Categories
Arts & Entertainment Development

A Standing Ovation for Newport’s New Premiere Music Venue

Ovation, the 25-acre mixed-use development planned by Corporex to transform the northwestern corner of Newport, has completed its first phase of construction with the addition of PromoWest Pavilion at Ovation—a music venue that promises big things for the river’s edge. The $40 million concert venue aims to attract hundreds of thousands of fans every year with over 180 acts, both big and small.

PromoWest Productions, which operates six music venues as well as the Bunbury Music Festival, considers the Newport venue to be their third crown jewel, alongside Express Live! in Columbus and Stage AE in Pittsburgh. All three feature a reversible stage allowing for smaller indoor or larger outdoor configurations, but as the newest, Newport’s venue features additional amenities designed to provide the best possible experience for fans, artists, and the production crew.

The multi-level indoor pavilion can accommodate 1500 to 2700 general admission fans plus an additional 428 seated. Outside, the amphitheater can accommodate 7000 general admission plus 1040 seated. The whole venue sits atop a parking garage that boasts upwards of 500 spaces.

Both indoor and outdoor areas feature giant sunken pits in front of the stage with raised levels surrounding them, providing excellent vantage points from every viewing angle. And no matter where you are in the venue, whether it be at the bar getting another round or on your way to the bathroom to get rid of the previous one, TV screens scattered strategically throughout the pavilion will keep you tethered to what’s happening on stage.

Murals of well-known musicians enliven the walls of the facility. Inside the VIP lounge on the second level, a mural featuring a TV is animated BLINK-style with a ceiling-mounted projector, adding yet another dimension to an already stunning work of art.

Backstage, six dressing rooms, each equipped with TVs and bathrooms with showers, are poised to make the performing artists’ lives as comfortable as possible. A full kitchen will serve as the base for on-site caterers, and multiple production rooms, each with its own private bathroom, are equipped to house show technicians comfortably.

The Green Room on the second level lives up to its namesake by committing to the color in every way possible and can be rearranged to accommodate artists’ varying needs. Adjacent to the Green Room is the King Records Room—a versatile, private space embellished with a colorful mural that pays homage to Cincinnati’s legendary artists and the historic recording studio in Evanston.

Click the photo below to launch our full photo gallery:

The venue’s first wave of acts was announced earlier this morning:

  • Lady A
  • Russ
  • Jelly Roll
  • Dirty Heads & Sublime with Rome
  • The Struts
  • Kip Moore
  • The Distillers
  • Jordan Davis

Another wave of artists will be announced on June 15th.

PromoWest Pavilion at Ovation is located at 101 W. 4th Street in Newport, KY, right behind the Campbell County Courthouse. Visit OvationPavilion.com for additional information.

Categories
Arts & Entertainment News

New Coffee shop Focuses on Community Connections

Tucked away on the charming and growing business district in East Walnut Hills is a new coffee shop that is only a few months old. Urbana Café, the Pendleton coffeeshop that began by operating out of a Vespa at Findlay Market, opened it’s second brick and mortar location in East Walnut Hills this summer.

However, this new location has an unexpected twist when you compare it to other coffee shops in the city: it’s decision to remain “unplugged.” Why? I spoke with owner Daniel Noguera to find out:

For Daniel, it’s all about taking a second to unplug and reconnect. His aim is to “Build community and connections.”

“That’s what we are aiming for. Come with your date, come with your family, come with your dad,” Noguera told UrbanCincy, We don’t want to take away the relevance of technology, because we all need it, but just take the five to ten minutes to disconnect, and after that, if you need to go back to your computer, you have your office and other places to do so.”

When I asked if their decision to not have wifi in their new location has been met with negative feedback, Noguera said no, in general. He said there is one local woman who continues to check in and make sure they are still sticking to their decision, and they always confirm, but she continues to come back and is a regular patron of the café.

Intentionality is a big part of Urbana Café’s brand. Noguera explained that they do not go into a community that is already well served. They want to bring something new to a neighborhood that will build relationships, and they don’t want to compete with other cafés.

By not having wifi available they change their customer base, so patrons will come to Urbana based on the idea they have set forth, which is building community.

Noguera is also intentional in “serving the best product we can with the best resources we can find, sourced as responsibly as we can.” They try to buy locally, make their pastries in-house, and try to build connections with those that they source from, always organic and fair trade, to continue to positive influence on the community here and elsewhere.

The new location can be found at 2714 Woodburn Ave.

Categories
Arts & Entertainment News

Foundation Event a Deep Dive into Bath House History

For decades these peculiar historic buildings sat hidden in plain sight. Maybe it was a house with two front entrances or a church. Maybe a building had a lot of hard concrete floors. In Over-the-Rhine, these could have been breweries, factories, or….a bath house?

Highlighting the history of one of the neighborhoods more hidden quirks, the Over-the-Rhine Foundation will host an event later this month in a former bath house.

A Sanborn Map showing the Pendleton Bath House

“In the early 20th century, the high cost of in-home plumbing and water heaters meant that Cincinnatians bathed at commercially operated bathhouses,” Foundation Trustee Tom Hadley told UrbanCincy, “Social reformers advocated for publicly funded baths as a way to check the spread of disease, improve living conditions and educate about the benefits of cleanliness.” He hopes the event can showcase this particular aspect of OTR history.

Foundation organizers hope the event will encourage attendees to explore the history of OTR in an informal and interactive experience.

The event called, “Taking the Plunge: History of Public Bath Houses” will be held on Thursday, Nov. 1 at 5:30 PM at the location of the former St. Mary’s Baptist Church in Pendleton. It is ticketed and tickets can be purchased here for $25. The Foundation will host a social hour at the Urban 3 Points Brewery following the program.

The event will be located within two blocks of a Cincy RedBike station on 12th and Broadway and is served by the #24 and #19 Metro bus routes via Sycamore Street.

Editor’s Note: Mr. Yung is a member of the Over-the-Rhine Foundation Board of Trustees.

Categories
Arts & Entertainment News

Flags for Neighborhoods go Beyond Games

Cincy Flags is an initiative that is looking to instill pride and place in Cincinnati through the design of a unique flag for each of the fifty-two neighborhoods. The flags will be designed through public input sessions where that input is then handed off to a designer who will apply finishing touches to the final flag design.

The idea started with Henry Frondorf, who won the first ever Engage Cincy Grant for the Neighborhood Games in 2016. He says his inspiration for the Neighborhood Games started as a spark when he attended the Men’s World Cup Match viewing party on Fountain Square in 2014.

The Neighborhood Games are a series of events where teams from each neighborhood compete to win the Neighborhood Cup. The events mirror the Olympics where there are an opening and closing ceremony. After his first Neighborhood Games, he realized that not all neighborhoods have a representative flag.

Left to right: Henry Frondorf, Josh Mattie, Chris Cliff-Perbix.

Because of this, Frondorf, along with designers Josh Mattie and Chris Cliff-Perbix, came up with the idea to instill a sense of place in each Cincinnati neighborhood through a flag. They applied this idea to the Engage Cincy Challenge Grant Program were chosen from seventeen finalists to receive $10,000 from the city for this initiative.

The Engage Cincy Challenge Grant Program, which is awarded by the City of Cincinnati, is intended to be a community building competition that intends to use the funds for the “development, launch and promotion of innovative projects that better a specific neighborhood or the entire city.”

So far, the project is in its information gathering stage. They’ve been surprised at the feedback they’ve gotten from the survey so far, with responses to questions like “what do you wish more people knew about your neighborhood?”

“You’ll get feedback from people who respond saying that what is most important about their neighborhood is that they’ve lived there for forty years and all the connections they’ve made through that. That is hard to represent, and we are trying to physically represent that feeling,” said Chris Cliff-Perbix.

“The vibe of a neighborhood is determined by the people in it. A flag can be a visual emblem of the spirit of the neighborhood, and it can be a tangible communication of a community,” co-founder Josh Mattie told UrbanCincy. “People are eager to embrace the embodiment of what they feel about their neighborhood. It is interesting to see how people use the form as a way to speak their voice about the wide variety of feedback they can give about their community,”

The flags were flown at the Parade of Neighborhoods Opening Ceremony at the Neighborhood Games in 2019.

This year’s Neighborhood Games Opening Ceremony was July 21 at 7 p.m. at Washington Park.

While the third Neighborhood Games is in the books you can still tell Cincy Flags what you love about your neighborhood by filling out the survey here.

Categories
Arts & Entertainment

Walking Tours from ‘Urbanologist’ Max Grinnell Return to Cincinnati

Max Grinnell is an author, historian, and professor who excels at sharing unique perspectives of American cities. This June, he will return to Cincinnati to host a series of walking tours titled Out of the Past: Tales from the Federal Writers Guide to Cincinnati On Foot.

Screen Shot 2015-05-12 at 10.57.51 AMThe walking tours are inspired by Cincinnati: A Guide to the Queen City and Its Neighbors, a book published in 1943 for the Federal Writers’ Project. This book was a part of the American Guide Series, also known as the WPA guides, which was a program funded by the New Deal to employ writers during the Great Depression. Today, the book serves as a snapshot of 1943 Cincinnati, when the city’s population was 455,610 and now-iconic structures like Carew Tower and Union Terminal were just a decade old.

This time period was “a bit of an ‘amber’ moment” in Cincinnati’s history, Grinnell told UrbanCincy, “as this was the Queen City at its industrial peak. I consider [Cincinnati’s WPA guide] one of the better city guides produced by the Federal Writers’ Project.”

This will be Grinnell’s forth time hosting a Cincinnati walking tour of this nature. Grinnell says he has refined the concept over the years, adding in even more historical context from other sources. “I’ve also done a bit more original research through local papers, business directories, and photograph archives from the University of Cincinnati,” Grinnell told UrbanCincy.

The 60-minute walking tours will take place on June 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. Tickets are available for $15 per person at Grinnell’s website.