discospiff

@Brutus_buckeye 5th & Race: I lived downtown when they tore this down, and was absolutely livid. We've seen City Council try and fail at real estate master planning. They forced out Elder-Beerman department store for the proposed 60-story Fountain Square West, which never happened. Instead, we got 10 years of parking lot, and then finally... another department store (Macy's, which is now vacant). 5&R was torn down for Maison Blanche/Nordstrom's, which never happened (more on that, below). Instead, we got 10 years of parking lot, and then finally... another office building! Smaller than the 5&R, and with less retail. This was the main intersection of the Skywalk. Removing it for 12 years killed the rest of the Skywalk, and it fell into disrepair. The building was barely more than 20 years old when torn down. What a waste. For downtown residents, like me at the time, it was the only shopping center that had the same stores you'd find in the suburbs. Going from memory: Wah Mee Chinese Restaurant (also kicked out of Elder-Beerman, listed above... then relocated to Convention Place Mall on 5th & Elm, which is now being torn down by guess who? The city.) Walgreen's Arby's Brendamours/later Cohen's: both Cincinnati-based sporting goods stores. Awakenings coffee. Burger King: 2 floors, with an elevator. Kitchen and non-smoking dining room on the ground level, smoking section dining room on the Skywalk level. Cuz yeah, this was the 90s. Side bar: the Skywalk in the 5th & Race was one of the last sections of the Skywalk that permitted smoking indoors, until the city acquired the building. Incidentally, only Tower Place Mall and the Carew Tower sections of the Skywalk still permitted smoking thereafter, though they banned smoking shortly after the 5th & Race was closed. As of 1999, the indoor areas of the Skywalk were entirely smoke-free. A florist Scully's on the Skywalk Previous tenants: Home State Savings and Loan An arcade What else? Anyone remember? Western-Southern Life's Eagle Realty division stiffed us, the taxpayers, on this building. They "sold" it to the city for $7MM, and the obligation that the city tear it down, at city expense, and then give it back to Eagle Realty for redevelopment. Everything happened except the last step. Eagle unloaded an asset, made money on it, and walked. McAlpin's was not happy to have Macy's (then Lazarus) come to the old Elder-Beerman location on 5th (more on that above), so McAlpin's closed, unless the city would give them space on 5th street, too. McAplin's parent Mercantile Stores was going to open a Maison Blanche department store on the site, but this deal was nixed when Dillard's acquired Merc. Nordstrom's came in as a backup plan, then reneged. Even without a deal for any department store, the city still tore down the 5th & Race. With no one planning to move in, it sat as a surface parking lot for years, with two Skywalk bridges dangling in thin air, disconnected. The 5th & Race tenants were not happy. Shortly before I moved downtown, I took a girlfriend from college on a Downtown Christmas visit, in 1996. We went through the 5th & Race, and the walls were plastered with signs from the tenants, around the time the movie Dumb & Dumber came out: "Want to see Dumb and Dumber? Skip the theater, go to city hall!" I remember these posters verbatim... they also talked about the "absurd idea of moving McAlpin's one city block". What I'd give to see one of those flyers again. The tenants sued to stay. The city did everything they could to force them out. They tore down the Skywalk over Race Street. The tenants sued, won, and the city had to pay them $1000/day the Skywalk was out, and then replace the Skywalk... this brand-new Skywalk bridge was in use only 2-3 months before the building was eventually torn down. That Skywalk bridge was then closed and never used again. They let the building go into extreme disrepair, even while still occupied. I remember seeing the ceiling cave in, at the indoor Skywalk level, and it was not repaired. And they turned the escalators off and put wooden risers at the bottom, where the escalator stairs were stopped. Walgreen's had just signed a 50 year lease with the 5th & Race. They sued. The city lost, and had to relocate them - which meant tearing down Dino's and Dodd Jewelers, where Walgreen's is now. Awakenings and Scully's on the Skywalk were especially unhappy. They did not re-open after the building was razed. It's amazing I remember all of this... yet City Council does not. IMHO, it's a revolving door of budding political wanna-bes who keep repeating the same mistakes.

@Brutus_buckeye this is really bizarre, I did not think anyone else remembered that PSA except for me! I told my (then-girlfriend, now wife) about it in 2000, and I sang the tune I remembered, "Respect yourself... na, na, na na na. Respect yourself, de de de de". Years later, we were driving down 71, and a Bruce Willis song, Respect Yourself, came on the radio. That's the track they used! My girlfriend's response, "Oh my God, it sounds exactly like the way you sang it!" I've looked all over YouTube for that PSA, I have not yet found it. I believe it mostly aired on 19WXIX. I did find the song, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trEuG-m9uBA A few other tidbits I remember: The lady had a Shillito Rike's bag, which would have been reasonable, given that the 5th & Race Skywalk was closest to S-R than any other department store. Also, that would have put it somewhere in the mid-1980s; post Shillito's, pre-Lazarus. Now, why do I remember this in so much detail? I woke up one morning in the very late 80s, thinking of the PSA, and told my step mother that "I wanted to respect yourself". She had no idea what I was talking about, and she replied, "You want to save your clothes?" Also, as a kid growing up near Oxford, going downtown was a once per year event, if even... so this PSA was my window to the big urban center with a Skywalk that I admired... admired so much, I moved there straight out of college in 1997 back when the Skywalk was intact, downtown was actually low rent (not the hipster paradise it is today), and OTR was Over The Rhine. Thanks for helping me relive the memories. Picture of the 5th & Race coming...