Photograph by Andrew Doench
A piano dirge plays. Rain spits on a dark, empty street. Storefronts are shuttered, and the corner-shop windows are papered over. A young woman with long brown hair casts her gaze out the window to a long-closed bank. “Our little town is in desperate need—help come and revitalize our business district,” she pleads.
The short video is an audition for the HGTV series Home Town Takeover. Submitted in 2020, it wasn’t successful in landing the reality TV show, but it illustrates just how far Lockland, a one-time industrial powerhouse, has declined. An elevated stretch of I-75 in the background of the clip looms as a reminder of the many people and factories that have left town over the past 40 years—and the feeling, among many of those who remain, of being passed over.
Alyson Gawrych is the woman in the video, and in real life she’s known for optimism, not glumness, about Lockland. She runs one of its most successful small businesses, Mill Street Studios. Filmmakers and photographers rent out decorated suites in the 12,000-square-foot building.
It was one of the first multi-studio operations of its kind in Cincinnati when she established it just before the pandemic. Today, Lockland’s central district is finally seeing the forward momentum that the video’s uplifting end scene—residents waving as a drone shot zooms outward—begged for.
Five short years after Gawrych arrived and began renovating her building, the storefronts look spiffy in the four-street historic district wedged between the north and south lanes of 75 (a.k.a. the Lockland Split). Several buildings have been, or are being, rehabbed back to their 19th and 20th century glory. Hollywood also came calling: The Bikeriders, Bones and All, and the upcoming Robert de Niro flick Alto Knights filmed here. A maker’s market in June enlivened the corner of Mill and Dunn streets, the district’s home base. Helen Smith moved Helltown Workshop, her upholstery business, here from Northside. In a space where a Kroger store sat 100 years ago, her shop window oozes fabulousness with colorful furniture and vintage decor.
“Alyson and I started calling it the Lockland Arts District because there’s the design firm [Collective Spaces] across the street, and everyone’s an antiques dealer,” says Smith. “This is still a place you can help develop and steer in a direction the community wants it to be going.”
Todd Snapp, a well-tattooed architect with clear eyeglasses and wavy gray hair, owns the corner building that houses Helltown Workshop. He recently put in a recording studio upstairs. He named the building Dunn Street Station and—along with his girlfriend Laura Hughes, plus Smith and her partner Brian Olive, a Grammy-winning musician—is doing much of the construction himself to create a hub for art, performance, and community.
Photograph by Andrew Doench
Sam Wilder, a bespectacled 67-year-old, remembers frequenting the spot when it housed Vaughn-Hesley Pharmacy in the 1960s. “We’d buy comic books and cherry phosphates,” he recalls. Wilder bought the building across the street for his office; he’s a business coach and runs an ad agency. The enclave, with a lounge area in back for frequent drop-ins by friends, displays Wilder’s vast collection of vintage and antique art and ephemera. With meticulously arranged floor-to-ceiling vignettes, it could double as a museum.
“Upgrading of buildings is infectious,” says Snapp. “I’m putting a lot of money into this because of a long-term vision. There’s a feel-good aspect to it, growing with the community and curating the vibe.”
Snapp got help when Jeff Nichols, director of The Bikeriders, also fell in love with the corner. The film company removed wood covering glass-brick windows and painted the exterior, among other improvements. They also paid rent—a location fee—on Dunn Street Station for three months, shooting bar scenes in the largest space and using Smith’s workshop for a production office.
More movie production can be expected in Lockland—not just for its antique-looking streets, but because of the dearth of pedestrian and commercial activity. “It almost feels like a movie backlot,” says Nichols. Fewer active stores mean less money a film company has to shell out for disrupting business as usual.
This is just the artsy part of the revitalization of a town that was purpose-built for industry, thrived
for well over a century, and then went bust. There’s much more to Lockland’s reawakening, but let’s first take a look back.
Lockland’s downturn, which began 40 years ago, ironically was the result of its original selling points: a transportation nexus with a welcome mat for factories. Its small size—just over 3,600 residents in 1.2 square miles—belies its oversize importance in Cincinnati history.
In the early 1800s, Nicholas Longworth, a Queen City founding father, saw the potential of this stretch of land along both the Mill Creek and the Miami and Erie Canal, whose construction began about the same time he and a partner bought up and platted the area. When four locks along the canal started being referred to as the “Reading Locks,” he hastily named the area Lockland, effectively laying claim to the stops. Boats would pause in the locks for a period of time, which meant business for establishments alongside it.
By the time the canal was completed in 1845, railroads were competing to transport goods. Those, too, were routed through Lockland. Meanwhile, the Mill Creek provided a convenient place for grist, lumber, paper, and asbestos mills to perch (and dump pollution). Stearns & Foster, an innovator in cotton products—you know it for its mattresses—employed 1,200 people there at one point.
“Lockland had more money than it knew what to do with,” Gawrych says in the audition video. “It had the biggest paper company and the biggest mattress company in the world.” Adds John Campbell, author of Lockland Ohio: A Thousand Memories in a Mile and Lockland Ohio: Visions of the Past, “It was packed so full of industry and residences and schools that at one time the real estate there was at a premium. During the Great Depression, my grandfather was laid off from his job and was told to go home. He walked to the next plant and got another job and finished out the day there.”
Boarding houses and restaurants, like those run by Campbell’s grandmother, thrived. Rodney Taylor, 58, remembers a bar on every corner when he was a teenager. (Wolfman’s Tavern, which he owns, is the last standing watering hole today.) Workers and residents kept two business districts humming—one in what was designated the historic district in 2019, and the other in West Lockland on Wayne Avenue.
Today, only a handful of Lockland’s old large-scale businesses remain in operation. A drive down the entirety of Wyoming Avenue, which runs east to west for a mile and change through the middle of the village, illustrates the stark contrast with Lockland’s neighbors. The street begins in Wyoming, a tony town with grand houses set deeply back on manicured lawns. Flowers encircle light poles at intersections.
Photograph by Andrew Doench
Postcard from the collection of Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library
Cross the train tracks to West Lockland, and it looks as if a bomb went off. On your immediate right is a long-dead gas station. Entire blocks of the business district are shuttered. A few offices seem to be in use, but for what? Signs don’t indicate. And when they do—say, the Lockland Bar and Grill—it’s just a facade. The bar no longer offers, as it claims on Facebook, “the most fun you can have outside the bedroom.” The few public-facing establishments are gaudy with blinking lights, chaotic window displays, and sun-faded signs. Single-family houses have been chopped up into apartments, with satellite dishes sprouting like mushrooms.
Soon you’re approaching the historic eastern side of Lockland. It looks better, but empty storefronts still make for a gap-toothed landscape. Cross the tracks again, at the arched white Benson Street Bridge, and you’re in Reading, a community that’s doing a better job of capitalizing on its historic past. Though still solidly working class, Reading, once a hub of garment manufacturing, has successfully branded its Bridal District. Dress shops and cafés cater to bands of roving women in tiaras and tulle veils.
Lockland continues to reckon with the dark stain of racism. Factories employed Black workers, but banks wouldn’t give them loans to buy houses. “Most Black folks came from downtown and moved to the east side of the canal,” recalls Virgil Lackey, a towering 85-year-old plumber whose father worked at what was called GE Lockland (until the plant became a part of the village of Evendale, established in 1952). “They fooled them and moved them to Lincoln Heights.”
“They” refers to Enterprise Building and Loan, a now-shuttered Lockland bank that for a long time was the only one giving mortgages to Blacks—if, and only if, they moved to the newly established neighborhood of Lincoln Heights just north of Lockland. Students from there attended Anthony Wayne High School in Lockland, which was erected to keep them separate from whites who attended Lockland High School. West Lockland remains predominantly Black, although the two communities mixed together more as time went on.
“I grew up in a Black middle-class family in Lockland. It was stable because everyone had work,” says Neil Anderson, 63, a licensed massage therapist who now lives in Northside. “I had friends on both sides of town.” Lockland’s downturn “hit the African American community especially hard,” he remembers. “But that love and that sense of small-town closeness is still very much alive today.”
Consolidation, globalization, and other market forces leeched the factories. “People started leaving in the late 1980s and early ’90s, and it became more of a little town instead of an industrial town,” says Kim Xander, a union carpenter and member of the village council. “All my high school friends’ dads worked at paper factories, and they had to go find new jobs. So it did get quiet around here for a long time.”
A literal death knell sounded in 1981 when a fired worker shot four of his former bosses, killing two of them, at the Diamond International paper plant. The following year, Lockland’s population dipped below 5,000, downgrading the city to “village” status. “Still, I never considered leaving,” says Xander. Small-town pride persists, with Lockland routinely rejecting any suggestion that it become annexed by the city of Cincinnati.
Cheap buildings, especially architectural gems located near the interstate and the city center, as Lockland is, usually entice entrepreneurs and artists. When rent and property prices soar in tonier neighborhoods, new life can take root in depressed ones. Structures get improved, and defunct buildings get repurposed. When the inevitable coffee shop opens, the signs of gentrification are as apparent as the baristas’ tattoos. A new era begins.
That’s not what happened in Lockland, however. (You can’t get a cortado anywhere.) While the fellow blue-collar neighborhoods of Over-the-Rhine, Price Hill, and Walnut Hills started blossoming back to life, Lockland remained fallow. Wilder was a pioneer when he opened his office here. “My friends thought I was insane,” he says.
He was attracted to the community’s “bohemian vibe.” But ambiance alone can’t make up for Lockland’s lack of essentials like a grocery store, pharmacy, restaurant, or library. Certainly, people can seek sustenance in the bordering neighborhoods of Reading, Wyoming, and Hartwell, but even that can be tricky with the village’s transportation issues.
The flight of the factories left Lockland with no corporate tax base or employment “glue” to keep it pumping. Storefronts sat empty or, at best, housed storage.
Then 2023 happened. A post-pandemic sprouting of artistic, commercial, and charitable activity seeded by people like Gawrych, Wilder, and Snapp appeared to usher in critical mass for real, if belated, revitalization. Pepper Construction, a Chicago-based firm, opened its new Ohio HQ in a multimillion-dollar restoration of the long-abandoned Stearns & Foster office building. Ninety employees work in the LEED-certified brick structure. “Pepper has been a godsend,” says Lockland Mayor Mark Mason Sr. Besides the taxes the corporation brings, Pepper’s salvaging of a building that embodies Lockland’s glorious past is akin to a spiritual healing. “My uncle worked in that building for 53 years,” Mason says, “so to see Pepper save it put a smile on my face.”
On the other end of the commercial spectrum is Sugar Shack by the Tracks, which also opened last year. It builds ice-cream sundaes, not skyscrapers, but is impactful because it draws hundreds of people into Lockland weekly. Co-owner John Aildasani, tall and tanned with boisterous, big-brother energy, also hosts events, such as fund-raisers for Lockland police. Kibitzing with customers, he’s a cheerleader and unofficial public information officer for Lockland. “Lockland has a lot of character and a lot of potential,” he says, “I’m looking to do other things here.”
Aildasani owns a construction firm and doesn’t need the stand’s meager profits to pay his grocery bills. “It ain’t a huge money-maker,” he admits. He sunk $400,000 into bringing the 1950s-style destination to life, with an adjacent lot that welcomes food trucks. “It’s more about giving back to the community. That’s really why we do it.”
Rounding out the new dynamics are two faith-based organizations. In West Lockland, free lessons in English language and bike repair are given to immigrants from the West African country of Mauritania. (Cincinnati is the largest U.S. magnet for these refugees from violence, and Lockland is where many of them settle.) The Metanoia Center, which runs the classes, and Valley Interfaith Community Resource Center, which distributes food and clothing, help ease the strain on Lockland from this growing population. Without any kind of meaningful dialogue taking place between the struggling community (few speak fluent English) and Lockland officials, the charities are doing the work of making the village more welcoming.
One of the main reasons Lockland is different from any other part of town is in the name itself. A big part of the village remains, well, locked.
First, there’s the Lockland Split, that wayward straying east of I-75 northbound lanes from the southbound route encircling most of the occupied homes. “Distinctive but notorious,” is how historian Jake Mecklenborg describes it. “A dependable source of aggravation for anyone in a hurry.”
The split was created in the early 1960s, probably because ongoing expansion of the highway would have forced Stearns & Foster to relocate. Plans to realign the highway have been in the works for over a decade and may be another decade-plus away from the start of construction.
But it’s the train crossings that are the real reason Lockland has not—and may not ever—take off in any significant way. It isn’t so much that loud freight trains blaze through Lockland’s five crossings more than 50 times a day or that a train can have more than 100 cars to it. The problem is that the trains will stop and sit for an hour, two hours, or more. It is Mayor Mason’s mission to change this. “I told them, You’ve got to leave me two crossings at all times,” he says. “But the railroad industry’s lobbying group is entrenched with the federal government.”
Mason is exasperated. “I have sent videos and still photos of emergency services, fire trucks, police cruisers, and paramedics trying to get to an emergency. I have personally seen children climbing over and under a train to get to school on time.” Taylor minces no words in repeating a common village cry: “It’s going to take somebody getting killed for anything to change.”
I reached out to the Association of American Railroads about these concerns, and I received a fact sheet in response saying, in part, “Railroads work closely with local government partners to manage and mitigate the impact of rail crossings on communities to reduce the number of crossings, improve safety, and ensure efficient operations.”
Anyone conducting business in Lockland must simply put up with the delays. “People who head to Reading for lunch can come back two hours later, having got stuck behind a train,” says Jerry Noble, senior vice president of Pepper Construction. “It’s kind of crazy and a lot of inconvenience. But we aren’t actively involved in that battle.”
Aildasani uses a charm offensive on train conductors. “Sometimes they come in for ice cream,” he says. “I tell them, If you stop short of the road you can have it for free, but if it’s in the middle and no one can pass, it’s twice as much. The conductors say they can’t control it. They can’t pull into the yard [further down] already occupied by another train.”
The situation has improved since the beginning of 2024, Lockland residents agree, though they can’t say why. Whatever the case, it’s not due to any promises from railroad companies to roll more safely.
The stultifying effect of the trains leaves Lockland cut off from the rest of the city and feeling frozen in time. Though a hassle for businesses, the village attracts creative class members who appreciate the Mayberry aesthetics and atmosphere—preserved architecture in a village built on a human scale before cars dominated the landscape. Small businesses, such as Hosanna Revival, makers of specialty Bibles, have been able to make Lockland work as a home base. But are there any other companies the size of Pepper Construction that can withstand the trains’ stranglehold?
The village administration believes so. It wants a mixed-use development called The Locks to rise on the 12.5 acres it owns where the Stearns & Foster factory once stood. They’re open to anything for development, from a shopping district to a residential area to an industrial site. But no more storage buildings. “I could have had 40 warehouses on that site, but that doesn’t produce revenue for the village,” says Mason. “We’re being very picky.”
Longtime observers doubt that anything like a restaurant—a thin-margin operation that would inevitably cost in the six figures to build out—will open anytime soon. And will people want to live in apartments built on a brownfield site? For the time being, progress will have to come in baby steps. “Artists start everything,” says Smith.
The last U.S. Census showed Lockland’s population ticking up for the first time in decades. Gawrych and Smith are putting together a Lockland business association. Snapp has offered Dunn Street Station’s bar space as a repository for Lockland’s historical archives and is hoping Tri-State Trails will route its bikeway network through the historic district.
Snapp gets a dreamy look in his eyes when discussing other possibilities for this odd little town that continues to charm and seduce. Earlier this year he bought a second fixer-upper a stone’s throw from Dunn Street Station. It cost $110,000. “It’s another 9,000 square feet of space needing a gut rehab,” he says. “No electricity, no gas, sitting 10 years empty. I have no idea what we’re doing with it, but I can’t let it fall apart.”
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