. Keep on being engaged in Cincy! :)

Gee, I can't imagine why black people who attended the event (like the ones mentioned upthread) would be upset by this attitude :roll: Again, having an honest discussion about gentrification and its attendant issues is totally great! But making out this (somewhat silly-sounding, to me at least) event to be a Yuppie Klan Picnic is, uh, not helping people engage in that discussion. ETA: there's clearly a lot of energy around this issue, maybe we'd all be better served by talking about gentrification in OTR in a broader context in the Gentrification thread?

My personal favorite thing about the editorial was that it presented DeB as being a white people thing when multiple people who'd actually gone said that there was a substantial minority presence. Don't let facts get in the way of a pre-established narrative, guys! Anyway, OTR has been changing tremendously and maybe the uproar comes from the fact that DeB symbolized that change to people. There's a lot of anxieties that gentrification understandably provokes and if it weren't DeB that provoked an outrage like this, it'd be something else. A more productive use of everyone's time and energy would be to support more affordable housing in OTR. if DeB really pissed you off, make a donation to OTRCH. final thought: parks are not just for residents of an individual neighborhood; they're for the entire city. It's not realistic to look at them differently.

Yes, I did. As I mentioned above, I found it to be under-researched, factually incorrect, and inflammatory. There's a real discussion to be had on gentrification at OTR, but that article isn't a good start.

how is it any more "distasteful" or "disgusting" than, say, someone renting part of the park out for a wedding?

that UrbanCincy editorial was ridiculous. Factually incorrect, under-researched, and horribly judgmental. (though I do agree that it would be nice if DeB asked attendees to give to non-profits located by the venues, like OTRCH or Bethel Union). It's not that issues of gentrification aren't valid questions - they totally are. But editorial screeds like this aren't helpful at all. My parents, who have lived in West Chester for over three decades, have been with us to Japp's and also many OTR restaurants, and they're now considering looking at living downtown when they no longer want to have a house with stairs in it, so people's perceptions are absolutely beginning to change very quickly. As for protestors, my favorite protestor at the Washington Park re-opening was the older white lady with a sign saying "the reWHITEalization of Washington Park". wonder if she's ever been back to see that Washington Park still has plenty of black folks who enjoy the park.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at above. Of course, when such features are around and can be saved, it's wonderful! But to me, the real value of a place like OTR isn't charming interior details; the real value comes from dense yet people-scaled and streetscape friendly architecture, hopefully of high quality. The thing that I've been the most pleased about all of the OTR infill that's been built/planned todate is that it's all in-scale with the surrounding neighborhood. That is really important.

oh man, that would be a bicyclist deathtrap for sure

But... at Mercer Commons, the garage is behind entirely new construction, not a facade. :wtf: I'm not sure why people are confident that the back portions of the two buildings in question near 15th and Race are especially notable or have the "charming details" that Mara's talking about. Some OTR buildings go back a really long ways and the back section is likely to be the crappiest section, frankly

oh man, this quote makes him sound super shady in a hilarious way: sure, telling a journalist that you don't want them digging into your background always makes journalists back off, because clearly there's nothing suspicious or of interest going on :roll:

I'm actually wondering if the "anchor store" mentality is outdated at this point - is that what really creates street-level activity and excitement in downtowns nowadays? I'd kind of prefer it if the city tried to focus on encouraging and creating shopping experiences that you can't get in a suburban mall. that being said, I don't really know anyone who shops at Saks, so maybe it's actually bringing a ton of excitement and activity to 5th and Race that i'm somehow missing out on.

That would be a real potential game-changer for Main, which is still a little sleepy during the day.