URBAN LIFE and URBAN LANDSCAPE SERIES CINCINNATI'S OVER-THE-RHINE AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY URBANISM Zane L. Miller and Bruce Tucker OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS Columbus Copyright © 1998 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Miller, Zane L. Changing plans for America's inner cities : Cincinnati's Over-The-Rhine and twentieth-century urbanism / Zane L. Miller and Bruce Tucker. p. cm. — (Urban life and urban landscape series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8142-0762-6 (cloth : alk. paper).—ISBN 0-8142-0763-4 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Urban renewal—Ohio—Cincinnati—History. 2. Over-the-Rhine (Cincinnati, Ohio)—History. I. Tucker, Bruce, 1948­ . 11. Title. III. Series. HT177.C53M55 1997 307.3'416'0977178—dc21 97-26206 CIP Text and jacket design by Gary Gore. Type set in ITC New Baskerville by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services. Printed by Thomson-Shore. The paper in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 98765432 1 For Henry List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Why Cincinnati, Why Over-the-Rhine? xv Prologue: 1850s-1910s 1 PART ONE ZONING, RAZING, OR REHABILITATION Introduction: From Cultural Engineering to Cultural Individualism 9 1 Social Groups, Slums, and Comprehensive Planning, 1915-1944 13 2 Neighborhoods and a Community, 1948-1960 29 PART TWO NEW VISIONS AND VISIONARIES Introduction: Community Action and Neighborhood Planning 43 viii • CONTENTS 3 Participatory Planning and the Downtown Renaissance, 1954-1964 47 4 Redefining the Problem, 1950-1966 59 5 Collapse of the Appalachian Option, 1964-1974 72 6 Empowering the Poor, 1971-1975 84 7 Integration through Historic Preservation, 1972-1980 96 8 The Separatist Counterattack, 1980-1982 111 9 The National Register Controversy, 1982-1983 125 10 Separatists Victorious, 1983-1985 138 Epilogue: Eclipsing the Public Interest 157 Appendix: The Major Housing Goal of the Over-the-Rhine Urban Renewal Plan, 1985 169 Notes 171 Index 217 Introduction Over-the-Rhine, 1997 xvi Cincinnati's neighborhoods, 1982 xvii Prologue Street map of Cincinnati, 1846 2 Cincinnati in 1875 3 Cincinnati's "Rhine," ca. 1900 4 Chapter 1 Projected plan for the basin and civic center, 1925 20 Planning Commission's proposed basin redevelopment plan, 1933 24 The dense West End in 1930 25 Chapter 2 The age of residential structures by neighborhood, 1940 30 Projected population trends by community, 1900-1970 (1946) 31 Cincinnati's communities and neighborhoods, 1946 33 Chapter 3 Map of the central business district (the Core) and its surrounding areas, 1956 54 Chapter 4 West End neighborhoods, 1975 67 x • ILLUSTRATIONS Chapter 6 Findlay Market, 1996 86 Chapter 10 Buddy Gray, September 1985 140 Jim Tarbell, June 1978 142 Epilogue Racial residential segregation by neighborhood 160 Counties in the Cincinnati metropolitan area 162 Mourning Buddy Gray at his Drop-Inn Shelter 167 H E project that yielded this book began in the early 1980s, Tan:d we have since then drawn on the assistance of more people than we can acknowledge here. Most important among them stands Henry D. Shapiro, who contributed seminal ideas for our explo­ ration, prompted our interest in taxonomies of social reality, and helped draft grant proposals that produced the money to keep us going. The grants came from the American Association for State and Local History, the National Endowment for the Humanities (RO-20821-85), the Ohio Board of Regents Urban Universities Research Program and Linkage Grant Program, and the Murray Seasongood Foundation of Cincinnati. We are indebted to Nancy Grey Osterud for helping to prepare the proj­ ect statement on which we based the grant proposals. Others at the University of Cincinnati also helped us. The board of trustees provided in-kind matching support by granting Zane Miller two quarters of academic leave for researching and writing. The Department of History and the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences made it pos­ sible for us to try out our ideas in the give and take of teaching. At the undergraduate level this took place in the Laboratory in American Civili­ zation (a research seminar), in a McMicken College special topics honors course on the politics of the neighborhood organization revolution, and XI • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS in a summer continuing education course on recent trends in city and neighborhood planning. We hope that the students learned as much from us as we did from them, particularly Robert Burnham, Penelope Cunningham, Theresa Eisenberg, Jana Morford, and Rose Vitale. This project also insinuated its way into the department's graduate level in­ struction through its Frontiers of Urban Research seminar, out of which came several useful papers, theses, and dissertations, especially those of Robert Burnham, Charles Casey-Leininger, Bradley Cross, Jon Dowling, Roger Hansen, Andrea Kornbluh, and Rose Vitale. Kevin Grace in the Department of Archives and Rare Books and Karen Kottsy, Sally Moffitt, and Donald Tolzmann of the reference department at the University of Cincinnati Libraries graciously responded to our requests and often guided us to sources we otherwise would have overlooked. Maureen Sullivan and the staff of the Urban Appalachian Council, especially Brenda Saylor, helped locate material on Appalachians in Cin­ cinnati, and Michael Maloney shared both his knowledge and personal archival collection on the Appalachian ethnic movement in Cincinnati. Loyal Jones, then director of the Appalachian Center at Berea College, and Shannon Wilson, archivist of the Hutchins Library at Berea, pro­ vided welcome assistance and encouragement. The project benefited, too, from researchers who worked long hours at meager wages. These included especially Bruce Tucker, whojoined us on NEH support as a research associate. He wrote two of the twenty- three chapters of the initial typescript and several drafts of chapters 4 and 5. Elliot Shapiro and Lisa Thomas conducted careful newspaper re­ search, and Ellen Cangi prepared a long oral history with Harris Forusz. Several people helped us dig up hard-to-find information. At Cincin- nati's city hall we relied heavily on Charles Nuckolls in the clerk of coun- cil's office, Ely Ryder in the city solicitor's office, and Charlotte Birdsall (now Thompson), Christopher Cain, Ed Mangold, Steve Schuckman, and Dan Young in the Department of City Planning. Franco Ruffini of the Ohio Historic Preservation Office located, photocopied, and mailed to us important material, and Bruce Goetzman donated his collection of documents and newspaper clippings on the Over-the-Rhine historic des­ ignation controversy. W. Joseph Dehner gave us access to the records of the Queen City Housing and Heritage Preservation Development Cor­ porations, and Jon Hughes contributed choice selections from his folio ACKNOWLEDGMENTS • of photos of sites and events in Over-the-Rhine. We also learned a great deal informally from members of the Ohio Historic Sites Preservation Advisory Board and Cincinnati's Historic Conservation board, on both of which Zane Miller served during the 1980s when these two bodies figured prominently in the story we tell. Others helped us in equally important ways. Hope Earls, the adminis­ trative secretary in the history department at the University of Cincin­ nati, provided us with working materials and technical and managerial assistance, and even found time to type clean copies of parts of the manu­ script and other items related to the project. Evelyn Schott efficiently, pa­ tiently, and promptly typed the second draft and four revisions of the manuscript that finally became this book. Barbara Hanrahan, director of the Ohio State University Press, supervised the^transformation of the manuscript into a book, and Lynne M. Bonenberger applied diligence, judiciousness, and good taste in copyediting our work. To these acknowledgments we add the name and memory of Nancy K. Shapiro, who not only constructed excellent oral history interviews but also provided us a model of intelligence, curiosity, commitment, good humor, and wit, even in the face of an illness that ended her life just as the book began to take shape. She and the others acknowledged here share in whatever merits readers might find in this book. The authors are responsible for its shortcomings. ZANE L. MILLER Why Cincinnati, Why Over-the-Rhine? HIS book started as an examination of a cultural conflict over Twh: o should live in a particular neighborhood, who should design its physical fabric, and who should decide. The contest stemmed from an effort by the city, state, and federal authorities to use recently de­ veloped historic preservation techniques to revitalize a poor, predomi­ nantly black, inner-city tract called Over-the-Rhine,1 110 blocks (362 acres) of mostly nineteenth-century architecture on the northern edge of Cincinnati's central business district. The nature of the neighborhood, the national popularity of historic preservation as a neighborhood con­ servation treatment, and the length of the battle (1979—85) over the appropriate social and physical environment for this old and richly historic area seemed of sufficient significance and general interest to warrant a study of how anti-preservationists beat city hall and what pro- preservationists might learn from it. But we soon discovered two things that extended the scope and dura­ tion of our work. First, the proposal of historic preservation as an appro­ priate treatment for rejuvenating Over-the-Rhine stood as merely one in a long string of cultural transformation programs devised for the area since the 1920s, when the city government first embraced the manipula­ tion of the social and physical environment for broadly cultural purposes INTRODUCTION Over-the-Rhine, 1997. Map by Dan Young, Cincinnati Department of City Planning. and when the Queen City emerged as a nationally recognized and ap­ plauded leader in this new field.