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Philip Spiess
Wow! I'm totally gratified by how many of you immediately responded to my inquiry about favorite spots in Cincinnati (my own list could go on and on)!
Richard: Ault Park was one of my favorites on Sunday rides with my grandfather. I knew that dances had taken place at the Pavilion in summer in, I think, the 1940s and early 1950s (though I never saw any), but we occasionally flew kites in March from the top of the Pavilion. Ault Park was also the site of Cincinnati's annual soap-box derby (the lanes were outlined on the street as you entered the park from the north). And on the hillside to the south down below Ault Park was Crusade Castle, originally a 19th-century Cincinnati winery, but for many years the headquarters of the Catholic Youth Crusade; when I last visited it (2003), the castle was intact, but its surrounding grounds were being developed as new housing. (Maybe soon I'll list Cincinnati's castles and castle-like constructions -- an amazing number, and Germanic, of course -- one of my fascinations since early childhood.)
Speaking of flowering hillsides in spring, each spring my family would go to a certain hillside along Hillside Avenue (I believe I'm correct on this, without looking it up) below Western Hills, not too far east of Fernbank (near the river) to pick or dig up Jack-in-the-Pulpits, Trillium plants, and Lillies-of-the-Valley, all of which grew there. For many years we had a Lillies-of the-Valley bed in our side yard in Clifton between two basement window wells; I attended it carefully every spring because I loved Lillies-of the Valley (and their smell).
Helen: The whole history of the Little Miami River is quite remarkable, which I won't go into now, but I'll just mention Fosters (I think above Kings Island Amusement Park), which had its own water recreation area in my father's day, known as Hoppie's (sp.?) Island.
Stephen: You tempt our worst suspicions. Ed: What a reminiscence of 1960s hippie psychedlic Pop Art / Op Art!
Dale: I, too, regret the original Mecklenberg's and the demise of Grammer's -- it gets harder and harder to find echt German cuisine in these United States, even in Washington, New York, and Baltimore. (I can't say enough about my love for Eden Park and its many cultural features.) As to the Zoo, in 1969, when I was in graduate school in Museum Studies, I attended the Midwest Museums Association Annual Conference, held that year in Cincinnati, with its opening soiree at the Cincinnati Zoo. A special feature, new that year, was the Nocturnal Animal House, and I amused myself (as is my wont, and after significant cocktails), with hiding in the dark corners (the interior was dark because of the nocturnal nature of its inhabitants -- I loved the vampire bat exhibit!) and asking people as they came through, "Have you seen the peccadillos?"
Steve: All of the various overlooks from Mount Adams (and, indeed, other Cincinnati hillsides, such as Clifton Heights and Price Hill Overlook) are tremendous. The Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception, the site of the annual Good Friday Pilgrimage (climbing, often on one's knees, up the stairs from Columbia Parkway below), was built and dedicated the year (1867?) that the Vatican declared the church's doctrine of the Immaculate Conception (yeah, it was truly that late in Christian church history). Holy Cross Monastery at the top of the hill, is, I believe, now condominiums (but they kept the Mediterranean look of the hilltop).
And Henry, I'm not sure which Pee Wee Valley you're referring to, but there's a remarkable one along the railroad tracks east of Louisville (if you're familiar with Annie Fellows Johnston's "Little Colonel" books). And thanks, Henry, for quoting Coleridge's phrase, "willing suspension of disbelief" (we may need it in this era).
Bruce: I don't recall listening to jazz in Mount Adams, which was the "happening place" in the mid-1960s to mid-1970s (Arnold Bortz's brother was, I believe, involved in its real estate renaissance), but I do recall going a number of times, during my college years, to a coffee house in Corryville (close to the University, of course), where there was jazz music and poetry readings (often accompanied by a low drumming background, as was the fashion then) and that sort of belated 1950s-then Hippie thing.
My own collegiate summer evenings, with visiting college friends, tended to be in the beer garden on top of the Wiedemann Brewery in Newport, Kentucky, where we could have decent beer and kalter Aufschnitt mit Kase, view the Cincinnati skyline across the river in all its lit-up glory, and hear the (not so dulcit) strains of the Delta Queen's calliope invigorating the evening air. Prosit!
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