Posted June 15, 200916 yr Reset 09' Series: 1. Cincinnati, exploring the eastern front 2. Cincinnati, stumbling around downtown 3. Cincinnati, over and out of Over-the-Rhine 4. Chugging further east: Ripley and West Union, Ohio Cincinnati, over and out of Over-the-Rhine Authored by Sherman Cahal on June 13, 2009 at UrbanUp This is the third installment of a photographic series covering the built environment in Cincinnati. Click on the respective links in the headers for even more photographs and information and be sure to click through onto the UrbanUp blog for more photographs and text! Over-the-Rhine My neighborhood, and damn proud of it as gritty as it is in parts. 1 2 Viewed from this angle, Cincinnati is incredibly dense. Too bad that in reality, surface lots pockmark the journey towards downtown. 3 4 The following are views along Central Parkway east to west, once home to the Ohio and Erie Canal and later our incomplete subway. 5 The building stock resembles nothing of the designs inside Over-the-Rhine. This was more 'public facing' and was on a busier throughfare, and was subsequently redeveloped in the earlier 1900s. If only the trend continued on, we might have seen more of Over-the-Rhine's Italianite structures demolished. 6 7 8 Bleh. 9 The Emery, where I live! A large unused theater attaches to the rear. 10 American Building 11 12 School for Creative and Performing Arts, the only public school dedicated solely for that purpose. Quite a diverse structure that replaces a mega surface lot next to Washington Park. 13 YMCA Gateway Quarter The Gateway Quarter is a mixed-use development project bounded by Central Parkway, 13th, Vine and Race streets in Over-the-Rhine. It is being developed by the Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation, or 3CDC, along with The Model Group, Urban Sites, B2B Equities and Northpointe Group. The four-phase project is slated to have 400 residential units completed by 2010, with each new year coinciding with each new phase of the project. 14 New units along 12th Street. 15 A streetscaping project is underway along Vine that involves burying utilities, installing new sidewalks and brick pavers, and repaving the roadway. Be sure to click through onto the UrbanUp blog for more from this post!
June 15, 200916 yr Good stuff! It seems that service organizations like Salvation Army typically put up that bland suburban-style stuff whenever they build new. In Fort Wayne, a local women's and children's shelter plans to build a new facility in office-park style that's completely out of character with the active, largely-intact early-1900's commercial district where they're relocating. Kudos to them for building on vacant real estate and for the very important work they do, but it doesn't seem like it would involve all that much more effort or expense to build a zero-setback facade that's more compatible with their surroundings. YMCAs of that era must have been built to a fairly standardized design; that one is nearly identical in appearance to the 1917 building where I lived for about a year and a half around 1960. It was a fun place to live in a then-vital downtown with movie theaters and restaurants and lots to do, and the building was always squeaky-clean and impeccably maintained. It had a laundry and dry-cleaning drop off, a barber shop, a cafeteria with some of the best home-style food in town, and free movies on Saturday nights.
June 15, 200916 yr Yeah, the Salvation Army building was constructed in 1960, and I'm not sure what it replaced but it was surely more compatible with the streetwall. I had this creepy guy following me around City Home too: He kept dogging me with questions on religion, my sign and wanted my name and phone number. He also wanted money for fried chicken... which I didn't oblige.
June 15, 200916 yr Andre apparently bikes to and from church a lot in the areas north and west of Washington Park where I don't head over to frequently, so I've probably missed him only a few times.
June 15, 200916 yr It's amazing how famous Andre is, myself being another who knows the guy. Guy was a genius before he lost it.
June 15, 200916 yr Thanks. "You don't just walk into a bar and mix it up by calling a girl fat" - buildingcincinnati speaking about new forumers
June 15, 200916 yr These are great as always Sherman. I do love the colors from photos 2 and 3 that you grayscaled...especially 3. The grayscale gives it an interesting historic feel that the color doesn't, but the color gives you a greater sense of vibrancy and life. As for the buildings along Central Parkway, the idea was to line the boulevard with glorious mid- and high-rises that would compliment Central Parkway in a grand and beautiful way. Hence the greater scale along there than elsewhere. It does always seem odd that the mid- and high-rises from the CBD taper off and then pick back up at this more northern locale. There's about that 3 block stretch of 8th/Garfield and 9th/Court that are chuck full of the former mansions where Cincinnati's elite once lived.
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