AN URBAN REVIVAL
BREWS IN THE HEARTLAND
Executive summry By Hilarius
D.G from national geography magazine,
original words by Andrew Nelson
THE subterranean
dank, which no sun has ever warmed, smells like yeast. Its chilly air pinches
my neck. A weak light coming from the opening above makes a pool around the
ladder I’ve climbed down, but beyond is pitch black. I tap a flashlight app on
my phone, and a vaulted ceiling flickers into view. Is it a Maya temple? An
Egyptian tomb? No. I’m in a 19th-century lagering tunnel 45 feet
beneath the sidewalks of Cincinnati, Ohio. Victorian breweries fermented and
cooled beer in this catacomb. Located in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, the
chambers were reopened by American Legacy Tours, a bunch of local guys who like
nothing better than to poke into the city’s dusty history. And talk beer.
“We had more than 36 breweries in Cincinnati at one time,”
my guide, Brad Hill, tells me. “A hatchet-toting Carry nation barreled into
town [in 1901] to stop the depravity. She took one look at the tippling-more
than 140 saloons on Vine Street-and turned tail and fled,” he says.
“Prohibition closed them, and the tunnels were forgotten.” I feel like Harrison
Ford discovering the Lost Temple of Suds.
Indy meets Cincy. Actually, here it’s all about “the
indies.” As much of America decamped for the suburbs or the coasts, artists,
craftspeople, and entrepreneurs rebuilt entire Cincinnati neighborhoods
alongside impassioned longtime. When I began hearing about it down in my own
adopted renaissance town, New Orleans, I had to see the transformation for
myself.
AS SIP BOURBON
with a few such pioneers at Japp’s , a former wig store on Main Street, the
discussion rangers from the where about of Pappy Van Winkle, the famously
elusive bourbon from neighboring Kentucky, to the details of the incongruous
bar in front of us, made from cabinets that once housed hair destined to crown
the heads of robber baron heiresses.
“What’s changed? Whcy Cincy now?” I ask
“A shift in consciousness,” suggest Peggy Shannon, a former
New Yorker. Her start-up, Queen City Cookies, provides a coveted treat for
locals as well as a taste of the city’s new prospects. “I’ve lived in a lot of
high-energy places, and here the excitement’s beginning to percolate.”
I watch her spout enthusiasm for her new home, and
Cincinnati strikes me as a drum major for a parade of heartland towns-from
Milwaukee to Indianapolis-now marching to a different beat. Their heritage
(rich) and their living costs (relatively cheap) have attracted interest,
especially from millennials saddled with job expectation (lower) and college
debt (higher). But Cincinnati stands out. Shannon thinks she know why.
“We offer world-class art, extraordinary architecture, and a
get-things-done attitude,” she says. “Cincinnati’s reputation has gone from
musty to must-see.”
Certainly, one addition not to miss is 21c Museum Hotel, a
ten-story hostelry on Walnut Street. A landmark building that nuzzles Zaha
Hadid’s Contemporary Arts Center, 21c is packed wit hso much modern art guests
could be forgiven for thinking they were sleeping in the museum itself.
“We are a museum first and a hotel second,” says collection
manager Eli Meiners, who tours me around the first two floors, open 24/7 for
anyone off the street who wants to look at artists such as Do-Ho Suh and Astrid
Krogh. Installations, many by Cincinnatians, occupyevery guest floor and change
regularly. On mine, the elevator opens upon a life-size sculpture of the singer
Madonna heeling her go-go boot through a Picasso. My room is sleek-all
lines-except for a four-foot-tall polyurethane penguin as yellow as French’s
mustard. In the bathroom, hotel designers commissioned local Rookwood Pottery
to create a witty series of white tiles brandishing body parts-lips, noses,
breasts, belly buttons. I feel a little as if I’, part of the spectacle.
ON A STROLL ABOUT
TOWN, Cincinnati show more tricks up its sleeve. Downtown proves dense,
walkable, and handsome-filled with skyscrapers of many eras, from the marble
and terra-cotta PNC building, opened in 1913, to the postmodern assemblages of
the Proctor & Gamble headquarters. The National Underground Railroad
Freedom Center is here, a testament to the city’s crucial role in the Civil War
era. And then there’s the dazzling art deco Union Terminal, shaped like a band
shell, that was the city’s train station when it opened in 1933. It now acts as
a cultural roundhouse, with six institutions including the Museum, and the Duke
Energy Children’s Museum.
Stacked like library books on an arc of hills, 19th-century
town houses form neighborhoods such as Mount Adams, Mount Auburn, and
Over-the-Rhine. Walking down to the Ohio River, I find myself at the city’s
newest attraction: 45-acre Smale Riverfront Park, squeezed between the Reds and
Bengals stadiums. It’s pats of the gazillion-dollar effort, called “the Banks,”
to reinvent Cincy’s neglected waterfront.
Nick Dewald is waiting for me at Moerlein Lager House, a
modern beer hall and garden across the street from the park. In their free time
Nick and his wife, Lindsay, head up City Flea, a curated market that functions
as an analog Etsy-bringing a hundred of the city’s makers together with buyers
every month. After lunch we go to the park, admiring the fountains and fresh
plantings. We rocks on metal swings as park benches, facing the river and the
blue Roebling suspension bridge, the proof of concept for its more famous
progeny, the Brooklyn Bridge. I’m sitting on Ohio’s front porch.
“Our historic industries were about making things, and
that’s returning,” Dewald explains, citing Losantiville, a group of industrial
and furniture designers taking inspiration from Cincinnati’s old traditions of
wood carving and manufacturing. “And there’s beer!” he adds.
In addition to the rebirth of craft beer like that of Bavarian
brew-master Christian Moerlein, Dewald tells me, there’s a host of new
labels-Mount Carmel, Rivertown, and Rhinegeist, anupstart in the brewery
district north of downtown.
“You have to check it out,” he says. So I do.
Like so much of this industrial town, the brewery district
is filled with mechanical trappings from an earlier time. Pulleys and joists.
Brick warehouse. Wood beams. Glazed tile. In Cincy, things whir, creak, and
trundle. They don’t swoosh or ping. As workmen jackhammer some concrete,
Rhinegeist owner Bryant Goulding greets me. He shows me where the tasting room
is being readied in a cavernous space with skylights.
“There’s no way this could happen in California-it’s too
expensive,” says the former San Franciscan, who moved here to open Rhinegeist.
“But Cincinnati makes dreams come true.”
I wish him luck and return downtown, trading industry for
glamour-the Netherladn Plaza hotel, now a Hilton, in the 49-story Carew Tower.
Wandering across the slick marble of the lobby, I nearby break my neck taking
in the French art deco: foliated bronze light fixtures, a ram’s head fountain,
and gilded ceiling murals of leaping gazelles and bow-lipped shepherdesses.
It’s a concrete sonnet to the jazz age and the best inspiration for a gin
martini since Jay Gatsby.
Later I join throngs of people gathered at Fountain Square
in front of the “Genius of Water,” a nine-foot-tall goddess who crowns the 1871
Tyler Davidson fountain. As night falls she becomes the muse to a rock band in
the plaza, electric guitars drowning out the plash of falling water. Everyone
lingers as if not wanting the music to end.
“Used to be downtown closed at 8 p.m.,” says the Rev.
Herschel Willis, a few blocks away at Piatt Park. The smoker at his Fins,
Feathers and Bar-B-Q restaurant is sending plumes of tangy woodsmoke curling
past the bronzed pate of Ohio son President James A. Garfield. “Now that’s time
the movers and shakers come out.”
Nowhere is the clamber upward more evident than in
Over-the-Rhine, a formerly down-on-its-luck neighborhood about the size of New
Orleans’ French Quarter, believed to contain the country’s largest collection
of 19th-century Italianate buildings-943.
“Over-the-Rhine was home to thousands of German immigrants
who came to the boomtown of Cincinnati in the early 19th century,”
explains real estate agent Seth Maney, who writes as blog called OTR Matters.
I’m munching on a rather un-Teutonic meal of pork buns and octopus salad with
Maney and others at Kaze, a Japanese restaurants on Vine Street. Nearby are
intriguing shops like Switch, a lighting store, and Article, a men’s shop that
hawks small-batch Noble Denim jeans made in Cincinnati.
“They brought their taste for hard work, architecture, and
craftsmanship,” Maney continues, “but somehow we forgot OTR and its lessons.
Its name tarnished.”
Perhaps tenacity saved Over-the-Rhine. Even as scars from
race riots in 2001 were slow to heal, some residents stayed put. The old German
community refused to abandon its heritage-in fact, priest still conduct a
weekly Mass in German at Old St. Mary’s Catholic Church. And now, finally,
residents and newcomers like Maney and his friends seem to be staging a revival.
a weekly Mass in German at Old St. Mary’s Catholic Church.
And now, finally, residents and newcomers like Maney and his friends seem to be
staging a revival.
I HAD HEARD SIMILAR optimism
expressed earlier at Senate, another OTR restaurant. “Two and a hald years ago
it was scary to come down Vine Street,” Patrick Stroupe had told me over the
rattle of his cocktail shaker mixing a drink. “Now it’s a amazing assortment of
restaurants and stores, with more on the way. This is town full of good ideas.”
Many of those come from the Cincinnati Center City
Development Corporation, known locally as 3CDC and the source of some $300
million of public and private investments in the neighborhood. The favorite
project so far, most everyone agrees, is the remake of Washington Park, an
eight-acre green space. The morning I visit, retirees Robert and Glenise
Maxwell are basking in the sun on a bench facing the redone tile-roofed
bandstand where German oompah bands used to play and, more recently, heroin
deals went down.
“That’s over now,” says Robert as he pushes back his red
baseball cap to scratch his gray hair. The couple, married for 48 years, are
longtime residents who have seen their neighborhood down and now see it up.
Children run past, screaming with delight as hidden jets of water spurt to life
beneath their feet.
The Music Hall, a vast castle of bricks and turrets, fronts
its northwest side like a curtain waiting to rise on the community’s second
act. “It was built with nearly four million bricks,” says architect Haviland
Argo, as we eat alfresco at the Anchor, on the park’s periphery. “Inside, the
Springer Auditorium has some of the world’s best acoustics for a musical
setting, though maybe the most interesting noises come from the ghosts
purported to haunt the place. The land it stands on was once a cemetery.”
I’m pleased to devour the gossip-and my trout. This city has
always enjoyed its food: Famous for their chili (beans optional), Cincinnati
spoon down two million pounds of it annually, including 850,000 pounds of
shredded cheese. Downtown, a beehive-topped waitress at Hathaway’s Dinner sets
made up with an order of eggs and goetta (a
kind of scrapple). At top-rated restaurants such as Boca, Abigail Street, and
Local 127 on Vine, chefs draw on deep traditions while kicking things up a
notch. Local 127 pays tribute to the city’s 19th-century reign as a
pork-packing center: The “Porkopolis” plate heaps with ribs and sausage, and
ode to the whole hog as well as an old city nickname.
THIS TOWN GAVE
America iconic brands such as Tide and Ivory soap, so it seems a fitting home for the American Sign
Museum, a 1907 factory building in Camp Washington with 600-plus signs.
A 20-foot-tall genie straddles the entrance. Inside, it’s a
flashing, buzzing, amping display of lettering exploding in neon and wattage. A
McDonald’s sign blinks from the era of 15-cent burgers. A revolving satellite
from Anaheim, California, orbits yellow neon Howard Johnson’s and a glowing
rostr of other motel names. The museum even has its own “Mona Lisa”-a wall-size
housewife pushing Bubble Up soda-as well as a time line of the history of 3-D
lettering.
In find another sign of the times when I turn a corner. In
front of a wall of barn timber advertising Mail Puch Tobacco, men and women sit
in pairs as if speed dating .small-shop owners from the Northside neighborhood
are networking with graphic designers and sign fabricators. They’re looking to
create public faces for their enterprises that will be colorful and practical
while reflecting the free-spirited community, from Take the Cake bakery to
Shake it Records.
“We want to train the next generation of sing makers,” says
museum founder Tod Swormstedt. “And help [the Northside] in the process.
LATE THAT EVENING,
I’m back in Over-the-Rhine when I encounter a knot of people in a parking lot.
There’s an sudden puff of flame. Startled, I draw back. Is it the circus?
“Night Owl Market, bro,” says a happy, if overly lubricated, young man.
Twenty something friends Sally Yoon and Nadia Laabs started
this conglomeration of food trucks and artisan booths on Main Street. Not far
from Findlay Market, Ohio’s oldest-running produce hall (it opened in 1855),
the event is held monthly from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. and harnesses the energy of a
rising downtown. Merrymakers come on foot and bike.
Tonight a cluster of revelers are dancing to a meringue
band, while others are trying to swivel hoops around their hips.
After the past few days of having my assumptions confounded,
midnight hula-hoopers and fire twirlers scarcely faze me. As I watch the
mirthful crowd, anything seems possible. A microbrewery. An art hotel. A
restored neighborhood. For now, I think I’ll give the hula hoop w whirl.
