Yesterday the New York Times ran a story about the revitalization of the Over The Rhine neighborhood in Cincinnati where I went to high school.
I graduated from SCPA in 1996 and spent about the same amount of time in class as I did at Kaldi's coffeehouse, just one block away. I loved being in that neighborhood, even though I came to school many mornings to find blood in the parking lot and the street corners.
When I came back from New York and wanted to take my sister to Kaldi's a year after the riots, my mother was scared and wouldn't let us go. It was hard to imagine that a neighborhood that was on the mend when I was in high school could have taken such a drastic turn for the worse.
The extreme poverty and lack of policing after the riots helped make my decision to live in Columbus a lot easier. I didn't live here when the Short North was run by gangs and I wouldn't want to, but it's now the best neighborhood in the city. I'm interested in living someplace with history and character. This past May, the National Trust for Historic Preservation put Over the Rhine on its list of the 11 Most Endangered Historic Places. I hope this time, the "renaissance" is for real.
