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Philip Spiess
Friends, I know this is long, but you don't have to read it all at once, because it offers:
GLIMPSES OF CAMP WASHINGTON
Camp Washington: Camp Washington has never been a clearly defined suburb, just a largely industrial area running along Spring Grove and Colerain Avenues in the bottom lands east of the Mill Creek, north of Mohawk and south of Northside. It acquired its name during the Mexican War of 1846, when the 1st and 2nd Ohio Regiments had an encampment there; because of it, a settlement with the same name grew up nearby. The Cincinnati Horse & Mule Exchange was also located here; it was a supplier of horses to the U. S. government from the late 1800s until the end of World War I. The area was annexed by the city of Cincinnati in 1870.
Hopple Street and the Hopple Street Viaduct: Hopple Street was (and, I suppose, still is) the major east-west thoroughfare through the heart of Camp Washington. It extends from Central Parkway on the east to Beekman Street and the Westwood-Northern Boulevard on the west at the foot of Fairmount. Built in 1916 to carry Hopple Street over the Mill Creek, the viaduct is 1,851 feet long with a 40-foot-wide roadway of 4 lanes flanked by sidewalks. One of the first of the several reinforced-concrete arch bridges to cross the Mill Creek valley and elsewhere in the city (such as at Ida Street in Mount Adams and along Columbia Parkway), it was rebuilt in the 1980s on the original piers, being widened to 60 feet (and 5 lanes) and raising the deck several feet, while removing the original decorative features and providing overhead lighting. Underneath the viaduct are railroad tracks, roundhouses, and unloading stations that were part of the massive Cincinnati Union Terminal development project of the early 1930s, now the Queensgate railyard operated by CSX (formerly the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad).
The Haffner Brothers “Eagle” Tannery: In our youth, when one went west on Hopple Street from Central Parkway, one immediately passed, on the north side of the street, the great Haffner Eagle Tannery, surmounted over its entrance by what proposed to be a sculpture of a great wing-spread eagle, but which frankly looked more like a goose from the street below. (When the tannery went out of business, this sculpture eventually ended up in the backyard of a residence on the eastern end, if I recall, of Galbraith Road / Kugler Mill Road in Indian Hill, just where the road makes a big turn and dips down to the railroad; it’s since gone from there, I don’t know where). [Note: Because Cincinnati with its meat-packing industries was so long a center of leather tanning, the University of Cincinnati had on its campus the Leather Research Laboratory, a Georgian Colonial building built in 1924 for the Department of Leather Research (established in 1921) and situated near the Herman Schneider Memorial Engineering Quadrangle. Supported by the Tanners’ Council of America, it was the only scientific research facility in America serving as the national research center for the Council and studying problems important to the leather industry. Although I doubt that this facility is still there at UC, I could be wrong. The city’s largest – and nationally important – tannery was the American Oak Leather Co., located on Kenner Street just north of Cincinnati Union Terminal.]
The City Workhouse: A remarkable Victorian castle-like structure, dating from 1866-1869 and designed by the firm of Anderson & Hannaford, stood for many years in a park of 26 acres at 3208 Colerain Avenue. This was the Cincinnati Workhouse and Hospital, the municipal penal institution for both men and women. The main building was 5 stories high, 510 feet long, and 60 feet wide; it contained 606 cells in tiers for the prisoners, as well as offices and personnel quarters; it cost half a million dollars to build. Other buildings on the grounds were where inmates worked at cooking, baking, laundering, sewing, crushing rock for the streets, and operating the municipal garbage incinerator (before it moved to a larger facility at the City Dump west of the Mill Creek) – after all, it was the Work House! (How Dickensian!) There were also male and female hospitals, quarantine wards for venereal-disease victims, and a welfare bureau for the rehabilitation of prisoners (how successful this was, I don’t know). The average daily population of the Workhouse was around 400 persons, but about 6,000 persons (mostly local) were received into custody each year, the most common offenses being drunkenness, prostitution, and serious traffic violations. The building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, but prisoners were moved out of the facility in the late 1980s and the building was torn down in 1990, just after the 1989 film Lock Up, starring Sylvester Stallone, was shot there. Today the site houses the River City Correctional Center, which treats felons for chemical dependency, while the door of a jail cell from the City Workhouse and an old prison register are on display at the Hamilton County Justice Center.
Municipal Garage and Automotive Safety Lane: At the corner of Central Parkway and Bates Avenue stands the Cincinnati Municipal Garage [I assume it still does]. Built in 1938 in a modest Art Moderne style to service and repair about 1,500 vehicles operated by the city, the facility also contained the shop where street signs of all sorts were manufactured and repaired. The adjacent automobile Testing Lane (known to us as the “Safety or Inspection Lane”), which opened in 1940, required (by ordinance) all motor vehicles operated by Cincinnati residents or other frequent or lengthy visitors to the city to pass a yearly mechanical inspection of their vehicle. [My sister and I well remember the occasions when, learning that our father or mother had to take the family car to “the Safety Lane,” we demanded to go along. This was because it was such fun: modern equipment tested the car’s brakes, wheel alignment, lights, etc., and we were allowed to ride in the car as this occurred; the car rode on rumble-strips (perhaps), raised up and down, and headlight-testing machines were rolled in front of the headlights. It was almost like a combination of a routine visit to a doctor’s office and an amusement park!] As cars and tests became more sophisticated and state inspection stations took over yearly car inspections, the Cincinnati Testing Lane passed into oblivion. [Note: In 2016, Cincinnati's Municipal Garage was at the top of the City Manager's list as the city-owned building in the worst shape; the Safety Lane is now used to repair fire trucks.]
Taft Field: Located below Central Parkway between Bates and Hopple Streets [I assume it still is there], Taft Field is a municipal recreation field for amateur baseball and softball established in 1911 when William Howard Taft was President; electric lights allowed for night games at an early period. I recall in my earlier childhood going to Taft Field from Clifton to watch massive fireworks displays, probably on the 4th of July (later we went to see fireworks on the Fourth in St. Bernard, Ohio). [I also remember, circa 5th grade, that my grandfather took me to see a demonstration by the Cincinnati Fire Department; a vacant house near Taft Field was set ablaze in the lower story and, as the fire spread through the upper stories, the firemen kept the adjacent houses from catching fire. My grandfather filmed the whole thing as the house in question was eventually destroyed and the fire put out.]
Cincinnati Union Stock Yard Company: Cincinnati’s union stockyard, rated 15th in size among the nation’s stockyards in 1943, located at 3119 Spring Grove Avenue and heir to the earlier abattoirs of Deer Creek on the eastern side of the city (known as “Bloody Run” before Gilbert and Eggleston Avenues covered up the creek), was founded in 1871 to consolidate the need of various local slaughterhouses to house and feed the livestock, shipped in from a radius of several hundred miles, until said livestock was sold. The stockyards covered an area of about 40 acres, with over 1,000 pens under roof; a feature was a double-decked hog house of concrete and steel. Company offices were in an 1873 building, and the Avenue Hotel, a hotel for drovers and stockmen, was run by the company. In the 1940s, during World War II, more than 1 million head of livestock a year passed through the yards. Adjacent to the stockyards was E[lias] Kahn’s Sons Co. (founded 1882), the nation’s 12th largest meat-packing plant [in 1943]. Its modern plant, built in 1926, consisted of 11 modern buildings on a 5-acre (later 17-acre) site. The plant, which in its heyday after World War II handled hogs, cattle, and sheep, shut down in 2006, and was demolished in 2012; the Sara Lee Corp. (which had bought the business in 1966) gave the site to the city of Cincinnati. [Kahn’s famous slogan, “The Wiener the World Awaited,” inspired me in 4th grade (1955): yes, I was a punster even then – I ordered my father to help make me a Halloween costume out of fiberglass, looking like a giant hot dog, which I could stand in and see out of (through one-way mirrored plastic); on the outside was stenciled the slogan “The Hallow-Weener the World Awaited.”]
Camp Washington Chili: Since 1940 Camp Washington Chili, one of Cincinnati’s notable “Cincinnati chili” parlors, has served its neighborhood and beyond, being open 24 hours a day (but closed on Sundays). It serves more than 1,000 cheese coneys per day from meat that is still packed from a local slaughterhouse; it professes to use neither chocolate nor cocoa, but it does employ about 18 spices in its recipe. Begun by Steve Zizzo Andon (who had worked at the Empress Chili Parlor) and Anastas “Fred” Zambrun, at the corner of Hopple Street and Colerain Avenue in what was once a Kroger store, its chili soon caught on. Ioannis D. Iannou, better known as Johnny Johnson, a Greek immigrant and nephew of Steve Andon, is now the current owner; he joined Camp Washington Chili in 1951, and has, with his wife Antigone, been the mainstay of the business ever since. The original parlor was razed in 2000 to make way for a street-widening project, but the business immediately rebuilt at 3005 Colerain Avenue as a 1950s-style diner, with lots of neon and a much greater seating capacity. The business was able to retain its iconic vertical “Chili” sign and mount it on the new building. In 1985, CBS Morning News called Camp Washington Chili “the best chili in the country.” The Chicago Tribune called it “the best, the most exquisite, and the most unique in Cincinnati, and ergo the greatest in the world” [!]. And blues musician Lonnie Mack has written a song in tribute to “Camp Washington Chili”; further, in 2000, Camp Washington chili was awarded the James Beard Award as an “American regional classic.” [My grandfather often went to Camp Washington Chili to bring home carry-out for his and my grandmother’s dinner.] [Note: There is also a well-known White Castle hamburger establishment nearby, where in my high school and college days, the Spiess family used to go to get “White Castles” for a midnight snack. My father called it "Whitey Castelli's Aluminum Room."]
Thw Crosley Corporation: The Crosley Corporation (1921-1956), and WLW radio and television, was discussed at length on this Forum in April, 2018, at Posts #3525 - #3538, largely by Paul Simons, Philip Spiess, Bruce Fette, and Lee Max, with further comments by Jon Marks, Ann Shepard Rueve, and Dale Gieringer. However, to recap: The Crosley Corporation’s 9-story with tower main plant (established 1924), as well as a number of other associated buildings, at the southwest corner of Colerain Avenue and 1329 Arlington Street in Camp Washington, is a classic Art Moderne concrete industrial building of its period (built in 1929 by Samuel Hannaford & Sons), embellished in spots with Art Deco decorations; originally Powel Crosley would broadcast WLW from the roof (the 9th floor and tower were offices). It was one of the world's largest manufacturers of radios, electric refrigerators, washing machines, gas and electric stoves, manufacturing at its peak 2,000 radio receiving sets and several hundred electric refrigerators a day -- to say nothing of the first compact car, introduced in the 1940s -- Powel Crosley, Jr., was a true pioneer in the development of the radio industry, becoming known as “The Henry Ford of Radio.” The building, which was used by Crosley until the 1940s, was sold at that time to the Aviation Corporation (later AVCO Electronics), and in 1960 the factory closed down. Sold in the late 1970s, it later had many owners, being used as a warehouse and a printing facility, but in 1998 it was purchased by Hosea Project Movers (now Hosea Worldwide, a storage and moving facility); however, in 2006 it was abandoned. (The last time I saw it, in 2003, it was rapidly declining into ruin.) Then, in 2012, the building was condemned by the city, but it was bought by C W Development LLC in 2014 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2015. As of 2021, developers for the owner, Crosley Renaissance LLC, were planning to convert the Crosley Building into a space for artists (including apartments), complete with a museum, café, restaurant, and storefront space for artists to showcase and sell their wares; the top floor would include a commons area with fitness center, game room, community room, business center, and two rooftop decks. [In my longtime professional work nationwide in historic preservation, this sort of scheme often succeeds initially, but doesn’t last over the long haul.]
Colerain Avenue Street Railway Substation: Constructed by the Cincinnati Street Railway Co., the Colerain Avenue substation just south of Hopple Street was one of 18 substations constructed from 1927 on in variations of Georgian or simplified Beaux Arts styles (the 19th, an exception, was the extraordinary Delta Avenue substation, just above Columbia Parkway, constructed in a Neo-Egyptian Revival pylon style -- no doubt an inside joke on the name of the street and the "Nile delta" -- unfortunately now demolished). These substations were the result of the street railway converting its single power station operation (located in Pendleton on Eastern Avenue) to a fully automatic supervisory distribution system, controlled by a load dispatcher at the central station at 1323 Walnut Street. Designed by the General Electric Co., the system was in full operation by the summer of 1928. To keep the substations cool in hot weather, the hot air was conducted to the outside by means of cool air traveling through the gratings on which the transformers sat and so upward through radiator pipes, whence it escaped through ventilators. The grounds of the elegantly designed substations were also nicely landscaped, but regrettably they now have all been demolished (or so I believe), the streetcar system in Cincinnati being abandoned in the mid-1950s.
Tunnels of the Cincinnati Rapid Transit System: The northern ends of the Rapid Transit System tunnels [see my article, “The Cincinnati Rapid Transit System,” Post #4476 (1-20-2020), on this Forum] emerge from under (and just west of) Central Parkway south of Hopple Street. They have been fenced and sealed off from public access by the city as being deemed “unsafe.”
Neighborhood Tenement Buildings: Behind the north side of Hopple Street, adjacent to (possibly) Colerain Avenue, there are a number of what might be called “tenement buildings,” buildings with prominent open porches on their back sides which would often have served as outdoor sleeping quarters on the hot nights of summer before air-conditioning came to be established (not that these quarters ever had air-conditioning). They are, no doubt, typical of many other so-called tenement buildings elsewhere in the city.
The “Campy” Washington Mural: Displayed on a building behind the Camp Washington Chili Parlor is a 45-foot-tall mural painting of George Washington’s head on a Colonial-era woman’s body in a pink and yellow dress and holding a fan (campy Washington – get it?). Around Washington are emblems of the Camp Washington area – the bull that escaped from the stockyards (there were several, actually, at least two reaching Clifton, one in my youth and one in 2003); the “tin man” from Jacobs Manufacturing (seen in our youth forever “walking” above the bleachers at Crosley Field); and a circle of “flying pigs” around Washington’s head.
The American Sign Museum: A bit north of the giant mural is the American Sign Museum at 1330 Monmouth Street, which collects, preserves, and displays classic signs from iconic businesses around the country; the museum also displays equipment used in the manufacture of signs. The museum is the brainchild of Tod Swormstedt, whose grandfather was the first editor (1906) of the signage trade journal Signs of the Times (which the Swormstedt family still owns); Tod began collecting and planning for the museum in 1999 and opened the museum to the public in 2005. [The predecessor idea for this museum was surely The Museum of Modern Mythology in San Francisco, which went defunct in 1989 after an earthquake.] Over 200 signs and other objects are displayed; over 3,800 objects are cataloged. Examples of the showier pieces are a fiberglass Frisch’s Big Boy with a slingshot in his pocket (later dropped from the statues), a McDonald Golden Arch from 1963 (when it still had the original Speedee character, before Ronald McDonald), and a Howard Johnson’s sign. Many of the signs and artifacts are on a mock street in a town called “Signville,” and Neonworks of Cincinnati moved its business into the museum, offering a live exhibit to show visitors how it restores neon signs. In 2012 the museum moved into part of the old Oesterlein Machine Co.-Fashion Frocks Inc. complex, a property on the National Register of Historic Places.
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, but after I slipped him some dirhans he did play it for you.
