A 1909 river valley view looking to the northeast from Mt. Echo Park high atop of Price Hill, one of Cincinnati's newest and largest suburbs at the beginning of the 20th century. Notice Downtown Cincinnati on the distant north bank of the Ohio River. It is completely obscured by smoke and haze, one of the reasons hilltop suburbs like Price Hill exploded in size.
The 1920 census made it official, the United States was an urban nation with more Americans living in cities than in rural America. However, even before the 1920’s a new trend was starting to unfold, a long slow march to the semi-rural edges of urban centers by people like Joe and Rose Sperber. In 1929 the Sperbers bought a brand new wood frame home in Westwood, near the small town of Cheviot. Like thousands of other Cincinnatians, the Sperbers were leaving behind a home in an older more densely packed neighborhood, in their case Lick Run, now known as South Fairmount, for the leafy hilltop neighborhood of Westwood.
THE NEW CITY
Westwood, once an independent village of upper middle class and wealthy families was annexed by the city of Cincinnati in 1896. It was one of many annexations by Cincinnati in response to its slowing growth during the post-Civil War years. From its birth in the 1790’s until the Civil War, Cincinnati consisted of the relatively compact six square miles that constituted the Downtown Basin along the Ohio River. Motivated by what seemed mediocre population growth after the war, the city’s leadership began to push for expansion as Chicago’s population surpassed it in the late 1860’s. Already smaller than St. Louis, Cincinnati’s leadership feared a loss in prestige and relevance as other Midwestern cities like Cleveland and Detroit exploded in size.
By 1870 Cincinnati’s leaders were calling for “ annexation of all outlying villages at once, stressing the inefficiency of having 11 mayors within a seven mile radius of the (Hamilton) county courthouse.”[i] Hence began an annexation spree that continued well into the 20th century, growing Cincinnati to 80 square miles.
This contour map of the area surrounding Cincinnati's Downtown Basin illustrates the hills surrounding the relatively flat basin. The steep hillsides of Price Hill, Fairview, Mt. Auburn, Mt. Adams, Walnut Hills, Westwood and Clifton limited the growth of Cincinnati until after the Civil War when a number of factors led to annexations and a steady migration to areas beyond the basin.
By the 1890’s a new city began to emerge, one with three distinct parts; the Downtown Basin, still the heart of Cincinnati, ringed by neighborhoods that were industrial-residential hybrids, surrounded by a second ring of neighborhoods that were almost purely residential that came to be known as suburbs.
Cincinnati neighborhoods by the 1930's
INDUSTRIALIZATION
Across the US urbanization was accompanied by a wave of industrialization that swept through places like Cincinnati’s West End, Camp Washington, South Fairmount and the Mill Creek Valley. While Cincinnati’s economy prospered as its industrial base expanded, it caused a corresponding drop in the quality of life across the basin and nearby neighborhoods. As early as 1874 the West End was described as “a quarter where the senses of smell are at once assailed with all the foulness of a charnel house,” noting it was a district filled with “mammoth slaughter houses, enormous rendering establishments, vast soap and candle factories, immense hog pens and gigantic tanneries,” all befitting of the city’s reputation as Porkopolis.
Porkopolis however, increasingly became a manufacturing center between the 1880’s and 1920’s with massive industrial plants at the center of its economy supported by a supply chain of hundreds of small businesses and a tangle of railroads producing machine tools, soap, consumer appliances and a wide range of other manufactured goods.
CONDITIONS IN THE BASIN
The new generation of massive factories made air pollution even worse. By the 1890’s things were so bad in America’s industrial cities that smoke abatement became a major crusade, including in Cincinnati. Members of a smoke abatement group noted they could not see most of downtown Cincinnati from Mt. Adams because it was obscured by smoke. One reformer wrote “Soot covered everything, indoors and out: drapes, furniture, clothing, walls, floors, and even children. It had an oily quality, which made it difficult to clean up, and an acidic quality, which made it corrosive on stone and metal surfaces. It was filthy. Merchants lost millions of dollars each year in spoiled goods; residents spent millions each year in extra cleaning bills.”[ii]
The Downtown Basin in the early 1930's
Air pollution was only one of many ills plaguing the Downtown Basin. Urban streams had essentially become open industrial sewers, with the largest , the Mill Creek, later designated as the most polluted waterway in America. [iii] By 1890 even the size of the Basin's population, which increased to 180,000, was a problem. Its population density, approaching 40,000 people per square mile, was stunning by any standard.[iv] Add to that, regular outbreaks of typhoid, floods and crime that accompanies high population density and you begin to understand why those that could afford to leave the Basin began to do so in the 1880’s.
THE STREET CAR SYSTEM & THE CREATION OF NEW SUBURBS
It was however, the development of new transportation infrastructure that made a migration to the suburbs possible and it could be argued, actually created the suburbs . By the 1920’s Cincinnati was a new city with sprawling suburbs that were largely bedroom communities along with a downtown core and nearby neighborhoods that powered the economic engine of an industrial economy.
It was all made possible by the appearance of street car systems in the 1880’s that were later consolidated into a single system of 222 miles of track connecting the outlying ( for that time) suburbs to the old city core, allowing people like Joe Sperber to commute seamlessly from home to work. By 1929 Sperber, an electrotype setter, could travel daily from his new home in Westwood to work in the West End, a round trip of almost 10 miles, an impossibility for a member of the working class a generation earlier. By the late 1920’s the automobile introduced by Henry Ford to the middle class in 1908 with the affordable Model -T added to the migration. With each passing decade a larger swath of Cincinnati’s population made similar work day commutes to industrial plants and the supporting workshops that ringed the city.
A 1911 street car map.
NEW INDUSTRY
The large industrial plants, largely located in neighborhoods close to the Basin had such large labor needs they were dependent on the street car system and later large scale automobile ownership. In the case of South Fairmount, formerly the home of the Sperbers, the eastern end of the community was dominated by the massive seven story Lukenheimer plant built in in 1899. Employing almost 2,000 workers, it manufactured valves and brass fittings for a worldwide market and far outstripped the labor force provided by South Fairmount alone. As the Lukenheimer plant grew, it needed access to labor across the Basin and the newly developing suburbs like Price Hill and Westwood.
INDUSTRIAL NEIGHBORHOODS
Lukenheimer was not alone. The new plants were massive as were their labor needs. From the 1880’s through the 1920’s new plants were built and continued to expand like Wright Aeronautical , later GE Jet Engine, that employed 48,000 people at peak employment in the late 1940's; Procter & Gamble’s Ivorydale plant 243 acres and employing 2,000; General Motors in Norwood employing 9,000; Cincinnati Milling Machine employing 8,500; the Crosley Corporation, maker of radios and other consumer electronics employing 3,000 and dozens of other manufacturers. The plants ringed downtown Cincinnati in neighborhoods that were as much industrial as residential: Camp Washington, St. Bernard , Lockland, Reading, Norwood Oakley and even tiny Addyston. [v] Filled with railyards, warehouses and machine shops supporting the sprawling factories these communities became the heart of the region’s economy . The industrial neighborhoods were also filled with homes- single family dwellings, boarding houses and tenements, woven in and around the factory buildings and railroad tracks. These were the homes of factory employees both skilled and unskilled, along with clerks and foremen who walked to the plants and home six days a week for their arduous 10 hour shifts.
The massive Ivorydale complex in the Mill Creek Valley, one the large industrial plants ringing Cincinnati.
SUBURBIA
As living conditions in the basin continued to decline, the emerging street car system and other infrastructure improvements made hilltop suburban homes a practical alternative for many. Places that had once been small, quiet, outlying villages and rural pastures were transformed into neighborhoods of residential streets over a 50 year period between 1880 and 1930. These neighborhoods were far more densely populated than anything that could be called rural but not nearly as dense as the Downtown Basin, while also lacking the commercial diversity and the street level vitality of a downtown city block. Satellites to Cincinnati, the suburbs generally were missing the commercial and industrial resources necessary to exist independently, becomming a commonplace feature of the American landscape.
INDEPENDENT VILLAGES & CITIES
Some of the small cities and village outside of Cincinnati’s formal boundaries stubbornly resisted annexation. Often these were endowed with a large manufacturing plant that meant jobs and a tax base that could provide the municipal services a modern community demanded. Cities like St. Bernard, Norwood, Lockland and Reading though surrounded by Cincinnati remained tightknit communities with the financial resources to maintain their independence to the present , even as industry disappeared. Other small villages and cities had no industry but still managed to remain independent like Wyoming and Glendale. Both were overwhelmingly made up of single family higher income homes and tied indirectly to the neighboring industrial communities of the Mill Creek Valley. Both were older farming communities that had transitioned to bedroom communities. With a heavy representation of large Victorian houses, some of which could be easily categorized as estates, both communtiies became home to the owners and managers of the industrial plants and businesses up and down the Mill Creek.
Close to Wyoming and Glendale was another tiny residential municipality, the village of Lincoln Heights. It dates back to 1923 when a Chicago based land company began selling lots to Africa-American families near the Wright Aeronautical plant at a time when practices like restrictive covenants and red lining made it difficult if not impossible for black families to buy homes in the new suburbs. Its population grew quickly but attempts at incorporation to provide municipal services were repeatedly derailed until 1947 when it formally became the village of Lincoln Heights. It was far smaller than originally planned, with land on which the Wright Aeronautical Plant sat excluded, depriving the village of a critical tax base.
PRICE HILL
Most of the hilltop communities bordering Cincinnati however, were annexed by the city. The city of Cincinnati could offer services and amenities at costs beyond the reach of most smaller communities; schools, police, fire protection, street lights and water among others. In the case of Price Hill most of which was annexed in 1870 two geographic barriers slowed population growth after annexation; steep hillsides and the Mill Creek which was regularly affected by flooding from the Ohio River and heavy rains that turned it into a raging torrent. A succession of bridges built over the Mill Creek throughout the 1800’s were destroyed by a litany of fires and floods until the present day Eighth St. Viaduct was finally completed in 1928. It was however, the building of a steam powered incline in 1874 to carry passengers and freight some 350 feet up steep hillsides along with the construction of street car lines that allowed Price Hill to grow into a sprawling bedroom community. Three street car lines , the 32 which wound its way up Elbron Avenue, the 33 running down W. Eighth to the western end of the neighborhood and the 36 that travelled Warsaw and Glenway Avenues played a huge role in the transformation of Price Hill into a thriving suburb of almost 75,000 residents by the 1940’s.
Many of its residents were of Irish and German descent, their families arriving in the first wave of immigrants to wash over the United States from the late 1840’s through the 1860s. A sizable percentage of these initially settled in the West End before moving to Price Hill which was seen as a solidly middle class suburb by 1930’s with a very strong Catholic influence seen in the form of numerous churches and educational institutions across the neighborhood.[vi] Eastern Price Hill was dominated by large brick and wood framed Victorian homes built on a landscape of peaks and valleys near the turn of the 20th century. However, a much wider diversity of homes was built in the western portion of Price Hill during a housing boom in the 1920’, much of it on rolling hills that had formerly been pastures and gardens.
Typical middle class suburban homes found in West Price by the early 1930's . This group of homes is located on Clanora Avenue off W. Eigth St.
WESTWOOD
Next door to Price Hill was another of the large early suburbs, Westwood. Formally incorporated in 1868, Westwood was a semi-rural community that could count among its early residents some of the city’s wealthy and powerful, among them Michael Werk Cincinnati’s first soap baron and James Gamble a son of one of Proctor & Gamble’s founders. It remained a sparsely populated wooded locality because of both geographic and man-made barriers – the Mill Creek and a tangle of dangerous rail lines beside it, along with the long, slow climb up Harrison Avenue, the gateway to Westwood. While these obstacles can be quickly dismissed today the combination of these barriers kept its population less than 900 according to the 1880 census, even after a narrow gauge rail road was built in the 1870’s to spur on its growth. In 1896 Westwood was part of another round of annexations by the city of Cincinnati and even though its population had doubled between 1880 and 1900, it stood at only 2,000.
This was built in 1897 by Eugenie Werk, the daughter of Michael Werk, Cincinnati's first soap barron. Known as the Werk Castle it was modeled on a French chateaux.
Much as in the case of Price Hill, the building of a viaduct over the Mill Creek Valley and a street car line that climbed Harrison Avenue, directly impacted Westwood’s population which steadily climbed to almost 11,000 by 1940. Harrison Avenue, the suburb’s main thoroughfare literally began as nothing more than a buffalo trace widened into a primitive road in the early 1800’s. It ran through Westwood into Cheviot, a small city that stubbornly refused to be swallowed up by Cincinnati and far to the west through the rural countryside. The viaduct and Harrison Avenue became so critical to daily life in Westwood, Cheviot and numerous outlying communities, it was replaced by a more modern and substantial structure in 1932, the Western Hills Viaduct of the present. A street car line, route 21, allowed Westwood to grow into a socio-economically mixed suburb of middle class skilled industrial workers living in modest wood frame homes, roomy brick Tudors of white collared professionals and a sprinkling of impressive estates of Cincinnati's elite.
AVONDALE
Avondale another of the large suburbs, also began to develop in the late 19th century. It was an unincorporated area of the county through much of the 1800s, home to merchants and businessmen who lived in large comfortable homes with a smaller percentage of residents who could be categorized as middle class. It was also one of the few new suburbs with an African-American population estimated to be 8-10% of its population.
This is the 8,500 square feet Herschede mansion, built in 1908 for Frank Herschede. It was one of many luxury homes built in Avondale in the late 19th and early 20th century.
In 1863 Avondale incorporated when residents sought the tools to legislate local ordinances for themselves. A few years later it appeared Avondale would be swept up in a wave of Cincinnati annexations but an 1869 vote for annexation was successfully contested in court. It was finally annexed in 1896 largely on the argument that Cincinnati could provide better municipal services including police, schools and fire protection.
Not long after annexation a sizable Jewish migration began out of the Basin to the northern portions of Avondale, primarily with the arrival of streetcar routes in 1903. By 1911 the #40 route was established along Reading Road, the primary transportation corridor reaching north out of the downtown through the heart of the suburb into the northern reaches of Avondale where a sizable Reformed Judaism community developed. At the same time an Orthodox Jewish community took root in the southern portions of Avondale. By the 1940’s an estimated s 60% of the suburb’s 24,000 people were Jewish, reflected in the number of Jewish institutions established there. In addition to synagogues, Avondale became the home of the Jewish Center, the Orthodox Jewish Home for The Aged, the United Jewish Agencies Bake Shop, Jewish Hospital and the Jewish Nurses Home.
The Kahal Kadosh Bene Israel Synagogue at Rockdale and Harvey Avenue . Built in 1906 it was the home of the oldest Jewish congregation west of the Allegheny Mountains until the late 1960's when the congregation built a new synagogue in Amberley Village.
Hospitals in fact became a dominant feature of Avondale with General Hospital, Holmes Hospital and Children’s Hospital all located there, along with the University of Cincinnati’s College of Medicine nearby. Centrally located and near downtown, it became the center of health care in the Greater Cincinnati region and a major employment hub.
WALNUT HILLS
On the hilltops to the east and northeast of the Downtown Basin another of the large early suburbs could be found – Walnut Hills. Named after the Reverend James Kemper’s farm, an early resident, most of Walnut Hills remained outside of Cincinnati’s city limits until 1870. However, the long hillside slope that Gilbert Avenue climbs out of Downtown to McMillan Avenue was annexed in 1850 to acquire its small commercial quarter.
Like the other hilltop suburbs, those moving out of the Basin in the 1870’s and 1880’s to Walnut Hills tended to be wealthy enough to own horse and buggy riggs and have the flexibilty to be unconcerned about the time and distance traveled in daily commutes. Many built impressive homes on large lots, some of which can still be found spread across Walnut Hills today.
This impressive home was built in 1881 on Grandin Road by J.G. Schmidlapp, distiller, developer and philanthropist.
The presence of the Lane Seminary, established in 1829, helped make the community a haven for a small community of African- American merchants in the mid-19th century.[vii] The Seminary began leasing land to African-Americans in the 1840’s creating one of the earliest African-American communities outside of Basin . By the 1870’s African-Americans were both purchasing and renting real estate on and around Lincoln Avenue as the Black population of Walnut Hills steadily grew with the Great Migration at the turn of the century. Fleeing the Jim Crow laws of the South for economic opportunity in Northern industrial cities in the years around WWI, African-Americans often found themselves exchanging the brutally demeaning de jure segregation of the South for the more subtle, though equally demeaning de facto segregation Northern cities like Cincinnati .[viii]
During these years, African-Americans found in Walnut Hills, suburban housing paired with the convenience of multiple street car routes which was rare in Cincinnati, along with churches and other social institutions like the Frederick Douglas School making it a desirable place to live. Horace Sudduth, an African-American real estate agent and investor became an important figure in expanding the Black population of Walnut Hills, offering valuable services and knowledge to those interested buying or leasing property there in the early 20th century. Sudduth's business interests also extended into the hotel business as the proprietor of the Manse Hotel, a Walnut Hills landmark. Opened in 1937, the Manse was an an important institution for the African-American community during the Jim Crow era, offering a range of first class services to Black travelers and Cincinnatians alike. [ix]
It was the arrival of the first electric street cars in 1888 on McMillian Avenue that really opened Walnut Hills to a greater variety of Cincinnati residents. By 1900 the intersection of McMillan and Gilbert Avenues, known as Peebles Corner had become a busy shopping district, probably the busiest outside of the downtown basin with six street car lines intersecting there.[x] Though primarily a residential neighborhood augmented by the Peebles Corner commercial district and several skilled manufactures like Gruen Watches, its population swelled to almost 25,000 by the 1930’s. Located between Downtown and Hyde Park, Walnut Hills became a conduit to the newer community of Hyde Park for a growing number of wealthy residents which was annexed by Cincinnati in 1903.
HYDE PARK
Located to the east of Walnut Hills, Hyde Park’s rural atmosphere changed primarily as result of street car links and real estate development initiated by a group of eight wealthy Cincinnatians in 1892 known as the Mornington Syndicate. Marketed to wealthy Cincinnatians it led to the incorporation of the Village of Hyde Park in 1896 before being annexed by the city in 1903. Not surprisingly the building of street car lines from 1886 to 1904 set off the initial building boom in Hyde Park which remained chiefly residential due to restrictions put in place by the Mornington Group to “keep out undesirable commercial and industrial development”.[xi]
CLIFTON: MT. AUBURN, CORRYVILLE, CLIFTON, FAIRVIEW
Situated immediately to the north of the Downtown Basin were a series of hilltops occupied by a group of small neighborhoods; Mt. Auburn, Fairview Heights, Corryville and Clifton, that many Cincinnatians often lump together under the incorrect though convenient label of Clifton. Mt. Auburn it could be argued, was actually Cincinnati’s first suburb. By the 1830’s it was already being used by wealthy Cincinnatians as a kind of refuge from the heat and humidity of the Basin. Though literally right on top of the city of Cincinnati, it was not formally part of the city until it was annexed in 1849. Wealthy Cincinnatians built homes across the small neighborhood, including one bought in 1851 by Alphonso Taft, the father of future President William Howard Taft. Built in the Greek Revival style it remained William Howard Taft’s home throughout his childhood.
In 1872 George A. Smith, an accomplished engineer, opened his Cincinnati Incline Plane Railway which climbed 850 feet from Downtown to Jackson Street near the top of Mt. Auburn. The steam powered platform made the trip in 90 seconds making Mt. Auburn far more accessible than it had ever been. The incline operated until 1898 when it finally shut down unable to compete with the electric street car line that climbed Vine Street from Downtown, following Vine north to Carthage near the city's northen corporation line. Again, easy access to a hilltop community by street cars and inclines spurred on a migration to Mt. Auburn and the other northern hilltop communities. Bythe early 1900’s Mt. Auburn had become one of Cincinnati's artistic centers and Vine Street had been transformed into one of Greater Cincinnati's most important transportation corridors reaching Carthage, Hartwell, Wyoming and Glendale.
Just to the west of Mt. Auburn was another small hilltop neighborhood, Corryville. Part of the 1870 annexation wave, Corryville became home to many German immigrants who moved northward and up from the Over-The-Rhine neighborhood in the Basin.
Clifton took its name from the 1,200 acre farm of Charles Clarkson. In 1842 the farm was lost to foreclosure and subdivided into large parcels that ranged from three acres to dozens of acres in size. In 1850 Clifton was formally incorporated as a village growing to more than 1000 residents by 1870. Many of those residents were wealthy Cincinnatians who regularly commuted to Downtown businesses from their comfortable estates taking tremendous pride in the charm of their hilltop paradise.
In 1882 Robert Burnet and William Groesbeck sold 163 acres of their Clifton holdings to the City of Cincinnati, 74 acres of which became the new home of the University of Cincinnati in 1895 while the remaining land was used to create a new city park named Burnet Woods after Jacob Burnet, Robert’s father, a successful attorney who at one time held seats in the Ohio General Assembly, state Supreme Court and the US Senate. In 1893 Clifton was annexed by Cincinnati and continued to grow as an enclave of comfortable homes and the growing home of UC to which Clifton was increasingly tied.
The Clifton Incline also known as the Bellevue Incline or Elm street Incline, was consider the highest of Cincinnati's five inclines. Built in 1876 it provided quick and easier access to Clifton from the Basin. It continued in operation until 1926.
The hilltops to the south and southwest of UC’s campus known as Fairview, were not annexed until 1893. This area, though literally right on top of the Basin, remained sparsely populated until the Bellevue Incline was built in 1876 followed by the opening of the Fairview Incline in 1892, making daily commutes to downtown convenient . Not surprisingly, many of those moving to Fairview moved up the hill from the Basin neighborhoods of the West End and Over-The -Rhine to a new neighborhood of single family homes packed close together on narrow streets. These modest working class homes were built on smaller lots relative to the much more expansive homes found north of UC’s campus on the broad, gas lit avenues of Clifton.
THE NEW CINCINNATI
By the 1930’s a new far more expansive Cincinnati had clearly emerged. No longer a densely compact city hugging the Ohio River, it was a sprawling city of neighborhoods spread across hilltops and valleys tied together and, in some ways created by a streetcar system and the new age of industrialization. Though many of the new suburbs and industrial neighborhoods were addressed in this post, a significant number of outlying neighborhoods that became part of the city of Cincinnati were not given attention to prevent this post from becoming too unwieldy in length.[xii] Most of these neighborhoods did not experience significant growth until the years after World War II, the subject of Part II in this series.
[i] Writers Program of the WPA, Cincinnati: A Guide to the Queen City and Its Neighbors, 1943, p.342.
[ii] David Stradling, To Breathe Pure Air: Cincinnati’s Smoke Abatement Crusade 1906-1914, 1997, p. 4
[iii] Cook, Anna; Gittel, Marilyn; Mark, Herb City Life 1865/1900, 1973, The Smell of Cincinnati, p. 143.
[iv] Rhoda, Richard, Urban Transport and the Expansion of Cincinnati, 1858-1920, Cincinnati Historical Society
Bulletin, Volume 38, No. 2, p. 11.
[v] The Crosley Corporation had been in Camp Washington since 1923. By 1929 more than 3,000 were employed in Camp Washington making Crosley radios and refrigerators in a facility anchored by its a seven story plant. Further north up the Mill Creek Valley was the sprawling Ivorydale plant of Procter & Gamble. Built in 1886 the giant plant grew to cover 243 acres with 120 buildings, employing more than 2,000 workers. Located in St. Bernard, a small city surrounded by Cincinnati neighborhoods, the plant provided enough tax revenue to the small city to keep it independent of Cincinnati. St. Bernard in fact was one of the many small cities and villages that has jealously maintained its independence as the city of Cincinnati enveloped the areas around it. Norwood another small city surrounded by Cincinnati neighborhoods, to the northeast of St. Bernard became home to a General Motors Assembly plant in 1923. At its peak, the Norwood GM plant employed almost 9,000, again providing enough tax revenue to provide the municipal services and infrastructure to keep Norwood from being swallowed up by Cincinnati. To the southeast of Norwood was another Cincinnati neighborhood, Oakley, which became home to the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company. CMM built a sprawling manufacturing campus there between 1906 and 1908 that at its peak employed more than 8,500 workers. None the less the tiny village of Oakley was annexed by Cincinnati in 1913. Another major machine tool manufacturer LeBlond Machine Tool, was originally established east of the Basin in Linwood in 1887. In 1917 LeBlond built a large facility in Norwood covering more than 20 acres and employing more than 1,000 during the war years. Just to the North of Cincinnati, Stearns & Foster built a massive plant to manufacture mattresses in the 1880’s employing more than 1,000 giving the small village of Lockland the ability to stay independent. Next door Wright Aeronautical built a manufacturing facility in the early 1920’s that would later spill into Evandale and Reading later becoming GE Jet Engine. At its peak of employment during WW II more than 48,000 people worked at the plant. Directly to the west of Cincinnati along the Ohio River was the 162 acre Addyston Pipe & Steel Company located in the village of Addyston. Launching operations in 1889 it grew to employ almost 800 workers making large diameter pipes most of whom lived in housing provided by the company, probably a necessity since it was located more than 13 miles from Cincinnati and well beyond the reach of a street car route.
[vi] Writers Program of the WPA, Cincinnati: A Guide to the Queen City and Its Neighbors, 1943, p.350
[vii] Yeraini, NancyOn The Ground: Walnut Hills Historical Society collaborates for preservation and progresss, Soapbox Cincinnati, 12/6/2016
[viii] Walnut Hills Historical Society, Lincoln Avenue at the Beginning
[ix] Sutton, Geoff; Walnut Hills Historical Society.
[x] Garrand, Karen, Walnut Hills: look For the Two-Way, 10/13/2012
[xi] City of Cincinnati, Conservation Guidelines: Observatory Historic District, p. 3
[xii] Other Cincinnati neighborhoods that were annexed but not discussed - Mt. Washington (1911), College Hill (1911 -1923), Sayler Park (1911), Mt. Airy(1911), Bond Hill (1903), Mt. Lookout (1910) Madisonville (1910), Kennedy Heights (1914), Pleasant Ridge (1911), California (1909), Sedamsville (1870), Riverside (1893), Evanston (1903)