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Philip Spiess
And now: THE CINCINNATI CITY DUMP AND INCINERATOR: A LOOK INTO THE INFERNO
Prologue: Have you ever looked into the cauldron of an active volcano? No, I haven’t been to Vesuvius nor have I climbed up the side of Popocatepetl (although I’ve been in Mexico City), but in the Caribbean, on the island of Saint Lucia, I looked down inside a mountain of burning embers and glowing ash. Nevertheless, it did not compare with my visit, in the spring of 1961, to the Cincinnati City Dump and Central Incinerator in South Cumminsville.
Early Garbage Removal in Cincinnati: In the early days of Cincinnati, as in the early days of almost every other American city, there was no such thing as garbage removal; when you were done with your banana peel, you flipped it over your shoulder into the street and heaven help where the next pedestrian might step (I won’t even mention the ubiquitous horses and what they left behind, but I once came up with a speech on the historic preservation of museum villages, such as Colonial Williamsburg, entitled “Cow Pies in the Village Street: Stepping Into the Past”). As I mentioned in Post #5595 (03-03-2021) on this Forum [“Mrs. Trollope in Cincinnati I”], in the late 1820s the Cincinnati streets were filled with scavengers – hogs! Mrs. Trollope, reminiscing about her Cincinnati sojourn in her highly critical account Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), grumbled that the city streets had no rubbish cart, “no pump, no cistern, no drain of any kind,” and, as a result, there was no way to dispose of garbage. Everything was thrown into the middle of the street for consumption by hogs (Trichinosis, anyone?). Dame Trollope continued: “In truth, the pigs are constantly seen doing Herculean service in this way through every quarter of the city, and though it is not very agreeable to live surrounded by herds of these unsavoury animals, it is well they are so numerous, and so active in their capacity of scavengers, for without them the streets would soon be choked up with all sorts of substances in every stage of decomposition.” [It reminds me of Robert Benchley’s cartoon of two charwomen looking at a pile of stinking garbage and commenting, “Isn’t it offal?”] Finally, in 1862, the Cincinnati City Council reported that: “About two years since, the City Council were seriously exorcised about the system then used in clearing streets, and they passed an ordinance compelling the occupants of houses to place their ashes and garbage in separate vessels, so that, during the summer months especially, they could be frequently removed.” The garbage in question was pretty much organic food waste and therefore commercially valuable (think “compost”); citizens had to pay the city or private entrepreneurs to haul the garbage away. The “ashes” were mostly mineral refuse and were either dumped into the river or into valleys and gullies around the city. (The blood from the Deer Creek slaughterhouses on the eastern side of the city, along what is now Gilbert Avenue, was dumped into Deer Creek, giving it the name of “Bloody Run” [one of several so-named areas around the city].)
Down In the Dumps: But change (not necessarily for the better) was on its way; the winner of the 1866 bid to direct the Cincinnati Street Cleaning Department had to pay the city for the privilege of hauling away the garbage. Colonel A. M. Robinson, appointed superintendent of streets, contracted with George Thompson to remove house offal and animal garbage. By 1886, the Cincinnati Fertilizer Company had its sheds by the railroad tracks on the riverbank six miles west of the city; this company cleared the streets and manufactured the waste into fertilizer – at a significant profit. By 1916 citizens were encouraged to utilize galvanized iron receptacles (i.e., trash cans) to “add materially to . . . preventing unhealthful conditions.” But homeowners mixed up the types of garbage they put out and this detritus clogged the fertilizer factory, so such refuse had to be dumped elsewhere. Again, this was in the ravines, bottom lands, and deserted areas, namely, everywhere; these dumps stunk and often caught on fire. Given their smells, the presence of rats and other vermin, and their unsightly appearance, they were considered a general nuisance as a public health hazard. So finally an official City Dump was established at Gest Street in the Mill Creek bottoms below Eighth Street (now called the Cincinnati Metropolitan Sewer District). Later, a further City Dump (now called the Millcreek Sanitation Plant) was established further up the Mill Creek on its eastern bank west of Camp Washington, east of Millvale, and at the southern end of South Cumminsville.
The Excursion (no apologies to William Wordsworth): In the Spring of 1961, my friends Jeffrey Rosen and Jonathan Marks and I were playing at my house in Clifton when my father, who had been cleaning out the basement and garage, asked if we wanted to accompany him to the City Dump. Of course we did! Traversing the bottom lands of the Mill Creek in South Cumminsville between Central Parkway and the Mill Creek, along what is called “Millcreek Road,” we crossed over great mounds of trash, broken bottles and other glass, miscellaneous bricks and furniture, abandoned household appliances and sinks, tubs, and toilets, wooden pallets, and who-knows-what else. The unholy and fetid smells of rotting garbage were prevalent in the hot Spring air, and further afield, closer to the Mill Creek, were smoldering heaps of burning trash, sending up smoke and flickering flames in the daylight, but (as I later saw) at night glowing ominously like evil eyes watching in the valley at the foot of the western hills. There were people there, too, those from the lower ends of society, combing over these heaps, looking, no doubt, for “treasures” – or at least something from which they could extract a little coin. We paused for several minutes to join them, unable to resist the exhilarating and uninhibited thrill which comes from breaking large panes of glass or heaving a rusty brick through an old porcelain john. We then proceeded on to our goal on the far side of Mill Creek, namely, the Central Municipal Incinerator.
The Great City Incinerator: Incinerators came into the city comparatively late, being established by Cincinnati’s Charter government in the 1920s. Later, four municipal solid waste incinerators were built by the federal government’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the mid-1930s. [There were, for example, the Crookshank Incinerator in Covedale, just north and west of Western Hills High School, and the Madisonville Incinerator on Red Bank Road opposite Hetzell Avenue.] Prior to that, the dumps described above were pretty much just set afire and the trash heaps allowed to smolder and burn. The Central Incinerator (also called the “West Fork Incinerator,” because it was at the juncture of where the west fork of the Mill Creek runs into the Mill Creek proper, that is, the one in question here) was built, as I recall, in the mid-1950s, and was, to my knowledge, the most modern incinerator in Cincinnati at that time. From the City Dump, one crossed the Mill Creek on the so-called Access Bridge and approached the ramp to the great dark and yawning entrance of the incinerator building itself. Following the line of city garbage trucks ahead of us, we entered and came onto a broad, paved platform that extended the length of the incinerator building to the exit ramp at the other end. On either side of this platform great pits dropped down forty feet or more to a floor below; into these pits the garbage trucks emptied their cargoes of largely organic garbage; we threw our trash down there as well. Looking over the edge into the pits one saw a scene from Dante: far below, a number of large manholes were open in the concrete floor; from these flames shot forth to a height of several feet, and dirty, sweating men with rakes were raking garbage into these circular infernos. The heat for a Spring day was intense, and the overwhelming stench of the garbage, combined with the ash and smoke, was almost unbearable. Then came the crane! The pits on either side of the drive-in platform were backed up on their far side by great walls of concrete that rose almost to the height of the roof high overhead; they might as well have been the adamantine walls of Dis, they looked so impenetrable. Where they were open at the top toward the roof, one could see that garbage was being burned in a pit on their other side, for periodically a giant clamshell crane would come over the top of the wall on ceiling-mounted rails and scoop up great mouthfuls of garbage from the pit on our side of the wall and take it back over the wall to drop it on the other side to be burned. This Dantesque vision of the “Fiery Furnace” of Old Testament memory has obviously stuck with me over the years! But, alas, it is no more! Although the building still stands, closed and abandoned and fenced in, it ceased operation in 1976; its fellows around the city began shutting down and were mostly demolished starting in 1973. The reason? Federal air quality regulations were passed in 1971, and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) was established in 1972.
Poetic Litterature: Later in 1961, Jeffrey Rosen went to The Netherlands to study for a year, and from there he wrote me, reminiscing about our visit to the City Dump. He put his nostalgia in poetic form, mimicking John Masefield’s poem “Sea Fever”: “I must go down to the dumps again / Where I.Q.s are so high, / And all I ask is a garbage truck / And a smell to steer her by . . . .” This, of course, provoked me into action; recognizing that here was a new sub-genre of literature, a whole field litterally, I promptly rattled off a series of parodies I later called Dumps: A Poetic Tribute. To give you just a taste (or perhaps an aroma), here is stanza 3 from my takeoff on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Bells” (following its exact line, rhyme scheme, and meter), written when I was supposed to be studying for my midterm AP English exams with Miss Keegan at Walnut Hills (January, 1962) [best chanted aloud]:
“See the dead furniture dumps –
Awful dumps!
Oh, what noble chair legs these, that now are turned to stumps!
In the horror of decay,
They are now all thrown away!
Too far gone now to repair,
They are now just lying there
Out of use.
In a mighty mass appealing to the mercy of the weather,
In a maddened heap and jumble they are lying there together.
Oh, this ruin, ruin, ruin,
Oh, decay that comes too soo-on,
And the misuse that destroys thus
Is the Devil that employs us!
For this treatment there is simply no excuse!
Oh, the dumps, dumps, dumps!
What a smell the garbage pumps
Of decay!
How beds, chairs, and tables thud
As they’re thrown into the mud,
And the stagnant pools send up a mighty spray!
Yet the insects fully know,
By the rotting
And the clotting,
They know just the place to go.
Roaches, beetles, flies, and ticks,
In the swarming,
So alarming,
Dance ‘mongst puddles, cans, and bricks,
Or amongst the tangled wire, or amongst the trashy humps
Of the dumps –
Of the dumps, dumps, dumps, dumps,
Dumps, dumps, dumps –
‘Mongst the utter gutter clutter of the dumps.”
[Und so weiter.]
Where, Oh Where, Has My Little Dog Gone?: Alas, the City Dump is no more, and when I went past the deserted City Incinerator in 2003 (my last visit to the city, at the time of my father’s death), the Central Incinerator stood vacant, dark, and cold, its great bulk fenced off from the nearby neighborhood of Millvale so that no straying youngster could fall into its Stygian gloom! It indeed had gone to the dogs. But wait! It really had! On June 19, 2014, John Peoples, of the Cincinnati Public Works Department, heard a dog barking and crying inside the incinerator when he came in to work. He went into the deserted incinerator, looked down into the pit, and saw a puppy trapped down there. Fire crews responded to a call and rescued the trapped puppy from the abandoned Central Incinerator, deciding thereby to name him “Smokey."
Rumpke’s Landfill: But Cincinnati proper wasn’t the only Hamilton County municipality to produce garbage. You may recall that a number of independent cities within Hamilton County are surrounded by the city of Cincinnati. Thus St. Bernard, Norwood, Sharonville, Cheviot, and Arlington Heights were among the other municipalities which produced, and therefore needed to remove, their garbage. And what happened to trash removal in Cincinnati after the EPA shut down the incinerators? Eventually every municipality, Cincinnati included, signed a contract with a Carthage pig farmer [shades of Porkopolis?] named Bill “Sweet William” Rumpke. He earned as much as $20,000 a month in the 1950s hauling garbage to his pig farm, where about 600 hogs ate up the refuse. But, lo! such activity provoked the neighbors to take a “Not in My Back Yard” approach, and Rumpke’s garbage business moved to Colerain Township, where his garbage landfill created “Mount Rumpke,” now the tallest point in Hamilton County. Rumpke Waste & Recycling (founded in 1932), still very much a going concern, is located at 3800 Struble Road in Colerain, just north of Bevis. Here’s how it currently describes its “Sanitary Landfill”: “All of Rumpke’s landfills are built in sections called ‘cells’, which are capped with a liner system similar to the one placed at the bottom of the landfill. Once the final cap has been installed, the landfills are monitored for at least 30 years. The bottom of the landfill features layers of gravel as well as intermittent leachate pipes designed to siphon leachate from the landfill and transfer it to a local water treatment facility. On the outside, Rumpke partners with energy companies to capture landfill gas as natural gas. Currently, our Rumpke Sanitary Landfill is the largest landfill gas-to-pipeline energy production facility in the world” [!].
The Mill Creek Greenway Trail: So what has become of the land in South Cumminsville over which the City Dump of pungent memory was scattered? In 1992, the Ohio Department of Health determined that fish from the Mill Creek were unsafe to eat, and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) recommended there be no body contact with the water (i.e., wading, swimming, or boating) because of high levels of untreated sewerage. By 1995, the Mill Creek was so polluted that only worms survived in its waters, and any carp that ventured into Mill Creek from the Ohio River would throw themselves onto the banks and die. By 1997, the national organization American Rivers called the Mill Creek the most endangered urban river in North America [remember the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, that used to catch fire?]. Thus the Mill Creek Restoration Project, now called Groundwork Cincinnati / Mill Creek, was founded to restore the Mill Creek to a habitable level. Working with other national clean rivers groups, it received technical services as part of the Urban Waters Learning Network in 2010, and it became a Groundwork Trust in 2012.
Part and parcel of this restoration project of the Mill Creek itself is also the restoration of its banks, as part of the civic improvement of the neighborhoods that adjoin it. As a result, thousands of trees have been planted, and derelict properties along almost five miles of the river (including the dump) have been turned into public greenspaces, trails [see below], and edible forest gardens. (What, you may ask, are “edible forest gardens”? They are an ecological food producing system, structured as, and functioning like, a forest. Low maintenance and largely self-supporting once established, they have layers of trees, shrubs, climbing vines, herbs, ground cover, and root crops. Plants and fungi work together to cycle nutrients and control pests and diseases.) Now the Freedom Tree Edible Forest Garden in Northside has pears and apples in autumn that you can pick and eat. And because of the restoration of the Mill Creek waters and its banks, peregrine falcons have now been spotted in the area, as well as sparrows, waterfowl, including blue herons, black-crowned herons, and cattle egrets; further, turtles, lizards, salamanders, and beavers now inhabit the Mill Creek's waters. It should also be noted that Groundwork Cincinnati has had over 39,000 Green Team youth in the Cincinnati Public Schools and other school districts in the Mill Creek watershed participate in its educational programming, using the Mill Creek as a living laboratory and working in ecological service projects. [Note: About two-thirds of the students are African-American and come from economically disadvantaged families who live along the waterway, so this has been a boon to the Millvale and South Cumminsville communities.]
In 2009, Groundwork Cincinnati began work on the city’s Mill Creek Greenway Trail. This hike-and-bike trail will provide exercise and recreation for Mill Creek neighborhood residents and others. Completed, the trail will extend 13.5 miles from the Hamilton County Fairgrounds in Carthage to the mouth of the Mill Creek. From there it will connect with the Ohio River Trail in Lower Price Hill, ultimately connecting with the east-west Ohio River Trail at the Cincinnati Riverfront Park, as well as with the Lick Run Trail, the West Fork Mill Creek Trail, the Little Miami Scenic Trail, the Great Miami River Trail, the Riverfront Commons (Kentucky), the Licking River Greenway Trail (Kentucky), and the Whitewater Canal Trail (Indiana). The Mill Creek Greenway Trail, extending from the Queen City shopping center at Mitchell Avenue (very eastern end of Winton Place) to the Mill Creek Road Access bridge (formerly the entrance to the City Incinerator) passes Salway Park and Spring Grove Cemetery, and includes the Space Walk, a 3/4 of a mile-long model of the Solar System; the Greenway Trail ends in Millvale at the intersection of Fricke Road and Beekman Street near the Ethel Taylor Academy. So “Ave atque Vale” to the Cincinnati City Dump and Municipal Incinerator, as Nature returns once again in her best modes to Cincinnati’s Mill Creek after 220 years of industrial pestilence!
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Please spay/neuter your pets. We are drowning in homeless pets. 
