"Cincinnati USA" is the cloying marketing term one sees around the airport. It also recognizes not only that the Cincinnati metro area stretches into northern Kentucky and southeastern Indiana, but that sprawl has taken its toll on the famous city in Ohio. This is a slow-growing metro in slow-growing states, but the city gained 0.3 percent population from 2000 to 2006, while suburban Butler County grew 8.4 percent and northern Kentucky's Boone County added 34 percent (through 2008). In 1900, Cincinnati was the 10th largest city in America and it topped out at 502,000 in 1960, dropping to around 332,000 now. In so many ways it is sui generis, but in other critical areas it is indeed the USA. Unfortunately, those areas are gloomy.
Winston Churchill called Cincinnati America's most beautiful inland city, and it's an observation that's hard to argue with even now. The city sits on wooded hills along gentle, wide bends of the storied Ohio River. The skyline pops up like a jewel box when you come down "death hill" on the freeway from the airport. Cincinnati is an architectural feast, filled with enchanting neighborhoods, lovely parks and deep history. This was the Miami country before the arrival of the whites, the richest hunting ground of the Iroquois Confederacy. Cincinnati was settled by Revolutionary War veterans, many members of the Society of the Cincinnati, and named after the self-denying Roman general who Americans likened to George Washington. Founded in 1788, it was the Queen City of the West, the gateway for generations of migrants and the haven for Germans who fled the crushing of the liberal revolutions of 1848 in Europe.
This city was so good to me when I was business editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer in the 1990s. Armed with one of the best staffs of financial writers I was ever honored to lead, we shook up the old-guard companies that weren't used to the prying eyes of journalists or transparency. Now I am using it as the setting for a new mystery series, The Cincinnati Casebooks, of which The Pain Nurse is the first. Seeing it again this month, after being away for 13 years, I was reminded of Mark Twain's witticism about wanting to be in Cincinnati when the world ends, because it's always behind the times. On the surface, the city seemed little changed. And thank God, for that slow pace has preserved so much good architecture. But beneath that veneer, the story was, as is always the case here, much more complicated.
On the one hand, Cincinnati has kept its downtown corporate titans: Procter & Gamble, Kroger, Macy's (Federated Department Stores), Fifth Third Bank, Western Southern and Carl Lindner's financial empire. The downtown hotels, anchored by the majestic art deco Netherland Plaza, seemed to be doing a brisk business. Ugly Riverfront Stadium had been replaced by two state-of-the-art facilities for the Reds and Bengals. Neighborhoods such as tony Hyde Park and Mount Lookout seemed as beautiful as ever. It remains a cultural mecca, especially its music and art museums. It is a university center full of smart people, harkening back to the intellectual gift of the German migration of 1848. It remains a wealthy place in a ravaged Midwest.
And yet the city has not recovered from the riots of 2001. When I lived there, Main Street was filled with clubs and restaurants, running from downtown into the adjacent Over-the-Rhine district and gentrification was spreading rapidly. Now Main is dead and Over-the-Rhine has become, if anything, a worse ghetto than ever before. Over-the-Rhine is one of the great historic neighborhoods of America, blessed with narrow streets lined by priceless 19th century buildings from when this was the German quarter of the city. To be sure, preservationists soldier on there, and at least the buildings haven't been torn down as in Detroit and most older cities in America. But the lost opportunity is stunning.
So, too, is the lost human capital. At 21.9 percent, Cincinnati's poverty rate is double the state's. This situation, seen across America, was helped only somewhat by the Great Society, and in some ways was made worse. It has been made much worse by the meanness, economic dislocation and prison-industrial complex of conservative governance. OTR is filled with corner boys selling drugs, much more so than when I lived in downtown Cincinnati. This is a city with a history of de-facto segregation and a stubborn unwillingness to address it. Maybe that was made better by the riots, maybe not. The unrest involved young men with nothing better to do -- I think of those corner boys when I see images of the angry young men around the world with no economic opportunity and hearing the call of violent radicalism. If we can't find a way to address this, the 21st century is going to be quite nasty. The riots, however, also showed how the creeping gentrification and lively nightlife weren't translating into making the poor residents nearby any better off. The result, however, was to reinforce white flight, class differences, racial barriers. This is an American problem, and it can't be escaped by all the middle- and upper-class folks who fled to the suburbs.
Now I wonder how the Great Disruption will affect Cincinnati -- and I fear Twain might be proven wrong. For example, the Delta hub at the airport is being wound down, with thousands of jobs lost. The merger with Northwest made the once-bustling airport an excess asset to be disposed of, to squeeze more green blood into the capital markets and the accounts of the financial elite. Still, the metro area's unemployment rate was 0.6 percentage points below Ohio's 10.5 percent in August. It matters that Cincinnati has retained such a corporate base -- but can it keep it amid the voracious destruction of the capital markets? Can it keep it with the deeply conservative instincts of its elite? In the 19th century, Cincinnati's powerful businessmen resisted the railroads in order to protect their riverboat interests. Chicago was not so closed-minded.
Cincinnati has the bad luck to be a Democratic city surrounded by a larger, rabidly Republican county. The result is that both are poorly served by transit and rail, deficiencies that will be more painful in the high-cost energy future that awaits us. Retail in the city has been drained away by suburban malls. All the suburban crap built around the city over the past 15 years, much of it on rich farmland we will need someday, will be increasingly expensive to maintain. If there's a silver lining, it's that the city itself has good bones -- great bones -- and could be a creative-class powerhouse. But only if it moves its underclass into the mainstream, something that the world economic outlook makes increasingly difficult. The middle class itself is headed down, as exemplified by the abandoned factories that dot the city.
I drove out to Oxford, where I did graduate work at Miami University, full of trepidation. Here the result was happier. One drives through miles of woods and cornfields and little Ohio crossroads until arriving at this compact little town and its beautiful campus. At least there are some parts of America that sprawl hasn't ruined. Dayton was sadder to see, a once-great city wrecked by economic change and the bad public policies of the past 30 years. The grand Dayton Daily News building downtown is empty, the paper having decamped to a sterile modern box barely in the city limits and requiring a car to get there. The city's corporate headquarters and tens of thousands of NCR and General Motors jobs are gone. And yet, Dayton showed a future awaiting much of America unless we make a radical course change: life goes on, poorer and meaner by slow degrees, the great American middle class of the mid-20th century a memory. But life goes on.
Back in Cincinnati, martinis in the Palm Court are as magnificent as ever. But there's a sadness that the city didn't become the world-beater it could be, that the better-off think they can sustain a status quo where Over-the-Rhine just floats in its misery, infecting the future not just of downtown but of the entire region. Of course Cincinnatians will disagree with me. They are special and unknowable to an outsider (I am not a native, didn't attend Elder or Seven Hills, or have great-great-granddad come over from Germany). Maybe so. This is a city of mystery and magic. But it is Cincinnati, USA, too.
And it is where Charlie Keating is from.
Posted by: Laura Cardinal | October 21, 2009 at 06:56 AM
Laura,you missed the whole point of Jon's column.
Posted by: ChrisInDenver | October 21, 2009 at 07:55 AM
I've never been to Cincinnati so I depend on pictures and one movie (Traffic) for my sense of it. Indeed, it does look enchanting. Even the slummy Over-the-Rhine neighborhood is an extraordinary jewel by comparison to the suburban crapola most of us live in.
To look at vintage pictures of American cities - say from 1930 to 1955 - is to become aware of a devastating and irreparable harm done to our country. We had beautiful cities and we trashed them with parking lots, ugly buildings, and suburban cancer. This is not merely an aesthetic qualm since the ugliness we now take for granted coarsens and anesthetizes community itself. The physical and political fragmentation of this nation is intimately interwoven.
We ceded most of our cities to the underclass and then blamed them for the devastation. The demonological formulations of the radical right depend on a wink and nod about "them". Why spend money on welfare queens? Let the cities become monuments to failed liberal policies instead.
Cities are the primary emblems of civilization. No one will remember or care about Wal-mart, McDonald's, or stuccoed McMansions. No one reveres Simi Valley, Plano, or Mesa. The project of civilization somehow got confused with consumeristic frenzies and the result is a country that looks badly loved.
Cincinnati will limp along but the judgment of history will likely condemn Phoenix. We had a huge updraft that argued for the car culture and low-density development. The downdraft we're experiencing now should be corrective on some level. But even as the dust clears, what remains? Any grand city squares? Ruined cathedrals? A city that was loved in its bricks and mortar? Many will pretend Phoenix is the future only because it vandalized its past so thoroughly. Even if it were feasible, that future would be a terrible bargain.
Posted by: soleri | October 21, 2009 at 10:51 AM
I am a Washington DC native that had never been to Ohio before I went to Miami University. I started school in 2003, and my first visit into Cincinnati itself was terrible. I thought it was a shitty place with none of the urban luster of my hometown.
Over the next four years I watched tremendous progress wash through downtown and OTR, and when I graduated in 2007 I moved to Central Pkwy--the dividing lines of the two most central neighborhoods.
Now that I have lived and worked in downtown/OTR for the last 2.5 years I have been able to witness the transformation first hand. And it's incredible. The nightclubs from Main St. ARE gone (thank god) and the shootings in the street have dropped dramatically. The number of times I am offered drugs as I walk up to Findlay market has gone from a minimum of 5 (no joke) to a max of 1 or 2. Most of the time no one even bothers me.
Posted by: theboilover | October 21, 2009 at 12:36 PM
Nice blog entry except you really did miss the transformation of OTR. What the corporate community has done through 3CDC is nothing short of amazing. In addition, the Police Community Relations in Cincinnati Year Five Report shows another stellar year of improvement following the historic Collaborative Agreement entered into in 2002. http://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/police/downloads/police_pdf37930.pdf
Posted by: John | October 21, 2009 at 01:26 PM
Will we see a rogue columnist Cincinnati 101 series? Why did Cincinnati fare better than most cities during the Great
Depression? Hhmmm...
Posted by: Joanna | October 21, 2009 at 03:48 PM
I am also not a native but I've lived here in Cincinnati for 19 years. The last 10 in downtown and the last year in Over the Rhine.
First, you can do a search for Cincinnati in much of your article, replacing it with your choice of American city, and the results will still be as correct. That is I think sad.
I completely agree that OTR is the key to Cincinati's future. There are now about 6000 people living in OTR -- many fewer than when you lived here. There is a chance to continue not only the very needed gentrification and economic development to the area (which as others have mentioned is very much going on - not sure how you missed that, maybe too many martinis at the palm court?), but also quality affordable housing, and jobs in the trades to help rehabilitate those magnificent buildings. The sorts of jobs that aren't shipped overseas. There is development that includes low income housing within, already.
When you were here, and I was here then too, business and city leaders always turned a blind eye to OTR. It really was truly forgotten. That has changed. Everyone is talking about OTR being the key (though not everyone believes it can happen, of course). I find that sort of discussion taking place to be the biggest change I've witnessed here in the last 10 years. Truly monumental, for Cincinnati and many other places.
Posted by: jim uber | October 21, 2009 at 05:02 PM
How can gentrification take place in the city when there are 200k less people in it? There are 500 vacant buildings in OTR alone should we let them fall to more disrepair beyond salvation? Or should we let "Gentrification" take place?
OTR is a product of bad city policy. Which has been controlled by the Democrats since the 80's.How can you have close to 200 social service agencies in such a small neighborhood as OTR neighbor. What else would you expect to happen to a neighberhood?
Posted by: Cincyfirst | October 21, 2009 at 07:40 PM
Ugh. Yet another woe-is-Cincinnati... The suburbs-ruined-America...OTR-is-noble-but-somehow-it's-our-fault-that-nobody-wants-to-live-there...commentary on social economic change. "Cincinnati" is indeed a great place to live and that's in very large part because of those good hard- working people in Montgomery and Delhi and West Chester and Fort Thomas and all those other evil burbs who strived to achieve their piece of the American dream. Please quit insulting the lifestyle choices of so many people. It isn't "better" to live in a dense cityscape without a car or in an old house with tiny closets and cramped kitchens. It's either an economic necessity for some or just another lifestyle choice for others. Thank goodness our citizens are free to choose.
Posted by: Tim Bonfield | October 21, 2009 at 11:09 PM
Have you been down the Gateway Corridor in Over-the-Rhine lately? It's a much more thriving neighborhood than Main Street ever was.
Main Street was filled with drinking and decadence. It was a place where you'd see suburbanites puking on doorsteps, not the kind of restored, vibrant neighborhood that OTR deserves.
The Gateway Corridor renovations are creating a thriving, creative neighborhood. Historic buildings are being restored block-by-block, crime is down, market rate condo projects are selling out (remarkable considering we are in a recession)and storefronts are being filled with unique, neighborhood businesses and restaurants like: Park & Vine, Switch, The Little Mahatma, Lavomatic,Outside, Urban Eden, Mica 12/V etc. (If you're looking for some great Christmas shopping in the city, these stores are all great places to visit) There is even a Segway store. What ghetto do you know has a Segway store?
OTR (specifically the Gateway Corridor) is fast becoming the arts and culture hub of the city. The Art Academy has moved here. The Opera, Symphony, Ballet and Chamber Orchestra are here. The Know Theatre is thriving and Ensemble Theatre is expanding.
Plus, millions more in investment are pouring into the neighborhood. At least 5 more buildings are being restored on the 14 hundred block of Vine Street. The brand new building for the School of Creative and Performing arts is set to open here next year and Washington Park is set to get a 14 million dollar renovation.
I work in Over-the-Rhine, and like many young professionals, I would love to live here (if I could afford a place in one of those newly renovated buildings). This neighborhood has turned a corner and it is a healthier, more vibrant neighborhood that Main Street ever was.
Posted by: Katie | October 23, 2009 at 09:03 AM