Standing Right Here: The Built Environment as a Tool for Historical Inquiry A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the Department of History, College of Arts and Sciences by Anne Delano Steinert October 2020 M.A. University of Cincinnati, 2015 M.S. Columbia University, 1995 B.A. Goucher College, 1992 Committee Chair: Tracy Teslow, PhD Abstract The built environment is an open archive—a twenty-four-hour museum of the past. The tangible, experiential nature of the urban built environment—streets, valleys, buildings, and bridges—helps historians uncover stories not always accessible in textual sources. The richness of the built environment gives historians opportunities to: invigorate their practice with new tools to uncover the stories of the past, expand the historical record with new understandings, and reach a wider audience with histories that feel relevant and meaningful to a broad range of citizens. This dissertation offers a sampling of material, methods and motivations historians can use to analyze the built environment as a source for their important work. Each of the five chapters of this dissertation uses the built environment to tell a previously unknown piece of Cincinnati’s urban history. The first chapter questions the inconvenient placement of the 1867 Roebling Suspension Bridge and uncovers the story of the ferry owner who recognized the bridge as a threat to his business. Chapter two explores privies, the outdoor toilets now missing from the built environment, and their use as sites for women to terminate pregnancies through abortion and infanticide. The third chapter uses patterns in the construction of public elementary school buildings to illustrate urban change though population growth, annexation, and political maneuvering. Chapter four uses The Delmoor, an apartment flat in Clifton, to explore the lives and work of two women whose achievements were enhanced by their choice to move into the Delmoor in 1919. Finally, chapter five explores the stories of three diverse religious congregations once embedded in the walls of the now-demolished Revelation Baptist Church. The dissertation closes with a brief discussion of the tools of public history and historic preservation which offer historians fruitful strategies for engagement outside the academy. ii ©2020 Anne Delano Steinert ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iii This work is dedicated to Louis Seneca Ely Steinert - my one true love, and to the memory of R. Kent Lancaster who taught me to believe in myself. iv Acknowledgements My completion of this project has been thanks to the efforts of brilliant and dedicated scholars and teachers. I stand on some powerful shoulders and I am filled with life-long gratitude for their support. I only hope I will make them proud as I move on to the next adventures. To begin, this project has been made possible by seemingly countless dedicated archivists and librarians who have searched out an impossible find, or scanned a document, or helped with some last-minute “emergency.” I am indebted to them all, but some of the most important and helpful have been, Scott Gampher, Sandra (Mickey) DeVise and Jim DaMico at Cincinnati Museum Center, Suzanne Maggard Reller and Kevin Grace and the University of Cincinnati’s Archives and Rare Books Library, Sally Moffit at Langsam Library, Christopher Smith in the Local History and Genealogy Department at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, David Pittinger at the Hamilton County Recorder’s Office, Ketta Lubberstedt-Arjes at the Kendall Young Library in Webster City, Iowa, the great collector of Cincinnati views Dan Prout, and the amazing Russell Welty in the Facilities Division of the Cincinnati Public Schools. My run of great history teachers started in seventh grade at Walnut Hills High School with Jeanne Mathews, who told history as a story. I met my most untiring champion, R. Kent Lancaster, when I arrived at Goucher College in the fall of 1988. He helped me practice deep observation and questions what I saw in the built world. For some wacky reason, Kent believed in me and that taught me to believe in myself. I was transformed by the time I got to spend with him. I wish there had been more of it. Andrew Dolkart has been a faithful friend and supporter since he I first took his preservation class in the New York/Paris program in the v summer of 1990. He has been my role model for rigorous scholarship and the careful reading of cities ever since. I am also grateful to Andrew and Dan Bluestone who both agreed to be interviewed as a part of this project. I have had incredible support at the University of Cincinnati. Three of the chapters of this dissertation began as papers in research seminars with Dr. Isaac Campos, Dr Kate Sorrels, and Dr. Brianna Leavitt-Alcantara. I thank them for their coaching and support. Dr. Fritz Casey- Leininger was an essential part of the early stages of my research and has been a supportive booster all along. I thank Dr. Steve Porter for his consistent support and Dr. Rob Gioielli who has been an amazing sounding board on this project and an exceptional partner in our work together on the Over-the-Rhine Museum. Dr. Rebecca Wingo has helped in so many ways--with ideas, motivation, editing, walks, drinks, and hugs. Finally, I am incredibly grateful to Dr. Brianna Leavitt-Alcantara for welcoming me into her accountability. I am honored to have been included and thank Bri, Dr. Kari Zimmerman, and Dr. Ryan Bremmer for all the wisdom and experience and support. I would like to thank the members of my committee. Dr. Tiya Miles has offered her generosity, thoughtful attention, and strategic brilliance. It has been a joy to reconnect after many years. Dr. Jeffrey Tilman, has been the eyes of architectural history and historic preservation in this piece. I am thankful for his attention to detail and honest feedback. I am forever indebted to Dr. David Stradling for getting this project finished. He provided a tight web of support to hold me up and keep me motivated. From my first day on campus, David been a steady, pragmatic, and persistent guide. His prompt feedback on this dissertation vi has been extremely helpful and he has given me countless opportunities to build my career. I am deeply grateful. Lastly, I would like to thank Dr. Tracy Teslow for chairing my committee, offering thoughtful comments and deep reads of my work, and for pressing me to be more mindful of issues of race and diversity. Our conversations have made my work richer and better. And finally, I thank my family. I am forever grateful to my parents Louis Steinert and Ruth Steinert Foote for supporting me emotionally, financially, and with lots of babysitting. My gentle, loving, smart, strong, and powerful son Seneca and I couldn’t have done it without them. At ten, Seneca doesn’t remember a world before I worked at UC. This history department has watched him grow up. I brought him, asleep in a stroller, to my first admissions meeting with David Stradling and just last night he was cheering me on as I struggled to finish the final footnotes. I will never be able to repay him for the hours of his childhood I have spent on schoolwork, teaching, and this dissertation. Thank you Seneca for all the snuggles and pep talks and urban adventures. You are my one true love. vii Table of Contents Acknowledgements v Introduction 8 Let’s Look Around Chapter 1 49 The Man Who Moved The Bridge: Cincinnati’s Roebling Suspension Bridge and Its Inconvenient Site Chapter 2 86 “Her Child was Born and Dropped into the Vault”: Urban Privies and Women’s Reproductive Choice in Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati Chapter 3 135 Schools for the City: Cincinnati’s Elementary School Architecture 1829-World War II Chapter 4 208 Apartments of Liberation: Suburban Multi-Family Dwellings in Early Twentieth Century Cincinnati Chapter 5 263 Sanctuary of Change: Four Walls and the “Precious Data” They Contain Conclusion 332 Public History and Historic Preservation as Tools for Public Engagement Bibliography 371 viii Introduction: Let’s Look Around Historians have been tardy to recognize that the environment, natural and [hu]man-made, is an amazing historical document. In our teaching and research we have not sufficiently explored how, rightly seen, a local landscape reveals as much about a society’s past as does a newspaper, a novel, or a Fourth of July oration. Nor have we thoroughly probed how urban, suburban, and rural terrains are palimpsests of linguistic, economic, technological and social history. 1 This dissertation offers historians an opportunity. The pages that follow explore and then illustrate the use of the “amazing historical document” that is the human-made environment.2 Mining its rich possibility allows historians to invigorate their practice with new tools to tell the stories of the past, expand the historical record with new understandings, and reach a broader audience with histories that feel relevant and meaningful to a broad range of 1 Thomas J. Schlereth, “Above-Ground Archeology: Discovering a Community’s History through Local Artifacts,” Local History Today (1972) 53. 2 Ibid. 9 citizens. While the built environment is flawed like any other source, its use in historical inquiry holds significant promise. It is an open archive that historians have not yet made enough use of. This dissertation offers a sampler of methods and motivations for historians to grapple with the built environment as a source for their important work. I have always felt the presence of the past in American cities.