Old Addresses

In the 1890s the street numbering system in Cincinnati was changed. An ordinance was passed in 1891, but the implementation seems to have taken at least half of the decade. In the old method, addresses started at 1 on a street and just went up one number at a time, one for each building. In 1891 Council passed a resolution requiring that each lot or each 25 feet be designated a number, and that the numbering start at even 100s at each cross street. In the photo below, you can see that 1424 Republic Street was once 110 Republic Street. ...Except back then it was Bremen Street, but you get the idea:

1895 addresses on Bremen Street

By 1900 the addresses were much simpler:

Renumbering of the City notice in the 1895 Directory (click to enlarge if you want to read):

Cincy History Preservation Project

A guest post today:

Bringing the West End Into the Digital Age:
Cincinnati History Preservation Project

The urban landscape of Cincinnati would be very different without Union Terminal and the railroads – especially Over-the-Rhine and the West End. Construction of Cincinnati Union Terminal wasn’t confined to the building itself, or even the rail yard and its buildings – the project encompassed sites from the Western Hills Viaduct all the way down to the river.

For a long time, Union Terminal was the ‘front door’ to the city: walk out into the sunlight, and you’re looking right at downtown. That’s a world of difference from the airport, which drops you off in suburbia (and could be AnyCity, USA).

Anyone who’s familiar at all with Cincinnati (and Cincinnatians) knows that people just don’t leave, or if they do, they almost always come back! So, the history of Cincinnati Union Terminal – and the development of the city as a result – is really a family history. It’s our grandparents and great-grandparents who worked on building and running Union Terminal. It was our relatives who were trackside at the Concourse in its heyday during and after WWII.

The Cincinnati Railroad Club has been there almost since the beginning, and has amassed a collection of over 70,000 artifacts. The collection encompasses more than rail history; it touches on Americana, architectural, military, sports and Cincinnati history. Like any private collection, the general public hasn’t seen most of it – and much of it is currently inaccessible.

We have begun work on the largest endeavor since the Club was founded – the Cincinnati History Preservation Project, which will accomplish two major goals: conserve and protect these valuable objects for future Cincinnatians, and digitize the collection so that it will be available to anyone with online access.

We’re at a crossroads of history and technology – the Club members’ first-hand experience with the artifacts and railroading, paired with the ability to geo-tag photos, use facial recognition, sort by shape and/or color, and so on, will give users the opportunity to interact with this collection on a very personal level.

That means Cincinnatians will be able to search for their family ties within the collection – whether it be related to the construction of the building or operation of the railroad, a military sendoff or reunion, taking the train to visit loved ones or even seeing a family home in the background of a construction photo.

Historically, Cincinnati has gone through numerous phases of growth in the routes and transportation that join the East Side and West Side with downtown, Northern Kentucky and beyond. What started as deer, Indian, and wagon trails later evolved into our railroads and highways.

Connecting with the past through the collection can be a valuable exercise in planning for the future - lessons learned from past initiatives to integrate streetcars and mass transit can be applied to current planning. This collection can serve as a rich resource for city planners and transit engineers who are working to shape the future of Cincinnati’s urban landscape.

As this diverse collection gets catalogued and scanned, we will be able to connect to other historic collections - libraries, colleges, genealogy Web sites, historical societies and more.

In order to keep this project moving forward, we need your help - donations, volunteers, your memories and most importantly, your feedback on the project site. We encourage you to visit www.savecincyhistory.com to browse, search and discuss – please let us know: what does saving Cincinnati history mean to you?

Here is a sample from the archives, showing construction of the Western Hills Viaduct, 1931:
 

Contact information:

Patrick Rose
Director of Special Projects
Cincinnati Railroad Club, Inc.
PO Box 14157
Cincinnati, Ohio 45250-0157
www.cincinnatirrclub.com

28th District School

I was thankful for this comment on a recent post:
"You were correct about the large institutional building at the Klotter Park. It was the location for the old 28th District School.Built in 1880 with an addition in 1887. There is a book "A History Of The Schools Of Cincinnati" by John Brough Shotwell.Look it up on Google books. It has a pic on pg 308. It was on Browne St.(guess it was a street back then,not an alley) west of Baymiller."

So I looked up the book, and for the public record here is the sketch and description:

18 rooms x 55 pupils each = 990 students!

And here is a Sanborn Map showing the School:

Archeological Digging

at Washington Park, where the playground was just removed:
 

I have no idea if they have found anything of interest.

WH Taft Museum

We recently visited the Taft Home on Auburn Avenue, the only National Park site in the City limits as far as I know. It was educational, and the kids got a kick out of it. It is great to have these kinds of cultural attractions right next door.

Remembering our righteous rebellion

Carolina Parakeet

 

On the third floor of the Downtown Public Library, there is a room, I think it is called the Cincinnati Room. It is on the bridge over Ninth Street. We rarely make it up to the third floor, but when we do, we are often rewarded with an excellent exhibit of some sort.

On permanent display in that room, there is a very large Audubon book of birds. It is in a glass case, and is opened to this beautiful page of the Carolina Parakeet. This now extinct species was found in very great numbers in the Millcreek valley by early white farmers in Cincinnati. James Audubon describes their slaughter:

..the Parakeets are destroyed in great numbers, for whilst busily engaged in plucking off the fruits or tearing the grain from the stacks, the husbandman approaches them with perfect ease, and commits great slaughter among them. All the survivors rise, shriek, fly round about for a few minutes, and again alight on the very place of most imminent danger. The gun is kept at work; eight or ten, or even twenty, are killed at every discharge. The living birds, as if conscious of the death of their companions, sweep over their bodies, screaming as loud as ever, but still return to the stack to be shot at, until so few remain alive, that the farmer does not consider it worth his while to spend more of his ammunition. I have seen several hundreds destroyed in this manner in the course of a few hours, and have procured a basketful of these birds at a few shots, in order to make choice of good specimens for drawing the figures by which this species is represented in the plate now under your consideration.

Can you imagine the Millcreek river in it's natural state, surrounded fertile floodplains and the ancient forest thick with these colorful birds?

The Way We Were

Here was a great find. The grandson of photographer Nelson Ronsheim revisited a dozen of his grandfather's pictures taken between 1939 and 1941 and replicated the shots. He has put the set of pictures up in a Flickr set called 70 Years Later. Thanks to drew-o-rama at design cincinnati for the heads up.

Here is one sample taken on Eggleston:


I spent quite a bit of time last night wandering through some of the other sets. He has 94 shots in his Nelson Ronsheim - Favorites set, there is a Planes and Trains set, some pictures from the Cincinnati Flood of 1937, and also a set of Nelson Ronsheim - other Cincinnati Photos.

It's a great collection of old (and new) pictures. Many of the pictures have some great background comments on the photos and locations.

Maps from 1904

This is a really cool find, thanks to @GeekJames on Twitter (who also tweets as @TakeTheCakeCafe). It is the two volume set Insurance Maps of Cincinnati, Ohio.

First off, I love the cover design. The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County offers both volumes in their Virtual Library. This was printed in 1904. But looks like it was updated through about 1930. They are very high-resolution scans, therefore each page is a separate PDF (2-4 MB in size). Both volumes have indexes, and it is easy to find the correct plate from those.

Here is plate 100 from Volume 2, which is a guide to volume 2:

I also loved the plate that had the old Fountain Square. You can also see the Albee Theatre and the Hotel Gibson. It is Volume 2, plate 115:
I forsee lots of time spent looking through these old maps. Be sure to check out the full-sized PDFs of these plates. I resisted the temptation to link directly to the PDFs, but you can find them easily starting at the link above.