Urbanist and activist Josh Junker (twitter) talks with us about the destruction of Cincinnati’s West End.

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Cincinnati was incredibly crowded, outside of New York we had the most densely populated urban core in the country. 

What was historically called the West End was anywhere east of Mill Creek west of Central Parkway and Central Avenue. And then south of Harrison Avenue and then the Ohio River on the south. It took up about half of the urban basin of Cincinnati and it grew to be a really prosperous and dense neighborhood. By 1890 it had 84,000 people living in it. 

Cincinnati through its history till around 1835 was growing very slowly, it was the largest city west of the Appalachians, but it wasn’t anywhere near prominence. Around the 1840s West End started developing and then it was annex to the city. It wasn’t even in the city until the 1840’s. Around 1840s through the 1870s, the entire urban basin area of Cincinnati which includes downtown Pendleton over the Rhine and West End, just exploded in population [00:01:00] because so many people were coming to Cincinnati.  

Both sides of my family has lived here since the mid 18 hundreds. My dad’s side has been here since 1870s and my mom’s side has been here since the 1850s. They have been here for a while. And that’s how I get to hear all of these stories about Cincinnati. I heard stories about how crowded it used to be back then. My Aunt Marie, her mother told her stories that they didn’t have any sanitation or anything. They had to find a pot to do their business in. They would have a one room apartment for a family of five. 

At that point Cincinnati was incredibly crowded, outside of New York we had the most densely populated urban core in the country- because it was built that way, they had to build where they could because the terrain surrounding was almost impossible to get up to the hilltops very easily. Cincinnati developed really unique compared to other cities, cuz they had only a four or five square mile area to really develop. 

That’s what led to [00:02:00] population concentrated in a small area. Then after around the 1880s or 1890s, it started declining of bit population as people were moving up to the hilltops. 

We were one of the first boom towns – the economic prospects with the river is what allowed Cincinnati to grow. It used to be is downtown had a lot of people Over the Rhine was the most dense part of the urban basin, but the West End was the area where if you still wanted to live downtown be close by, but live in a nice little mansion. That’s where you lived at.

There’s a row on Dayton Street that still exists. It used to be called Millionaires Row because a lot of Cincinnati rich people decided to live there. The Upper West End was pretty well off. But if you go down to the lower West End, it was like a lower middle class neighborhood that, that started changing around the [00:03:00] 1870s, 1880s, when a lot of the immigration would mostly go to before then that was over the Rhine. 

If you’re in the west end, in the late 19th century I can’t even imagine what the smell would be like in the west end of Cincinnati. Not only did you have a lot of overcrowding because of how dense it was, we also had slaughterhouses, which is how we became known as Porkopolis. We had so much slaughtering of pigs around that time. I believe we were the top meat producer in the United States at that point. So you would smell a lot of byproducts that come with slaughterhouses, not good smells.  

This all starts to shift a little bit – in 1918, there was a organization founded by progressives called the Better Housing Organization that looked at the conditions of housing in the urban basin in Cincinnati, said this all needs to change. A lot of them had good intentions. But if you read more and more into it, [00:04:00] the more and more you question the validity and the meaning behind their intentions. Especially when you consider a lot of ’em had the policy of we don’t want you moving out to the suburbs. We still want you to live here. Even if someone wanted to move out to the suburbs, they’d be like, no, you can’t do that. You still have to live here. If you were an African American coming up from the south, as the Great migration was starting , the only place you could really go to was the West End. You couldn’t go anywhere else.  

They built the first federal housing project in 1937 was Laurel Holmes. Here’s the interesting thing. They don’t tell you unless you research into public housing. It was not integrated at all until the late forties and fifties. Laurel Court wasn’t built for the African-Americans that primarily lived on that neighborhood. It was built for whites only, even though it was in that neighborhood that housing wasn’t available to the black Cincinnatians that lived there. They eventually built after [00:05:00] that Lincoln Court, which was the early forties housing project, just south of where Laurel Homes was. 

From the thirties, it became clear from the city and how they acted, that they saw the West end as a slum, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They don’t really do much to repair it. The Better Housing League does some stuff, but they don’t really do enough. And again, their intentions weren’t entirely crystal good. 

Post World War if you look at what happened there, the entire urban city of Cincinnati had a 1% vacancy rate In 1950 there was almost nothing for rent, or for sale in the city. They desperately needed to build housing, but Cincinnati had been trudging along since around the thirties thinking, oh, we’re just gonna stagnate a little bit. And All of a sudden they got this great big amount of people where we went from 450,000 to 500,000 in one decade. And If you look at the statistics of the neighborhoods, all the urban core neighborhoods, which is [00:06:00] predominantly where people migrating into Cincinnati first get their starts – all those urban neighborhoods had significant growth.  

The West End grew significantly in population. In the mid fifties, the entire city says, okay, we had the interstates coming through. We just need to combine all these projects and we need to get rid of the neighborhood because we need an industrial area.  

The city says we need a huge bond issue and we’re gonna create a better neighborhood for West End. We’re going to destroy the slum so people have better living conditions and so that we can create more jobs within an industrial sector right next to downtown. All the suburbs read through the lines, and they voted against it because they knew what the city was gonna do. They knew that all the people in the West End are gonna be displaced and they’re all gonna come up into the neighborhoods that we live in. So they voted against it because they saw that as a problem for [00:07:00] us . 

Ironically it was the West End that got the bond issue to pass in the first place because they overwhelmingly voted for it. Which is crazy to think of, but if you look at the campaign and what the mayor was saying, and what the city leaders were saying, you would think, okay, they had a plan for relocation. They were gonna build a lot of residential units around the West end to give them better living conditions. I can actually have a shower and a tub and everything. I can get a nice job while I’m at it too. That’ll be great. That’s where a lot of the mentality of West End residents came in. That’s why they voted overwhelmingly for it.  

That bond issue is what started the Kenyan Bar Renewal project. It runs into some hurdles almost immediately. They were gonna destroy about 10, 600 housing units. They were gonna displace all existing persons that lived in that area. 26,900 people. 97% of that population was [00:08:00] black. The city said we will help them with relocation assistance. We will compensate them for what they’re going through. Now, some of the property owners might have gotten them, but the vast majority of those who lived in the West end, I’d say 95%...