Author: Randy A. Simes

Randy is an award-winning urban planner who founded UrbanCincy in May 2007. He grew up on Cincinnati’s west side in Covedale, and graduated from the University of Cincinnati’s nationally acclaimed School of Planning in June 2009. In addition to maintaining ownership and serving as the managing editor for UrbanCincy, Randy has worked professionally as a planning consultant throughout the United States, Korea and the Middle East. After brief stints in Atlanta and Chicago, he currently lives in the Daechi neighborhood of Seoul’s Gangnam district.

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Arts & Entertainment Business News

Moerlein, Paulaner bringing massive festival tent to Cincinnati’s central riverfront for Oktoberfest

Cincinnati has long been home of the world’s largest Oktoberfest celebration outside of Munich, and it will soon be getting larger. At the 2012 Oktoberfest Zinzinnati festival, the Moerlein Lager House will partner with Germany’s Paulaner Brewery to create the ÜberDrome.

The ÜberDrome will be a massive Oktoberfest tent covering the entire event lawn at Smale Riverfront Park. It will connect with the biergarten at the Moerlein Lager House and will create a space for approximately 3,000 festival goers.

“This ‘über’ fest tent, filled with Munich-style tables and benches, will span the entire length and width of the Schmidlapp Event Lawn, adjacent to the Lager House in Smale Riverfront Park,” said Greg Hardman, Managing Partner of the Moerlein Lager House and CEO of the Christian Moerlein Brewing Company. “The Oktoberfest beer will be flowing, there’ll be endless platters of delicious German dishes and the celebration will go on and on!”

The Moerlein Lager House will add a new element to Cincinnati’s annual Oktoberfest celebration when it introduces the ÜberDrome in 2012. Photograph by Randy A. Simes for UrbanCincy.

Paulaner is a famed German brewery that is well known for its enormous festival tent in the Theresienwiese during Munich’s Oktoberfest. Hardman says that the brewery was looking for a perfect location to present their Munich-style Oktoberfest celebration in Cincinnati, and determined that the central riverfront was just that.

The ÜberDrome will feature German-style pretzels, specially made Hudepohl Beer Wurst and other sausages, wiener schnitzel and strudel plus a wide selection of Paulaner and Moerlein beers including the Paulaner Oktoberfest Weisn, which was the original beer sold at Munich’s Oktoberfest.

The festival tent will also include a performance stage in the center of the space that will feature a variety skits, comedy, games, and music by Bavarian-style bands like Alpen Echos, Pros’t, and Heuboden Musikanten who will fly in from Germany for the event.

“This has been a life’s dream of mine to bring something like this to Cincinnati and, like the Moerlein Lager House itself, we are shooting for the ‘WOW’ factor,” explained Hardman.

Cincinnati’s 2012 Oktoberfest celebrations will take place from Friday, September 21 through Sunday, September 23. The ÜberDrome (map) will be open on these days from 4pm to midnight on Friday and Saturday, and 12pm to 9pm on Sunday.

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Business Development News

$27.3M investment to transform historic Enquirer Building into 238-room hotel

The historic Enquirer Building in downtown Cincinnati is finally set to get its long anticipated makeover. However, this time it will be as a hotel instead of the residences originally envisioned for the 86-year-old tower.

Plans call for a 238-room hotel with 12,000 square feet of street-level retail space. The renovation work would be completed over the next two years, with the first guests arriving at the end of 2014.

SREE Hotels, which typically operates Marriott hotel brands, will be the eventual operator of the new hotel one block from Fountain Square. This will also be SREE Hotels first project in the Midwest.

The planned hotel would become downtown’s fifth largest and would bring its total to more than 3,000 rooms.

“It is always great when we can preserve and restore one of our historic buildings,” Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory stated in a prepared release. “The deal also illustrates the increasing demand for more hotel rooms in Cincinnati. We have been focused on creating providing a great visitor experience for all of our guests, and that is paying off with increased tourism and convention business.”

The $27.3 million hotel project follows a failed effort by Middle Earth Developers to renovate the historic building into 152 apartments, 53,400 square feet of office space, and 170 parking spaces.

The new hotel would be the third recent hotel to join the greater downtown area over the past three years. According to the Cincinnati USA Convention & Visitors Bureau, downtown hotels had a 63 percent occupancy rate in 2011, and are experiencing record numbers thus far in 2012.

Developers of The Banks have also been in negotiations with hotel operators for a planned hotel at Freedom Way at Main Street directly across the street from Great American Ball Park.

“This deal, coupled with the renovations at the Hyatt, help to build our capacity for bigger and bigger convention and meeting business that in turn help our economy,” Cincinnati City Manager Milton Dohoney noted.

According to City officials, the project is contingent upon a 75 percent exemption on the increased tax value of the $27.3 million investment, which would equate to approximately $7.3 million over the course of 12 years. The deal was passed out of Cincinnati’s Budget & Finance Committee yesterday in their first day back from summer recess, and will go before the full City Council on Wednesday, August 1 at 2pm.

Enquirer Building exterior photograph by Thadd Fiala for UrbanCincy.

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Up To Speed

Bunbury Music Festival impresses in year one

Bunbury Festival: 2012 Wrap Up | Each Note Secure.

Cincinnati has been left without a noteworthy summer rock festival since Desdemona ended and never returned in 2006. That was until Bunbury entered the scene July 13-15. The music festival went up against an impressive array of local events and two well-established rock festivals nearby in Louisville and Chicago. More from Each Note Secure:

Regardless of Bunbury’s minor hiccups, I was blown away by the size, organization, and turnout of the festival. The festival pulled in 55,000 people in its first year, which is mighty impressive considering it shared dates with two other musical festivals that have been around since 2002 and 2005 respectively…Bunbury haters will continue to balk over the lineup (there’s always Midpoint!), but I was impressed that the festival was able to draw a wide range of folks, from older fans of GBV and Jane’s Addiction to the younger fans who came out for Neon Trees.

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Business Development News

‘The Rhine’ examines what all the changes in OTR mean to long-standing residents

As Over-the-Rhine continues to be transformed, some have wondered if the changes taking place may have a negative impact on the low-income residents currently living in the neighborhood.

This was the fight Buddy Gray long fought for Over-the-Rhine until he passed in 1996. The door was then opened for a change to this dynamic in the early 2000s when the Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation (3CDC) was able to purchase hundreds of properties throughout the downtrodden neighborhood.

Since that time hundreds of new housing units and dozens of new businesses have opened up shop. While some of those new businesses and residents match those that have long called the neighborhood home, others do not, and instead present a stressful new reality for those low-income residents who are seeing their world change around them.

The following video, entitled The Rhine, was produced by Kyle Pedersen in an effort to highlight these struggles. UrbanCincy in no way taking a position on the contents of this video, but instead thought it would be useful as a point to start a conversation about the changes taking place in historic Over-the-Rhine.

What do you think? Are the differences between the new and the old residents of Over-the-Rhine too great? What, if any, opportunity is there to bridge that divide? Have investors done enough to engage the existing community? Is the existing community, and their representative organizations, overreacting? We would love to hear your thoughts and ideas.

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Up To Speed

With World Choir Games finished, Cincinnati eyes next major event

With World Choir Games finished, Cincinnati eyes next major event.

The 2012 World Choir Games exceeded all expectations, and city officials are being praised for their ability to execute the international event flawlessly. With the two-week event now over, Cincinnati leaders are eyeing what might be the next major event for the Queen City. More from the Cincinnati Enquirer:

As the Games’ concerts and contests unfolded, as medals were won and lost, as choirs from around the world roamed the streets of Cincinnati giving this old river city a vibrant international feel thanks to midday traffic jams, conversations flavored with a multitude of accents and scenes sweetened by sidewalks teaming with smiling faces, the city’s party planners made a wish list. The events discussed included: Cincinnati’s 225th birthday, a World Choir Games-sanctioned Games of the Americas – starring choirs from the tip of North America to the toes of South America – and a new Tall Stacks Music, Arts & Heritage Festival, all in 2013; Baseball’s 2015 All-Star Game, and the University of Cincinnati’s bicentennial in 2019.