Posted August 11, 200618 yr I've been sitting on these images for quite a long time and thought I would share them to those who have not. Enjoy Cincinnati 1907 And finally the overall General Park Plan Added bonus, 1925 Plan birdseye
August 11, 200618 yr Wow. That is just phenomenal! Where/when/how did you get that? What a treasure...
August 11, 200618 yr Amazing. "You don't just walk into a bar and mix it up by calling a girl fat" - buildingcincinnati speaking about new forumers
August 11, 200618 yr Those plans really are fantastic...how great would Cincy have been if those plans held true to today!! Oh....what could have been :|
August 11, 200618 yr Actually a whole lot of it actually happened and is there but was not fully realized and has not been well maintained. A lot of people don't realize that UC was built in Burnett Woods, that all of UC's east campus was originally Burnett Woods and MLK was only built 30 years ago. The Central Parkway sketch is funny, because they are clearly hoping for a Paris-like boulevard, which relies as much on the buildings that front it as the layout of the street itself.
August 11, 200618 yr Also these drawings show what joke computer illustration is. We can look at these monochrome drawings and have no problem understanding what was envisioned. I quite seriously doubt that in most situations computer illustration is faster and in most cases I think it's actually worse at illustrating what is planned.
August 11, 200618 yr Where/when/how did you get that? What a treasure... The UC library archives has a copy of this and I was able to scan most of the images for a project I was working on a few years back. high res ? I can't figure out how to upload images larger than 1000x750 on photobucket. And I'm too cheap for pbase or any of the other hosts. So if you would like the actual image size I would be more than happy to email them to you. And the General Park Plan is absoluetly amazing when viewed at full size. jmeck is right, these hand drawings blow the shit outta any computer GIS made images. I can only image how much time they spent on these.
August 11, 200618 yr Mohr37 emailed me the shots, which I've posted in this gallery on pbase. Just the three largest ones - if anyone's interested in some of the other images, PM him and he can email them to me to add to the gallery... Thanks again for posting these! What a cool find...
August 11, 200618 yr What a great find. I don't think I've ever seen that perspective of The Cincinnati Hospital before. The canal looks lovely :wink: But what really caught my eye was in the 6th pic down the "map of the area of congested population of Cincinnati",and the corresponding key to the right showing persons per acre. Not surprisingly otr is the most dense,and the westend holds its own, but look at the other area around Lytle Park,and downtown itself, as well as the area east of Sycamore to the base of Mt. Adams (is this bucktown?) and the uber dense area between 8th and 5th. Very cool find all the way around. THANK YOU !!!
August 12, 200618 yr It is a shame that Kessler plan for Cincinnati never was followed. His blvds and parks helped define Kansas City, MO.
August 12, 200618 yr "It is a shame that Kessler plan for Cincinnati never was followed." As Jake already said, much of it WAS followed. Columbia Parkway, Victory Parkway, Central Parkway, Ezzard Charles Drive, and others were built more or less in line with the Kessler Plan. Filson Park, Jackson Hill Park, and numerous other small parks and playgrounds were built all over town. The present Washington Park resembles the one in the Kessler Plan. Maybe we are so used to these things that we take them for granted? I also agree that the quality of drawing is excellent. Furthermore, the concept is also excellent. Compare to the 1948 plan, or more recent plans. The Kessler Plan is a work of art!
August 12, 200618 yr It's interesting how there was such an urge worldwide to create grand boulevards prior to the automobile and subway eras. In Europe most of the cities have wide straight boulevards dating from the later 1800s, all which required domolition of thousands of small buildings. But despite there being no shortage of straight streets in the US, there was still this drive to make existing streets look like grand new streets of Europe.
August 13, 200618 yr Well, 1907 was the very beginning of the automobile era. Ford was already making cars, but his Model T wouldn't be mass produced for another 6 years, in 1913. There was still a lot of traffic in 1907, including horse drawn, street cars, railroads, and so on. At that point, traffic was growing; 1907 saw more traffic than any year before that. Perhaps Paris led the way and every other city copied Paris. I think LeCorbusier sums it up well. From "The City of Tomorrow" by LeCorbusier, 1929 "The Great City is a recent event and dates back barely fifty years. The growth of every great city has exceeded all prevision. This growth has been a mad one, with disturbing consequences. Growth of Population 1800 1880 1910 Paris 647,000 2,200,000 3,000,000 London 800,000 3,800,000 7,200,000 Berlin 182,000 1,840,000 3,400,000 New York 60,000 2,800,000 4,500,000 We must de-congest the centres of cities in order to provide for the demand of traffic. We must increase the density of the centres of cities in order to bring about the close contact demanded by business. We must increase the means whereby traffic can circulate We must increase the area of grean and open spaces." I think it's funny that in 1907 congestion was seen as the biggest problem; today, it's population loss! LeCorbusier also had some cross-sections in his book. He says that street widths and building heights should be proportional. You can get by with a narrow street if the buildings are only one or two stories. As the building height rises, the street width should increase also. Some urban designers say that the Parisian Boulevards, lined with 6 story buildings, show the opitimum proportions for high density. Indeed, I think the Kessler rendering of Central Parkway looks really fine.
August 13, 200618 yr >I think it's funny that in 1907 congestion was seen as the biggest problem; today, it's population loss! In the US. In Asia and elsewhere the cities are exploding in size as we speak as peasants move to cities. The US doesn't have peasants anymore, no one is sustenance farming except for handfulls of mentally ill eccentrics living in the Mississippi delta swamps and other remote areas. Jobs requiring no skills are rarer than ever and they certainly aren't in cities. The width of Parisian boulevards might be "perfect" for Paris, but in Barcelona, for example, the 25ft. wide streets are shaded from the sun on hot days and the stone buildings don't retain much heat. That happened a lot more by accident than by design, but it's the very fact that Paris was so grandly redesigned that I think made it so influential, aside from it being the world intellectual and art capital during the time when the boulevard construction was going on.
August 13, 200618 yr Yes, Paris is bigger than Barcelona, so that would make a difference in the street layout. Imagine if Central Parkway was lined on both sides by 6 story buildings! The parking lots detract from this so badly. In Oxford there are some new Miami University buildings going up on High Street that sort of follow this pattern. You are right about the population patterns. The United States is said to be 10 years behind Japan and 50 years behind Europe. I wonder if China will experience the same trend eventually? The capitalist paradox is that if you replace all of the workers with machines, there will be no laborers left to buy your products. In any case, none of these pre-war planners had any idea of the scale of the effects of the automobile. Even in the 1920's they recognized that growth was slowing, and that it would peak within a century or two. They had no idea, though, that the city would expand in area to 20 miles wide while density declined in the core. The Kessler plan showed a lot of foresight in preserving the best natural features, specifically the hilltops, as parks, but the plan never quite came to it's full potential simply because the density declined. Jackson Hill Park, Filson Park, Mt. Echo Park, etc., are all beautiful but mostly empty of people. For that matter, Central Parkway is mostly empty, too. The 1925 plan projected the population of the City of Cincinnati thus: 1920 400,000 1930 425,000 1940 450,000 1950 475,000 1960 500,000 1970 525,000 1980 540,000 1990 560,000 2000 575,000 2010 600,000 2020 610,000 2030 620,000 2040 630,000 2050 640,000 2060 645,000 2070 650,000 2080 660,000 But instead of 600,000 today, we have 300,000 - about half of projection, and only 3/4 of what we had in 1920!
August 13, 200618 yr >Yes, Paris is bigger than Barcelona, so that would make a difference in the street layout. Actually the ancient part of Paris is gone whereas Barcelona's is still there, although it is bisected by one of the boulevards we're talking about. > Imagine if Central Parkway was lined on both sides by 6 story buildings! The parking lots detract from this so badly. As they do everywhere. A 6 floor building is about the max you can build without elevators, I'm guessing the higher floors rent for less. Moving your stuff in and out of a 6th floor apartment would be a pain. > You are right about the population patterns. The United States is said to be 10 years behind Japan and 50 years behind Europe. I wonder if China will experience the same trend eventually? The capitalist paradox is that if you replace all of the workers with machines, there will be no laborers left to buy your products. "Labor" as defined by early communism has to with the actual lifting, stacking, and basic moving effort your body can do and then mindless assembly line work. Very little ditch digging and other basic physical labor still happens in the US with the exception of some farming, mostly in California's central valley, and most of that is done by Mexicans. Today people weep for the plight of the Wal-Mart employee, when the ammount of lifting and danger those workers are required to do is an insulting fraction of what was going on 100 years ago and still goes on around the world. Few Americans today have experienced 12-15 hours of dangerous, relentlessly physical work in the 100F sun or in the 0F cold. Probably fewer than 10% American workers break a real sweat at work wheras 100 years ago that figure would have been around 90%. Both the unskilled laborer and the skilled artisan are more or less gone, still there is no way anything approaching 100% machine world could ever exist.
June 12, 200817 yr But instead of 600,000 today, we have 300,000 - about half of projection, and only 3/4 of what we had in 1920! Well, look how barren the east side of downtown is (Broadway Commons), how much is taken by Interstate interchanges, how underdeveloped it is in the West End, and how detached our main post office and former transit (rail) hub are from the rest of the city. There's your extra 300K.
June 12, 200817 yr But instead of 600,000 today, we have 300,000 - about half of projection, and only 3/4 of what we had in 1920! Well, look how barren the east side of downtown is (Broadway Commons), how much is taken by Interstate interchanges, how underdeveloped it is in the West End, and how detached our main post office and former transit (rail) hub are from the rest of the city. There's your extra 300K. Not quite but I get your point. The issue with the population projections is that they probably didn't factor in smaller household sizes and larger dwelling units as a part of the evolving US culture. That has had a major impact on population "decline" for older cities that saw massive overcrowding (by today's standards) in their heydays.
June 12, 200817 yr ^ Nor did they expect the explosion of development in ex-urban areas. The suburbs of Cincinnati were virtually non-existant in 1907. If anyone has data on what the population of the Cincinnati metro was in 1910, I'd love to see it, because we could use that and the numbers above to determine if the expected growth was actually achieved or exceeded in the metro instead of just the city. We're at a little more than 2 million in the metro right now, which I have to believe is far more than what would have been expected given that the estimate of 600,000 probably didn't take into account the population dispersing across the region from Union to Batavia to West Chester.
June 12, 200817 yr http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i222/mohr37/1907%20Kessler/CentralParkwayPlan.jpg ^Amazing!
June 13, 200817 yr The east side of downtown was never highly developed. That plan was developed at the tail end of that neighborhood's time as Bucktown. The Deer Creek ran into the Ohio following basically Eggleston Ave. Lafcadio Hearn has some fascinating reporting from the mid-1870s about the life in those neighborhoods. It was the core of the 1862 riots.
June 13, 200817 yr But instead of 600,000 today, we have 300,000 - about half of projection, and only 3/4 of what we had in 1920! Well, look how barren the east side of downtown is (Broadway Commons), how much is taken by Interstate interchanges, how underdeveloped it is in the West End, and how detached our main post office and former transit (rail) hub are from the rest of the city. There's your extra 300K. Not quite but I get your point. The issue with the population projections is that they probably didn't factor in smaller household sizes and larger dwelling units as a part of the evolving US culture. That has had a major impact on population "decline" for older cities that saw massive overcrowding (by today's standards) in their heydays. For the 1950 census, Cincinnati was shown as having 504,000 people. All the underdeveloped or claimed land from the Urban Renewal days accounts for space that could easily accommodate another 100,000 now. I'd say many of our city's neighborhoods have become more populous since then, but our center city and areas to the west and east have become wastelands. I could see potential for Cincinnati to achieve one of those estimate figures down the road.
June 13, 200817 yr Most of that population was in the Mill Creek basin. Those neighborhoods alone could probably hold 100k people. Add the fact that most of the most built multi-family units in the city would have been filled with families instead of singles or couples and you get to those numbers.
June 14, 200817 yr If anyone has data on what the population of the Cincinnati metro was in 1910, I'd love to see it, because we could use that and the numbers above to determine if the expected growth was actually achieved or exceeded in the metro instead of just the city. 731,744 http://recenter.tamu.edu/data/popmd/pm1640.htm
June 14, 200817 yr That would explain the alignment of SR 264. Bridgetown from Harrision to Glenway was at one time for a short while SR 268. That is in fact quite the find. Also, I've been looking forever to figure out what road was Bloody Run Road. Now I know. This is an amazing thread to say the least.
June 17, 200816 yr If anyone has data on what the population of the Cincinnati metro was in 1910, I'd love to see it, because we could use that and the numbers above to determine if the expected growth was actually achieved or exceeded in the metro instead of just the city. 731,744 http://recenter.tamu.edu/data/popmd/pm1640.htm Thanks Evergrey. Now, getting very loose with those numbers... The earliest city population listed in this thread is 400k in 1920. The metro population (from Evergrey's link) in 1920 was 766,074. The plan projected the city's population in 2010 to be 600k, or an increase of 50%. If we now assume that the planners assumed that the metro population would grow steadily with the city population (a rare and dangerous double assumption!), we can work out what the expected 2010 metro population should be. That number is 1,149,111. Since the population of the Cincy metro in 2006 was 2,133,678, it looks like the region as a whole did quite well even though the city's population is about half of what was expected.
June 18, 200816 yr I have numbers from a plan that was published a few years after the Kesler plan. According to the "Official Plan of the City of Cincinnati, 1925," the population and projections were: City of Cincinnati 1925 400,000; 2010 650,000 Hamilton County 1925 500,000; 2010 750,000 Campbell, Kenton, and Hamilton Counties 1925 650,000; 2010 900,000 The Hamilton County projections turned out to be pretty close. Instead of increasing from 400,000 to 650,000, the City of Cincinnati DECLINED from 400,000 to about 300,000. Obviously, they assumed a higher density in the city and did not anticipate the sprawling suburbs.
June 18, 200816 yr Good point. If Cincinnati had annexed most of the developed parts of Hamilton County such as Norwood, Reading, Sharonville, etc., those projections would be pretty close.
February 13, 20241 yr On 8/10/2006 at 8:07 PM, mohr37 said: I've been sitting on these images for quite a long time and thought I would share them to those who have not. Enjoy Cincinnati 1907 http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i222/mohr37/1907%20Kessler/CoverPage.jpg http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i222/mohr37/1907%20Kessler/ExistingParks-1907_1.jpg http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i222/mohr37/1907%20Kessler/ProposedCincinnatiParkSystem_1.jpg http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i222/mohr37/1907%20Kessler/ParksLocationMap_1.jpg http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i222/mohr37/1907%20Kessler/BasinParkPlan_1.jpg http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i222/mohr37/1907%20Kessler/LincolnPark.jpg http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i222/mohr37/1907%20Kessler/LytlePark_1.jpg http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i222/mohr37/1907%20Kessler/McMikenAvePark_1.jpg http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i222/mohr37/1907%20Kessler/WashingtonPark_1.jpg http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i222/mohr37/1907%20Kessler/CentralCanal.jpg http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i222/mohr37/1907%20Kessler/CentralParkwayPlan.jpg http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i222/mohr37/1907%20Kessler/CentralParkwayNorth.jpg http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i222/mohr37/1907%20Kessler/UniversityAveParkway.jpg And finally the overall General Park Plan http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i222/mohr37/1907%20Kessler/GeneralParkPlan_1.jpg Added bonus, 1925 Plan birdseye http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i222/mohr37/1907%20Kessler/50YearBasinPlan.jpg Where can one find these images online without the photobucket stamp? Love them all.
February 14, 20241 yr 7 hours ago, Miami-Erie said: Where can one find these images online without the photobucket stamp? Love them all. https://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/sites/planning/assets/File/164987.pdf “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” -Friedrich Nietzsche
Create an account or sign in to comment