From Vacant to Vibrant: Cincinnati’s Urban Transformation

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http://www.governing.com/topics/urba...formation.html

From Vacant to Vibrant: Cincinnati’s Urban Transformation

How a lot of money and a little luck brought one of the nation’s most dangerous neighborhoods back to life.

by Alan Greenblatt | September 2014



People going to the symphony in Cincinnati used to feel like they were taking their lives into their own hands. The massive Music Hall sits across from Washington Park, which until recently was best known as a good place to score and shoot up heroin. Police would sometimes station themselves every 25 feet along Elm Street after concerts to prevent music lovers from having to go from hearing Mahler to being mugged.

The scene is completely different these days. Students from a neighboring arts high school were hanging out on the steps of the park’s bandshell on a recent Thursday afternoon, while city workers set up tables and tents for the weekly “yappy hour” for dogs. Younger kids performed cartwheels or raced down slides on playground equipment made to look like medieval fortresses. “I was there one night with my mother and mother-in-law and thinking to myself that as recently as four years ago, neither one of them would be caught dead in that park, let alone at 10 o’clock at night,” says local attorney Eric Cross.

Washington Park has undergone an $8 million renovation, but that represents a minor facelift compared to what’s been going on in the rest of the neighborhood. Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine section, which lies directly north of the city’s downtown, has seen a half-billion dollars’ worth of investment over the past decade, resulting in one of the most remarkable urban transformations of recent times.

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[Austinlee]

Over-the-rhine has gone from ashy to classy!