My house on Cutter Street in the West End is 1.3 miles from my place of work on Walnut Street, around the corner from Fountain Square.  1.3 miles is precisely .4 miles longer than I would have chosen for my commute.  It takes 23 to 24.5 minutes to walk to work or, more important, home for lunch where I like to indulge in a tuna sandwich and take a five minute nap on the sofa.  When I walk home on the lunch hour, I have to bolt that tuna and forget about the nap. I could, I suppose, step up the pace, or take a route that does not go past Gus Miller’s hat shop, where I am often distracted by the possibilities Gus offers those of us who have been ordered by the dermatologist to stay covered.  So, if I walk, I have to shell out for lunch in town.  (One reader of a local blog whined about the lack of cheap lunches downtown.  Other commenters piled on quickly.  They’re all over the place.  Nice the way the blogosphere self corrects.)  I have my choice of three bus routes, but by the time you’ve shelled out three bucks for a round trip, you might as well have bought the six inch tuna at Subway.  So I have a brace of commuting solutions, the motor scooter and the bike.  The motor scooter takes eight minutes, but messes with my carbon footprint which I’m trying to keep down to a 9D.  The bike takes ten minutes, but I get screamed at by local drivers who seem to believe bicycles are demonic.  It’s always something.

I’m curious.  Are you reading this on your BlackBerry while stuck in the traffic coming in from West Chester on the Mill Creek “Expressway” or are you waiting for the tow trucks to pull the jackknifed semi-trailer from the Cut In The Hill?  

I live in a social experiment.  My home is a three story townhouse built where Lincoln Court, the southernmost of the nineteen-forties housing projects that once flanked Ezzard Charles Drive, which was once Lincoln Park Drive, about halfway between Music Hall and Union Terminal, which stands on what was once Lincoln Park, all of which was a stone’s throw from an Indian mound at Sixth and Mound Streets that was leveled in the city’s earliest days.  

The social experiment is to see whether replacing a concentration of low income renters in outmoded metropolitan housing with a mix of rental units and owner occupied houses and a mix of subsidized and unsubsidized citizens will be a good thing for the city.  

I didn’t have dreams of living in a social experiment.  After thirty years of rehabilitating old houses, I had dreams of living in a house with electrical outlets where I needed them to be and a garage with an automatic door.  I’ve lived in the social experiment for four years now, and I can tell you that being able to plug in the vacuum cleaner in the room it/s going to be used in is worth any amount of money.  As it happens, the price on the house was very good, there’s a pleasantly long tax abatement, the neighbors in my row are better dressed than I am, and my wife, who grew up in the suburbs and wasn’t keen to go back there, is happy.  So my particular experiment is working.

I still get a kick setting out on foot for the opera from a front door that’s just a couple of blocks away from where I used to park on the street in order to beat the rapacious fees charged by the Music Hall garage.
From time to time, people whose ideas of city life are formed by breathless local newscasters ask if it isn’t dangerous here.  I don’t know whether to tell them that the most menacing aspect seems to be the surprisingly large population of fairly aggressive crows that hang around the neighborhood.

Years ago, fresh out of school, full of energy and bent on carving out a life, my wife and I joined close friends in a hunt for property in town that we could afford to fix up and live in. We wanted something close to the center city, something with a little character, the antithesis of the suburban dream.

What can I say?  The sixties had just happened.  

We drove through nineteenth century street after nineteenth century street in the neighborhoods surrounding downtown.  To our disappointment, Mt. Adams, the obvious choice was already too wonderful and way too expensive for beginners.  As it happened, the combination of right house and right price in 1972 turned out to be in the triangle of streets at the eastern end of Over-the-Rhine, so it was there that we started tearing out the tons of linoleum, carpeting, venetian blinds, and, in one case, a basement full of tires that had accumulated in the checkered lives of our houses.  It was and is a great neighborhood.  Our children were born there and we still have friends on the old block.

But I never forgot our first look at the West End, which had its own flavor and history, an unbeatable location a walk away from Fountain Square, and a beauty that the wise Enquirer artist Caroline Williams turned to time and again in her superb line drawings.  So when, after many years and several moves, the chance came up to buy into the West End, we did it.

We are, from time to time, congratulated for what some people seem to think moving to the West End was a bold act.  There was nothing bold about it.  It was the right place at the right time in a city that is, at long last, appearing to have its own right time.

A few years ago the Powers That Be, faced with impossible expense and nearly insurmountable technical difficulties, backed off of a plan to make Cincinnati’s convention center roughly the size of the airport in order to compete with Chicago’s McCormick Place and other enormous convention centers.  The fallback position was to make the place a little bit bigger and a lot better.  The catchword was Best In Class.  

That was smart.  The changes are good, and business seems to be coming back.  It’s an intelligently planned and well executed convention center, and I think Duke Energy got a great deal.

Best In Class seems to be where we’re headed with the city, and that’s even better. There were years when the planners and fixers seemed to be perpetually apologetic for Cincinnati’s not being New York.  They never seemed to grasp that Florence doesn’t apologize for not being Milan, that Oxford has no desire to be London, or that Denver is perfectly fine with being Denver rather than Seattle.  

A different mentality seems to be in place now, and it shows.  The moves the city has made in recent years, the moves the city is making now seem no longer to have as their raison d’etre to be the next Jacksonville or Charlotte or even, God help us, Indianapolis, but to be the best Cincinnati.  There appears at last to be an understanding in the right places that the intellectual wealth here is at a level with the great physical beauty of our city, that we can make adult decisions with the involvement of people from every reach of the metropolis, and that the past is the past.

It will be good to be best. 


Editor's Note:  Don't forget to check back tomorrow to read Albert's views on urban living.