Dave Menninger

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Great weather has brought the crowds back, just in time for the Opening of Essen Strasse last Saturday.  Sounds good, but what, exactly is Essen Strasse?  

The Market sits on Elder Street.  The north side is where the outdoor vendors set up to sell everything from ball caps and shades to fabrics and handmade jewelry.  The south side of the market is where a group of merchants set up grills, prepare lunch and beverages from the end of May through October.  It is called Essen Strasse.  Essen Strasse means "food street" in German.  We re-named south Elder "Essen Strasse" to honor the German Heritage of OTR.  But there is more to the story then that.  After World War 1, there was a serious anti-German sentiment in Cincinnati.  So much so, that the City Fathers decided that German would not be taught in schools, church sermons could not be delivered in German, German language newspapers were banned and all street names that were German, had to be renamed with English words.  It was known as anti-german hysteria.  This effort to eradicate German culture from Cincinnati effectively drove it underground.  A city that owed much of its cultural and economic growth in the 1800's to German-American immigrants turned its back on these industrious citizens and their heritage.  So, we decided to take the heritage back and honor south Elder Street with a German name.  Ther is an Ohio Hisotorical Society marker on the corner of Essen Strasse by Saigon Market that recounts this unpleasant era in Cincinnat history.  Stop by when you are at the Market and read more about anti-German hysteria in Cincinnati.

Let's return to the happier, present time.  Essen Strasse vendors will be serving up your favorites beginning at 10:00 am on Saturdays and at 11:00 am on Sundays through September.  So bring an appetite and sit down under a striped umbrella, eat and people watch.

Participants include:

Herbs and Spice and Everything Nice:  The Grill Sergeant returns, serving up a biscuit smothered with grilled fruit salad or, for lunch, a terrific grilled shrimp skewer.

 Aunt Flora's  Enjoy a single serving of Aunt Flora's famous cobbler and a cup of vanilla ice cream.

Miss Helen's grill is back!  Enjoy brats, metts, hotdogs, wings, and those famous steak burgers.

Kroeger and Sons Meats:  Signature sausages, chicken and brats and metts.

Kennedy Family Grill:  Grilled roasted corn on the cob and sweet potato chips.

The Turkish Grill:  Grilled portabella mushroom sandwhiches and grilled eggplant and feta pitas.

IMPACT'S Smoothies and Jucies:  Take a health break with a fruit smoothie or a fresh vegetable juice, made while you wait for optimum nutrition.

See you at the Market!

(Contributed by Cheryl Eagelson, Marketing DIrector Findlay Market)

 

Best places to experience the architecture of James Keys Wilson in Cincinnati.

Top 6 answers on the board . . .

1. Plum Street Temple (1866)
8th & Plum Streets

Stunning and unique and the reason why it is No. 1.

2. Spring Grove Cemetery including Gatehouse and Office (1863) and Dexter Mausoleum (1869)
4521 Spring Grove Avenue
3. "Scarlett Oaks" – Schoneberger House, Clifton (1870)
440 Lafayette Avenue
4. "Woodburn" – John S. Baker House, East Walnut Hills (1854)
1887 Madison Road
Wilson lived nearby and married in to the Keys family. John Baker was the father-in-law of his wife's brother Samuel, who also lived nearby (and whos house he also designed). Keys Crescent which is nearby takes its name from this family. It is speculated that Wilson adopted his wife's family name for business reasons.

5. The Samuel Allen House, Glendale (1859)
25 West Fountain Avenue
Wilson eventually lived in Glendale and was one of Glendale's incorporators in 1851.

6. 4th Street including Mitchell & Rammelsberg Furniture Co. (1870) - future part of McAlpin’s Department Store & Herschede Building (1857)

James Keys Wilson was born in Cincinnati in 1828. He began his practice in approximately 1848 at the age of 20 upon his return from his training in Philadelphia and New York (under Martin E. Thompson and then James Renwick, Jr., designer of the Smithsonian Castle). From approximately 1851 to 1863 he partnered with William Walter. Walter would go on to partner with William Stewart and they designed many Cincinnati buildings including Mother of God in Covington (1871) and Covenant First Presbyterian (1875). Both James McLaughlin & Charles Crapsey also studied with Wilson before starting their own practices.

After about 1870, Wilson does not appear to have done much work, or at least large commissions. He does serve as the first President of the Cincinnati Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) from 1870 to 1871 and again from 1872 to 1873. Cincinnati was in fact the 2nd Chapter of the AIA in the nation. A nice article in the "Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians "speculates, for whatever reason, he fell out of favor to architects like Samuel Hannaford and James McLaughlin.

An important work not in Cincinnati by Wilson is the Bethany College Old Main & Commencement Hall (1858 - 1871) in Bethany, West Virgina. It along with Plum Street Temple and Spring Grove Cemetery are National Historic Landmarks. A tremendous accomplishment.
James Keys Wilson died on Oct. 21, 1894 and is buried in Spring Grove – Section 49; Lot 1, Space 6. As far as I can tell, there is no headstone. His daughter is also buried in the family lot and does have a simple marker.

References:
Patton, Glen. James Keys Wilson (1828-1894): Architect of the Gothic Revival in Cincinnati "The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians", Vol. 26, No. 4 (Dec., 1967), pp. 285-293. Clubbe, John. Cincinnati Observed: Architecture & History. Ohio State University Press, Columbus. 1992
Langsam, Walter. Great Houses of the Queen City. Cincinnati Museum Center, Cincinnati. 2002.
Historic images from the Library's Cincinnati Memory Project and the West Virginia Archives & History.

Photo courtesy of here.

Have you ever been walking through your neighborhood, and arrived at a stretch of road with no sidewalk?  Was it still safe to continue walking?  If not, what must one do to get a sidewalk installed?  And, is there anything politicians can do to make it easier for concerned citizens to work towards increased pedestrian safety in their own neighborhood?

I have a simple solution that could benefit every City neighborhood—and even neighboring municipalities—that wish to have better sidewalks.

As it stands now, abutting property owners are responsible for paying to have a new sidewalk installed.  But times are tough.  Forking over construction costs for something like that might not be in everyone’s budget! 

So is there a way to still get sidewalks without unfairly burdening abutting property owners?  Besides, the walking public will use the sidewalks just as much, if not more, than the house that pays to install a section of walk.

I think City Council should make a slight change to Cincinnati Municipal Code, allowing citizens to place the question on a neighborhood’s ballot.  If a neighborhood would like to see sidewalks installed, a modest amount of signatures from area property owners should be all that is required to take the question to the vote. 

Let’s say a stretch of road has twenty property owners, but a whole neighborhood has thousands of properties.  Splitting sidewalk construction costs equally among all property owners would make the bill negligible, as opposed to making each homeowner pay for the stretch in front of his or her house.

If the issue passed on the ballot, property owners would receive a small one-time sidewalk construction charge on their property tax bill, and the neighborhood would have improved walkability without unfairly burdening single homeowners.

I just caught word of what sounds like an interesting way to learn more about OTR. Inner:City Tours has put together a Podcast tour of Over the Rhine!
From CincyFringe.com: "Inner:City is a guided walking tour through the spaces between the Fringe venues and a comic exploration of the theater inside all of our heads. Participants will download a podcast onto their own iPods which will lead them on a multimedia odyssey through a neighborhood rich in theater history. This site-specific audio installation will invite its audience into the stories of this neighborhood in a one-of-a-kind theatrical experience that is one part video-game-without-the-screen and one part performance art installation, with just a dash of The daVinci Code."
There are a TON of great things going on over the next couple of weeks with the Fringe Festival so go check them out! There's even a mural being painted "live" on the South side of the Know Theatre building by a group of local artists.
CincyFringe.com

Also, Check out Soapbox Cincinnati's Article about the Fringe Festival Here

This one sounds pretty interesting too!

So I was just at the Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts. It’s a lovely old library, full of books and music and comics and they offer Internet access to just about anyone who walks in the door, which is nice. While there I noticed they were currently hitting up the locals for $25,000 worth of technology equipment. $25K is enough for a decent number of books, but it’s actually not lot of money when it comes to computer hardware, so if I were in charge there, I’d want to make sure I got the full value out of every drop. So:

Ditch Windows in favor of Ubuntu Linux. Here’s why:

1. Ubuntu is cheap. Ubuntu is free and will remain so. That means it would offer feature and security updates for years to come for no extra cash. It also runs like a champ on low-end hardware, which brings me to #2.
2. Ubuntu runs like a champ on low-end hardware. This means you could not only upgrade the machines you have now without costly licensing fees, but new machines could be super low end and still offer crazy good performance. I just build myself a KPC shuttle box for around $240, and you could add a monitor on to that for about $90 more. And Dell offers Ubuntu laptops for $500. So at $330 per desktop and $550 per laptop, you could get about 38 desktops and 22 laptops. That’s 60 new machines!
3. All you really need is Firefox anyhow. Each copy of Ubuntu comes with Firefox, probably the fastest and most compatible web browser out there. Your own web brochure says the main reason for this tech upgrade is to get more people on the internet. Perfect fit — plus no machine gets a virus because someone went to the wrong page.
4. Ubuntu would be dead easy to administrate. I can see why a place would worry about administering a bunch of linux machines, but it wouldn’t actually be that hard. In fact, I would suggest, instead of worrying about it, adopt a no-troubleshooting policy — if there’s any serious issue with a machine, just wipe it out and install Ubuntu from scratch. The install takes about 10 minutes (and my mom could do it!), and then add another 5 minutes after that for installing Flash, setting the printers and configuring Firefox’s home page. Compare 15 mostly idle minutes to the time required to troubleshoot a flaky Windows install, and there’s no contest.
5. But what about..? …content filtering? Will our library content filtering run on Ubuntu? Don’t bother. Use Open DNS and block porn and other “adult content” from the network entirely. What about printing? Ubuntu recognizes pretty much any printer with no problem. What about our existing library databases? They’re web-based, so it doesn’t matter what web browser they use.

Wht do you think? Crazy, or just so crazy it might work?

~Jeff

The 2008 Cincinnati Fringe Festival marks the 5th year of its existence. The festival started tonight at the Art Academy in Over-the-Rhine. Over the next 12 days, Downtown and Over-the-Rhine will support 20 different venues which will play host to a variety of art including visual, performance, and film. There will also be an ongoing mural installation on the south side of the Know Theatre over the 12 day festival.

The Cincy Fringe Festival is one of 20 active Fringe festivals in North America including New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Minneapolis...with the original stemming from Edinburgh, Scotland which began 51 years ago.

Organizers are still looking for volunteers to assist in various ways throughout the festival. You can get involved by signing up online (it's very easy). Volunteers get a Fringe Festival t-shirt for signing up for one shift and get two free tickets (to any Fringe show) for every shift you sign up for after that.

There is a lot more I could ramble on about, but you can get most of the information from the website. You can order tickets, get reviews, preview shows, and much more.

Mark your calendars! It's almost time for the Friend's June Book Sale at the Main Library.