West Side Story

The Name Game

Jack Heffron — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 15:53:00 GMT

Near the corner of Glenway Avenue and Guerley Road stands Price Hill Chili, a rambling batch of interconnected buildings that opened as a single storefront in 1962. At “PHC” you’ll find perhaps the purest distillation of the west side, particularly the old-school Price Hill variety. On any given night or weekend morning, the place is a busy bustle of diners—many of whom know each other through the intricate web of west side connections that bind us like family. Amid the harried servers, clatter of dishes, and Elder sports memorabilia, people mingle among the tables, stopping to catch up on who’s doing what. At the hostess stand, you can buy shirts that announce “West Price Hill—Where Life Is Good” in black or gray, as a polo, long-, or short-sleeve T-shirt.

But a short walk down Glenway from Price Hill Chili—217 steps to be exact—stands the Covedale Branch of the Hamilton County library system. Next door to the library stands the Covedale Center for the Performing Arts. So is this Covedale or Price Hill? Complicating the question is the Western Hills Professional Building squatting between the restaurant and library. You might wonder, “Where the hell am I?”

A little clarification: The name “Western Hills” is simply a blanket term for this part of town and doesn’t refer to any previously incorporated area. Documents dating back to the 1930s even styled it The Western Hills. The Price Hill vs. Covedale confusion is a far stickier question. It has led to petitions and passionate editorials, argumentative meetings and snappish posts on web forums, even a push to change the official boundaries. West Price Hillians argue that the name already is official. The areas previously known as Price Hill and Covedale were annexed by Cincinnati in 1930 and now exist on the city’s maps under one name: West Price Hill. Case closed.

But many west-siders have informally referred to an amorphous western part of Price Hill for years as Covedale. Fueling their argument, they point to the library and the performing arts center, which was built in the late 1940s as the Covedale Theater. Nearby you’ll find Covedale School and Covedale Avenue, which runs parallel to Glenway Avenue for roughly a mile, through the heart of what Covedalians call Covedale. In fact, they have begun calling that particular stretch the “Covedale Garden District,” featuring quaint streetlamps and charming Tudor Revival homes, mostly built in the 1930s, with sharply pitched Spanish-tile roofs and fieldstone facades. On the west side (and to real estate agents throughout the city), the name “Covedale” implies a step up from “Price Hill.”

Of course, Price Hill is a big area—over six square miles—and its streets vary widely in terms of home values. A good number of West Price Hill homes are far more elaborate than those in the Covedale Garden District, but others, well, aren’t. Likewise, many homes in Covedale are pretty standard Cincinnati fare. The names, therefore, are evocative more of image than reality.

To better legislate what was Cincinnati’s largest neighborhood, the city, in the mid-1970s, officially broke Price Hill into three sections—Lower, East, and West—all of which have images of their own. Within those formal designations, people informally use names like Covedale, Overlook, the Incline District, and Eighth and State. And then there’s a whole other level of socio-geographic naming that goes on. Following west side tradition, it’s even more common for denizens to tag areas with the names of Catholic parishes. You state your location—and a good bit about your background and economic status—by noting you are from St. Lawrence or St. Teresa or Holy Family.

Non-west-siders might scoff that this type of muddle is normal over here, which is one reason why they always get lost when they venture across the Mill Creek Valley. But the confusion recently has led to a battle that undermines the unity for which the west side is known. Last summer the fight about what to call where spilled into the Livable Communities Committee of Cincinnati City Council, where Covedale made known its desire to secede from West Price Hill and become the city’s 53rd officially designated neighborhood.

Secession is, of course, a fightin’ word. Still, I wondered why the West Price Hill vs. Covedale debate had taken on such importance, and why it was shot through with such vitriol. I set out to find the answers—and quickly came to regret my decision. I haven’t suffered through so many tense conversations since Parent-Teacher nights when my sons were in grade school.

The combating groups—the Price Hill Civic Club and the Covedale Neighborhood Association—don’t sound so tough. But both mean business and neither plans to budge anytime soon. The debate jumped to a new level in 2008 when the PHCC, the official body that represents West Price Hill, erected a number of street signs saying “West Price Hill.” A big sign on both sides of the officially recognized borders proclaims, “Welcome to West Price Hill.” For the CNA, those signs, some of which were located in what they call Covedale, were commensurate to firing on Ft. Sumter. The war officially had begun.

Into their front lawns Covedalians stabbed signs announcing “A Proud Covedale Resident” in blue block letters. And right below the bold headline: “Demanding Equal Recognition.” The CNA circulated a petition, gaining more than 500 signatures, objecting to the signs and demanding recognized boundaries. Commentaries written by Jim Grawe, head of the CNA, began appearing frequently in west side editions of the Community Press. In a commentary he penned in October of last year, Grawe declared: “...a few Price Hill zealots...[are] using sophisticated propaganda and repression...[to] stifle public discussion and suppress our Covedale heritage. Now, wielding their political power, they secure public funds to erect West Price Hill signs within the accepted Covedale boundaries, even after being informed that it would upset a great number of local residents.”

In Grawe’s editorials the point is always the same: Covedalians have been crushed under the boot of West Price Hill, and they are fighting back. Last August, they presented their case to the council’s Livable Communities Committee. Hesitant to take the feud before the entire city council, the committee decided the groups should reach a mutually agreeable solution themselves. In the meantime, the signs would remain in place. Committee chairperson Roxanne Qualls suggested that perhaps the signs could be covered up until an agreement was reached.

Mark Armstrong, president of the PHCC, defends the signs. “The boundaries of the city were respected,” he says. “We did this with the city. Despite what’s being said, we’re not trying to change anything. Our task is to promote West Price Hill, and that’s what we’re doing.” Armstrong adds that part of the section Grawe wants to officially recognize as Covedale is West Price Hill’s central business district—the aforementioned Price Hill Chili, library, performing arts center, Refuge Coffee Bar, and a number of other retailers. “On the official map of Cincinnati neighborhoods, there is no mention of Covedale,” Armstrong says.

Grawe, however, points to the city map used in the Cincinnati Metropolitan Master Plan in 1948, which does cite Covedale. He also mentions that Green Township includes Covedale in its list of six neighborhoods. That’s right: to make things even more complicated, part of what is known as Covedale is in Green Township. Another part stretches into Delhi Township. And then there’s the part that’s in Price Hill. Grawe wants to end the confusion.

“People need to have a clear sense of place,” he says while seated in his dining room above the hair salon he owns on Sidney Road. (His opponents frequently note that the building stands just beyond the city limits, so that he isn’t a city resident and shouldn’t be raising such issues.) “And what they’re telling us is that we don’t exist. Covedale doesn’t exist.”

You may be wondering, as I did, couldn’t they just say they’re from West Price Hill? Well, yes. But would their property value drop as a result? That question cuts to the heart of the matter. Covedalians don’t want to list their homes as being in Price Hill. And the only thing they hate worse than people calling their neighborhood West Price Hill is a listing for a home in Price Hill that claims to be in Covedale. Do such house-listing shenanigans really go on? I asked a few real estate agents I know to get a more accurate sense of the situation. None would go on record, and all sounded relieved to end the conversation, which they did as quickly as possible.

“It’s a volatile situation,” one said. I asked another if the same house listed as Covedale would have a lower price—and value—if it were listed as Price Hill.

“There would be a difference in perception,” the agent said before hurrying off the phone.

It’s a hot-button issue that few people, other than Grawe, want to discuss. I couldn’t even get the Price Hill Historical Society to confirm some historical facts. They want no part of this fight. And so, rather than a parochial, largely semantic feud, we have what amounts to a class war, one in which property valuations appear to be at stake. Both sides seem to feel that the outcome could affect the survival of the area as a place “where life is good.”

Grawe often says that part of his fight is to preserve the history of Covedale, though there really isn’t a whole lot of documented history to preserve. No record exists, for example, of why the area was named Covedale. In the extensive document the CNA prepared for the council committee to prove that Covedale is a separate locale, 19th century maps of the area do cite the name. On the other hand, they also cite Warsaw, Cedar Grove, and St. Peters, all of which have receded into history.

Like many west side communities in the 19th century, what we know as Covedale was mostly farmland. The names on maps usually were applied to tiny business districts that included little more than an inn, a blacksmith shop, maybe a schoolhouse, and a general store. Though mentions of a place called Covedale can be found as early as the 1830s, according to The Cincinnati Historical Society’s The Bicentennial Guide to Greater Cincinnati, Covedale was established in the 1920s as people moved farther west from the city. Price Hill had been established much earlier. Evans Price started a community at the bottom of the hill, on the western side of the Mill Creek Valley. His son Rees continued to develop the area, and Rees’s son William helped to build the incline that connected what was then called “Price’s Hill” and the city.

Better roads, extended streetcar tracks, and the opening of the Western Hills viaduct eased travel, but the culture remained isolated and entrenched—German, Irish, and Italian Catholics—and that’s the way they liked it. What they didn’t like was the migration, beginning in the 1930s, of Appalachians to the bottom of the hill. As the Appalachians moved slowly up the hill, previous residents moved farther west, fusing with areas such as Covedale. Though that name remained in use (and Grawe is quick to whip out photos and advertisements to prove it), the smaller places sort of became known collectively as Price Hill—and when the area was annexed, the “sort of” became official.

While attending high school in Price Hill, I don’t recall any talk of east and west. Price Hill very definitely was “upper” and “lower.” And those designations weren’t just geographical. “Lower” meant lower in just about any way you can imagine. “Lower” meant the Appalachians, sometimes more uncharitably referred to as “hillbillies” and “river rats.”

Folks from “upper” looked down on them while also fearing they would spread up the hill, bringing crime, drugs, and the ruination of their property values. Of course, people from outside Price Hill did not make such a distinction. They included all Price Hillians in that characterization. Sometimes they used euphemisms such as “blue collar” and “working class,” but we knew what they meant. When I was at Elder in the blow-dry 1970s, other schools called all of us “greasers”—a rabble of hillbilly hot-rodders who slicked back their hair like Elvis and exuded the personal sophistication and upward mobility of The Fonz. Of course, no one hates a stereotype more than someone who fears being lumped into it, so the distinctions on the west side remained hard and fast.

This sort of social or ethnic stereotyping (and segregation) goes back even further. During World War I, a wave of anti-German sentiment crashed across the U.S., even in good old Zinzinnati. Germans were called “huns” and “krauts.” In Price Hill, developer John Mueller went so far as christening a new street “Relleum,” his own German-sounding name spelled backward. Though anti-German sentiment faded, the street is a reminder of America’s fickle characterization of ethnic groups as acceptable—or not.

In Price Hill today, the ethnic character is changing again, which is part of the reason the argument about names has reached a new intensity. The first decade of the 21st century saw the demolition of several large low-income housing projects in the West End and Westwood—Laurel Homes, Lincoln Court, and English Woods. Their destruction was part of a national trend toward decentralizing poverty. Looked at more cynically, many dollars were being invested in gentrifying downtown areas, and destroying those places was part of “cleaning up the neighborhood.” No doubt many Cincinnatians applauded the effort to give the disadvantaged a helping hand, while secretly hoping that the hand didn’t extend too far into their own neighborhoods.

Through national economic assistance programs such as HUD and Hope VI, some of the displaced residents were issued Housing Choice vouchers (commonly called Section 8). In the early and mid 2000s, after the housing projects were demolished, only 26 of those vouchers were used in Price Hill. Still, west-siders feel they have absorbed far more than their fare share of the people displaced from public housing —many of whom are African-American—because they lack the political punch of the east side elite. They can point to the most recent 2010 numbers from HUD, which list East Price Hill as having 520 Section 8 housing units, West Price Hill with 345, and Westwood with 889. By contrast, the combined neighborhoods of Hyde Park, Mt. Lookout, Mt. Adams, the East End, Linwood, Columbia-Tusculum, and California contain a total of 21. Add Pleasant Ridge and the total reaches 284.

As early as 2003, in an issue of New American City magazine, Melva Gweyn, one of the founders of a community group called Westwood Concern, said, “We’re pretty well saturated with Section 8. Since they have expanded [Section 8] so much in our area, we have had a rising crime rate, and people have left the area because they have been accosted by people on the street.” In other words, the issue isn’t that the west side opposes decentralizing poverty as much as it opposes recentralizing it in an area that has long cherished its separateness from the rest of the city.

Cincinnatians reading the newspaper or watching the local news now are hearing about violent crime and gangs and drugs in “Price Hill.” The crime may have occurred in Lower or East Price Hill, but even those at the top of the hill fear that their neighborhood’s reputation as safe and clean is eroding. And Covedalians want no part of that street cred.

“[The PHCC’s] point of view is to market Price Hill by claiming Covedale [so they can] say, ‘See, Price Hill isn’t so bad,’” says Grawe. “They’re claiming all of this to extend the boundaries and saying it’s all Price Hill.”

Armstrong maintains that’s not true. “We haven’t changed the boundaries at all,” he says. “The signs are placed where the boundaries always have been.”

The two sides finally met in late September, at a PHCC meeting. If Qualls hoped that they’d reach an agreement, she was wrong.

“It was the most uncomfortable meeting I’ve ever attended that I was invited to,” Grawe recalls. “We wanted them to read our document and then we’d meet again. They wanted to settle the matter right there—and to give us an earful.”

Armstrong remembers it differently: “They brought no solutions, only their demands.” The sides parted having accomplished nothing. “At this time it’s a non-issue,” says Armstrong. “There are no plans to meet again, and it’s not going to come up anytime soon. For the most part, things are quiet on the western front.”

Grawe, however, plans to continue making noise. Armstrong sounds like he wishes Grawe and his Covedale secessionists would just go away. And when you think about it, both positions seem like stereotypical west side attitudes.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love Price Hill,” says Grawe. “My goal is not to embarrass them. But I’m not going to stop.”

“It’s negative drama that we don’t need,” responds Armstrong. “It’s divisive, and it doesn’t reflect well on West Price Hill. I’d rather focus on the positive things happening here and use our energy to keep making things even better.”

And so the debate goes on, as it does among urban neighborhoods throughout the country. For now, life in West Price Hill is still to a large extent good, as the T-shirts claim—no matter what name you call it.

Illustration by Ryan Snook
Originally published in the March 2011 issue.

Too Long at the Fair?

Jack Heffron — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 15:52:00 GMT

I fell in love for the first time in my life at the Harvest Home parade. I was only 9 or 10, and so the relationship was not destined to last. It was also complicated by my not actually meeting the object of my affection. She was performing in the parade, an older woman, maybe 13 or 14, twirling a baton, the ends of which burned with dazzling flames. With her sequined costume and fiery baton, she shimmered in the twilight, buoyed through the air by the blare of a marching band. A year or two before that life-changing moment, I saw my first cow up close and personal at the fair. It looked considerably larger and more intimidating than the bucolic bovines standing in roadside fields toward which my brothers and I lobbed a “moo” from the car on family trips.

A few years later I saw a live band for the first time—teenage guys pounding out songs in the big white barn at the Harvest Home Fair. The thump of bass and crackle of guitar grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. I knew immediately that I wanted to do what they were doing. And a decade later, I was. Even played once at the fair, where we won some award, though I can’t recall what or why. I was 20 and a rocker, and my memory of that time is a bit, well, hazy, for reasons I don’t care to discuss.

Years later, I marched in the parade with my sons, who were very young at the time and involved in gymnastics. Wearing mint-green T-shirts, dozens of kids cartwheeled on stick-thin arms and legs through a minefield of horse manure all the way down Harrison Avenue in the heart of Cheviot.

I don’t offer these memories because they’re exceptional. I offer them because they’re not. It’s a rare long-time west-sider who doesn’t have stories of the Harvest Home Parade and Fair—the tradition runs that deep. This year, however, I wondered if we would see a waning of interest. The west side diaspora continues, as former Westwoodians, Delhites, and Cheviotonians move farther west. Maybe these people have moved on emotionally as well, leaving behind the quaint entertainments of the old neighborhood.

And if the appeal of a fair is largely to kids, do they even care anymore about seeing cows and pigs and horses? Maybe the little ones do, but even pre-teens live with their faces in their phones, on which they can access their Facebook pages, text a hundred words a minute, and post countless pictures of themselves looking silly with their BFFs. Ducks can quack and chickens can cluck, but neither can Tweet. Hanging out with animals probably seems dull in comparison to Wii and Rock Band and computer games in which entire worlds can be built and controlled, and best of all, destroyed.

It’s conceivable that adults, too, have grown tired of what seems like an anachronistic event. A month before the Harvest Home Fair, which is held on the first weekend after Labor Day, the Hamilton County Fair drew the smallest attendance in its 155-year history. Officials blamed the heat, but August is always pretty steamy in Cincinnati; tough to conclude that high temperatures caused the low turnout. Maybe the days of beamish boys and girls showing off their barnyard animals just ain’t what they used to be. In an interview in The Enquirer about the county fair, Commissioner David Pepper opined, “A county fair is about coming around agriculture. Having it in the middle of the city—where it used to be more remote, but now is in the middle city—is just not working.”

He could be right. And the Harvest Home Fair is held in Cheviot, an inner-ring urban community that nary a cow or pig has called home in a long, long time. If the county fair can tank so miserably, what would keep the Harvest Home afloat?

The fair’s festivities always begin on Thursday with the parade, which runs east from the western edge of Cheviot along Harrison Avenue then makes a sharp left turn onto North Bend Road, where it wends its way to Harvest Home Park. In all, it probably covers a couple of miles. The placing of chairs along the curb begins as early as Tuesday. On Wednesday evening they fill the entire route—hundreds of them. Aluminum chairs, molded-plastic chairs, folding metal chairs, canvas camp chairs. For decades west-siders have reserved their spots in this way, and for just as long they’ve taken pride in noting that no one worries about the chairs being moved or stolen, such is the high moral character of our part of town. But confidence in that sentiment might be changing with the times, as a number of people have strapped their chairs together with ropes and bungee cords, some even tying them to parking meters. A level of trust in one’s neighbor is obviously eroding.

Still, everyone seems cheerful as the parade kicks off. If I was concerned about the diminishing appeal of fairs, the turnout for the parade is reassuring. The crowd—sitting and standing three or four deep—fills every inch of the route. I squeeze into a spot at the North Bend turn, squinting into the sun while the marching bands and horses and classic cars file toward us. Green Township Fire Department trucks and SUVs make the turn with lights, sirens, and horns blasting, followed by a van from Glier’s Goetta pulling a calliope that toots an old-timey tune. Soon after, the crowd applauds a contingent of Purple Heart war veterans, most of them in their 70s. Even louder applause greets Buddy LaRosa, waving from the back seat of a black convertible. A volunteer for a political candidate moves among us trying to unload plastic cups, telling us that they feature a “new design this year.” I wonder if the candidate does too.

It’s been years since I’ve been to the parade. After my kids lost interest, I stopped going. It had become mostly just a traffic hassle, having to plot one’s course to avoid it. Apparently I haven’t missed much. Parade entertainment hasn’t made great strides to meet the demands of a new generation, which may be the secret to its appeal—a slice of Americana, served up the way your mama and her mama and her mama made it. The high school bands look the same (though the baton twirlers lack the panache I recall from my youth). The politicians provide plenty of enthusiasm, stomping down the street with eager waves. And no parade would be complete without a brigade of Shriners weaving their frantic figure eights in the tiny one-man cars that must be manufactured solely for them. Many of the drivers feign a lofty indifference, but you can tell they love every minute of it, scooting along in mini-limos and mini-race cars and mini-SUVs, a maroon fez atop each head.

A mother with two little girls stands in front of me, sort of narrating the parade—along the lines of “Look, see the horses?” and “Here comes the marching band.” The girls, who are probably around 3 or 4 years old, wave at every passing person with a fascinated, if slightly stupefied, look. To them, this scene is utterly amazing. Clowns and teenagers and horses are walking right down the middle of the street and waving! Teenagers in band uniforms tromp past as the drummers snap a crisp cadence. The little girls’ curiosity is contagious. Those of us nearby begin waving too.

I find myself getting more into the spirit of the event—for a while. Maybe an hour. But the parade keeps going. And going. My attention span falters as the shadows lengthen. The bright blue of the sky fades like a summer tan, and the evening begins to carry a hint of autumn. I mosey across the street to the patio of the Black Sheep, a restaurant and bar on the corner of Harrison and North Bend. From there I can sit and watch. After two hours, the parade is still going strong. And to my surprise, the crowd is too. It has thinned a bit, though not as much as you’d expect. But then there’s not a lot of competition for entertainment on a Thursday night. The fair itself might be another story.

Marketed as “The Biggest Little Fair in Ohio,” the Harvest Home Fair is also one of the oldest. In fact, it’s almost as old as the state. According to The Bicentennial Guide to Greater Cincinnati, published by the Cincinnati Historical Society, it began in 1806, when Enoch and Ashsah Carson and their eight children invited neighboring farmers to celebrate a successful harvest. The annual gathering became a tradition, and was cancelled only once, during the war—I’m referring, of course, to the War of 1812. I know: Pretty amazing, when you think about it. In Middle America we don’t have many traditions that old.

By the 1850s, the one-day celebration had grown so large that the Green Township Agricultural Society was created to manage it. In 1860 the Green Township Harvest Home Association was formed to take over what officially became the Harvest Home Fair. The Kiwanis Club of Cheviot-Westwood took the reins in 1939. Though the City of Cheviot owns Harvest Home Park, the Kiwanis runs the fair, which, from what I can see on Friday night, seems to be as popular as ever.

A procession strolls the sidewalks on both sides of North Bend Road to the fairgrounds. The Ferris Wheels and rides cast a neon glow among the trees while the games and food booths do more business than they can handle. The Rusty Griswolds—as cover bands go, a kind of ’80s version of Sha Na Na—provide the entertainment, while kids run from ride to ride. The most popular one seems to be the merry-go-round that features real horses—well, maybe ponies is more apt. Little kids clamor for another ride as soon as they dismount. One youngster tells his parents that he’s already named his pony and insists on taking it home; his parents convince him to settle for getting back in line “one more time.”

The mood calms on Saturday afternoon, which focuses on animal competitions. In the 4-H tents, suburbanites stroll past cows and roosters and sheep and goats and pretty much any other barnyard denizen you can think of. The people look much more interested than the animals, which lounge in hay-strewn pens. A pink pig whose snout and hindquarters are mottled with gray, snoozes soundly, oblivious to the hands stretching over the rail to touch him. I’m happy to learn the next day that he is crowned the “Grand Champion,” though I’m pretty sure he could care less.

In the field on the north side of the park, at least a dozen girls sit astride horses arranged in a wide oval. A man on a microphone calls out commands, and off they go in canters and trots and gallops. Though they look tiny compared to their horses, they execute the maneuvers masterfully. Their parents sit in lawn chairs next to the field, taking pictures and videos.

A soft but persistent drizzle falls throughout much of the afternoon, but it doesn’t appear to dampen any spirits. It does add a musty layer to the smell of the fair, which is pungent, an earthy cocktail of animals, hay, and excrement. The scent socks you in the nose the minute you step through the entrance, announcing that this event is not just another church festival. It’s tightly bound to a more distant past, when farms dominated the area, which was isolated from the rest of Cincinnati by the Mill Creek Valley. Even as seemingly half the crowd ambles around talking or texting on their phones, it’s easy to feel connected to the many thousands of others who, over the course of two centuries, have wandered on this very spot on a cool night in early September, celebrating the harvest and savoring a communal moment before the start of another long winter.

A large crowd gathers in the stage area on Sunday evening to hear The Menus, five west side guys who, lead singer Tim Goldrainer tells us, have been performing for 27 years. One of Cincinnati’s most popular groups, The Menus are the perfect choice to close the fair. They’re a good-time band whose act focuses on Goldrainer’s smooth voice and campy stage antics. He opens the show wearing an Oak Hills basketball jersey, short pants, and a pink tutu. After the first song he runs behind a curtained corner of the stage and reappears in an Elder wrestling singlet. “I went to both schools,” he tells the audience.

The fair is winding down. Some of the vendors have abandoned their booths and a few others are packing up. Long shadows drape the crowd, which numbers in the hundreds, many sitting in white chairs near the band while others stand at the rear—most of them laughing as Goldrainer cartwheels across the stage, and singing along to pop standards like “Sweet Caroline” and “Jack and Diane.”

Though the band doesn’t electrify me like the one I heard at the fair many years ago and the stage is set up in a different spot from the one I played on, watching The Menus brings back those times. Many of the folks in the crowd are probably delving into their own cache of memories. The fair, ultimately, is about nostalgia, and Goldrainer plays to that feeling, even when dressed in a fright wig and a Speedo. Between songs he jokes about west side places that have been gone for a long time. “I miss Zantigo’s,” he tells the crowd, and a lot of heads nod, recognizing the name of a fast-food Mexican place on Glenway Avenue that closed more than 25 years ago. Words like community have been rendered trite with overuse, but this gathering exudes a sense of shared history.

A week after the fair, its chairman, Pete Mingus, is pleased with the turnout. “It was probably one of our better years,” he says. “We had record crowds on Friday night and Sunday night.” Though he doesn’t have a final tally, he estimates attendance at between 25,000 and 30,000. He admits that in the struggling economy he wasn’t sure the fair would attract its usual crowd or that businesses would pay for booths.

A life-long west-sider, Mingus has his own memories of the fair, which he has worked on as a member of the Cheviot-Westwood Kiwanis for the past 15 years. As a member of the band at St. Catherine Grade School and LaSalle High School, he marched in the parade many times. “The Harvest Home Fair is such a west side staple,” he says. “It’s our end-of-summer ritual.” But the fair needs new blood to ensure its future. This year the managing committee created a group called The Harvest Home Fair Association to bring in people interested in working on the event without joining the Kiwanis. “It’s so new we don’t even have a membership list yet,” Mingus says.

It’s hard to imagine autumn without the fair. Something about its long tradition and loamy smell connects us to the changing seasons, and provides a comforting place from which to face an uncertain future. I’m reminded of a moment on Sunday, when a 4-H kid, a blonde young lady in her early teens, hopped into a pen with several sheep. One had become skittish, perhaps because of the crowd. She whipped her leg over the wooden rail and plopped down next to the black-faced sheep and patted its head, cooing, “It’s just me. I’m here.” The fair is a lot like that.

Illustration by Ryan Snook
Originally published in the November 2010 issue.

My Journey to New Delhi

Jack Heffron — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 15:52:00 GMT

Have you ever smoked hookah?” my 19-year-old son asked me not long ago.

At first, I wasn’t sure how to respond. It was one of those unsettling parental moments when a father must resist the urge to chide his child, now an adult, about unhealthy habits. That urge was complicated by my not actually knowing much about the health effects of smoking a hookah pipe. I also felt that parental twinge of chagrin at lacking a worldly experience one’s teenager can oh-so-knowingly claim. Add to the mix an even sharper twinge of curiosity about what it’s like to smoke a hookah, and you have a sense of my confusion. I had seen photos of my sons on their Facebook pages, huffing a hookah at the Clifton cafés with their college friends, viewing them with interest and a bit of, OK, horror.

With that weird weave of emotions knotting in my throat, I came clean. “No, I’ve never smoked one,” I said.
My son then told me about a brand new hookah café that just opened in Delhi.

“In Delhi?” was all I could manage to say. I can think of no place on earth less likely to host a hookah lounge. True, the township’s name has an antecedent in India, where some historians believe the hookah pipe was invented, but that’s where the similarity ends. Insular, conservative, and formidably suburban, Delhi prides itself on trim lawns, safe streets, and minding its own damn business. Around these parts, the name is pronounced DELL-high, as opposed to the more mellifluous DELL-ee, an alteration that sort of sums up why it’s such an unlikely home for an exotic ritual that is suddenly hip. Having lived many years on the west side I have cherished memories of the place, but a setting for trendiness it ain’t—unless things there are changing. Perhaps Sahara Café heralds a new beginning. If so, I needed to see that for myself—to find out how and why someone would be compelled to smoke a hookah. And, most of all, why one would do it in Delhi.

Though Delhi Township boasts more than 30,000 residents, people outside its borders generally don’t hear a lot about it. Locked deep at the southern end of the west side with no easy interstate access, Delhi is a quiet, if sprawling, suburb where little of wider interest happens. Its rolling hills, once dotted with small farms, exploded into endless, winding, suburban streets in the baby-boom years, creating a rather homogenous area where, as a friend and long-time resident once told me, you could get lost in a helicopter.

The main reason why someone from any other part of town would make the trek would be for the College of Mount St. Joseph, which is located on the southwestern side of the township. With an enrollment of roughly 2,300 students, Mount St. Joe is a small, pretty campus, but like Delhi itself, isolated and somewhat subdued. The township’s signature event is the annual Delhi Skirt Game, in which burly members of the fire department and athletic association dress up in drag and play softball to raise money for various causes. Begun in 1977, the Skirt Game draws quite a crowd, which provides a sense of the area’s gestalt; in other words, Delhi is the kind of place where this type of entertainment would be a big hit.

In the more distant past, Delhi was a rural community best known for its production of flowers. According to Peg Schmidt at the Delhi Historical Society, the area once featured 55 greenhouses and in the 1890s attracted the annual meeting of the National Horticultural Society to the area. At the time, Cincinnati’s branch of the society was made up mostly of Delhi growers. Though the number of greenhouses has dwindled to eight, Delhi still calls itself “The Floral Paradise of Ohio.” The nickname was coined, according to Schmidt, by a trade publication in the 1920s or ’30s and “it stuck.” While it must be tough for a community to give up such attractive branding, the moniker no longer seems quite apt. Even the Delhi Flower and Garden Center, which opened in 1960, has fled for richer ground in Springdale and Liberty Township.

It seems that there’s been a whole lotta fleeing going on. As I drive along Delhi Road, the area’s main artery (and still called Delhi Pike by many locals), it’s impossible not to notice that New Delhi is struggling through tough times. This road was once a bustling cacophony of commerce, packed with chain restaurants and groceries and department stores with plenty of local purveyors included in the mix. Now the strip malls here are hurting.

The retail hub throughout the boom years was Del-Fair Shopping Center, which opened in the mid-1950s on the corner of Anderson Ferry Road and the pike. Though it’s not yet seven o’clock when I pull into the parking lot, the place is mostly dark. The largest anchor store—a former Thriftway that takes up a quarter of the entire mall—is empty. The space now hosts a haunted-house venue called “Dungeons of Delhi” during Halloween season. The middle anchor space also is empty, as are a few of the smaller spaces. A Fashion Bug and a McCabe Do-It Center valiantly remain, surrounded by a locksmith, a check-cashing store, and not much else. In its heyday, the shopping center was known best as the home of Del-Fair Bowling Lanes, located in the basement—34 lanes, a long bar, a restaurant, and a wide, carpeted concourse. In August, after 54 years in business, the lanes shut down.

Del-Fair Lanes was woven into Delhi’s culture; few local businesses or venues epitomized the area more completely. Life-long resident Bob Dinsmore was sorry to see it go. “It was a big icon for the community,” he says now. The loss was even bigger for Dinsmore because his father, Thomas, was one of the original owners. They sold it in the late 1970s, though the family continued to frequent the place. “We were going to start a league again if they hadn’t closed,” Bob told me.

Though his father, who passed away in late 2009 at the age of 93, had been out of the business for many years, Dinsmore says he remained interested in the bowling demimonde and watched it erode as the old-guard promoters died or moved on. The economy has hit the industry hard. Owners of bowling centers have, not surprisingly, decried the state smoking bans, which they felt would be tougher on them than on bars and restaurants, where customers can simply step outside for a smoke. Bowlers, however, have to change their shoes to leave.

I contacted several officials in the industry but couldn’t get anyone to return calls or e-mails to verify how the ban has affected their business. Articles in industry publications and on Web sites tell a mixed tale. Some say that smoking bans have hurt; others say they helped, drawing in a different clientele. Either way, the irony was painfully obvious, at least to me: While one iconic Delhi gathering place had closed in part because of the smoking ban, another gathering place that explicitly focused on smoking had opened. And was alive and well.

Traffic boils along the pike, which is brightly lit by signs for fast-food chains. The strip malls sit back behind the restaurants, and I pull into Delhi Shopping Center, younger than Del-Fair by at least 20 years, hoping that the economic situation is better there. I see right away that competition is brisk. Three of the largest stores all wear bright banners on their marquees proclaiming “Space Available.”

Feeling sort of depressed about the state of New Delhi, I head farther down the pike to Delhi Plaza but (sadly) find the situation much the same. The largest anchor space is closed, leaving only a few going concerns—Cash Plus, Total Tan, Miracle Dance Theatre, RadioShack, KeyBank. The heavy traffic would lead one to believe the area is thriving, except that Delhites appear to spend their money only on fast food.

I scoured the Internet trying to dig up some reaction to these changes but found instead a Facebook page called “I Grew Up in Delhi” that has attracted more than 2,000 members, mostly baby boomers waxing nostalgic about their youth. Though it seems that a number of the posters still live in the area, none expressed more than wistful dismay at the current state of things. They mention numerous defunct stores and restaurants, but no one had mentioned the new hookah lounge—or much of anything that has happened in the past 20 years. The purpose of the page is sentimental recollection, I know. But you’d think there would be at least a stray comment or two on the present situation. I began to feel nervous as I read the posts, wondering if the area had become largely theoretical, a geographical place that had once existed rather than a living, breathing neighborhood adapting to the world we live in today.

That world, it turns out, includes the enjoyment of smoking hookah, and I am eager to find out more about it as I pull into the parking lot of Sahara Café, just past Greenwell Avenue. The café occupies a small building that must have been a house at some point in its history. More recently it was Perk on the Pike, a coffeehouse that succumbed to the recession.

I wasn’t sure what I expected—maybe something more along the lines of the hookah cafés in Clifton, which are dark and have a nightclub ambiance. Here the atmosphere was, well, more like the coffee shop it replaced. Inside, Middle Eastern music undulates softly through two rooms filled with matching tables and chairs arranged on polished hardwood floors. A stone fireplace fronts one wall and rugs depicting Middle Eastern temples hang on two of the other walls. I am alone except for a pair of college-age women sitting in a corner, a hookah between them. (Before you ask about Ohio’s smoking ban, yes, this is all perfectly legal. A business can request an exemption from the ban if at least 80 percent of its sales are related to tobacco—which basically means hookah cafés and tobacconists. However, they must re-apply for that exemption annually and must occupy a free-standing building.)

Historians are undecided about when and where the hookah pipe came into existence. India, Egypt, Iran, and Turkey lay claim to developing the ritual of smoking the pipe, which is also known by a variety of names, including narghile, and in Pakistan, huqqa. Some cite the origin in India in the late 15th century but believe the pipe was refined and popularized in Turkey in the mid-16th century, quickly becoming part of what shishapipe.net calls “the coffee shop culture.” A large part of its appeal was as a social custom, with people gathering around the pipe to talk, much as they would at a bar or coffee house today.

As I sit down at a table, the owner, Maher Baira, slides a menu in front of me. He looks to be in his 30s, a slim, dark-haired guy who speaks with a heavy accent that I learn later is Syrian. The names on the menu sound like cocktails—fuzzy navel, piña colada, cosmopolitan, apple martini. But no alcohol is served here. Those are the flavors of shisha, a leafy, sticky paste made of tobacco, honey, and ground-up dried fruit.

I have no idea what to order until my sons arrive to enlighten their unhip dad on the subtleties of this ritual. We get strawberry daiquiri shisha with a small, cored watermelon placed around the bowl of the pipe to add extra flavor. The shisha is stuffed into the bowl and covered with aluminum foil. Hot round coals are placed on top of the foil to heat the shisha. When the smoker inhales through a thin hose, the smoke is drawn through cold water, which burbles as it releases the smoke up the hose. Unlike with cigars and cigarettes, the smoke from a hookah is not at all harsh. Instead, it’s cool and mildly sweet, a pleasant sensation.

My sons lean back and cluck perfect smoke rings into the air above us, which I admit is a bit disconcerting, but I guess that’s part of my journey to New Delhi. We sit and chat, passing around the hose. Sahara Café slowly fills with young people. Maher greets most of them in a familiar way, suggesting that they are regular customers.

Later, I ask him why he picked Delhi to open his café. He says a friend owns one of the Clifton cafés, and he didn’t want to compete with him. In Delhi, competition obviously isn’t an issue; he’s got the entire west side to himself. Raised in Syria and Lebanon, Baira moved to the U.S. in 1990. He attended schools in various parts of the country, including, for nearly two years, Mount St. Joe. During that time he lived in Delhi, so he’s familiar with the terrain.

“All the people here were good to me even though my English was not so good then,” he explains. As for the local reaction to his new cafe, he says people are curious about it. “They’ve heard of hookah, but they say, ‘What does it do?’” Located just a couple of miles down the pike from Mount St. Joe, Sahara attracts college students, but since he opened in late September, Baira says he has attracted older folks, too, who come in for coffee or for his spiced Arabian tea, one of the house specialties, and they find themselves trying the hookah. “You don’t have to be a smoker to smoke a hookah,” Baira says. “It’s a totally different thing.”

Smoking hookah is a long-standing tradition in the Middle East, with a café “on every corner,” Baira tells me. In the U.S., it started to catch on about a decade ago on the West Coast and has since spread east. As for why it has become popular, people seem to enjoy the serene feeling they get from the ritual. “People like to sit and smoke and relax,” he says. I’ve heard college kids talk a lot about the relaxing effects of smoking hookah, but I see every customer drinking coffee or tea or Red Bull or Mountain Dew. I’m not sure how relaxed they can feel with all that caffeine plowing through their bodies, though the mood in the café is mellow.

Baira thinks that college students like smoking hookah because it’s something new, something they haven’t been around before. My theory is that the ritual of smoking an exotic pipe smacks of something illegal without the actual threat of arrest. More sensual and sophisticated than doing bong hits in a messy dorm room (not that college students ever do that), smoking hookah conjures images of opium dens in foreign lands, of being avant garde and cosmopolitan, while the resulting sensation is merely soothing.

After a couple of hours have drifted past, I head out the door, leaving my sons and their friends to enjoy their latest cool spot, which is, if not crowded, certainly attracting customers. “We’re getting by,” Baira says. “Week after week it gets a little better. Little bit by little bit.”

I hope his assessment applies to all of Delhi. Part of the problem here is simply the state of the economy. The other issue is that Delhi really isn’t new anymore. Just as it is no longer the floral paradise of Ohio, it’s no longer the place where the folks on “I Grew Up in Delhi” grew up. Many of them have moved on—to other cities and states, to the fresh green world of Butler County, or to the suburbs sprouting up farther west, where their children are gathering new memories. Meanwhile Delhi forges ahead, building its next life, as do we all.

Illustration by Ryan Snook

Originally published in the January 2011 issue.

Haunting Miamitown

Jack Heffron — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 15:50:00 GMT

It’s 11:30 on a muggy, buggy summer night, and I’m standing in an old cemetery, the final stop on the Miamitown Ghost Tour. Jeff Morris,the guide for our brave little band, tells us that the cemetery is haunted,which is not tough to believe given the look of it. Cragged, ancient headstones lean at weird angles, which appear even weirder in the shadows cast by moonlight slithering through the pines that enclose the property on two sides.

The headstones look strange, but what’s even stranger is that there aren’t a lot of them. The area is mostly covered with grass. Jeff tells us that the cemetery is full, but many of the graves are unmarked because the occupants of two other cemeteries in town were moved here many years ago to accommodate new construction. When the Miamitown Elementary School was built across the street from where we’re standing, the work crews found many unmarked graves and had no way of identifying the “piles of bodies.” And so they simply moved and re-buried the anonymously departed. Perhaps, Jeff adds, that’s why the spirits are restless.

“When people visit this cemetery at night, they sometimes feel like they’re being watched,” Jeff says. He’s a tall, lean guy in his early30s with sharp features and a shaved head. He’s been giving the tours since2006 and does approximately 200 per year, mostly on weekends, though leading up to Halloween, he does at least one tour every night and sometimes as many as three. He’s certainly got his spiel down pat, creating an eerie mood augmented by touches of humor.

“People sometimes feel chills running up their spines,” he tells us. Given the stifling heat, I find myself wishing for a chilly spine.Then he says that people have seen ghostly figures wandering here. The one most often seen is a little girl in a white dress who vanishes when she is approached. Perhaps, he suggests, she is the ghost of a little girl who died in a fire in 1939 at the old Methodist Church, which was located next to the cemetery.

Perhaps, but then she’s not hurting for spectral company.For the past hour we have walked the streets of the little town, located next to the Great Miami River in what could be called the far west side. Jeff has told us about, among others, a ghost cat, a ghost truck that fell into the river when the bridge collapsed in 1989, a ghost hitchhiker sometimes seen on Harrison Avenue’s “Dead Man’s Curve,” and the ghost of an old woman in a rocking chair who customers at Village Pump Antiques used to encounter as they browsed. When a psychic visited the shop, he said the ghost told him that she was lonely, and so the shop’s owner made a habit of saying hello to her and encouraged customers to do the same.

I’m not sure how much I believe, but Jeff weaves in plenty of documented history, which casts a patina of truth—or at least possibility—onthe tales of Miamitown’s ghosts. And according to Jeff and his brother, Mike,the plethora of ghosts could be good for the local economy. That’s their goal,anyway. The Morris brothers have partnered with the local historical society in hopes of protecting Miamitown’s future by marketing the notion that its past is still very much in its present. In other words, Miamitown’s ghosts could keep it from becoming a ghost town.

East-siders likely will need a spin through MapQuest to find Miamitown. West-siders, however, know it well, if only because they pass through it on their way to someplace else. The most popular someplace else is Miami Whitewater Forest. The park and the beautiful golf course next to it attract thousands of visitors every year, most of whom cut through Miamitown on State Route 128 (called “Main Street” within the unincorporated village) or on Harrison Avenue, which crosses the Great Miami River.

You also might come through the town to watch your kids play sports. On either side of Harrison Avenue, just east of the river, you’ll find the “futbol” fields operated by the Tri-State Futbol Alliance, a rather continental-sounding bunch, especially given the nature of the vicinity, which is better known for pickup trucks parked in gravel lots in front of bars with names like The Best Damn Bar in Town. Just north of town, kids play “soccer” at the enormous Miami Whitewater Forest Soccer Complex, where you can watch games on 16 fields or, if you prefer, easily land a 747. A little farther up 128you’ll find Rumpke Ballpark, where Little Leaguers and softballers rule the summer nights. In short, people find reasons to go through Miamitown. They just don’t seem to be stopping in it anymore.

Like many a small Midwestern burg, Miamitown is struggling to survive. Its main drag drags at a snail’s pace these days. But for a longtime it featured a number of antique and collectibles shops that on weekends drew visitors. Even in its heyday, which lasted from the 1970s through the’90s, it lacked the quaintness of a Lebanon or Old Milford, but it possessed an earthy charm and authenticity that had its own appeal. Many of the shops occupied 19th century homes and stores—quirky, oddly designed buildings that stand jowl to jowl. If Hansel and Gretel had a pair of two-fisted American doppelgangers who built the Main Street of a small Midwestern river town, this would be it.

For the past decade, the shops have been closing. Today there are only a couple left that keep regular hours. The town’s most popular draw, its Christmas Walk, run by the Miamitown Business Association, has ceased to exist, as has the association. Though a few restaurants remain open, most prominently Kreimer’s Bier Haus West, located right off I-74 at the southern end of town, many of the historic buildings now sit empty. Something needs to be done, and the Morris brothers feel they can do it.

I met with the Morrises on a sweltering summer evening at Miamitown’s historic town hall, built in 1880. It has served a number of functions through the years and now is primarily home to the Miami HistoricalSociety. Like his brother, Mike Morris is tall, well over six feet, and lean,though he has a thick head of dark hair. At 29, he’s three years younger, and far less talkative, than Jeff. Both are somewhat shy and soft-spoken but they possess a quiet confidence, the kind it takes to build a business selling a product that is, for the most part, unseen. Their business includes the Miamitown Ghost Tours and a weekly Internet radio show called Miamitown Ghost Talk Radio, which airs on Tuesdays nights at 10 on the All Souls Paranormal Radio Network. (Podcasts are available online.) They discuss general paranormal subjects and often interview national experts in the field, but they felt that “Miamitown” had become part of their brand so they kept it in the show’s title.

They’ve also recently published two books: Haunted Cincinnati and Southwest Ohio (Arcadia) came out early last year, and Cincinnati Haunted Handbook (Clerisy Press) debuts this month. They speak at ghost-hunting conventions and last year launched the Miamitown Paranormal Conference, which was held in October in the building where we’re sitting. The conference drew more than 300 people as well as camera crews from local TV stations, along with more than two dozen vendors.

“Strange brew” doesn’t begin to describe the event; Stephen King meets Norman Rockwell is more like it. Craft vendors set up in front of the town hall, while the paranormal peddlers occupied the big room inside. The speakers gave talks in the basement of the firehouse next door. You could learn about Bigfoot sightings, buy a hand-woven basket, see kids getting their faces painted, and hear tales of ghostly horror all in the same place.

I assumed that the Morris brothers were long-time residents of Miamitown but in fact, they grew up very near Western Bowl in Western Hills.Mike is an Elder grad and a graphic designer; Jeff attended St. Xavier and Miami University. By day, Jeff works in the pharmaceutical industry. After living for a while in New Jersey, Mike and his family moved five years ago to Miamitown.Jeff and his family now live in Covedale. Another surprise: neither nurtures along-time interest in the paranormal.

“Until Jeff brought it up, I never even thought about it,” Mike says with a chuckle.Jeff brought it up back in 2005, after his interest was sparked by tales of ghostly doings on Buffalo Ridge Road, where for decades west side teens have sleuthed for spooks. Jeff lived nearby at the time and found himself driving slowly up and down the road’s hills and winding curves in hopes of seeing,well, he wasn’t sure what he might see. But he definitely wanted to see it.

To feed his curiosity, he investigated the history of the road. Its haunted reputation rests mainly upon the remains of a planetarium.Early in the 20th century, the city of Cincinnati planned to build a planetarium there but got no further than laying out the foundation before funding fell through. The white stone foundation still exists, casting an eerie glow on moonlit nights. As years passed, a story developed that the foundation was the remains of a crematorium that burned to the ground, unleashing the spirits of those who had been baked to ash. Though Jeff may have been disappointed to learn the truth, his interest only grew stronger—both in local history and in the paranormal. And Miamitown seemed to be chock full of both.

“When I moved here and he started to come over, he saw what a perfect town this was, very historic, and that’s how he got the idea for the tour,” Mike explains. When they started the tours, they saw it as a fun little sideline rather than as means to bring business and people to the town.“Miamitown just happened to be a perfect place for a ghost tour,” Jeff says.“There aren’t many towns in the area that have so many 19th century structures all in a row.”

Then they met Diane Bachman, president of the Miami Historical Society. Bachman who has joined us in the town hall, was born and raised and has lived most of her life in Miamitown. She has seen good times and bad, and the failure of a number of ideas for bringing interest to the town.“When you told me about the ghost tours, I gave you two years—max—probably less than that,” she tells Mike. “Then he comes in one day and says, ‘We just published a book.’ And I said, ‘Excuse me?’ And now he says they’re publishing another book. The tours are great because it’s something interesting that will bring people in.” Pointing a thumb in Mike’s direction, she adds, “He’s been one of the positive changes here.”

Bachman, who is in her fifties, has short reddish hair, a matter-of-fact demeanor, and a wry wit. She waves away the prestige of her title as president of the historical society, saying, “No one else wants to do it.” By day she works downtown for Pieczonka Unlimited, a trophy and engraving store, but she found time to work closely with the brothers to put on last year’s conference and they’re working hard to make this year’s event—which will be held on October 2—even bigger.

Bachman is urging local businesses to get involved—the restaurants serving a seasonal special or two, the beauty
salon painting faces and fingernails in Halloween themes. “We’re hoping the businesses will sort of do what they do,” she says. “We want the restaurants do fun things that day.”

Jeff says that residents were a bit skeptical about theghost tours at first but have come to accept—and even appreciate—having such a unique undertaking in their largely forgotten village. “The people seem to be100 percent behind the idea,” he says. “There are a handful of the older people who think the idea is kind of silly, but after last year’s conference, when somany people came, and the historical society made some money, they saw how many people are interested.”

Admission to the conference is free. The historical society serves food and keeps the profit, along with the proceeds from a raffle. The brothers keep the profits from the vendor fees. “We’re going to try to extend it down the street,” Bachman says. “How much of the town it will take up I have no idea. We’re going with the flow.”

Flow has always been a major obstacle in the growth of Miamitown, which, until recently, lacked a unified sewage system. Folks here mostly have relied on septic tanks. Whitewater Township (population 5,000) is now putting in the pipes, which will make it easier to attract businesses and housing development, says Bachman. The far western townships are Hamilton County’s last undeveloped area. With the west side continuing to move west and Harrison expanding east, residential growth is not an unlikely possibility now that the township has created a sewer district.

The notion of large-scale development, however, doesn’t appeal to Bachman or the Morris brothers. They would like to see growth but also to maintain the historic nature of the town. “We want to be a vital business area, to bring that back,” Bachman says. “A place where people could go shopping and eat and do a little bit of everything. It was always a pretty good mecca for business until the antique dealers left.”

“We just don’t want all the buildings gone,” says Mike.

“That would be completely tragic,” Jeff agrees. “Those buildings have been there for over a hundred years. You tear them down and put up a warehouse and pretty soon Miamitown has nothing that defines it. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.”

During the tour I took, the brothers noticed that a sign had been removed on one of the buildings, which in the mid-1800s housed a general store called Werts & Bledsoe. Though many tenants have moved in and out of the building through the years, the sign remained in place—until suddenly it was gone.

“That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m afraid to see,” Jeff says. “This ghost tour maybe can help preserve the physical history of the town, and it makes me feel good that that’s a possibility.”

It seems that the restless spirits in Miamitown are very much present and accounted for—and with the Morris brothers’ effort and creativity, it’s possible they won’t be forgotten after all. Strange as it may sound, they could play a role in securing Miamitown’s future.

Illustration by Ryan Snook
Originally published in the September 2010 issue.

Soap Floats

Jack Heffron — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 15:49:00 GMT

Despite the dreary weather, when I heard last winter that a rally would be held to save the embattled Gamble House on Werk Road in Westwood, I decided to check it out. The 13-room house, built in the 1830s, had been in the news as concerned west side citizens struggled to shield it from its owners, the Indian Hill–based Greenacres Foundation, which had announced its intention to tear the place down. No doubt I would see a handful of shivering, well-intentioned do-gooders pacing with signs in front of the haggard mansion. But to update my membership in the Well-Intentioned Do-Gooders Club, I thought I’d swell the ranks.

What I saw as I drove along Werk Road bordered on the surreal. Easily more than a hundred people lined the sidewalks on both sides of the road in front of the Gamble House, shaking their signs at the passing drivers, many of whom honked in loud support. Vans from two local TV stations were knifed into spots a couple of blocks away. Unable to find an open space, I turned around and drove back through the cheering gauntlet of protestors. With the streets just as jammed on the other side of the house, I turned around again and drove through one more time, staggered by the enthusiasm—and sheer size—of the crowd exhorting each other with steamy breaths of defiance.

This couldn’t be real. But it was happening. The question then became—why? West-siders care about their community as much as anyone, but historic preservation isn’t exactly the type of lightning rod that gooses average joes and janes from their couches and shoves them out the door into a freezing afternoon to stand by a road lugging signs in support of a house that, until recently, many didn’t know existed. Something else must be going on.

The Internet forums hadn’t provided a clue that a groundswell was burbling. I had heard no impassioned talk among neighbors or at the grocery store or coffee houses or restaurants. Out of the blue, it seemed that west-siders were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore. But mad about what? Was an old house that no one had lived in for years really igniting such a spirited call to arms?

The Gamble House is a beautiful place, no question. A clapboard Victorian with Italianate features, it sits on 21 rolling acres on Werk Road, a couple of blocks from Mother of Mercy High School in the heart of Westwood. Though it has remained unoccupied since 1961, when Olivia Gamble died, for many years it was zealously preserved under the eye of James N. Gamble’s grandson, Louis Nippert, a wealthy and well-known local tycoon who, perhaps most famously, was a part-owner of the Reds during the days of the Big Red Machine. After significant restoration in 1991, the house was given a preservation award by the Miami Purchase Association (now the Cincinnati Preservation Association) but since then—or rather, since Nippert’s death in late 1992—the house has been sliding slowly downhill, figuratively speaking. In truth, it needs a lot of work, but according to an inspection report, it is structurally sound. The report estimates repair costs between $300,000 and $400,000. (C. Francis Barrett, the attorney for Greenacres, contends that the cost to –restore- the home would be much higher, in the $2 million range.) Though the windows are now boarded up, it retains a certain magisterial grace.

Given the house’s location, the typical west-sider has driven past it hundreds, even thousands, of times. But I’ll wager that until a few months ago none of them had any idea it was called The Gamble House or that it had been the home (from 1875 to 1932) of James N. Gamble, philanthropist, inventor of Ivory Soap and creator of Ivorydale, benefactor of such local landmarks as the University of Cincinnati’s Nippert Stadium and Christ Hospital’s research center, scion of the famous Gamble family—as in Procter &—that played a pretty big role in building Cincinnati.

For years I drove or jogged past and admired the place, but I didn’t know it had a name or even that it was vacant. I assumed that members of the local gentry lived there, cozy in their retreat from the surrounding neighborhood that was, well, in transition. What, then, had turned this impressive yet largely anonymous home into a cause célèbre? To find out, I contacted the group fueling the fight.

Greg and Liz Kissel of the Westwood Historical Society have spearheaded what quickly has become an uproar. We met at the Henke Winery in Westwood, where the broad bay windows next to our table look out on the stately Westwood Town Hall, opened in 1889, thanks in part to the civic leadership of James N. Gamble. The hall is located on Harrison Avenue, which had been the main artery connecting Westwood to downtown Cincinnati during Gamble’s day, and through his efforts in support of a rail system that had been located nearby, the area grew into what is now the city’s largest community.

Across the street stands the gorgeous stone facade of the Westwood United Methodist Church, another gift from Mr. Gamble, who, according to the church’s website, matched the contributions of the 150 other members of the congregation five to one to pay for the church, which opened in 1897. Around the corner and a few blocks down Montana Avenue sprawls the Gamble-Nippert YMCA. Residential streets in the neighborhood include Gamble Avenue; Penrose Place (named for Gamble’s wife, the former Margaret Penrose); and Daytona Avenue, named for Gamble’s vacation home in Daytona, Florida.

OK, I was starting to understand the passion behind the battle to save the home. Mr. James Norris Gamble had touched a lot of lives, and his influence and generosity continues to pervade Westwood. The research I’d done about him since that first rally revealed a staggering list of accomplishments. He was, by all accounts, not only fabulously successful in business and a forward-thinking visionary but a community-minded citizen and a helluva nice guy. Maybe the fight was less about the house than about preserving the memory of a man who was, without question, Westwood’s all-time leading resident.

That theory was pretty much confirmed by the Kissels. They looked nothing like the rabble-rousing firebrands I expected. In their middle years, they immediately strike you as reserved and refined. With his lush white hair and white goatee, Greg, an architect, would look at home mounted on a snorting steed in paintings of the Battle of Gettsyburg. Liz, a registered dietician, is petite and exudes a quiet sophistication. They’re life-long west-siders—she from Cheviot, he from Bridgetown. For the next two hours they outlined the history of the house and the fight to save it.

Concern about the fate of the Gamble House is not new for them. Though most of us began hearing about it in February, the house has been a steady blip on their radar since they helped form the Westwood Historical Society in 2002.

“From the very beginning that was one of the first questions everybody would ask,” Liz says. “What’s going to happen to the Gamble House? It’s been there forever, but nobody really knows what goes on. You don’t see a lot of activity except for people cutting the grass periodically.” To find an answer, she contacted Carter Randolph, executive vice president of the Greenacres Foundation, who represents Louise Nippert, Louis’s widow. (Randolph also oversees the Louise Dieterle Nippert Trust.) Though Liz says Randolph was vague in his responses to her initial inquiries about the house, she felt that no plans were being made to change the home in any way, and the society’s concern was unwarranted. “There didn’t seem to be an urgency,” Greg adds. “There didn’t seem to be much for us to follow up on.”

And so they didn’t. Years passed. They met with Randolph a few times, even toured the place in 2007 and 2008, and although they remained wary, they believed that Greenacres held the house’s best interest at heart. Then in March 2009, in response to a neighbor’s complaint, the house was cited by the city for its peeling paint and broken sidewalk. The city contacted Randolph requesting repairs. In August 2009, the house was officially transferred from the trust to the foundation, in what amounted to little more than some paperwork. The city sent more requests for repairs to Randolph, now representing Greenacres as the owner. While some repairs were made, according to the city’s records, that file also indicated that the foundation planned to demolish the house.

Historical society member Bob Prokop saw the declaration of intent on the city’s Community Problem Oriented Policing (CPOP) website, an online version of building and code violations records. Prokop and his fiancée, Laura Twichell, have been in Westwood all of three years. They moved from New Jersey—not for jobs, but to take advantage of Cincinnati’s housing market. “You can’t find an affordable house with character there,” Prokop said. His love for classic homes has led to his interest in fighting for the Gamble House. Members of the society and Westwood Concern, a group of private citizens dedicated to civic causes in the community, gathered on Martin Luther King Jr. weekend to plot strategy. They needed to find a way to convince the city—and the owners—of the house’s historic importance and its cherished place in the hearts of west-siders. A pretty tall order for a house that a lot of people didn’t know about.

“They just know it as the big yellow house,” Liz says. “And because it sits back so far, people drive by it and can’t see it.” The committee leading the charge to save the house, therefore, had to broadcast that story as quickly as possible and hope the local citizenry would follow the call to action. The Kissels agree that when people hear the story of James N. Gamble and the fight to save the house, they climb aboard the bandwagon.Of course, being on the bandwagon and helping to push it down the road are altogether different. Sure, the average resident would prefer that such a unique place be preserved, but is that resident really going to do anything about it? Perhaps the folks at Greenacres had the same thought. And just in case, they moved fast in pushing the city for a permit to demolish.

Big mistake. The people leading the charge are a savvy bunch. They wrote letters to the city, sent fliers to local residents, appeared on local radio shows. They launched a social-media campaign that spread the word in ways never possible before. Society member Mary Kuhl set up a Facebook page that in just a few months drew nearly 3,000 members. Prokop, a web designer, fed the page with regular updates and created savethegamblehouse.org, which defaults to the Facebook page “Save the Historic Gamble Estate NOW!” He also sent out more tweets than a flock of starving egrets. An online petition to save the house gathered 1,500 signatures in a matter of weeks.

The sweep of interest rolled way beyond the boundaries of Westwood—to every community in the city, to transplants in Texas, Arizona, and California, even as far away as Northern Ireland, from which the Gamble family had emigrated almost 200 years ago. Prokop came upon the blog of Nelson McCausland, Northern Ireland’s Minister of Culture, Arts, and Leisure, who, purely by chance, posted an entry in February about James Gamble Sr., putting him in the “Scotch-Irish Hall of Fame.” Prokop commented on the entry, explaining the fight to save James N. Gamble’s house. McCausland was so moved by the story that he sent a letter of support that was presented to city council in May before the unanimous vote to designate the home as an “historic district overlay” and put it on the Cincinnati Historic Landmark list.

The designation offers some protection, a few hoops that Greenacres would have to jump through before bringing in the wrecking ball, but there are limits. Despite the designation, the house could still be demolished. And Greenacres contends that the request for the demolition permit predates the designation anyway so they’re free to do what they want. Judge Norbert Nadel was scheduled to make a decision on that question, but in late May the case was referred to the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Ohio after the attorney for Greenacres filed more claims challenging the constitutionality of council’s decision. That delays the final decision, which will likely be appealed no matter what it is. Translation: This fight could drag on for some time.

The broad support suggests that the movement has spread beyond a classic west side–east side battle, and the Kissels agree that this is much more than Cincinnati’s typical trench warfare. “Maybe that had something to do with it at first, but it’s grown much larger than a west side thing,” Greg says. Liz concurs, noting that they hear frequently from east-siders who support the cause.

And it’s not as if Greenacres is some rapacious corporation gleefully eager to flatten our history to build condos. Greenacres puts much of its time and resources into programs designed, as they state on their website, “To encourage conservation and appreciation of nature by providing the public, particularly children, opportunities to study plant and animal life in their natural settings.” The foundation wants to extend the programs already in place in Indian Hill to the Gamble property. Tough to argue with such a noble undertaking. Westwoodians wonder, however, why the house can’t be part of the plan. The historical society, according to Liz Kissel, has offered a number of suggestions for ways the house could be used. “We researched other historic houses and how they were repurposed,” she says. “We came up with a bunch of different suggestions. [Carter Randolph] said none of them are viable.” (Randolph contends that he’s never received a written proposal from the historical society and that “any uses of the property would have to be very respectful of the Gambles and the Nipperts.”)

Still, Prokop says that everyone in the group has worked long hours in the past few months, noting that when he would e-mail the Kissels at one in the morning, he’d usually receive an immediate reply. He has thrown himself completely into the cause, believing that the house, and the man it honors, are worth what he calls his “second full-time job.”

And as the story of James N. Gamble spreads, it’s likely that more and more folks will pick up protest signs and march—if only symbolically. That may still be necessary. In late April, the Cincinnati Preservation Association offered to buy the house, including a small piece of land for access. Attorney Barrett says CPA’s bid was not a formal offer, and that the foundation has concerns about the intended use of the property, which have been expressed to CPA’s interim director Paul Muller. The Kissels believe the CPA could work well in partnership with the Greenacres educational programs. But would such an uneasy alliance actually work? Maybe, in a way, we owe it to the guy. The Kissels certainly feel that way.

“We just want them to give us a chance to be stewards,” Greg says, “for someone who, frankly, was a steward for us.”

Illustration by Ryan Snook

Originally published in the July 2010 issue.

Let the Good Times Roll

Jack Heffron — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 15:47:00 GMT

It’s happy hour on a Friday, and everyone in The Black Sheep, a nightclub-restaurant in Cheviot, looks happy, chattering away around black high-top tables. A three-piece band called Fineline, led by popular west side guitarist Tim Keller, provides some energy, playing an eclectic mix of mellow-ish covers on a stage at the far end of the L-shaped room.

Next to the stage, a door leads to a large patio, where smokers huddle for shivering puffs in the winter air. I’m here with friends, trying to instigate a pub crawl through every bar on the Cheviot entertainment strip, roughly a tenth of a mile along Harrison Avenue. My goal is to fully experience what is becoming one of Cincinnati’s busiest gathering spots for a good time. A friend points out that there are more than 10 bars along that short walk, and by the end of it we will, indeed, be crawling. She has a point. There are actually 13 drinking establishments within a half-dozen blocks of where we’re sitting. Still, there’s no way to fully appreciate the strip without experiencing it. You’re game, right? Then let’s go.

Since we’re already here, we’ll start with The Black Sheep. The happy hour crowd is made up mostly of baby boomers, but younger folk have begun filtering into the place, and by 11 will have it to themselves. A nighttime band starts at 9 to keep things hopping. There’s a good menu of bar food available—appetizers, sandwiches, and a surprisingly delicious pizza.

The Black Sheep is located on the southeastern edge of the Cheviot strip, and since opening on New Year’s 2008 it has drawn patrons from throughout the city, who can either stay and dance the night away or use it as a starting point before heading further west. Which is how owner Scott Scherpenberg planned it. In fact, that’s how he came up with the name. A dark-haired, 30-ish guy bristling with energy, Scherpenberg is a Cheviot native and resident. Using the west side code of naming one’s home parish, he identifies where he grew up simply as, “St. Martin’s.”

A Cheviot fireman by day, he opened the place with partners Greg Kling and Tom Gessendorf. So, why “The Black Sheep,” I ask. Scherpenberg tells me that Cheviot is named after the Cheviot Hills in southern Scotland and was settled by Scots. (This I knew, though in Scotland the word is pronounced like Chev in Chevrolet, while we west-siders say Shiv.)

Cheviot, Scherpenberg continues, also refers to a breed of sheep common in the Scottish hills. Because the breed is white, farmers sometimes lost them if they grazed too high in the snow-covered terrain. To make their herds easier to find, the farmers would mix in a few black ones. Thus “The Black Sheep,” the place that will help anyone in the city find the herd of Cheviot bars.

I’m impressed by the amount of thought put into the name. Scherpenberg goes on to explain the thought he’s put into his establishment. “The goal was to create a place where my mom doesn’t feel too old, and I don’t feel too young,” he says. Given the broad range of ages around us, he seems to have succeeded. He says he’s learned a lot in a short time about the never-ending battle to stay afloat in the current economy.

“It’s not easy,” he says. “You’ve got 13 places inside Cheviot and five more right outside.” But rather than eliminate the competition, he hopes they will work more closely together, believing that the bars collectively draw far more people than any of them would attract by themselves. “You don’t have a lot of entertainment areas in town,” he says. “So we have something unique here.” Eager to find out how unique, we head out the door.

We walk maybe 30 feet to the corner of North Bend Road and Harrison Avenue, turning right on Harrison. A short block later we come to Skin’s Place, with Costello’s right across the street. These no-frills bars cater to locals, with televisions tuned to sports, pool tables, and modest bars. You won’t get a Cosmo or chocolate martini here. A bright sign announces “Skin’s Place” above a navy-blue awning that also announces “Skin’s Place.” Costello’s features a less winsome facade, going more for the battered bunker look. Both places conjure the old days, when bars ruled with far less fanfare. Long-gone establishments such as the Hob-Nob and the E&B catered mostly to blue-collar local guys seeking a cold beer and good fellowship.

After quick stops at Skin’s and Costello’s we take a very short stroll down Harrison to Rootie’s Brickhouse, a small, square room with exposed brick walls, large windows, and a smattering of high-top tables and stools. Along with its excellent roundup of draft beers, Rootie’s has a cozy, comfortable quality—a bit tonier than its neighbors but without a lick of pretension. Most of the tables are full and a boisterous game of darts in the far corner draws a small audience. By midnight on a weekend you can barely get inside.

But Rootie’s popularity pales next to the place next door—the Cheviot Sports Tavern, a hopping hub for the early-20s crowd. One of the largest clubs on the strip, the draw here is games—darts, pool, and cornhole. If cornhole is king on the west side, the Cheviot Sports Tavern is its bejeweled throne. The thump of bags on boards provides a backbeat within the loose, rowdy atmosphere reminiscent of a backyard party.

The location has housed several restaurants through the years. In the 1960s and ’70s, it was a popular eatery and drinkery called The Gay 90s. It drew many regulars, including Pete Rose, whose swanky car parked out front contrasted sharply with the humble surroundings. In Hustle, his book on Rose, author Michael Sokolove interviewed the owner, Danny Gumz, a boyhood friend of Pete’s. Despite local rumors to the contrary, Gumz said his place was not a gambling hangout and that Rose came just to play cards, with no money involved. But other Cheviot bars, Gumz told Sokolove, provided plenty of opportunities to gamble. “In the ’60s you could bet in any damn tavern in this town,” he said. Sokolove describes Cheviot in that era as “hardscrabble,” and while today you won’t confuse it with Las Vegas, the nightlife, if a bit scrabbled, is far less hard.

To get to our next stop, we must cross Harrison Avenue again, a quick scurry that is a large part of the Cheviot Entertainment Experience. Between smokers gathered at every doorway and partiers strolling from one place to the next, often scampering across Harrison in little groups, there’s nearly as much action outside as in.

We slip into Fogarty’s, where we meet owner Eileen Borgmann. A striking blonde, Borgmann has been in the bar business for years, though her main job is running TB Sports Awards and Custom Apparel, a silk-screening store that occupies the front part of the building.

The bar has changed names a few times recently. When Borgmann bought the building in 2004, the bar was called Shelton’s and featured a first and second floor. Downstairs was pool, darts, and a bar. The larger upstairs room offered live bands and dancing. Then it became Rockin’ Kickin’ Country and then Mr. B’s, which attracted a younger, more boisterous clientele, and Borgmann quickly tired of the hassles and closed it down again. A few months ago she reopened as Fogarty’s, using the family name in honor of her grandmother Jane and her uncles Murray and Jack, the latter well-known to older Cincinnatians as a news reporter on WCPO radio and television.

The top level is now only rented for parties. The bottom remains a small bar that is dark yet inviting. Borgmann plans to decorate with an Irish theme. “I want an Irish pub but not fabricated,” she explains. “I don’t want the clovers and Celtic knots. It will be like an Irish pub in Ireland.” She’s seeking a mellower, older crowd.

She says the draw for the strip is the number, diversity, and proximity of the bars. “That’s what makes Cheviot neat,” she says. “You have so many different options. All the bars feed off each other. They’re all clean and nice, and you can just go from one to the next.” She also notes that the bars provide an inexpensive alternative to downtown and the Levee. If less glamorous, they’re cheaper, which could add to their growing popularity in these thrifty times. You might wake up with a throbbing head after a night out, but your wallet will feel OK.

Though Borgmann is a gracious host and Fogarty’s a charming spot, we must move on, crossing Harrison again and walking a block to the intersection with Glenmore Avenue. Turn left and you’re at Keller’s Cheviot Café, which is right next door to Roswell’s. They might as well be the same place; the front doors are within a few steps of each other. Keller’s, owned by Cheviot mayor Sam Keller, is twice as large and features two bars, louder music, and a slightly younger crowd. At one end a couple evaluates the pool table as if preparing to perform surgery, while at the other “Happy Birthday” balloons float above a roaring group in full celebration mode. Drinkers stand two-deep at both bars. Roswell’s, meanwhile, is nearly as busy but seems more akin to Skin’s Place and Costello’s.

Right around the corner on Harrison, we come to the bar that may have sparked the change in the flavor of Cheviot’s entertainment district: The Second Street Saloon. Opened in 1980 on Second Street downtown, it fell victim to the construction of Paul Brown Stadium. Owner Carol Baker changed locations but kept the name. For Cheviot, this was a step up—a new spot run with more than a desire to attract people from the neighborhood. A fancy sign and inventive promotions drew new regulars and gave the strip a more energetic attitude. Though it’s essentially a shotgun bar—a long narrow room with pool and darts in the back—it attracted a broader clientele, which began spilling over into all the other bars. With that, the strip was born.

Located a few doors down Harrison, the Smokin’ Monkey is open for business on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. With nary a window in the place and a single, full-metal door, it looks a bit forbidding from the outside. I had always assumed it drew a crowd of young men who like to guzzle beer, punch each other, and throw up (and the women who love them) but the reality is far different. The interior is surprisingly nice. An undulating bar graces the far wall, and the main dance area explodes with colorful pulsing lights. Urban pop blares through a first-rate sound system and owner Denise List, who works behind the bar, explains that dancing is the main attraction here, along with her many specialty drinks, particularly the 29-ounce Mega-Monkey or one-liter Long Island Iced Tea in a range of flavors from mango to “exotic.” Both come with glow-stick straws that make the drinks look almost radioactive. “Most people order one of my drinks,” List says proudly. “They’re beautiful, and that’s our biggest draw.” She pours the drinks into large beer steins for men, who may feel unmanly walking around with a bowl-shaped glass of glowing fruit-flavored liquid.

The crowd ranges widely in age and is, if energetic, well behaved. In fact, the only scary thing about The Smokin’ Monkey is the mural of a smoking monkey on the wall behind the bar—a questionable, even sinister-looking, fellow. Well, the monkey and the ghosts. It seems the place is haunted. Things regularly go bump in the night and in the morning those things aren’t where Denise and her staff put them. At least once a month, she comes in during the day to find all the liquor bottles behind the bar turned around, the labels facing the other way. The jukebox sometimes bursts into song even when it’s not plugged in. A heavy ice scoop often finds its way into a cooler behind the bar, though it’s always left in the front ice bin.

“I noticed strange things happening right after I bought the bar, but I didn’t tell anybody about them,” List says. “I didn’t want people to think I was nuts.” By now she’s not the only person who has noticed the unexplainable events. “It’s like pulling teeth to get my staff to go into the basement,” she says with a laugh. Having owned the place for 12 years, she’s become accustomed to paranormal activity, though she invited a ghost-hunting group to investigate and has done research on the building.

The property was originally owned by Cheviot’s founder John Craig. Two of his sons were killed by lightning and his wife drowned in a cistern. They were buried near the building in what is now a large parking lot. The upstairs, says List, may have been a brothel and a bookie joint a hundred years ago, which fits well with the nefarious history of old-time Cheviot. Whether someone met a violent end and is still hanging around, she doesn’t know. I wish we could hang around longer—no, really— but we must keep moving.

Across the street stands Luckey’s, an Irish-themed bar with the shamrocks and leprechauns Eileen Borgmann hopes to avoid at Fogarty’s. Two wide front windows offer a warm welcome, and the band you see playing on a stage right behind them lets you know the joint is jumpin’. Luckey’s offers live music four nights a week. The crowd varies from twentysomethings to older folks and seems pretty varied in background, though a sign on the door forbids the wearing of “colors,” suggesting that some of those folks are bikers. But I can’t say for sure, just as I have no idea why Luckey’s is spelled with an “e.”

Fact is, I’m too tired to find out. And I’m grateful that the next stop is our last. We head to Maury’s Tiny Cove for a nightcap. A west side institution, Maury’s opened in 1949 and very much retains the atmosphere of that era. With its strangely low ceiling, red leather booths, dark paneling, and even darker lighting, it looks like the set for a Rat Pack movie. In fact, as we take a seat at the bar upstairs (the one downstairs is packed), Dean Martin croons “Ain’t that a Kick in the Head” through the ceiling speakers.

Despite waitresses bustling through with trays full of steak, the atmosphere here is calmer than in the other places we’ve visited, the crowd a bit older, more sedate, more sophisticated. In the warmer months, the bar extends onto a patio deck with umbrella’d tables, giving patrons a pleasant view of Cheviot’s residential streets and the place a livelier tone. For now, the ambiance, if strikingly anachronistic, is a welcome relief from pool tables and dartboards and ecstatic rounds of Jaeger Bombs served in plastic shooter cups. Sometimes the entertainment district can be a bit too entertaining. I’m hoping to hear some Sinatra—in fact, I’m counting on it—and enjoying some relief from the frenetic world of Saturday night on the strip. Here ends the crawl. Can I say what happens in Cheviot, stays in Cheviot? Yes, I can.

Illustration By Ryan Snook

Originally published in the March 2010 issue.

Foolproof Directions

Jack Heffron — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 15:46:00 GMT

When I tell east-siders I’m from the west side, the most common response I hear is, “I always get lost over there.” They recall an ill-fated trip to a body shop or to S&S Western Bowl, mention an aunt’s house they can never seem to find, or bluntly state that they avoid this side of town and its Silly String layout whenever possible.

I’ll admit it can be confusing to get around here. There’s no grid, and even main arteries tend to wind capriciously through ever-changing neighborhoods. North Bend Road, for example, is located nowhere near the Village of North Bend. And the sharp bend in the road takes you east, not north. If you miss the bend and keep going straight on what appears to be the same street, you’ll find yourself on Cheviot Road, which is located 3.5 miles from the city of Cheviot (where you can, however, find Cheviot Avenue, which has absolutely nothing to do with Cheviot Road). Thus, a certain amount of bewilderment among the uninitiated is understandable. Even the voice on your GPS will start to sound cranky.

To be fair, west-siders have similar trouble with the east side, particularly the Far East. I’ve lived in Cincinnati for many years, but for a long time places like Amelia and Milford were as foreign to me as Dubai. And yet, for whatever reason, west-siders suffer the bad rap. If we get lost looking for Anderson, we’re stupid and provincial. When Andersonians lose their way trying to find Covedale, it’s the west side’s fault for being such a muddle. Nevertheless, by popular request, I hereby provide a guide to the west side for those of you who don’t know Mack from Monfort Heights, Devil’s Backbone from Dog Trot, Ron’s Roost from The Crow’s Nest.

The main reason folks get lost over here is our lack of interstate highways, which has kept the west side isolated and insular since, well, forever. On the east side, one can always use I-71 as an orientation. Far Easterners use I-275. East-west arteries like the Norwood Lateral and Ronald Reagan Cross County Highway help too, as does Columbia Parkway. No matter where you live, you’re never all that far from one of these roads.

On the west side, depending on your neighborhood and the time of day, you can spend 20 minutes or longer just reaching an interstate. The closest one is I-74, which, as local highways go, seems to get the same lack of respect the west side receives. Getting on 74 usually means that you’re leaving the west side because it offers so few connections within the area. We do have some main roads, such as Westwood Northern Boulevard, Glenway Avenue, and Delhi Pike, but these are seen by outsiders as little more than paved Indian trails.

The other problem is that it’s not easy to tell when one has passed from one neighborhood to another. Bridgetown fuses into Mack. West Price Hill more or less becomes Covedale. Delhi sort of melds into Western Hills—truth be told, there really isn’t a Western Hills in a specific sense. It’s a generic name given to a nebulous collection of neighborhoods. In recent years, civic groups have begun erecting little signs that announce one is entering Miami Heights or leaving Taylor Creek, but if you’re looking for a more significant signifier, well, there isn’t one.

With these thoughts in mind, let’s begin by heading west on I-74, because we know you’re a little more comfortable using an interstate. Take the Montana Avenue exit, which, in itself, is a bit tricky because it allows you to get off the highway but not back on again if you’re traveling west. If you stop here for gas, you’ll need to drive a few miles along Shepherd Creek—a lovely trip past horse farms and wooded hills—and make a left on North Bend Road to find the highway.

If you go straight at the end of the Montana Avenue ramp, you’ll pass Putz’s Creamy Whip, which always raises a giggle from my out-of-town Jewish friends. Then you’ll enter Mt. Airy Forest. With more than 1,400 acres, it’s one of the largest urban parks in the state. It’s well-known for its beautiful arboretum, herds of white-tailed deer, first-rate disc golf course, and a ubiquitous handful of questionable-looking men sitting alone in their parked cars.

But let’s turn left and head up Montana Avenue’s long, steep hill, which on icy winter days presents a delightful challenge to west-siders, who enjoy spending rush hour sliding toward the interstate or a violent death. Montana Avenue leads us into the heart of Westwood, the city’s most populous neighborhood, where you’ll find the Westwood Town Hall, a gracious old building built in 1889 and recently remodeled to more graciously appear as it did in 1889. The town hall stands at the intersection of Montana and Harrison Avenue, where we’ll take a right into the Westwood business district, which, like most such districts in inner-ring neighborhoods, ain’t what it used to be. Empty storefronts and check-cashing centers have replaced the local bakeries and drugstores that once made it a quaint and buzzing retail locale. A hundred years ago—and longer—Westwood was a posh address, home to soap barons like the Werk and Gamble families. Now, not so much. Even the Westwood grade school has been shut down. Still, the neighborhood features a few noteworthy spots, such as the Henke Winery, a charming restaurant that has produced the state’s top wine for the past three years.

Harrison Avenue leads us into the city of Cheviot, which is, in fact, a real place with official corporation lines and everything. Cheviot has its own mayor and city services, along with what seems to be the densest concentration of liquor licenses in the state. It’s not hard to get a drink here. On the weekends the many bars buzz with revelers who come from all over the city to party in their favorite hangouts, joyously staggering from one place to the next. Some of the establishments, like Skin’s Place and Rootie’s Brickhouse, harken back to the beer-and-a-shot spots that used to freckle the main drag. Others, like Black Sheep Bar & Grill and Mr. B’s, are bigger and offer live music and dancing. Cornhole rules at the Cheviot Sports Tavern while karaoke is king at Keller’s Cheviot Cafe.

Old-timers tell me that back in the day every bar in the city offered gambling—numbers games, sports betting, or a perpetual card game in a back room. They say the town was known as “Little Chicago.” Seems like there were quite a few little Chicagos; I’ve heard the same said about at least a handful of other places. Today the town is more legit. The commercial district does include more than watering holes—a few mom-and-pop diners, antique shops, fast-food restaurants, and the best dry cleaner (Kroner’s) in the universe. But it’s mostly bars. Even the mayor owns one. Those brave enough to attempt the city’s frequent pub crawls usually end up crawling home.

Now stay on Harrison through Cheviot until we reach an important fork in the road on the western edge of town. Bear left and you’re on Bridgetown Road; bear right and you stay on Harrison. Either way, you’ve now entered Bridgetown. Many years ago there was a railroad bridge in the heart of the area, and most people thought the bridge inspired the name; in fact, the name actually comes from Bridgeton, New Jersey, the previous home of the first settlers.

If Cheviot is the west side’s party central, Bridgetown is its quintessential suburb—middle-class homes filled with mostly white, mostly Catholic west-siders who vote Republican, save their money, cut their grass, and root for the Reds. Of course, that’s a superficial view, and like all places it’s more diverse and complex than it seems. It’s home to the very cool Zen & Now Coffee House and the equally cool Fawn Confectionery, along with Stump’s Lanes, Ron’s Roost Restaurant & Bar (known for the gigantic chicken on its roof), and the classically retro Zip Dip ice cream stand. Bridgetown also used to be home to the venerable, and after its destruction, venerated Wagon Wheel Café at its main intersection—where Bridgetown Road meets Glenway Avenue, which suddenly becomes, for reasons I’ve never investigated, Race Road. I remember even as a kid hearing west-siders call the intersection, with perverse pride, one of the most dangerous in the state. To widen the intersection—thus making it less dangerous or congested—the Wagon Wheel was closed in March 2008 and torn down later that year despite public outcry. The building was nearly 150 years old. On the property once stood the Bridgetown Hotel and Saloon, which essentially spawned the neighborhood. Nearly two years later, the lot remains empty. No construction or widening or any sort of safety- or convenience-inspired work has been done. In fact, it’s been seeded for grass. It seems like a waste of history and local color, though, in fairness, a driver now can more easily see the oncoming car right before the collision.

At this intersection we can turn right and take Race Road as it dips and winds through jagged topography all the way into Monfort Heights. Or we can go straight, deep into the heart of Bridgetown and on into Mack, named many years ago for the Markland family’s dog (the Marklands ran the general store and post office in what was previously called Dry Ridge). The best-known landmark in Mack is the water tower, a robust hunk of metal that survived a head-on collision with the 1974 tornado that ripped through the area. Around that time, an enterprising gang of youths spray-painted “Mack Studs” in huge black letters on the tower, giving all of us local boys a shot of self-esteem until some callous civic group demanded a new paint job.

Bridgetown Road (once known as Cleves Pike) slithers through Miami Heights, and eventually dumps us into Cleves, along River Road. The river towns of Cleves, Addyston, North Bend, Sedamsville, and Sayler Park form the southwestern rim of the west side. When you reach this point, you’ve probably missed your destination and are completely lost. You need to turn around and head back the way you came. Or you can continue farther west into Indiana, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Let’s back up to the intersection of Bridgetown Road and Glenway Avenue and turn left onto Glenway, the main commercial artery of the west side. The six-mile road takes you past a seemingly endless parade of restaurants, stores (big box and smaller box), strip malls, non-stripping malls, car dealerships, body shops, schools, and churches. On it you’ll find many of the places synonymous with the west side—Western Bowl and Price Hill Chili; Elder, Seton, and Western Hills high schools; Oskamp ball fields; the Covedale Center for the Performing Arts; and Phillipps Swim Club. You’ll pass the densest aggregate of chili parlors in the city, maybe even the world. West Side Chili even offers a six-way, which is called a “Glenway,” and we can stop there for a bite if you really want to feel a part of things.

Packed with traffic at seemingly all hours, Glenway Avenue leads you from Bridgetown through the heart of Western Hills and on into Covedale—a vague area that has fought to retain its name so its residents can savor a unique sense of place and avoid saying they live in Price Hill. Once a proud, clean, working-class area, Price Hill has begun to suffer from falling property values, rising crime rates, and an increasingly sketchy reputation. The days when Price Hill epitomized the west side are fading. Even Price Hillians now refer to West and East Price Hill, the West being the side used more frequently in real estate ads. Most say they live in Covedale or, as is becoming more common, “the Covedale Garden District,” a name that conjures bucolic images of flowers and trees rather than muggings. Depending on whom you ask, Covedale spans parts of Green and Delhi townships with a chunk or two stretching into Cincinnati proper. It boasts many lovely older homes and quiet streets, some of which no doubt have splendid gardens or at least decorative shrubbery.

For those of us who have lived on the west side for a long time, names like the “Covedale Garden District” are tough to say and tougher to swallow. For me, the area remains “Price Hill,” and there’s certainly no shame in that. There’s lots to like about a place where the roots run so deep. And where the streets run so haphazardly. Next up on our itinerary is Delhi, where it only gets worse.

We’ll take a right on Cleves Warsaw Pike and head west, past a number of beautiful mansions built in the early 20th century, when this area was looking like the western equivalent of Indian Hill. Though many of the homes are majestic, this area never achieved the same exclusivity. Some have aged better than others, and in recent years some of the spacious properties have been broken up to make way for handsome, if somewhat less majestic, homes. Those clustered around the Western Hills Country Club, however, remain impressive.

At the country club, we’ll turn left onto Neeb Road, which apparently was laid out by an engineer with a fondness for roller coasters. If you’ve survived Kings Island’s Son of Beast, you’re probably ready to take on Neeb. The ear-popping ride takes you up and down one slope after the next. If you’re even braver, we can go a bit farther west and face the break-neck curves, steep hills, and sharp switchbacks of the aptly named Devil’s Backbone. I’m ready if you are, and I’ve provided sick bags and drop-down oxygen masks for our trip. Maybe another time? OK, we’ll stay on Neeb, which eventually leads us to the intersection with Delhi Pike, where you’ll see the lovely campus of Mount St. Joseph College. A left turn leads us into the heart of Delhi and its miles of suburban homes, most of them built in the boom years of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. If you thought Bridgetown was confusing, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. In Delhi you can get lost in a helicopter. Delhi Pike, however, is like a milder Glenway with its myriad shopping centers and leads us directly through the area. The commercial district eventually gives way to the long descent to River Road, which takes us back into downtown. You’re back in familiar territory.

And so you see, it’s really not so confusing after all. The key to getting around over here is to accept that you’re going to get lost and be willing to stop frequently to ask for directions. Most of us who live here have lived here for a long time, and we’ll know the easiest way to get you where you need to go. We’re a friendly bunch and probably will throw in a few recommendations for where to eat, along with a story or two about the places you’ll pass along the way. There really is a lot to be said for a place where the roots run deep—even if the streets seem like a hopeless tangle.

Illustration By Ryan Snook

Originally published in the January 2010 issue.

Behind the Music

Jack Heffron — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 15:44:00 GMT

I’ve been trying for weeks to get an interview but have had no luck—a nightmare of missed connections, conflicting schedules and silence. The nightmare is worsened by the fact that the people I’m trying to interview are teenagers who my teenage sons know very well and who I’ve known since before they could drive.

But their lives changed last spring with the success of a reality show on MTV called Taking the Stage, set at the School for Creative and Performing Arts. Suddenly Mia Carruthers and Aaron Breadon are now talked about by teens from coast to coast. Earlier this year, on blogs and fan forums, people from across the country sounded off about which guy Mia should date—a question that apparently drove some of the show’s dramatic machinations—and offered strategies Aaron could use to convince Mia to choose him. For me, reading those opinions bordered on the surreal.

As does my inability to get them to sit down for an interview. I offer to drive to their house in Price Hill, where Mia, Aaron, Mia’s brother Alex, and Seth Huff—the rest of their music group, Mia Carruthers and the Retros—all live. Even though Mia and Aaron graduated from SCPA, they will still appear in the show’s second season, some of which was filmed last spring. All I want to do is talk to them about life after the show. I wonder if they’ve had their 15 minutes of fame, or if they’re trying to use that moment in the spotlight to grab even more national attention. I’m guessing the latter: The band has already played a few gigs around town. And in August they went to Nashville to record their eponymous EP, set to be released this month.

The fact that they live together in Price Hill makes them all honorary west-siders, though only Aaron was raised over here. (Mia and the other Retros grew up in West Chester and Mt. Lookout.) And how cool is that—being famous and living together as a band at the ripe old age of still-can’t-buy-beer? Who didn’t dream of such a thing at 18—national celebrity, a hip new group, and everyone living under one roof?

My hopes for an interview improve when I run into Aaron at a show where my sons are performing. He’s always been a good guy, a unique blend of mellow and intense. A gifted drummer and pianist, he wears his white-blond hair long now and sports a wispy beard. In my mind he’s still the skinny, buzz-cut kid ripping through flashy fills on a drum set so shabby his tom-toms, held in place by duct tape, would literally fall on the stage during songs.

He apologizes about the delay on the interview.

“No problem,” I say. “You’re busy. So maybe this week we can spend an hour—”

“Thing is,” he says, “you need to talk to our publicist at MTV. Everything has to go through her.”

I’m stunned. And I must look stunned because he adds, “But she’s real cool.”

Seriously? Their publicist? The days of his asking “Hey, can I get a ride home?” were not that long ago. Back then Mia was barely in high school, a cherub-faced waif singing at an all-ages place in Cheviot called The Hat, where teens slumped on lumpy couches and texted their friends. From a musical standpoint, she didn’t especially stand out. She strummed her acoustic guitar and sang her plaintive songs like any other chanteuse-in-training. She did, however, possess a wan, almost ethereal prettiness perched on a foundation of unmistakable poise, as if she were simply waiting for the hand of fate to tap her shoulder. I heard her play several times but don’t recall ever meeting her. I’m beginning to doubt if I ever will, though running into Aaron offers a sliver of hope.

I ask him for the publicist’s contact information. He doesn’t have it with him but he promises to send it right away. And two weeks later, after I call again, he does send it. OK, it’s the wrong number, but it’s enough that I can find her myself. Whatever—he’s 19. And a drummer.

I mostly don’t mind the runaround because my lack of access means that these young musicians have already achieved a modicum of fame. Every city and town likes to name-drop its famous people, and we’re no different on the west side. When your biggest celebs are Pete Rose and Carmen Electra—who collectively drag more baggage than Paris Hilton on a yearlong cruise—that’s not easy to do. Still, we’ll drop those names in an instant, proving that even in a place known for church festivals and moral indignation, fame always supersedes the less savory aspects of the famous person.

We have more than our share of famous athletes, but the music business has proven a much more difficult arena to conquer. We don’t have many pop-star names to drop when guests come to visit. Actually, if we define popular music as songs produced after the start of rock and roll in 1955, we have exactly nada, zippo, not one.

Why is that?

Hard to say. And while I wait for permission to interview Mia and the Retros, I try to find out. It doesn’t take long because, with some notable exceptions, there haven’t been many big successes in all of Greater Cincinnati. You’d think a city this size would have produced more, but even going back 50 or 60 years doesn’t build much of a list. Let’s face it: Hitsville we ain’t. Our musical high-water mark would be the legendary King Records, which launched a number of shining stars after World War II and throughout the 1950s and ’60s. Unfortunately, none of the really shiny ones were from Cincinnati.

At area music fests, we trot out Peter Frampton, though his British accent tends to undercut our claim to his Cincinnati-ness. There’s Bootsy Collins, Adrian Belew, Lonnie Mack, the Isley Brothers, and Midnight Star. The Lemon Pipers had one hit. The Goshorn Brothers, Larry and Tim, stirred some excitement with their bluesy band Sacred Mushroom in the late ’60s and went on to play with Pure Prairie League.

A few promising prospects arose in the ’80s, such as Over the Rhine, but they never quite reached the pinnacle. In the early ’90s we quivered on the brink of the big time with the likes of the Afghan Whigs, Throneberry, and the Ass Ponys. National music magazines speculated that Cincinnati could become the next Seattle. Not quite. A few years later 98 Degrees featured a couple of local lads, though the group was mainly based in Los Angeles. One of those lads, Nick Lachey, produces Taking the Stage. Another, Justin Jeffre, favors white suits and ran for mayor in 2005.

Jason Arbenz was the lead singer in Throneberry and now fronts a band called Goose. He’s been a key player in the local music scene for 20 years and has written about it for several publications. He has also worked as a regional scout for Columbia Records. He says the city’s isolation from the coasts explains, in part, our lack of big-name stars. “It’s almost suspicious how little success Cincinnati has had,” he says. “But we’re so far off the map that bands weren’t careerists. Bands in L.A. were so much more business savvy. Cincinnati bands, refreshingly, just did what they wanted to. They played for their friends.”

He also mentions the lack of support for local bands. “You have to overcome a lot of apathy to get anyone to listen to your original songs,” he says. “Cincinnati largely doesn’t care about the bands in this town.” However, Arbenz thinks the tide may be turning. Technological advances have made it easier for musicians to produce quality recordings themselves, while the Internet allows them to reach an audience from nearly anywhere. “With things like YouTube and MySpace, you can get exposure that you couldn’t get before,” he says. “You don’t have to get L.A.’s attention to get the world’s attention anymore.”

Mia Carruthers and the Retros already had the country’s attention for a while this year, giving them a head start in their climb to the big time. I’d tell you how they feel about that—if I could talk to them.

But after a phone call and several e-mails to MTV, I still can’t get approval. The kids’ “cool” publicist tells me that my request will be “vetted.” They obviously take their vetting seriously at MTV—and take their time doing it. I’m reminded of a good friend who years ago requested an interview with author Salman Rushdie for Esquire when Rushdie was in hiding from Muslim extremists who had issued death threats against him. My friend had an easier time landing that interview than I’m having with teens who live a couple of miles away.

Then the fickle gods of journalism present a gift. It seems that, by coincidence, my sons and I will be in Nashville when Mia and the Retros are recording. Well, our trips overlap for one day, which will have to be enough. We can hang out with the band, and I’ll at least get some colorful details in a unique setting for the article, describing as an eyewitness the band’s first step toward immortality. Still lacking permission from MTV, I don’t plan to interview them, which could put them in an awkward position with their contracts, but the curtain of silence at last will be swept aside.

While we’re there, driving up Music Row, my son texts Aaron, their messages rocketing back and forth at teen thumb speed. The band has just arrived. Later: the band is heading to the studio. Later: the band will be in the studio all day. And maybe into the night. In the end, the band will not have time to meet with us.

I ask my son if we could just go and watch. He says we’d make the band uncomfortable—a bunch of people lurking around. But my deadline is roaring down at me like a cartoon anvil. I’m OK with lurking. I know, though, that he’s right. This is a big moment in the lives of these kids. Still, I give the lurking idea one more pitch before giving up.

The fickle gods giveth—and they taketh away.

If we go way back, west-siders can bring up two big names—Doris Day and Andy Williams. They were huge in their day. True, most of us weren’t alive in that day. Doris retired many years ago and now lives a hermetic life in California, but Andy still packs them in at his Moon River Theater in Branson, Missouri. Not bad for a guy who turns 82 next month.

Neither is a west-sider in the truest sense. Doris Von Kappelhoff was born in 1922 and grew up in Evanston. Her parents split when she was 13, and she lived with her mother and brother. When she was 15, they moved in with her aunt and uncle, who owned a tavern in Price Hill. Doris and her mother lived upstairs, and she graduated from Seton High School. So she did live on this side of town for a while, which is close enough. She was a popular singer in the 1940s and into the ’50s, when she became better known as a movie star. A few of her biggest hits—“Sentimental Journey,” “Secret Love,” and “Que Sera, Sera”—are considered classics.

Andy Williams was born in 1927 and spent his early years in Wall Lake, Iowa, (population 841). H0is family moved to Cheviot when he was 14, and he attended Western Hills High School. So we’ll claim him as a west-sider too. Andy started out singing with his three brothers—think The Jacksons, without the rhythm or profound dysfunction. Like Doris Day, the Williams Brothers were a big hit in the ’40s, breaking up in the early 1950s to launch solo careers. Andy made more hits, and appeared often on national TV shows. He’s most famous for singing “Moon River” and some Christmas classics in a voice so smooth you can slide right down it. He had his own TV show in the 1960s, on which he’d wrap his mink-lush pipes around classic ballads and wear a lot of diabolically comfortable-looking sweaters.

Doris and Andy, however, pre-date popular music for most people, and even their names don’t exactly paint the west side as a hotbed of musical talent. Today our likeliest prospect is a band called the National, five guys from Western Hills now living in Brooklyn. They’ve released four CDs since the early 2000s and have toured the country and the world. Made up of two sets of brothers—Aaron and Bryce Dessner, and Scott and Bryan Devendorf—and singer Matt Berninger, the National gained a bit of mainstream fame when their song “Fake Empire” was used by President Barack Obama’s campaign during the ’08 election. Their alt-rock sound may be too alternative to make them household names, but hip friends from out of town might be impressed if you mention them.

For more perspective on the situation, I talked to Jeff Siereveld, who was one of the original “Garage Kids” when he was in his early teens in the late 1960s. He and his friends worked at the Ludlow Garage in Clifton, sweeping floors, taking tickets, doing whatever needed doing. In return, they saw the amazing national acts that passed through the venue during its heyday. Though raised not far from the Garage, he now lives in Westwood. “It seems like in Cincinnati, by the time the bands get tight enough, get really good, they’re married,” he says. “They don’t want to go on the road anymore. And it’s hard to blame them. That’s a rough life.”

Echoing Jason Arbenz, Siereveld mentions the same handful of near-miss performers from all around Cincinnati who rose and fell like distant comets through the years. He also mentions the changes in technology that allow musicians today to reach their target audience but notes that the targets are shrinking, becoming more specialized. Music fans are less and less aware of performers outside their own tastes. To the alternative/indie audience the National is red hot; for those not in that audience, they’re completely unknown.

As for the west side’s dearth of even near-misses, he speculates that playing music is not a large part of our culture on this side of town. “Maybe music wasn’t stressed as much as it was in the east side’s secular and affluent households,” he says. “We were all brought up to play. I can tell you that I remember kids coming to Clifton School with instruments, but I can’t think of Catholic kids doing that.”

A sobering thought. And so, I ask him, if we were to claim a “West Side Sound,” would it be “Moon River”?

“Could be,” he laughs. “I’ve lived over here long enough to think that might be right.”

I can’t allow myself to believe it. Surely a savior will emerge someday. I’m rooting for Mia and her Retros.

Having given up on hearing from MTV and doing the interview, I learn that the band will perform on Fountain Square. The concert will be filmed as part of the second season of Taking the Stage, meaning that their initial 15 minutes of fame apparently isn’t over quite yet. For our Great West Side Hope, the publicity of playing on the show will be a big boost—far bigger than, say, a magazine article.

Illustration by Ryan Snook

Originally published in the November 2009 issue.

Go West, Young Fan

Jack Heffron — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 15:43:00 GMT

To put a spin on an old joke: One night I went to a ball game and a church festival broke out. The game was played at Western Hills University High School on a hot summer evening and involved the Cincinnati Steam, a team in the Great Lakes Summer Collegiate League. Haven’t heard of them? Me either. But it was one of the most entertaining games I’ve ever seen.

The Steam, which plays its 14 home games at West High, is the league’s reigning champion and ended last season ranked sixth in the nation among all collegiate summer league teams by baseball Web site PG Crosschecker. In a city where our sports teams post a whole lot more Ls than Ws, you’d think they’d get more attention.

Maybe it’s another one of those east side, west side things. Though the players are drawn primarily from throughout the Tri-State area, next to league night at Western Bowl, a football Friday night at The Pit, or any night at Price Hill Chili, a Steam game provides the quintessential west side experience. The crowd spans a broad mix of ages, the accoutrements are basic and low-priced, and the energy is feverish. The ballplayers run and hit like they’re playing in the World Series. Hamburgers, hot dogs, and ears of corn sizzle on an open grill. A gabby MC entertains the crowd between innings. A young woman walks around selling split-the-pot tickets. (An unbreakable law of the universe: Put 10 west-siders in a room and before long they’re splitting a pot.)

The atmosphere is small-town Americana, the type of homey nostalgia that pro teams are trying to evoke these days to salve the game’s image, which has been wounded by player strikes, outrageous contracts, and reports of rampant steroid use even among its biggest stars. No end of Disneyfied effects are employed by the big leagues to create the innocence of yesteryear, but after sitting for less than an inning on a wooden plank in the grandstand during a Steam game, you realize that, for better or worse, this is the real deal.

Eager to learn more about the team, I called the Steam’s office and found myself talking to the general manager, the inimitable Max McLeary. McLeary is a character—literally. He’s the main focus of Mike Shannon’s book Everything Happens in Chillicothe, which follows the 2000 season in the Frontier League and chronicles the exploits of a certain one-eyed umpire. When the book was released in 2003, McLeary grabbed his 15 minutes of fame, taking a seat on The Tonight Show and carrying on the joke of being a half-blind umpire. Self-conscious the man is not.

When I called, he was busy at his Cheviot office, scheduling umpires for high school games through an organization he founded in 1992 called Baseball and the Blues. When I called back a few days later, he was still busy but said he had a few minutes to chat. Then he chatted for the next hour and a half. I managed to wedge a question into the conversation now and again, propelling the garrulous McLeary into a new direction with hardly a break in stride. At one point he said, unnecessarily, “You don’t get the CliffsNotes version from me.”

McLEARY GREW UP in Western Pennsylvania and after playing ball at Penn State he became a minor league umpire with hopes of making it to the majors. He moved to Cheviot in 1976 and now lives in Indiana. One day during the blizzard of 1977, he was out walking with his girlfriend when she suddenly slipped on some ice. When he reached down to help her up, the toe of her boot kicked his right eye. After seven hours of surgery, it was lost, along with his dream of being a big league umpire.

McLeary explained that the Steam is beginning its fourth season in the Great Lakes Summer Collegiate League, an organization of 10 teams located mostly in Ohio but made up of college players drawn from throughout the country. Major League Baseball supports the summer league by supplying the baseballs. In exchange, pro scouts see college prospects playing against tough competition while hitting with wood bats, rather than the aluminum ones used by high school and college teams.

The Steam was created—and is still run—by a group of west-siders. Steve Brown, a state tax auditor, approached his friend Bill O’Conner, a dentist, with the idea in 2005. Both are involved with the Cincinnati Weststars, which fields select baseball teams of kids ranging in age from 9 to 18. The pair contacted McLeary and soon made him the general manager. The Steam’s director of baseball operations, high school teacher Tony Brumfield, came aboard to run the press box and the internship program. The team operates out of the lower level of O’Conner’s dental office; Joy Bachman, O’Conner’s long-time office manager, is the Steam’s secretary and, according to McLeary, “actually runs everything.”

Set up as a nonprofit, the Steam relies on support from the Reds Community Fund and corporate sponsorships, primarily Beacon Orthopedic, with help from others, such as TriHealth. Kroner Dry Cleaners, a west side business for 70 years, cleans the uniforms for free. “We don’t make any money,” O’Conner says. “Nobody’s making any money. That’s not the point.” The point, he says, is to give players in the Cincinnati area a chance at a pro career while also developing them into good citizens and community leaders. “It’s baseball and it’s more,” he says.

The Steam primarily invites local guys to play, though occasionally the invitation is extended to non-locals. Other teams recruit players from throughout the country. “We were told we couldn’t win,” O’Conner says, but the Steam has quickly developed into the premiere team in the league, hosting the last two all-star games and averaging 700 to 1,000 fans per game while the rest of the teams draw approximately 200. “We never dreamed in this short time we’d be so successful,” O’Conner says.

McLeary feels that the team’s focus on area players is the reason. “With the other teams, they spend a week learning each other’s names,” he says. “When we have our first practice it’s like a family reunion. These kids have played against each other. They know each other. We have team chemistry from the get-go.” He also credits the level of competition in the high schools and among select teams throughout Cincinnati. “These kids are used to battling,” he says. “Our success shows the level of talent in this area.”

FOLLOWING OUR PHONE call, I met with O’Conner and McLeary at Champions Bar & Grille in Western Hills on a busy Saturday night. The two men are a study in contrasts. O’Conner is tall and slim, neatly dressed and succinct, a guy you’d trust with an aching molar. McLeary is earthy and loquacious, his face deeply lined and darkly tanned, his voice a sustained crunch of gravel. He’s also frenetic. During our conversation, his cell phone rings at least a half-dozen times—to the tune of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

Both credit the Reds Community Fund for a good bit of the team’s success. In exchange for the Fund’s support, all Steam players are required to work with MLB’s Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) program. Steam players run the practices and games and coach the kids. McLeary crows that the players have a perfect attendance record. “I’m so proud of them,” he says. “A lot of our guys have had the advantage of being born into the right environment that allows them to play select ball, whose parents can afford it, and now they have to give back to the game that’s treated them so well.” (McLeary holds the title of Director of Operations for the Reds Community Fund but describes his role as “they tell me what to do, and I do it.”)

McLeary frequently mentions the need to give back to the game, which he obviously loves, and it’s good to hear that the Steam walks that walk. But community outreach aside, fans come to see great baseball, and the Steam does its best to deliver. Last year’s team won both the regular season and league tournament championships, and 19 players from that team have returned. Last year’s coach was former Cincinnati Red Todd Benzinger, who has since moved on to manage the Dayton Dragons, the Reds’ Class A minor league affiliate. Another former Red, Ron Oester, coached the ’07 squad and this year the tradition continues with Dave Collins at the helm. During his 16-year major league career, Collins played for the Reds from 1978 to 1981 and then returned from 1987 to 1989. A hustling, rah-rah guy as a player, he seems like a perfect fit for the Steam.

The talk of former Reds players and of kids eyeing a pro career made me realize that, even today, some kids nurture the age-old dream of playing in the majors. Back in the day, it seemed like all the guys I knew dreamed of playing for the Reds. And through the years, the Reds have often seen fit to make that dream come true. According to my brother Joe, in the 140 years since the Cincinnati Red Stockings formed the first professional baseball team, at least one local has made the roster in all but 10 seasons. Odd fact: the Reds won the pennant in three of those 10 seasons—1919, 1939, and 1940. This fact, dug up by Joe, whose knowledge of the Reds verges on the scary, bodes well for the fortunes of this year’s Reds: For the first time since 1941, not a single lad from the area is on the team.

THINKING ABOUT SUCH boyhood dreams, I decided to contact my boyhood hero—Westwood’s own Jim Brosnan. Brosnan played for the Reds from 1959 to 1963, but I learned of him through a series of kids’ baseball books he wrote later, some of the first books I ever read. When I was older, I read his classic books for adult fans—Pennant Race and The Long Season. Growing up, I thought, Here is a guy worth emulating: a native west-sider who plays big league ball and writes books as well as magazine articles. Brosnan espoused a love of reading and writing, jazz and classical music, not to mention a well-made martini. He was a jock-sophisticate with a droll sense of humor and a wry view of the world. From what I’ve read, he was seen by other players and coaches as a bit of an odd duck, and something about his odd duckiness struck a chord with me.

Brosnan has lived in Chicago for more than 30 years, but I called him to find out what it was like to achieve the dream of playing for the hometown team. Was it, I asked, something you always wanted to do?

“Not really,” he said. “I didn’t think it was very likely. By the time I was playing with the American Legion, I hoped to play in the majors, but it didn’t matter which team.” Thrilled just to be talking with him, I said, “But you must have been excited when you were traded from the Cardinals to the Reds in ’59. Coming home and all that.”

“No, I didn’t like it to start with because I was happy in St. Louis,” he said. “But it was a big break for me in the end because I got to play in a World Series.”

OK, so my theory was a little off-base. Still, once he got here, surely it was fun to play in front of family and friends who filled the stands at old Crosley Field to watch the hometown boy, right?

“Not really,” he said. “I don’t remember them coming. I didn’t get many starts so they wouldn’t know when I was pitching.” Well, that’s true. He pitched mostly as a reliever—a pressure-packed role. So maybe it was a wee bit more pressurized playing in front of the hometown fans?

“I never thought of it that way,” he said. “I’d been six years in the big leagues by then. I knew I could do it.” Aw, come on! In your first full season with the club, in 1960, you started Opening Day, I said. Quite an honor, I said. The ballpark was full, I said. It’s your hometown, for God’s sake—that had to have been at least a little like a dream come true?!

“Let’s just say it was not successful,” he said with a chuckle. “I don’t really remember much about it. I only remember that I was lousy.”

Thinking that his assessment was just a bit of Brosnanian self-effacement, I later thumbed through Opening Day: Celebrating Cincinnati’s Baseball Holiday, by Greg Rhodes and John Erardi, only to find out Broz was right. He’d been lousy. He lasted just an inning and two-thirds, giving up four runs on four hits and walking three before heading to the showers.

Forgetting about my stupid theory, we moved on. He talked about growing up in Westwood in St. Catherine of Siena Parish and going to Elder, playing American Legion Baseball. His sense of humor—and sense of irony—remain very much intact. When he published his books in the early 1960s, they shattered many myths about ballplayers as All-American Heroes, and they stirred controversy. Though he clearly enjoyed the baseball life, he held no illusions about it. When he arrived here as a player, he’d already been traded twice and seen the business side of things, which can disillusion even the most wide-eyed dreamer. Donning the local colors, he says, didn’t mean much. “By that time I had been in baseball for 10 years,” he said. “The uniforms all fit about the same way.”

We had a delightful conversation and he remains very much on a pedestal for me, but if I was looking for sentimental accounts of boyhood dreams coming true, I was clearly barking up the wrong tree.

SO I FOUND a different tree—Chris Welsh, the long-time Reds TV analyst. Though not a west-sider, he grew up in Kenwood and also pitched for the Reds. Despite the raging Brennamania among many Reds fans, Welsh has long been my favorite local broadcaster. My first question was, well, did he have that dream?

“Of course,” he said. “It definitely was a dream. But I never thought it would turn into reality. As a kid I dreamed of playing with Pete Rose, and I ended up playing for Pete Rose.” When he came home to play for the Reds in 1986, he was 31 and had pitched for the San Diego Padres, Montreal Expos, and Texas Rangers. Still, he says, playing for the local team was special.

“I had already had a few years in the majors, so the novelty was gone, but something happened when I put a Reds uniform on. It was in spring training, and walking out on the field, it was surreal. It was an indescribable feeling of nervousness, elation, satisfaction.” He recalls vividly his first start, against the St. Louis Cardinals, and his first win, against the San Francisco Giants. I wondered if playing in front of local fans, family, and friends, upped the wattage when he walked out on the mound.

“Well, sure,” he said. “They had seen me in the big leagues when I came through playing for other teams, but when you’re with the hometown team, it seemed like you were carrying a bigger weight. It was a little more pressure.”

Players on the Steam hope to feel that pressure some day. McLeary says he sees at least a few pro scouts in the grandstand at every game. No doubt they’re surrounded by a cheering, raucous crowd. And the Steam hopes those crowds at West High grow larger this year. They play 14 home games, through August 1 (find their schedule online at www.cincinnatisteam.com) and no doubt a hardy crowd of fans will fill the grandstand for each of them. Which makes Max McLeary very happy.

“On the west side of town, it’s like Field of Dreams,” he says. “You turn on those lights and people show up.”

Illustration by Ryan Snook

Originally published in the July 2009 issue.

Festivus for the West of Us

Jack Heffron — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 15:43:00 GMT

It’s not yet 1 in the afternoon, and the temperature already oozes past 90, dragging with it nearly 100 percent humidity. Perfect weather, it seems to me, for Cheviot’s annual WestFest street festival. Though the event is in its eighth year, I’ve always been out of town and missed it. This year, I’m going. And I’m excited. Seriously.

A festival that is so self-consciously, even self-aggrandizingly, west side is a must-do for any self-respecting native. Because when it comes to festing, no one does it better. Years of training at countless parish festivals have made us masters of the art. Bring on your funnel cakes and fish ponds, your brat-grilling and Big Six wheel-spinning. We’ll show you how it’s done.

The aptly-named WestFest kicks off at 1 p.m. on a late June Saturday, and I’m hustling to the opening ceremony. No doubt a Green Township trustee—or Cheviot’s mayor—will make a speech about glorious west side traditions. Then he or she will cut a cord or ribbon or something and raise a cheer. Or maybe not a cheer, but surely there will be some sort of pomp and circumstance befitting this majestic event. When I arrive, I see vendor booths lining both sides of Harrison Avenue, which is closed to traffic for at least six blocks of Cheviot proper. Smoke wafts from the grills and ovens, which combine to kick the heat a half-dozen degrees higher. The middle of the street, however, is nearly empty.

Stages stand at either end of the festival area, and I’m not sure which one will host the opening ceremony. I rush toward the west end, which seems more fitting and more likely. By the time I get there, sweat pours down my face and my T-shirt clings to my back. Maybe 20 people sit in rows of white plastic chairs set up in front of the stage, which is empty. No testing of microphones, no awkward shuffling of dignitaries. I wait for a few minutes and check my watch: one on the dot. Nothing.

Behind the rows of chairs, a couple of sound engineers stand at a mixing board under a white tent.

“Will the opening ceremony be here?” I ask them. Both look confused, as if I posed the question in Neptunian.

“Or will it be on the other stage?” I point down Harrison Avenue toward the eastern end.

Blank stares.

To fill the silence I ask, “Or does it pretty much just start?” The guy closest to the mixing board says, “I think it pretty much just starts.”

And he’s right. Without a lick of fanfare—no cutting of anything—a line of maybe a dozen little girls from Judy Link’s School of Dance and Baton troops onto the stage, wearing black skirts and red leotards. Music erupts through the PA speakers, and the girls begin to dance to “I’m in the Money.”

Seated in the chairs, parents furiously snap photos.

WestFest has begun.

THE FESTIVAL IS run by the Cheviot-Westwood Community Association, a 74-year-old civic organization. Bonnie Perrino chairs this year’s event, along with Chris Baker and Peggy Sullivan. Perrino owns Angel Touch Nursing Care on Harrison Avenue; her office is the event’s command center. She is the only remaining member of the original group that created WestFest in 2002. From somewhat humble beginnings, WestFest has become one of Greater Cincinnati’s more popular summer fests; Perrino says they draw approximately 30,000 people each year. While most come from the western side of town, sojourners are known to come from as far away as Norwood, Northern Kentucky, and eastern Indiana. However, with age and reputation come the upstarts. While this year’s fest should be just as successful, it faces serious competition: Goettafest in Covington; Paddlefest at Coney Island and Sawyer Point; the Panegyri Greek Festival in Finneytown; and the Hyde Park Blast are all happening the same weekend. How much festing can one city do?

Perrino seems unperturbed and stresses the value of the event to the community. “Our goals when we started were to bring the community together for a party and to make some money to put back into the community,” she says. “And we’ve accomplished those goals. It’s done even more than we hoped.”

This is true. The profits fund holiday decorations in Cheviot and Westwood, including the nativity display, a local treasure. “The gambling booths fund the annual Young Citizen Banquet, which honors students who are community-minded,” Perrino adds.

The festival has grown steadily, and this year is the biggest yet in terms of vendors—44. I ask Bonnie how it compares to the west side’s other big occasion, the Harvest Home Fair. “The fair is a fair,” she says. “They have livestock and general exhibits. This is more of a festival. We’re partying right on the street. We’re right in the heart of our little town. It’s just a big community project.”

Feeling almost noble, I head out to find a beer booth, where I contribute to the civic-mindedness and artistic aspirations of our local youth.

BY EVENING, REVELERS pack the streets. A high-energy band from Mason called Flatrock covers a Pearl Jam song; the singer, Mike MaGee, does an impressive job. Sunset has brought some relief from the heat, but the mass of bodies and the busy grills keep us plenty warm. Floodlights and neon illuminate the festival, especially in the Kid Zone, the main entertainment area. At the game booths, people toss and shoot various things to win stuffed prizes. At the biggest booth, a large SpongeBob SquarePants hangs upside down in what looks like a bizarre effigy.

Most of the booths are run by local churches and civic groups—moms and dads and kids rather than flinty-eyed carnies. Though we are not more than a few miles from the heart of Cincinnati, it’s tough to ignore the feeling that we’re in some rural Midwestern town, on Main Street USA. A few blocks on either side of the main street, fields of corn and wheat and soybean should be growing. I think that’s a large part of WestFest’s appeal. It’s a big party with a small-town atmosphere—a unique place to be when you’re still inside the city limits.

The Harvest Home Fair projects much the same feeling, maybe even more. It features shows and competitions involving livestock, horses, and flowers—quite an aromatic event. Approximately 30,000 people attend each year, beginning with the parade on Thursday evening (the fair is held the weekend following Labor Day). All along the parade route—Harrison Avenue, then a left at North Bend Road, and on into Harvest Home Park—locals reserve their spots the day before by placing chairs on the sidewalk. It’s common for west-siders to see hundreds of empty chairs lined up ready to go, and I’ve never heard of any chairs being stolen.

This year Harvest Home Fair—the self-proclaimed “Biggest Little Fair in Ohio”—celebrates its 150th anniversary, and the event’s roots wind even deeper into local history. According to www.harvesthomefair.com, things got started in 1806, when Enoch and Ashsah Carson invited other farmers in the area to celebrate a bounteous harvest. It became an annual gathering and was made official by the formation of the Green Township Harvest Home Association, which took over proceedings in August 1860. The Kiwanis Club of Cheviot-Westwood assumed control in 1939, when ownership of the park was transferred to the city of Cheviot. Since that group took control of the event they have donated over $2 million to area organizations, according to Pete Minges, who is in his second year as the fair’s chairman.

“Anything that benefits the lives of children, that’s who we donate to,” says Minges, who runs Neidhard-Minges Funeral Home, along with his brother, Mark, and is a life-long west-sider. He cites the Boy and Girl Scouts and the Margaret B. Rost School for the disabled as recent beneficiaries. Approximately 400 volunteers work the fair, and Minges estimates they collectively put in 20,000 hours. He says it draws attendees mostly from the west side, though the 1K race, in its sixth year, and the 5K run/walk, in its seventh year, draw from throughout the city. “It’s known throughout the state,” he says.

Minges told me that this year the fair’s theme is the 200th birthday of Green Township, but otherwise the Harvest Home will be much the same as in past years. “It’s in a populated community, but we keep the old traditions alive,” he says. “The fair is like the west side. It’s very consistent. It doesn’t change easily. It reflects the community it’s in. ”

IN THE INTEREST of journalistic research, I re-route my Sunday morning run to scamper through the WestFest area and survey the carnage from last night. I’m stunned to find it almost spotless. The streets, the sidewalks, even the narrow alleys between the booths are almost frighteningly free of litter. It’s as if a platoon of meth-fueled Boy Scouts descended during the night and wiped the place clean. Not so much as a single beer cup or hot dog wrapper or cigarette butt can be found. Fresh garbage bags line the waste containers on every corner, fluttering in the early breeze with what seems like arrogant efficiency. The combination of last night’s raucousness and this morning’s cleanliness strikes me as classically west side—we’ll have a lot of fun, and then we’ll clean up afterward.

Sunday offers a breeze and a few degrees less heat. Just off the main drag, on Glenmore Avenue, classic cars—mostly ’60s and ’70s muscle cars—roll into parking spots. By early afternoon, people are drifting back to the fest, though definitely a different demographic from last night—a mix of older folks and young families. The stroller-per-capita rate is sky high, and the Kid Zone boils with activity. But much like the night before, the focus seems to be on adventurous eating.

You’ll find deadly delights such as deep-fried Twinkies, Oreos, and Snickers. You’ll also find gyros and baklava, hot bacon slaw, jalapeño cheese stuffed pretzels, baby-back ribs, garlic mushrooms, and chicken and sausage gumbo. You can get sushi and crab rangoon at the Thai Taste booth. Wassler Meats offers a German or Italian sausage hoagie complete with grilled onions and peppers, or you can try their “Pop’s Homemade Goetta Sandwich.” To satisfy sweet teeth, WestFest offers chocolate-covered cheesecake on a stick or chocolate chip walnut pie from the west side’s supreme-o dessert dude, Gary Haas of Gary’s Cheesecakes and Fine Desserts. To wash it all down, several booths sell “Pop and Water.” (You’ve got to love the boldly unapologetic Midwesternness of a sign selling “Pop.”)

Lacking a cultivated palette, I can’t judge with authority the quality of the food at WestFest. All I can tell you is that for two days there’s a whole lotta chewin’ goin’ on. But mastication zooms to a whole new level at the Maury’s Tiny Cove–sponsored pickle-eating contest.

At five o’clock on Sunday afternoon, hundreds of people gather at the west stage to watch the contest. The master of ceremonies is Rodger Kay, a disc jockey from radio station Oldies 1480 AM, which has been playing music at its booth throughout the festival. “Let’s make some noise!” Kay yells into the microphone. “Loud enough that the east-siders can hear you!”

The first round features six contestants—four men and two women—who sit at a long table spanning the front of the stage. Each is given a clear storage bag filled with a pre-determined number of garlic dill pickle slices. They have three minutes to down as many as possible.

During the three minutes they chomp ferociously, cheeks stuffed and mouths moving so fast they appear to be in pain. Before finishing one slice they stuff in another. After each round, the pickles remaining in the bags are counted, and the winner’s total is announced. Men tend to stand while chewing, sometimes hunched over, leaning an arm on the table, while the women tend to sit and chew one slice at a time. The giddy crowd cheers their favorites and Kay keeps up a steady palaver on the mic to stoke everyone’s interest.

The second round includes last year’s champion, Bob Ominob. With his thick black beard and black ball cap pulled low, he looks like he’s in disguise. He sets the high mark with 63 pickles, a tough score to beat. In fact, no one does. In the third round, a teenage girl puts forth a valiant effort before heading off the back of the stage, where she throws up. Though the competition is fierce, everyone cheers Bob when he retains his title. Afterward, we drift back down the street to find something else to see and eat and drink.

“WHAT’S UP, BEST side?” asks the lead singer in the group Busted as the band kicks off its set on the east stage. Busted plays mostly classic rock covers and plays them well, though the band at the west stage is playing pretty much the same stuff. Other than the egregious lack of an opening ceremony, my only complaint about WestFest is the sameness of the acts, which defeats the purpose of having two stages. We need to offer more variety of style and era. While it’s nice to see folks over 40 still kicking out the classic jams, it would be equally nice to hear more bands playing songs recorded after half the crowd was born. And if I felt that way at my age (definitely over 40), the teens and twenty- and thirtysomethings must feel close to nausea as yet another middle-aged bunch cranks through a set of oldies.

Or maybe I’m just getting crabby. The heat, the crowds, the noise, the food converge to say it’s time to go home. I trek back to my house but can’t resist sitting on my deck, where I can still hear snatches of music rolling over the neighborhood.

It’s Sunday evening in late June. The sun is fading. Shadows lengthen as the sky slowly turns a softer blue. A red balloon, having escaped the grip of a child at WestFest, floats high in the air—not much more than a dot in the deepening twilight, drifting far above the treetops. Tomorrow the work week begins and before we know it summer will end—though that change will be marked by the Harvest Home Fair, where long ago farmers celebrated the season’s bounty with a get-together whose theme could be summed up with “I’m in the Money.” Given the current economy, that sounds like a good song to sing.

Illustration by Ryan Snook
Originally published in the September 2009 issue.