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Philip Spiess
Larry: You're saying that house has been there for 60 years? Incredible! (How come I never saw it?) Is it livable?
Paul: There are many wonderful 19th-Century houses in Clifton (or used to be), such as the Rawson estate, the Huenefeld estate, the chemist/pharmacist and author John Uri Lloyd's house, and Cincinnati industrialist and Art Museum director Alfred P. Goshorn's house on Clifton Avenue (with the later addition added by my friend Jack Strader for his Wurlitzer theater organ from the RKO Paramount Theater in Walnut Hills), political boss George B. Cox's house on Ludlow Avenue at the northern entrance to Burnet Woods (for many years the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity house, now, apparently, the Clifton branch of the Cincinnati Public Library) and others, which I chronicled in my 1965 pamphlet, Sites and Scenes in Clifton: An Historical Tour, done for Clifton Town Meeting. Many of these houses I photographed in the 1960s and 1970s (a good number of which are now gone -- the reason I went professionally into Historic Preservation work).
The one which first excited my interest was the McDonald-Balch estate ("Dalvay"), fronting onto Clifton Avenue, but south across McAlpin Avenue from Clifton Elementary School. It had great ornamental gates which interested me as a child, two on Clifton Avenue, one on Wood Avenue (its back gate); these later ended up in College Hill at the former Archibishop's Palace, "Laurel Court," later the home of Cincinnati's so-called "Pizza King." Alexander McDonald, who built the house, was an associate of John D. Rockefeller in Standard Oil; I'm not sure who (George?) Balch was, but his widow lived until 1958, when she bequeathed the property to the Episcopal Church. The church, in turn, finding no use for it, sold it to the Cincinnati Board of Education, which demolished the house and erected the present Clifton School annex (or is it now the main school?) on the property, across McAlpin Avenue from the original 1905 Clifton School (which my grandmother, my mother, my sister, and I attended), and which succeeded the earlier Resor Academy on that site.
My interest in historic houses prompted me, in 1958 (I was 12), to tour the Balch estate two times before the house was to be torn down. It had a stained-glass dome over the main staircase (lit from above by electric bulbs, not atypical of great houses for that era), a fine billiard room with a classic-sized pool table, and an incredible ballroom (a later addition) on the back end, which included a very Baroque-decorated pipe organ. It also had -- most impressive! -- a set of blue stained-glass doors leading onto a patio on the McAlpin Avenue side (I believe there was a conservatory there at some point, which had since disappeared). In the attic was a copper [zinc?] tank, which was an emergency cistern for the house. On the grounds back of the house was a carriage house (it may still be there, for all I know) and a building which housed a concrete indoor swimming pool, which looked, I swear, like the hippopotamus tank in the Herbivore (Elephant) House at the Cincinnati Zoo. (But this was typical of swimming pools of the era -- cf. the one in the basement of Biltmore House, Asheville, North Carolina.)
During my college years, I miraculously acquired (some at "Acres of Books" -- see discussion above) both the architect's rendering of the original facade of the Balch estate (later altered slightly) on oiled linen, and a small series of photographs of both the house's exterior and its interior in its prime. I was also fortunate enough to tour the Cincinnati publisher (whose firm was the world's largest publisher of textbooks) Obed J. Wilson's estate (cf. the Art Deco Wilson Auditorium at U. C., now apparently demolished), later the Julia Jurgens (Jurgens hand lotion) Joslin estate (I was sadly disappointed on entering its Italianate tower, which was far smaller than I'd imagined it from the street, and its even smaller octagonal cupola to the east), and its two-story carriage house, on Lafayette Avenue at the northern end of Middleton Avenue before it was torn down to make way for the modest subdivision that is now there. I've also had access to the towers of William Neff's "The Windings" (for many years the Convent of the Sacred Heart, which was also a Catholic girls' school), Henry Probasco's "Oakwood" (he was famous for funding the Tyler Davidson Fountain on Fountain Square in memory of his brother-in-law -- see way above on this Forum), and George K. Schoenberger's "Scarlet Oaks", for many years now the Methodist Home for the Aged, where the Hudson River School's noted painter Thomas Cole's larger version of his series of four paintings on "The Voyage of Life" (the smaller ones are in the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) hung for many years in its art gallery until Cincinnati Enquirer publisher Frank Dale got them sold to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C., in the 1970s to increase his political standing with the Nixon administration (see my diatribe earlier on this subject on this Forum -- some rather unfortunate copies -- daubs, rather -- now hang in the "Scarlet Oaks" gallery in their place).
In short (I've been too long), there are wonderful houses (some early 20th-Century ones, too, in the neo-Tudor style) on Clifton Avenue, on upper and lower Ludlow Avenue (ignoring the commercial district), on Lafayette Avenue and its eastern end, Lafayette Circle, on Middleton Avenue, on Morrison Place and environs, on Glendale Place, on Belsaw Place, and on many minor streets in between.
As to the "castles" of the "Seven Barons of Mount Storm" (again see my 1965 history of Clifton), all on Lafayette Avenue, four of their houses are still standing: Schoenberger's "Scarlet Oaks"; Probasco's "Oakwood"; William C. Neff's "The Windings" (on the hill above my modest 1940s house on McAlpin Avenue), now, I think, if it's still there, the focal point of a subdivision; and the Huenefeld estate. These others are gone: Robert B. Bowler's "Mount Storm" (now the site of Mount Storm Park -- I have pictures of his original Italianate mansion); Obed J. Wilson's "Sweet Home"; George W. McAlpin's "Sunflower House" (a site now occupied by the Cincinnati Woman's Club); and Rufus King's Italianate structure. (Okay, that was eight, rather than seven; there is some debate as to which were the "Seven Barons of Mount Storm.")
But above all, there remain, on Lafayette Avenue and Middleton Avenue and Lyleburn Place and elsewhere in Clifton, the superb 1890's Welsbach gas lamps, which formed and effected my Victorian outlook on life for ever and ever.
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