CityBeat has the scoop. Some firefighters are pretty upset with their command staff over having them clean up a new firehouse before they can start using it. I’d say that would not be in their job description, but, hey, that’s just me.
I am going to indulge a second. Wait. Isn’t that what blogs are for anyway? Well, regardless, today is my birthday. Happy Birthday to me! But I have felt so lucky today – especially in light of what happened Sunday.
Melissa – my beautiful, talented, smart, funny, thoughtful, caring, tremendously supportive, understanding and kind girlfriend – started off my day with two incredibly neat, cool and thoughtful gifts. One was this very nifty, sharp wristwatch. The other is this glass globe with the city of Cincinnati inside, featuring the skyline and some significant buildings. It’s very special and right up my alley.
On top of that, my great family is having a nice shindig for me tonight which will include a big dinner and lots of them – and probably more gifts. One of my gifts – from my parents; a bunch of compact fluorescent bulbs I wanted to replace the incandescent ones in my apartment – came in the mail today. Plus, throw in all the great messages I have received online through e-mail, cell phone text messages, Facebook and MySpace and it’s rounded out for a very, very nice day. It’s great to be and feel loved. Thanks, everybody! I am just so happy and wanted to spread the love a lot bit… Hope you are having just as good a day, birthday or not.
UPDATE: We made Ch. 9′s news last night, except Lance Barry, the reporter who showed up at the scene, kinda didn’t get the story right. I saw him there and would have gladly given him more details. But he left after a few minutes, thus missing the real story. And I wasn’t mentioned at all – which Melissa thought was pretty funny. And “allegedly?” My ass.
Watch out. Tonight at 8 p.m. an approximately 17-year-old African-American boy, approximately 5’6″ to 5’8″ tall, thin build, with a narrow, long face and extremely pronounced lips, wearing a gray and black hoodie and gray sweatpants and a gray skull cap, pulled a semi-automatic 9mm gun on my girlfriend Melissa and I in front of my apartment building near 13th & Race streets in Over-the-Rhine.
We were in her Toyota, parked along on Race Street, near the two large stone pillars on the perimeter of Washington Park, across from Music Hall. Her car was running (I was driving; she was dropping me off and we were about to split for the night) and I was able to speed away.
The boy first approached the car, Melissa rolled down her window a few inches and he asked what time it was. I then responded that it was 8 o’clock. He then reached into his shorts to reveal the gun. She rolled up her window and he began banging on the glass the butt of the gun. As I drove away he was able to break the back passenger window with the gun. I don’t believe any shots were fired and there were at least four people standing nearby.
Around the corner, at Tender Mercies on 12th Street, a fire truck and ambulance was parked with their emergency lights on. I turned quickly at 12th & Race streets east and went to the fire truck. Because Melissa is a Cincinnati firefighter I figured we would know someone there.
Luckily we did. I even had met a bunch of them before, too. One of them put out on the two-way radio that a gun was pulled on a firefighter. Several police showed up on the scene within seconds. Thank God we saw those guys. They were a major sight for some very sore, sore eyes. And they were awesome (thanks, guys).
Besides being extremely shook up and Melissa’s car window being broken, we are, luckily, all OK. But keep an eye out for this prick. And watch out for yourself.
Photo courtesy of MReece
I’ve been meaning to weekly post links to my column as they appear in CityBeat. Haven’t really gotten around to doing that. I’ve done four so far and you can see the archives of those and a couple other stories I’ve written for CityBeat.
This week’s column, though, was a little personal. It involves the area where I grew up and one of the “suburban” legends that flourished when I attended Colerain High School and, I found out Saturday night, lives on today. Except, as I also learned, that the physical part of the legend is being torn down, possibly ending the stories for good – but also possibly finally giving the soul of the woman who was tormented by those legends a little peace. But it also ends the chances of seeing a familiar sight from my childhood growing up on Dry Ridge Road – loads of happy, giggling hayrides through Colerain’s rolling hills.
Even though my parents have sold the house I grew up in and I now live in the local near-antithesis of my boyhood confines, Over-the-Rhine, I still have a fondness for where I grew up. I have little desire to live there anymore, not because I am a snob or think I’m too good for the area. It’s more of a been-there-done-that sort of feeling I get when I go back to that part of town.
I just like the urban life more than I care for the suburban life. I was explaining this to my lovely ladyfriend, Melissa, the other day, summed up, in part, as my irritation of having to drive more than 20 minutes to get to anything. I’d prefer not to drive at all when in town, but if I have to travel more than about 20 minutes I start get a little irritated (sometimes I just take a bus).
Luckily Melissa lives in Mount Washington, an easy 15 to 20 minute drive from downtown (and though it’s a bit suburban, it’s still in the city). Colerain, well, that takes about 30 minutes to get to. Bummer.
Northgate Mall, Colerain Avenue, Colerain Elementary and (the former) Colerain Junior High School, my old high school, the YMCA, the Skatin’ Place – where I attended numerous school skating parties and later was a deejay – plus places as simple as Farbach-Werner Nature Preserve, Groesbeck United Methodist Church or White Oak Presbyterian church, where I attended numerous events, all bring back memories. It’s not a bad place. Just not my place anymore. And a nice place to visit.
I missed Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory‘s first press briefing of the year Tuesday, but heard a story on WVXU-FM and then read on the Enquirer’s political blog that the mayor “expects recommendations from the GoCincinnati study.”
Well, that reminded me that, uh, yeah, I wrote about that already. In The Post. But it appeared in the paper on Dec. 31, 2007 – the last day – and the Enquirer pulled the plug on The Post’s archives at or about midnight on Jan. 1, 2008. That means the story appeared online for all of about 12 hours and was over shadowed by all the coverage about, well, The Post’s final edition.
A little background: I received a copy of the preliminary Go Cincinnati report (i.e. not the final draft, but close) in early December after several city employees told me it was done and I filed a public records request. And though I didn’t spend much time talking about it in the article, streetcars are being recommended. What I thought was more interesting was the idea of place-based economic development. Streetcars already seem to have lots of support, place-based economic development just seems like it will have a bigger impact on more neighborhoods, thus more people – good and bad.
Read on…
By Joe Wessels
Post contributor
Cincinnati officials are studying whether a “place-based” approach would be best for the city’s future economic development.
In an unfinished report that is part of the “Go Cincinnati” economic development initiative, experts in several urban development and real estate research firms suggest the city should spend money building up specific areas of the city and that would, in turn, spur further development in other areas.
The report — conducted by Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution and Social Compact, Cincinnati-based KMK consulting and Bethesda, Md.-based Robert Charles Lesser Co. — cites “existing growth opportunity districts” as downtown, Over-the-Rhine and Uptown, an area around the University of Cincinnati campus in Clifton, Corryville and Clifton Heights.
“New growth opportunity districts” include three areas:
* Seymour Avenue and Reading Road corridor, an area covering parts of Bond Hill and Roselawn, including the TechSolve industrial park near the Seymour Avenue and Interstate 75 interchange and Cincinnati-Hamilton Community Action Agency on the former site of the Swifton Commons Shopping Center.
* Queensgate and the south Mill Creek corridor, an area south of the I-75 and I-74 interchange south to the Ohio River. This area has become a “generally obsolete industrial corridor” that could be redeveloped into “green industrial parks,” according to the report.
* Madison Road corridor, which begins at the Center of Cincinnati shopping center in Oakley and stretches east to Madisonville, which could become a “complex employment, retail and high-density housing concentration” that would allow for “drivable sub-urban” office buildings, akin to similar developments in places like Blue Ash, West Chester and Mason.
City Councilman Chris Bortz, chairman of Council’s economic development committee and who helped spearhead Go Cincinnati with Mayor Mark Mallory, said the initiative, which has not been finalized, would allow the city to concentrate funds on particular areas that would help drive up the city’s dwindling tax base.
“The lifeblood of a city is its income tax,” he said. “You need to have more jobs.”
How to do that includes a strategy focusing on “public and private investment in specific geographic areas that can serve as economic drivers of the entire city and region,” according to the report.
“If we are going to continue to be competitive as a city, we have to attract business and residents,” Bortz said. “You need to find sites, find land where businesses can locate.”
The last time the city did this type of analysis the Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation, or 3CDC, was formed.
That group has been primarily responsible for the redevelopment of Fountain Square and Over-the-Rhine, and was originally charged with getting the long-delayed Banks riverfront project launched.
It also precipitated much of the development around University Hospital and the University of Cincinnati, Bortz said.
Bortz said it was time to do another report to see where the city should go next now that most of the other projects are under way.
“That data led us to the areas that are under review and are serious recommendations that can lead us to the next level,” he said, emphasizing that the report is not finished.
Mallory said he would not comment on the report’s findings until it was completed.
Bortz said focusing on smaller geographical areas allows for deeper concentration and, hopefully, bigger results that can spur other development.
“You do that by concentrating on certain areas or there is no impact,” he said.
I have received several nice e-mails in the past few days related to the closing of The Cincinnati and Kentucky Post. My friend John Overbeck, once a journalist but now working as a teacher of gifted children, sent me this quote written about the closing of the Chicago Daily News in 1978, an afternoon newspaper. It was a year after The Cincinnati Post signed the joint operating agreement with the owners of The Cincinnati Enquirer. The agreement gave the Post 29 more years than the Chicago Daily News.
I think this pretty well sums up how I felt Monday as I attended, what can be best described as, The Post’s wake after the final edition went to the printers.
When I was a kid, the worst of all days was the last day of summer vacation, and we were in the schoolyard playing softball, and the sun was down and it was getting dark. But I didn’t want it to get dark. I didn’t want the game to end. It was too good, too much fun. I wanted it to stay light forever, so we could go on playing forever, so the game would go on and on.
That’s how I feel now. C’mon, c’mon. Let’s play one more inning. One more time at bat. One more pitch. Just one? Stick around, guys. We can’t break up this team. It’s too much fun.
But the sun always went down. And now it’s almost dark again.
(Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Mike Royko, on the death of the Chicago Daily News, March 3, 1978)
The New Year got off to a perilous start at University Hospital in Avondale, a Cincinnati neighborhood.
A medevac helicopter from Kentucky – attempting to take off around 6 a.m. New Year’s Day – abruptly slammed into the top-floor helipad atop University Hospital, just floors above the emergency department, said Liz Matern, a nursing supervisor at the hospital.
The yellow and black helicopter, not owned or leased by the Health Alliance, the parent organization that operates University Hospital, was dropping off a patient from “somewhere down in Kentucky” when a gust of wind forced the helicopter back down on the concrete pavement located on the hospital’s roof, about six stories in the air.
Around noon, the black tail boom of the helicopter – with the cabin, or main body of the aircraft, resting against a steel beam on the edge of the heliport – still dangled off the edge of the hospital just above the same place that ambulances bring patients to the emergency department.
“That’s 2,000 pounds of jet fuel over my emergency department,” Matern said. “A wind gust just blew them down on the pad.”
Matern said that ambulances were notified through their dispatchers and temporarily diverted to the hospital’s front doors. There a hospital security officer met the rescue personnel and directed them through the building to the emergency department.
University’s emergency department is the Greater Cincinnati area’s only level one trauma center, considered to be best equipped to handle the most serious medical emergencies including car accident, stabbing and shooting victims, among other maladies.
“We never stopped taking patients,” Matern said. “We had to divert our traffic.”
Hospital officials notified the Cincinnati Fire Department who responded to the scene and secured the helicopter to the building so it would not fall. Firefighters were working to determine the best way to move the helicopter back on top of the building, Matern said.
“They are there to supervise (the scene),” Matern said. “They are trying to move it in so the whole thing is on the heliport.”
No patient was in the helicopter and the crew members inside at the time of the crash were not injured, she said.
This is the second incident for University Hospital’s medevac program in two days. Monday afternoon an AirCare helicopter, operated by the hospital, was forced to do an emergency landing near the Grand Victoria Casino in Rising Sun, Ind. after it experienced mechanical problems. A patient inside the helicopter was transferred to an ambulance and transported to University Hospital.
“It was just a little rougher landing than we are used to,” Matern said.
Click on the above photo to see more images from the scene.