This is what we lost: a sprawling urban city that spanned to the base of Price Hill. All for some trashy office parks, a highway and light industrial crud.

 

 

Yes that is Crosley Field in the upper far right.

 

What is that skinny long building in the bottom left corner of the picture? I think that is the corner of West 5th and Central.

What is that skinny long building in the bottom left corner of the picture? I think that is the corner of West 5th and Central.

 

^Notice the Sixth Street Market House in the bottom left

Also the demolition of the neighborhood contributed to the decline of downtown retail since downtown was within walking distance of the West End, meaning downtown was to some extent their "neighborhood" business district.  So 50,000 residents within walking distance of downtown were booted elsewhere, and everyone's wondering where downtown retail went. 

I've been putting together some "before and after" photos and Street Views, using a collection of street improvement photos from the 20s, 30s, and 40s. I find the old photos really interesting, and the current scenes pretty depressing in most cases: http://zfein.blogspot.com/2014/02/cincinnati-then-and-now-004.html

 

Here's the source of the old photos, but beware because it's easy to lose a few hours of your day in these: http://drc.libraries.uc.edu/handle/2374.UC/702780/browse?type=series

I've been putting together some "before and after" photos and Street Views, using a collection of street improvement photos from the 20s, 30s, and 40s. I find the old photos really interesting, and the current scenes pretty depressing in most cases: http://zfein.blogspot.com/2014/02/cincinnati-then-and-now-004.html

Those images are amazing. This intersection floored me. Looking north on Colerain from North Bend. This would be by the Mt Airy water tower. The old pic is 1936

Hard to imagine but Colerain Ave. was once a charming country road.  Even the current photo doesn't portend the monster that begins a mile north of this point. 

I hadn't seen that one, but here's one I noticed that is looking east from a few steps away from that same spot. It's almost as depressing:

 

 

What sticks out most to me, aside from the obvious changes in density, is the addition of huge, gaudy street signs, signals, and pavement markings. Some parts of the city are so much uglier today because we want to be able to move our cars through them at a slightly quicker rate.

My grandfather claims that it was standard practice for kids in the 1930s to hitchhike up and down Colerain Ave. from the bottom of the hill in Northside to wherever they were going.  There wasn't a streetcar line, obviously, or apparently any bus service for quite awhile, maybe until Queen City Metro. 

I used to hitchhike around Springfield & to Columbus & Dayton all the time in the early 70s.

I've been putting together some "before and after" photos and Street Views, using a collection of street improvement photos from the 20s, 30s, and 40s. I find the old photos really interesting, and the current scenes pretty depressing in most cases: http://zfein.blogspot.com/2014/02/cincinnati-then-and-now-004.html

Those images are amazing. This intersection floored me. Looking north on Colerain from North Bend. This would be by the Mt Airy water tower. The old pic is 1936

 

Now and then when I see her face

she takes me away to that special place

but if I stared too long

I'd probably break down and cry

 

Those West End photos are just brutal. So sad. :cry:

From L-R: The Sheraton, ???, ???, The RKO Albee, ???.  Feel free to fill in the blanks.  Oh, to have that collection of buildings along 5th at FS again.  Instead we have the Westin.  Why would you have ever demolished that Sheraton?!?!

 

 

BTW, this flickr feed has dozens of great FS historicals by Tim Hubbard.

 

^ Kinda think this photo might be from early-May 1970, a day or so after the Kent State shootings, when a couple thousand of us marched downtown to Fountain Square in protest.

What the hell happened to the West End?! At a quick look, nothing remains but the train station! Gone forever. The worst part is development like that will never happen again! So painful!

 

There are a few buildings along Dalton Street and Hopkins that are still around from the time of this photo, but very few.  Some of the buildings between Freeman and Dalton in the area of the Enquirer printing plant made it until 1983 (pretty sure that's right, it may have been '84) before they were demolished.  Back then they were run down and deserted and hardly anyone cared.  I think the demolition of the West End may have been the biggest blunder that the City ever made....

This is what we lost: a sprawling urban city that spanned to the base of Price Hill. All for some trashy office parks, a highway and light industrial crud.

 

 

Yes that is Crosley Field in the upper far right.

 

I've never seen this view of the west end before that whole Queensgate/75 crap. Thanks for posting this.

 

WLWT 1983 blooper reel

Springer, Rashid, Horstmeyer, Hirsch, Barry & some backgrounds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8H0xHuVzqA

^Jeff Hirsch reporting on the Convention Center expansion at 7:00.  Norma was a dish.

You've seen the pics of the old Cincinnati Library - here's the confessions of a page who worked there

Was randomly looking around for pictures of DAAP and came across these awesome photos of DAAP from before the Wolfson and Eisenman additions, the construction of MLK,  etc.

 

 

http://library24.library.cornell.edu:8280/luna/servlet/view/all/what/Bauhaus%20Buildings/where/University%20of%20Cincinnati,%20Clifton%20Avenue,%20Clifton%20(Cincinnati,%20Ohio)/

 

There are a handful in that set.

 

Sander Hall

 

 

http://library24.library.cornell.edu:8280/luna/servlet/view/search?q==%22University%20of%20Cincinnati-Main%20Campus%2C%20Cincinnati%2C%20Ohio%22

 

Some more of Sander Hall in that set.

 

Photos of downtown Cincinnati buildings taken in 1968 by the Hamilton County Auditor for tax assessment purposes:

 

http://hamiltoncountyauditor.org/vintagephotos.asp

I assume photos would include moving pictures.  I stumbled across this YT post.  It is a WLWT news cast from September 1988. At about 1:45 Pat Barry shows a pic and makes mention of a future project.  You'll be stunned. 

 

http://youtu.be/fWdtd3c6WHQ

A reminder of how long major projects can take from conceptualization to completion.

That looks like Atrium I in the background: http://goo.gl/maps/Wpva4

A reminder of how long major projects can take from conceptualization to completion.

 

That project ran into the 1990-91 recession.  There was a glut of office space on the market.  The Western-Southern boys know how to make money.  They have a huge advantage over everyone else because they can cash flow these giant buildings.  That meant they could sit and sit until the timing was perfect. 

NOTE: Deleted stupid posts.

The Cincinnati Fun Map - 1982

This came out right about the time I moved to Porktown. Later, I worked at a pre press place that did work on these posters for other cities. Dunno if it was the same company that produced this.

Somebody posted this on FB, unfortunately this is so small you can barely make out anything.

The Kroger Building is labelled as the Kenner Building.

I had that poster!  Funny that the Bengals apparently didn't buy into it back then - that football player looks more like a Chicago Bear.

 

And look at all the Arby's restaurants!

Yeah we had that too.  I'd love to find one now, I bet hardly any that survive are in good condition. 

My favorite photos of historic Cincinnati: http://otrmatters.com/beautiful-historic-photos-of-cincinnati/

Here's one for everybody. It is a framed poster in my parent's basement. It is the Cincinnati Bicentennial Fireworks Commemorative poster from 1988. The sponsor at the bottom there if you can't see it was Skyline Chili.

that was an interesting display

watched from Fairview Park

the CFD was on high alert

:-)

I watched it from a roof on Wheeler St. or somewhere else in CUF.  There were tons of people up on roofs. 

IIRC, the fireworks were shot from the buildings as if to make the city a birthday cake complete with candles.

 

you can see the shoddy 1980's graphics work on this poster.  It's a neat piece for nostalgia sake but wouldn't pass the muster of HS graphics class nowadays.

 

Central Bridge...how we miss thee.

Heh, yeah.  Daytime shot of the city.  Nighttime shot of the river that doesn't match up.  And then fireworks added in.

With 4x5 film there was something called "masking", where they would literally mask off sections of sandwiched negatives or transparencies.  That is where Photoshop's various "mask" functions were derived.  If you look through ads in magazines from the 80s and earlier, you will see that this analogue masking had a "look" to it that you really can't create digitally.  It was time consuming and took a lot of skill even to get the sort of crude results you see here. 

dodge & burn

dodge & burn

 

Sandwiching variously exposed negatives was the analog HDR.  You had to have the camera on a tripod and you could sandwich -1 and +1 negatives or some other exposure combination.  This was necessary for a lot of product and architectural photography.  Only top photographers could get the best results.  Now Photoshop can perform this task in two seconds. 

Everybody seems to love today's "clean design" but to me it all looks like stuff I could do myself in MS Paint. There's nothing about it that captures your imagination.

unfortunately, this poster SCREAMS WTF?

I worked in a photo lab back in the 90's.  I sandwiched negatives from time to time in the print machine just screwing around.  I remember the shots that produced the most peculiar result was overlaying a shot of the Golden Gate from the Marin side over a shot of the Cincy skyline from Covington.  The scale was all wrong but to the uninitiated it looked totally believable.  I'm feeling like I still have the print archived somewhere in a box.  I should digitize it for grins and  giggles.

Th Oakley Sock Store, 1983.

I had just moved to Cincinnati a year or two earlier & lived in Oakley for a year.

This was on the north side of Madison just west of where the road dips down below the train tracks.

I really wondered about what kind of town I had moved to...

That must have moved to Monroe.

 

I love the hand-painted signs like the "Sweeper Shops" you see in Appalachia have.

This a shot I took out the back of my friends VW Scirocco (memba those?) on our way to FL.  In August, 1992!

 

Not much to see but thought I'd post since it shows the skyline and it was during the construction of the current Covington cut.

 

I drove a Scirocco in high school and college. Loved that car!

This a shot I took out the back of my friends VW Scirocco (memba those?) on our way to FL.  In August, 1992!

 

Not much to see but thought I'd post since it shows the skyline and it was during the construction of the current Covington cut.

 

 

 

I believe we can see the old overpass and exit ramp that was removed as part of this project.  I never drove on that ramp but it served the southernmost parts of Covington's basin.  I seem to remember that the old drive down the S-curve was even more exciting than the current configuration, because there was this brief flash where the city came partially into view, then it disappeared again before coming into full view.   

 

 

It also served commuters in Fort Wright, as it was far more convenient to drive through sourthern Covington from Kyles Lane than it was to sit in traffic on "Death Hill".  I'm not sure if that factored into why that exit was eliminated.

That was the Jefferson Avenue overpass and it was similar in construction to the overpasses that still exist at KY18 and US42. 

 

The exit was closed about 1982 because it was just to dangerous for drivers to try to make the exit headed NB.  The whole configuration was odd and driven likely by Covington business interests.  By the 1980s it was clear that highway speeds and commercial trucking prohibited such an interchange.

 

The second to last picture posted is significant because it is dated almost to the exact day that my own photo out the back of the Scirocco was taken.  Without a couple weeks of each other!!!

 

Finally, the last picture illustrates why the Cincinnati skyline appeared, disappeared and reappeared.  Those curves were sharp!

Nice. The old alignment was just terrible. In the second photo, you can see the old guide sign for the Jefferson exit that has been "green'ed" out. I am assuming out of control trucks frequently used the ramp as a runaway ramp and turned over?

They used "safety", like how they are with the Brent Spence, but the main issue was the slow climbing of the trucks.  I believe the climb was 1% steeper than the current climb, which is a huge difference for loaded trucks.  I seem to remember in light traffic passing trucks that were struggling up the hill at 10mph. 

 

Also I very clearly remember the new highway "floating" in its own space as illustrated in the second photo, however I seem to remember that traffic was shifted three times.  There was the original roadway, a temporary roadway everything was shifted onto, then the final shift onto the current roadway. 

Not a photo but I found this youtube video of Cincinnati at Christmas time back in the 1930s:

 

 

I've wanted to take a time machine back to that era to see how vibrant the city was, this is probably the best footage I've seen (wish I could find even better).

 

Note the crowds crowding into the bus for Mariemont...

This is the northwest corner of 5th & Race.  The photo was taken shortly before demolition of the buildings began.  On the left is the Stouffer's hotel which opened in 1968 so my guess is that this photo was taken in 1967.  Dunnhumby USA is currently building their U.S. headquarters on this site.  Looking north on Race Street is the Terrace Hilton.