On a recent morning I found myself again in Fairfax. It was suggested I go check out Coffee ‘n Cream, a coffee shop and soft serve ice cream parlor along Wooster Pike. I did and was pleasantly surprised by what I found: A very attentive owner in an owner-operated coffee shop with good coffee.

I plopped down and proceeded to leech the Cincinnati Bell wi-fi from the Speedway gas station across the street (CnC’s connection was down) and got talking to Joe Schneider, the guy who owns the place.

When people find out what I do for a living I often get asked about how to get stories in the paper. Many times it’s an entrepreneur looking to find the hook that will get a story in the media and then loads of customers in their door. My first quip is usually that there is an easy way to get in the news - and a hard way. The easy way, of course, would be to make news - say, by robbing banks, or worse. For the record, I don’t recommend that. The hard way would be to convince some journalist that you have a story worth telling. (Granted, this is the old style of top-down story telling that I think is dying, so don’t think I’m completely forgetting myself here.)

I told Joe that he needed a hook. That would be something that makes his place special - a stand-out among the plethora of individually-owned coffee shops in the area who serve good coffee (though he serves soft serve ice cream, too, which I thought was kind of unique).

He then expressed his frustration that his “passengers” (he sometimes slips, calling his customers by what they called them at Delta Airlines, where he worked for more than 20 years before retiring) love his “splash sticks,” something that he has used for about two years. Then he pointed to an article in USA Today (the same paper owned by the parent company that owns the The Cincinnati Enquirer) that he clipped out and put on the wall. It was about Starbucks - with a location just about a half-mile down the road from him in Mariemont) - was finally getting to introducing the same thing. He said he has tried to pitch to local reporters who frequent his shop to do a story on his business - but no takers.

I can understand his frustration. I told him I would blog about his dilemma, let my readers know what a good coffee shop he is running and see if anyone else would link and/or write about it. It’s too bad that sometimes things like this are happening in our own backyard, yet we can’t find the space to fit it in our own local paper. I think just about every locally-owned business is worth writing about to some extent.

Below is a recording of an uncut phone interview recorded around 6:45 a.m. today (4/18/2008) with University of Cincinnati Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Bahram Shahrooz, PhD. Shahrooz is an expert on earthquake building design and earthquakes. I caught him at home about an hour after the earthquake that was felt in Cincinnati.

I apologize, but the audio is not perfect. I recorded it with my handheld digital recorder, which is mono and has fairly low quality.

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I got this map here.

That means we felt the earthquake pretty much (or within one minute) of it actually happening. That puts us pretty close and probably felt pretty close to a 5.4 magnitude here, just a little less.

At 5:396 a.m. this morning the USGS is reporting an earthquake was epicentered in Illinois… Back in 2000 I wrote a piece for The Cincinnati Enquirer about earthquakes hitting in Cincinnati. But basically, the New Madrid seismic zone was responsible for an earthquake so big that it rung church bells in Boston, Mass Charleston, S.C.

Why? Unlike the earthquakes in California (where I lived for the better part of three years and never felt one earthquake ever and was told they happen - small ones - everyday), the plates here are very, very large and cover thousands of miles. So, when the earth’s crust slips in Illinois we feel it here - or in Boston.

This morning’s trembler came in two waves. The first one woke me up and I looked around to see the exposed ventilation swinging from the ceiling. I could hear pots clinging together. Then it stopped. About 30 seconds later , a smaller, less intense quake shook everything again.

It was a little unsettling. From my West Coast friends I have heard about how scary they can be - and now I can agree, from experience. I live in a building that is more than 150 years old and the first thing I thought was it might coming tumbling down.

We just had an earthquake in Cincinnati. It was centered on the New Madrid faultline along the Ohio River near Evansville, Ind., according to the real-time United States Geological Survey Web site.

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.

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.