"Streetcars Preferred Over Busses" -- article from 1925

Here we are reading the very beginnings of the disassembly of Cincinnati's original streetcar system -- specifically the circa 1925 consideration of bus service in place of streetcars on Ludlow Ave. in Clifton.  The occasion was the reconstruction of Ludlow Ave. from a narrow 2-lane country road to the wide boulevard still seen today (two fragments of the original Ludlow Ave. of course still survive to its north).  The streetcar company sought to save money on its street paving obligations (The Cincinnati Street Railway was required per its franchise to pave the space between its tracks, a foot to either side, and the space between double-tracks) by substituting busses.   This move would have transferred the cost of paving the center of the rebuilt Ludlow Ave. to the Park Board.  After considerable debate, streetcar tracks were built in the new Ludlow Ave., but only remained there for about 20 years.  

Goodbye, Glencoe

May 11, 2013:

Gettin' High in the 'Nati

The best thing since Price Hill Girls:

https://soundcloud.com/justin-truax/high-in-the-nati-explicit#play


Oh, and here's Price Hill Girls, in case you haven't seen it:

The Breeders: Safari

Unfortunately I missed The Breeders tonight at The Southgate House Revival.  I don't know if they played this song or not, but I think this song and its video are intensely entertaining: 

I don't think this video was played on MTV at all.  If it was, it was only played a few times, which is a shame, since I think it's one of the best examples of the attitudes of the times for those who were the intended audience of this music.  I didn't see it for the first time until it was posted on Youtube in 2007 or 2008.  

Will Cincinnati music snobs finally embrace The Afghan Whigs after they played SXSW?

So now that Cincinnati's Afghan Whigs have played SXSW, are they cool enough for MPMF?

Ironic Slot Machines

Who are the geniuses behind slot machine themes?  That's right, your social security check is about to vanish:  

Another disturbing view from the new casino -- the suckers wasting time waiting in line to get the money they're about to throw away:

New UC Law Building Renderings

See how easy that was to get you to click on this link?

UC likes to remind us about its award-winning starchitecture (as a friend in art school once commented at a student film festival, the films with the most cuts always win "best editing"), but perhaps it should be modeling itself after venerated Harvard Law:

...which appears to have modeled itself after the Lindner School of Business:

The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, ruckksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and casesttes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the jurik food still in shopping bags--onion- and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.

I've witnessed this spectacle every September for twenty-one years. It is a brilliant event, invariably. The students greet each other with comic cries and gestures of sodden collapse. Their summer has been bloated with c riminal pleasures, as always. The parents stand sun-dazed near their automobiles, seeing images of themselves in every direction. The conscientious suntans. The well-made faces and wry looks. They feel a sense of renewal, of communal recognition. The women crisp and alert, in diet trim, knowing people's names. Their husbands content to measure out the time, distant but ungrudging, accomplished in parenthood, something about them suggesting massive insurance coverage. This assembly of station wagons, as much as anything they might do in the course of the year, more than formal liturgies or laws, tells the parents they are a collection of the like-minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a nation.