Founded in 1844 and inspired like many American rural cemetery movement burial grounds by Père LaChaise Cemetery in Paris, Spring Grove Cemetery is the huge contributor to the field in Cincinnati. Like many others, a cholera epidemic and a desire to replace small urban cemeteries spurred its founding. An impressive Gothic Revival gatehouse welcomes the…
Tag: Romanesque Revival
Bellevue Brewery and Central Parkway, Cincinnati, Ohio
The former Bellevue Brewery sits high up on a hill above Central Parkway, the former Miami and Ohio Canal. Ironically, this was originally the back of the building. But of course, it might seem logical that industry would grow up along the canal, though I wonder how much utility the waterway really provided by the…
Elm Street Between Elder and Wade Streets, Over the Rhine, Cincinnati, Ohio
Heading south down Elm Street from Findlay Market, there are more commercial and restaurants spaces compared to Race Street, which run parallel to each other. The north side of Elder Street, below, shows how vibrant the area around the market is. Heading south, there are a wide variety of Italianate buildings. But later, taller buildings…
Mill Creek Valley, Cincinnati, Ohio
Lick Run, which we looked at yesterday, empties into Mill Creek, the industrial spine of Cincinnati. Not surprisingly, it has been heavily modified, altered and polluted by humans over the last two hundred years. There is something sublime about the giant swath of hundreds of miles of railroad tracks that you can see fleetingly while…
Lick Run Reborn, Cincinnati, Ohio
I have often said that I post about other cities not as a boring tour of my vacations, but as a way of comparing and contrasting with St. Louis, so we can learn how other cities are doing things better, and to see how other cities in America developed in the same way, and sometimes…
Two Churches, Mount Adams, Cincinnati, Ohio
We’ll look at the two Catholic churches on Mount Adams in more detail today; they perhaps could not have more prime locations on the heights of the promontory, securing sites long before the development of the neighborhood around them. First up is the former Passionist monastery of the Holy Cross which served the Irish population…
Mount Adams, Cincinnati, Ohio
We’re going to take a break from Over the Rhine to visit Mount Adams, an example of a successful community fit into a tight space. As the name implies, and as can be seen above in the historic photograph, the steep slopes of the hill have kept the outcropping isolated northeast of downtown Cincinnati. Eden…
Half Flounders, Over the Rhine, Cincinnati, Ohio
Half flounders are not somehow unique to St. Louis. I found them all over the Over the Rhine neighborhood, mostly north of Liberty Street where there is more demolition and vacant lots, making it easier to see the rear of buildings. Like I had mentioned when visiting the town of Blois in France, while certainly…
Liberty, Sycamore and Thirteenth Streets, Over the Rhine, Cincinnati, Ohio
We’ll look at a variety of streets next. Liberty Street is a classic example of a narrow street that was widened by the demolition of historic structures, creating what I call a traffic sewer. The north street wall is preserved, as you can see above and below, but on the south side, there’s a jagged,…
German Village, Columbus, Ohio, Part One
We now turn to Columbus, the capital of Ohio, and the German Village neighborhood south of the city’s downtown. German Village is one of those special places in America that I have a feeling most people have never heard about, but it is easily one of the most beautiful and harmonious built environments I have…