TroyEros

Can I ask what has lead to so much demolition of the historic stock in Clifton Heights? There used to be quite a few beautiful Victorian mansions and churches. Alot of Cincinnati neighborhoods have been able to keep there historic stock in tact (for the most part). But with the Clifton Heights area it just seems there this constant "itch" to erase historic structures, for bland new student housing blocks... Can anyone explain why? And why there's hasn't been more opposition (similar to what we saw for the Dennison Hotel group, and the Davis Furniture building in OTR) from grass root groups? Granted I can maybe understand "why" it's occuring. No doubt more housing is needed for UC, and these old Victorian Mansions, and Churches do little in the way of providing proper housing and retail. It's just sad that you have a neighborhood like OTR who has managed to save the old, while infilling the new. With Clifton, it feels like, "nope" lets just bulldoze anything old, and replace it with new. I just don't understand why...

Somewhat unrelated, but is there ground floor retail going into the new Holiday Inn as well?

Is the 15th and Vine project still scheduled to be office space? Any potential for ground floor retail and office space above?

Am I the only one who thinks that the open green space between The Yard House, and the restaurant adjacent (whatever it will end up becoming) should be utilized better? I was thinking how it would it be cool to have it be a public square, with many a few trees, and a fountain in the middle with some benches circling the fountain. There's not many type of squares like that in Cincinnati, besides fountain square..

Pendelton is absorbed in the historical boundary no?

Jesus talk about lack of faith from these developers. There's already so much parking already for the banks. What's going to happen if cincinnati residents start becoming less dependent on cars and more dependent on bikes, and street cars, and hopefully light rail. We are going to build this massive amount of parking that would lay vacant.

So the Queen City Radio location is scheduled to become a Bar & Beer Garden. Opening Spring 2016. Official site: http://qcrbar.com/ https://www.instagram.com/queencityradio/

Alot of those people who are going to the Banks (at least from what I've encountered), and are not going to more "urban" destinations like OTR is because they still believe OTR is dangerous. I have a friend, who remembers how OTR was like back in the early 2000's, and still holds the belief that its still like that to this day. The banks is for people who aren't willing to go past there comfort zones when it comes to "inner city" urbanism.

I was there Saturday. It was actually pretty magical, and felt NYC like. A tavola was playing old christmas music, that were being blasted through the speakers, alot of passerby's where shopping for presents, alot of people dressed up festively for Santa Con, OTR was all dressed up and garnished for the Holidays, it was a pretty magical moment where you had to stop and soak in everything that was going on, and ask yourself, "Am I really in Cincinnati right now?" The best thing about what I saw was how diverse the OTR crowd was. Saw alot of people from other countries, and different ethnic backgrounds. Made you feel you were in "actual" city where there is diversity. What excites me the most, is that this is essientially only of a QUARTER of OTR we are talking about. Imagine, a fully revitalized OTR, that stretches from a busisness/resturaunt/shops packed Pendelton, all the way through Vine, up to the Mohawk/Brewery district. If we can replicate this type of "life, and activity" throughout ALL of OTR, then Holy shit will this place become something incredible to witness.

Anyone else think that's way to many locations for Taste of Belgium? Literally there's one in OTR, And one near UC, and now you have one at the banks. There's also the rookwood location...I mean, I feel this is only going to saturate the market, and hurt sales.

I feel like if your a restaurant/bar and your not locating yourself in OTR, your shooting yourself in the foot. OTR gets so much pedestrian traffic and word of mouth, and each restaurant has so long wait times on the weekends. If you manage to make decent food/serve good drinks, then your bound to be successful from the spill over from people tired of waiting for there go-to spot.

EXCLUSIVE: Startup GNFN leaves Norwood incubator for OTR http://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/news/2015/12/16/exclusive-startup-leaves-incubator-for-otr.html Anyone have access?

Don't forget to weigh in on the Liberty Street reconfiguration. Comments are due back this Wednesday December 16! http://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/…/liberty-street-safety-impro…/

Holy crap! Something like that would be incredible! ^ Would truly make the north and south of OTR whole again.

If this guy doesn't have money to maintain a building, how the hell is it legal for this guy to be able to continue to keep ownership of the building? I feel like there should be a mandatory level of upkeep, and if the owner isn't able to maintain that upkeep, than the building should be allowed to be bought on the open market.

Pretty much. If Cincinnati was smart, they would plaster big video boards along empty space walls, add a bunch of neon, and add a bunch of high end fashion retailers, and some fast food places. and make it the focal point for the cincinnati "tourist" The banks is the closest Cincinnati will ever have to Toronto Dundas Square, or NYC Time Square. Fountain Square will never be that place. The only thing missing are the retail destinations. The banks needs high end retailers. I'm talking H&M's, Prada, a Hard Rock Cafe, an AMC movie theater, etc.

The red building?

Not sure why I like this picture so much...But the density, and the bicycle rides, and the row of cars in the background, just kind of reminscent of that 70's Vine street picture with all that density. I guess, it's just a reminder to me that things are looking up.

So c-dawg can you explain what killed Cincinnati population so badly from the 50's to today? We have only 50k living in the metro today. I understand the creation of the suburbs and the whole baby boomer effect after ww2 was a big role player. But so did many cities have that occur to them, but didn't see that large of a reduction in a population. I understand cities like Detroit that relied on a huge industry but Cincinnati didn't really have that occur either. People just ran in droves to the suburbs, at a huge rapid rate.. But why?

A biker supply store.

Well Cincinnati does have that...but it's all located in Sharonville/West Chester. There's a enclave Arabic/Indian/Asian community in Westchester, and a huge Indian Community based in Sharonville. The question is, how do you hone on these immigrants, and make urban living attractive, and have these enclaves sprout up downtown. Right now, whenever I ask someone why they choose not to go downtown/live downtown, it's always "Cincinnati is to Dangerous". Until that perception changes, it'll be a while before that ease of access makes it way downtown.

I thought more about C-Dawgs the most "american" city out of all the cities. Thinking more about the populace that we have in Cincinnati...The appalachians, African Americans, Euro decadents (primarily German), it makes you realize that cincinnati is really mixed. It has a country vibe, maybe because of the close proximity to KY, but yet it still has an urban vibe due to the amount of African Americans who live in the city...and you still have all the previous german decendents who used to live downtown in the suburbs (hopefully there children end up returning back to downtown).

This is the one thing that has constantly surprised me and infuriated me as I've explored the city. The developmental patterns of city neighborhoods here are so totally bizarre and I've struggled to wrap my head around how so many contradictory styles of architecture and city planning can exist in the same city. The "detached row houses" just seem so baffling to me, especially in Corryville. They're the exact same skinny houses you see down in Pendleton or elsewhere but they have sizeable side yards and huge back yards more in line with what you'd expect to see in other Great Lakes cities, interspersed with outher housing styles. It's just so weird that the layout of some of the (relatively) flatter neighborhoods didn't continue the building pattern of what you'd see in the basin. I get that a lot of it was the wealth running out to the original suburbs, but it still seems incredibly spread out in some parts, and it never really reached the point where the old stuff got torn down and replaced with denser construction. I think the west side confuses me the most. You'll notice that I don't have many photos from west of the Mill Creek, and part of that is because I just can't geographically figure out that side of town at all. To even get to places like Westwood you have to travel up an incredibly long boulevard that is essentially isolated until you get to the other side of Mt Airy Forest, and it all seems so completely detached from the density down in the basin and the Mill Creek valley. I guess I would have expected these areas to have developed closer to the edge of the hillside with higher densities, but then you get into Price Hill and it's all very spread out again before fairly quickly breaking down into cul-de-sacs. It just seems so very bizarre, like it's its own little world. That said, I'm hoping to spend some more time over that way since it really is unexplored territory for me, for the most part. Every neighborhood here meets other neighborhoods in such odd ways, and I think it makes Cincinnati feel very detached and eclectic simply because each neighborhood really is its own little city that happened to grow out and bump into another city that has a completely different development pattern. There really isn't anything like it, and it's led to such an incredible diversity of architecture that you're always going to find some really weird, eclectic gem hidden in the oddest place. And that's what I love the most about living here, is just how surprising it is. You can take four different routes to the same place and you'll travel through four completely different environments. It never gets old. What you described is exactly what I feel everytime I step foot in Over the Rhine. Seriously, stepping foot in Washington Park on a blue skyed spring day is a sight to behold simply because of how "other wordly" it feels like. 1 block away is downtown, yet you feel like you've stepped foot in a quaint village, completely detatched from everything else. And that diversity you mentioned can even be seen in just streets in Over the Rhine. Look at each street in OTR. Elm, Pleasant, Race, Republic, Vine, etc. and just notice the diversity. The buildings, and vibe you see on Main Street is so different compared to Vine Street, and Vine Street has a different vibe and feel to Elm Street. The side streets like Republic have there own look and feel that differ compared to say another side street like Clay. Each street in OTR has it's own feel and look. It's kind of a micro look at Cincinnati as a whole.

That "indistinct" culture is due to (at least my belief anyways) just decades upon decades of disinvestment of the Urban Core. You essentially have only 50K people actually living in the urban core, and more than half of those residents are incredibly low income residents. Most of the true Cincinnatians who used to live in the urban core, and used to live in Over the Rhine, and Price Hill, and Walnut Hills, and Clifton, and other Cincinnati neighborhoods during the so called "hey day" all went running to the suburbs in the late 50's and 60's, and stayed there. What always surprises me is when you google Detroit, and go to google images, the first images pop up are of the ghetto's, and how deteriorated everything became. It's funny though, if you went driving around Cincinnati in the early 2000's, it really wouldn't have looked any different. Over the Rhine was a neighborhood that was being demolished bit by bit, while the other half was laying wasted and vacant. Walnut Hills was in the same boat, maybe not to that severe of an extent as OTR, but many of the buildings were (and are still today) vacant. It felt like no one gave a damn about Cincinnati, and the progress that did occur was sooooo slow (and came crashing down during the 2001 riots). Only in the last 5 years we have had this renaissance/revival of sorts occur. I do truly believe Cincinnati is on the cusp of a "2nd" Heyday so to speak. With millennials returning back to urban living, public transportation improving, and neighborhoods returning back to there former glory (OTR, and soon Walnut Hills), I truly believe Cincinnati is on the verge of becoming held in the same respects to the national public as Austin, and Portland are. But as far as identity and culture go. It's there, it's just not as appear ant because of the sprawl that occurred and the years of disinvestment in the urban core. I will say this, and it's a bit of an aside. I was taught in History Class that Cincinnati and Chicago are very interchangeable. If the train never became popular, and canals and river boats were still the preferred method of transportation than Cincinnati would have been today's Chicago, and Chicago would have been todays Cincinnati. Either way, Cincinnati has such beautiful hills and valleys, it always makes my mind to travel and wonder how Cincinnati would have looked like if it grew to the scale of Chicago. Imagine the density on those hills like Price Hill and Mount Adams, and Mount Auburn. It would have been a sight to behold.

Regarding tuckers, I read the cincinnati mag article. Apperantly there's alot of new inspection processes that are needed to be done. But apperantly if it goes through (which they are hoping to be approved in december/janurary) , then they will eventually reopen. They want to re-open, but new resturaunt regulations are pushing them back.