Reflections from Cincinnati (2022)
I grew up in Cincinnati in the 40’s, 50’and 60’s then went off to school and since then have returned only occasionally.
We were there for four days in September, two of which were filled with a joyous reunion of our far-flung tribe. I was struck by the development of the Riverfront, the downtown and the over the Rhine districts; it makes the downtown a fun and welcoming environment in the evening.
The annual Octoberfest filled the downtown area where we were staying with revelers sharing their joy. The waterfront has two big stadiums for the Reds and Bengals and all the attendant bars and restaurants to serve their devoted adherents. It now has a beautiful walking path along the river and lots of green park space for all to enjoy.
More banks and insurance companies have added to the skyline’s nighttime luminescence. Downtown now has lots of brew pubs, and restaurants creating a downtown nightlife missing in our far distant youth, where we went to Mount Adams, Mount Lookout or Clifton for merriment, libations, and dancing.
The old Union Station has been refurbished into a collection of museums on the city’s history. I remembered taking the train east to New York and then on to school; it was then a busy and bustling terminal and now services only a single passenger train between New York and Chicago, only three times a week. There should be a strong regional train system between Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus, maybe Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, and Louisville as well.
The city itself has lost population shrinking from over 500,000 when I was growing up to about 350,000 today. The traffic is less; the overcrowding is less, and there is much more open green space. The air is cleaner and clearer; It has become a much more livable and attractive city. Metropolitan Cincinnati area has grown phenomenally; it grew from about 800,000, when I was growing up, to over 1.8 million today.
The big GM automotive plant in Norwood is gone, but the GE jet engine plant in Evandale survives. Cincinnati is no longer the heavy manufacturing city of my youth. Proctor and Gamble and Kroger appear to be the flourishing survivors. The other biggest employers are the University of Cincinnati and the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.
The thriving airport that I remember from my youth no longer has so many passenger flights or competing airlines. Delta had built a large and heavily trafficked regional hub there which has now been substantially downgraded due to Delta’s financial difficulties. We connected from the Bay Area through Salt Lake City just to get to Cinti. The Cincinnati airport (in Kentucky) has morphed into a fast-growing hub for cargo planes.
The Ohio River of my youth was dirty from industrial pollution and filled with barge traffic, multiple barges propelled and guided by one or two tugboats, coming down river from Pittsburgh, West Virginia, and Kentucky and then headed down to Saint Louis and New Orleans. It is now clean and attractive and used for pleasure boating. The great river highway system along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers is no more.
The University of Cincinnati was founded back in 1819. It was a mid-sized municipal university when I took summer classes there in the mid 60’s; it has now become a huge state institution of higher education, second only in size to Ohio State; its enrollment has grown enormously to over 44,000 students. I remember relishing our little hometown Cincinnati Bearcats beating OSU’s Buckeyes of the John Havlicek and Jerry Lucas, Bobby Knight and Larry Siegfried era for the NCAA championships in the early 60’s.
Our family had moved from New Orleans to Cincinnati in the mid 1840’s. The reunion discussed the roles of our ancestors as slaves, slaveowners and mixed-race free people of color in deciding to leave New Orleans and seek opportunity, safety, and security upriver. There were family drama and inheritance issues from a patriarch that may have impelled their exodus. In Cincinnati, they discarded their mixed-race status, their religious identities, and melded successfully within one generation into the social and business worlds of a fast growing, prosperous, and progressive Cincinnati.
Several of my cousins and their children and grandchildren still live in Cincinnati. Most, however, have moved all over the nation and indeed all over the globe from Southern Africa to South America, from Israel to Norway. When I was young, our grandparents’ house, the Hermitage, was the haven and happy space for all of us to gather and celebrate. After it was torn down in the mid 60’s, there was no center to serve as the safehold for the family. And their children headed off on their own diasporas to Vancouver, Toronto, Denver, Geneva and Tucson. Only the John and Ros Wulsins and Bill and Peggy Kites stayed in our ancestral city.
Speaking personally, I never wanted to live there, it seemed too hidebound, tradition-bound, and too much was expected of me to stay within and carry on the family heritage. I found my new homes and friendships, my personal freedoms, the opportunities for personal and professional growth, and immersion in the vitally needed social changes, first in Boston and then in California.
I drove past our old homes in Walnut Hills, Hyde Park, and Indian Hill with my nephew, remembering the neighbors, friendships, and families. So little has changed in these old neighborhoods, other than less population density and less traffic congestion. We lived in a neighborhood with some families of up to 10-12 kids which dwarfed our own fearsome, foursome.
The Hermitage of my youth was the place where my grandfather worked in his woodworking workshop in the basement on the weekends and after work, where the furnace had to be fed with coal, where fresh vegetables grew, the chickens laid eggs and fruit trees grew, where mules pulled the mowing and raking and hay bailing machines, where we learned to ride horses and get back on after being thrown off, where we hand pumped water from the well, where my grandmother reigned as benevolent and nurturing, wise and understanding, where the attic contained all things of young boys’ delights left over from our parents youth. It was a refuge. It was the center of our youth, where untold magic unfolded on Christmas eve. Now it’s a luxury apartment complex.
I stayed one night with an old Legal Services pal and enjoyed their end of summer pool party with the neighbors. I asked a number of these people who I didn’t know what they liked so much and appreciated about my old hometown. They loved the sense of livable community, the affordable housing, the job opportunities, the revitalized downtown, an excellent and accessible free public education at Walnut Hills for their kids. They were highly enthusiastic about the new electric vehicle and new chip manufacturing sites being planned for the state and what that would do for the state and nation’s economic development. We were in a neighborhood called Paddock Hills that I remember as a home of one of my elementary school classmates where we hiked and explored.
My cousin and I met at the Guyer Center where he was researching ancient history documents about our family. We drove up to Price Hill for lunch with a view over the whole city and Ohio River Valley. It was a special place that we had never visited. I do remember one of my Walnut Hills classmates lived up there.
On arriving, I went in search of the Underground Railway Museum. Overlooking the Riverfront and the historic Roebling Suspension Bridge which links downtown Cincinnati to Covington Ky. and located equidistant between the two stadiums is the National Underground Railway Freedom Center, which details Cincinnati’s critical role for escaping slaves on their trail to freedom. It was an important center for abolitionist thought and anti-slavery activism and just across the river from Kentucky, then a slave state. It is the most important reminder of Cincinnati and Ohio’s crucial roles in the lead up, the fighting, the national leadership, Reconstruction, and the aftermath of the Civil War. Three of our ancestors fought in the Ohio regiments and one of them died at the notorious Andersonville prison camp. One of our cousins reports that our great grandfather’s history of the Ohio Calvary regiment in which he served is now important primary source material on the battles in Tennessee.