Working overtime to keep alive the weird soul of the Queen City. [Greg Hand, Proprietor, handeaux/gmail]
For a few years before 1920, a Cincinnati neighborhood served as a laboratory to reimagine democracy. By all accounts, the experiment succeeded admirably, until Cincinnati’s mayor launched a smear campaign. The experiment grew out of concerns that America’s cities were growing so large that really important, vital needs were overlooked and often ignored. This was especially true regarding the…
Rodney Forest Ludlow was among the richest young men in Springfield, Ohio, in 1888. His father owned an iron foundry and arranged lucrative positions for each of his sons. Rodney, or “R.F.” as he preferred, was 35, married with four children and socially connected. Rodney visited Cincinnati regularly. Perhaps business brought him to the Queen City, but Bertha Wilson certainly had something to do…
Toward the end of 1951, a customer walked into the East Hills Plating Company in Bellevue, Kentucky, with a box full of old silver items for repair, replating and sale. Among the assorted objects, proprietor George Grainger spotted an impressive and substantial trophy cup of solid silver. It was engraved for presentation to one Emmet P. Gray by the Cincinnati Automobile Club. Mr. Grainger…
Casimir Werk, grandson of the millionaire soap maker and vintner for whom Werk Road is named, saw a UFO one balmy Sunday evening in 1905. The unidentified flying object was soon revealed as an identified flying object but yielded an even bigger mystery. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer [28 August 1905] Werk watched an unidentified object he believed might be an airship explode while it flew…
Throughout the summer and autumn of 1897, H.G. Wells published his ground-breaking science-fiction novel, “War of the Worlds,” in serial form, over several issues of Cosmopolitan magazine. Simultaneously, the United States reported hundreds of UFO sightings, with dozens of witnesses in Cincinnati alone. Coincidence? They didn’t call the mysterious aerial objects UFOs in those days, of course. They…
Exactly how many Belles of Tusculum were there? Tusculum, of course, is the verdant hilltop overlooking the old town of Columbia in the eastern reaches of Cincinnati. At least two women acquired the title of “Belle of Tusculum” and it’s possible that a third beauty lurks in the annals of time. We shall start with Anna Rebecca “Reba” Harcourt Long Elliott, born in 1875 to Sarah Ann Greenwald…
Way atop Mount Tusculum, there are some streets that remind us this marvelous hill was once a vineyard. The streets named Chardonnay Ridge, Riesling Knoll, and Catawba Valley are fairly redolent of the vine. Curiously, those obvious streets may have less connection to that old vineyard than three nearby streets, namely Delaware Ridge, Creveling and Elsinboro, and therein lies a tale. The…
The pillars of Cincinnati society shook in 1910 as two very wealthy and very much respected women tussled over a man neither had ever met. The man in question was Abraham Lincoln, and he had been dead for 45 years. It was Eleanora Alms, or, as she was called in those days, Mrs. Frederick H. Alms, who first stirred the kerfuffle. Eleanora Cors Unzicker Alms was born in 1846 to Joseph and Margaret…
Among the most commonly viewed images of old Cincinnati is the so-called “Wienerwurst” photograph. Reproduced in almost every book on Cincinnati history, the image portrays a sidewalk full of men standing near a couple of saloons and a tobacco shop. Prominent in the center of the image is a big sign offering “A Wienerwurst With Each Drink.” This image is occasionally misidentified as portraying…
At nighttime, Cincinnati shines like a jewel these days, with lights and lamps of all sorts. A panoply of neon, incandescent, LED, and fluorescent sources spray photons in a dazzling array. Electricity, however, has only dominated the past century or so of our city’s history. Before 1900, when Cincinnati’s nightlife was legendary, every single source of illumination involved some sort of flame. It…
Throughout our city’s long history, interest in croquet has ebbed and surged, sometimes in cycles briefer than a decade. One year, the Enquirer [19 September 1895] dismissed croquet as horridly passé: “Only a bold man would dare to be known nowadays as the croquet champion. Proficiency in that sport has come to be rated by the vulgar in the same class of accomplishments as superior skill in…
It was seasonably cold, with temperatures hanging in the 20s, as thousands of spectators poured into Cincinnati’s Exposition Hall on Monday morning, 14 February 1876. Once inside, the crowd packed into the stands to watch five days of … walking. Yes, walking. For a couple of decades in the Nineteenth Century, walking was a major spectator sport, attracting huge crowds and, this being the…
In 1901, Cincinnati City Engineer Louis Gustave Frederick Bouscaren appeared before the Water Works Board with a rather expensive request. Bouscaren asked the Board to approve a $500,000 brick cover for the Eden Park reservoir. That immense artificial lake, covering 13 acres and more than 30 feet deep, held 100 million gallons of water, divided into two basins. Exposed to sunlight, the reservoir…
The City of Cincinnati, encouraged by all the major dental associations, first considered adding fluoride compounds to the water supply to reduce tooth decay especially among children in 1952. Although equipment for this purpose was installed, fluoridation was cancelled at the polls in 1953. [ Read Part One here. ] Fluoridation reemerged as a question in 1960, pushed toward another vote by the…
There was a big anniversary at the Greater Cincinnati Water Works this year, but it does not appear that anyone celebrated the occasion. Fifty years ago, on March 15, 1976, after more than 25 years of controversy, the million-plus customers of the Greater Cincinnati Water Works first began drinking fluoridated water. Perhaps the Water Works simply forgot this golden anniversary. More likely, it…
They don’t call them UFOs anymore. Those mysterious things zipping around up there are now known as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, no longer Unidentified Flying Objects. That’s okay. Back in the 1940s and early 1950s, before we settled on UFO as the official acronym, we called them flying saucers, even though many sightings involved shapes not commonly found in the china closet. The really big…
It is possible that Ohio voters may be asked this year to vote on eliminating property taxes. Ironically, a little more than a century ago, there was a nationwide movement to do the exact opposite – remove all taxes except for property taxes. The national headquarters for this Single Tax League were right here in Cincinnati. The Single Tax League was an outgrowth of the writings of Henry George,…
As a child, did you hop around on a pogo stick? Would you believe that Cincinnati was introduced to pogo sticks in 1922 by a New York showgirl? It’s true. The showgirl in question was a Cincinnatian named Marjorie Whittington, who lived with her family at 942 Morris Street just off the northern edge of Eden Park. Marjorie’s father, John Whittington, was a carpenter and Marjorie worked downtown as…
On 27 September 1929, the Cincinnati Post ran a photograph of a comely young flapper staring at a yo-yo, accompanied by a drawing of the toy in action. Under the headline, “It’s A Yo-Yo,” the newspaper explained: “Latest fad sweeping the country, one known in the Philippines for generations, is the yo-yo. A yo-yo is a weighted disc-like spool, with a string wound around its axle. To ‘yo,’ one…
So, you might suffer under the delusion you have attended some wild parties in your life. Really? Have any of those wingdings ever made the front page of the newspaper? For three weeks of coverage? Did any of your social events ever require a statement from the archbishop? Or threaten to upset the mayoral election? No? I thought not. Meet Moses Goldsmith. He was born into poverty. His parents were…