Lately, I've been intrigued by some "ghost" streets that appear on the Hamilton County Auditor's online records, but no longer physically exist.  Some of these streets are surrounded by vacant residential parcels that are still privately-owned, with taxes paid, even though they lack street access.  It's not clear based on the information available online why these streets don't exist anymore.  Perhaps the topography proved too challenging and buildings had to be torn down.  Or maybe they ever only existed on paper?  I'll get the thread started with the one that baffles me the most, Severn Ave. in Clifton.  I have a couple others that I will add later. 

 

Severn Ave. is a relatively short street, with about a dozen residential lots on each side.  It is a no-outlet street, accessible only from Green Hill Ave.  But today, Green Hill is only a jog, connecting Juergens Ave. (down to Avondale) and Greendale Ave (up to Clifton).  Was it ever extended and then abandoned, or never extended?  The clues are mixed.

 

Let's start with Mapquest, which registers 101 Severn Ave. as follows:

 

However, the U.S. Postal Service doesn't register any Severn Ave. addresses.

 

Here's how the Auditor's records show the streets and accompanying parcels. The parcels on the north side of Severn are owned as back yards by the homeowners on Lafayette Ct.  The parcels on the south side and along Green Hill Ave. have no online records:

 

Here's how it looks from the air.  Can you detect a break in the tree cover where there bend in Green Hill might have been, and the intersection with Severn?

 

I've lightly highlighted where I detect what might be the traces of the street.  Maybe the street was cleared but the development never came into being?

 

To solve this mystery, perhaps I will have to do some ground recon or go look at some old plat maps.  Anyone have any ideas?

 

Please add your own ghost streets of Cincinnati! 

 

Coming soon:  Excelsior and Mcilvine Streets, Mt. Auburn, and Van Lear and Cliff Street extensions, Clifton Heights.

Next in the series:  Excelsior and Mcilvine Streets, Mt. Auburn.  The severe topography in this area makes it clear why these streets were abandoned.  Yet they remain on the books.  Maybe someday, modern building methods will overcome the challenges of these sites and Excelsior and Mcilvine will live again!

 

From the Auditor:

 

Several of the parcels are still privately owned.  There are even six addresses on the street, between 219-230.  The USPS has these addresses on file, but they are deemed non-deliverable.

 

Here's how it looks from the air.  You can't see Mcilvine (though you can from Dorchester in person, I will add a photo later), but the ends of Excelsior are clear.

 

Edit: This 1905 photo depicts the Sycamore St. bend shown in the aerial above. The houses in the foreground were located on Excelsior St.  The large buildings sat along Edinburgh Pl., another ghost street. Only the two circled buildings still stand.

 

A future development opportunity?

Most of the "ghost" streets in Cincinnati are a victim of the Geology of the area. Slides are extremely common on hills where over-development has occurred, or where roads have been placed in precarious places. For example, driving down Clifton Avenue towards OTR one will see a large hillside that is completely undeveloped. This is due to a huge rotational slide that happened in the 60s. People in this city must be extremely wary of developing on hillsides, and must take the necessary precautions to ensure that their property will not slide down the hill.

 

Other roads that are "ghost" roads not in the city still exist. The abandoned portion of Delhi Road still exists, and in some places has a pavement thickness of 2 meters due to landslide corrections. Other roads, such as Devil's Backbone Road, have no hint of the road on the hillside in which they were abandoned.

Interesting topic.  Take a look at the auditor maps in the area of North and South Fairmount.  There are a ton of ghost streets around those areas.

It's interesting, those plots and those areas you mention in South Fairmount are the exact area my Geology Professor examined for a bunch of DAAPers who were going to build a house on one of the properties. When he examined it he found that there were major signs of previous rotational slumps (land slides), and concluded that building in the area would destabilize the hill once again.

This is a very interesting thread. I've heard ghost streets typically referred to as paper streets, at least for the ones that only ever existed on paper.

 

I've seen a great illustration of what the bend in Sycamore (@Edinburgh) in the book Cincinnati Scenes, iirc. I'll try and dig that up.

Bizarre that streets might just disappear like that and amazing that no one properly records into the public record the disappearance of a street from something as significant as a land slide!

 

On a semi-related topic, I've read that discrepancies in mapping are sometimes intentional tools of copyright protection. One mapping company might add an additional street or misrepresent a geographical feature (something minor, of course, not like a freeway or something) in order to ensure other companies don't just poach their geographical information and transfer it onto their own maps. I was wondering if anyone knew if that was true.

 

 

^Well all kinds of surveying errors have led to screwed-up intersections throughout the region, where township section lines failed to meet properly.  One visible in the top satelite image is Clifton Ave's tapering to the east to the point where it suddenly leaves the section line and heads downhill to Spring Grove Ave.  And of course all of the cardinal direction streets in the Symmes Purchase are oriented on the magnetic cardinal directions, not true north.  This was in direct violation of the charter and caused all kinds of problems.  Symmes also blatantly sold what is now Springfield Township, which was supposed to be the "university" township, or what became Miami University. 

^Well all kinds of surveying errors have led to screwed-up intersections throughout the region, where township section lines failed to meet properly.  One visible in the top satelite image is Clifton Ave's tapering to the east to the point where it suddenly leaves the section line and heads downhill to Spring Grove Ave.  And of course all of the cardinal direction streets in the Symmes Purchase are oriented on the magnetic cardinal directions, not true north.  This was in direct violation of the charter and caused all kinds of problems.  Symmes also blatantly sold what is now Springfield Township, which was supposed to be the "university" township, or what became Miami University. 

 

Jake, Any other good examples of this tapering?

Look at Auburn Ave. near Christ Hospital, it looks like some sloppy work there.  The worst of all is Liberty St. as it comes across from the West End, it wavers well off course (the section near Reading Rd. was built in the 1960's, this isn't what I'm talking about).  Liberty St. was the baseline of the entire Symmes Purchase township grid so when your baseline is off obviously you're going to have a lot of problems later on. 

 

The first section of the US divided into townships was the "7 ranges" in eastern Ohio near the Pennsylvania border and the second was the Symmes Purchase.  Because communication was so bad in the 1780's and Symmes was of course in it only to make a buck he took advantage of the situation and didn't demand a precise job from his surveyors, who were of course armed with only a compass and 22 yard measuring chain.  These fluctuations caused all kinds of litigation problems and that along with improved technology is what made possible the nearly perfect rectangular township grids of later decades.   

 

There are examples of these poor meets as far north as Montgomery County, where east-west surveys have to go at a diagonal between north -south lines, rather than perpendicular.

 

This can be seen on roads, too.  OH 725 runs at a diagonal between Washington Church Rd and Mcewen due to this survey offset.

 

 

So this made the township boundaries true north but the roads mag north?

 

So what's up with roads like Kemper, Cresentville and Tylersville having the back and forth angles?

 

It is also interesting how roads west of the G Miami are oriented correctly. Also if you look at Dayton the east side of the city seems to be tilted and the west side seems to be fine. And as far north as Urbana the E-W streets seem to "match" Liberty Street

 

I had to check this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmes_Purchase

^yeah, that's correct, west of the Great Miami was outside the purchase, it was surveyed later.  Surveying on magnetic north was an act of laziness and nothing else, it is after all a lot easier to walk through the woods following the compass needle than it is to constantly calculate true north.  The government sent out its top crews to mark the important state boundaries like Ohio/Penn and Ohio/Indiana, these lines were drawn pretty much perfectly, but for decades anybody could be a surveyor, there was no formal training because trigonometry was not used initially.  A chronometer was used to find longitude in those days, and there were likely zero of them east of the Alleghenies when this was happening.  Lewis did remarkably accurate longitude measurements on his western expedition with a chronometer hauled all the way from Philadelphia, but it took him weeks of training ahead of time to get the hang of it.   

 

I've argued for awhile that a big reason why Cincinnati's surburban traffic flows so much better than that in southern cities is that there is a dense network of both these rectilinear streets which followed the section lines, radial roads, and cowpath-type roads.  Compare it to township-less suburbs of Atlanta and Nashville, where country roads turned suburban avenues consist mainly of radial roads and meandering cowpaths and there is much less redundancy.  Cincinnati's suburban section roads lead nowhere in particular and so there is a much denser suburban road network. 

 

       

^Galbraith Rd., Compton Rd., and North Bend Rd. are good examples of what I'm talking about in Hamilton County.  All those roads begin and start at completely anonymous points and don't pass directly through town centers except for Compton through Mt. Healthy.