On Thursday, November 8, UrbanCincy is partnering with the Walnut Hills Redevelopment Foundation (WHRF) and Teilen to bring Cincinnatians a unique storytelling event to take advantage of the crisp fall nights.
“The idea behind the event is to bring back the experience of gathering with friends and family members around a campfire,” explained Randy Simes, Owner and Managing Editor of UrbanCincy. “It is at these moments where we are able to share stories about ourselves, and learn more about those we care about. The only difference here is that this will be an open event set in a truly urban environment.”
Stories Around The Urban Campfire will take place on November 8 and 29. Graphic designed by Brittany Coyle for UrbanCincy.
Stories Around The Urban Campfire will start at 6:30pm and include approximately one-hour of storytelling, but those attending are encouraged to linger and enjoy the evening at DeSales Plaza (map).
Food and drink will be available for purchase from Suzie Wong’s and Café DeSales throughout the evening, and there will be a temporary fire pit set up for people to gather around.
The storytelling experience will be modeled after what Teilen uses for their other events, where each speaker gets approximately five minutes to share their story. Teilen founder, Joe Wessels, will be on-hand to moderate and keep track of time.
UrbanCincy and Teilen are currently signing up people who would like to speak for approximately five minutes. There is a limited availability of slots, so please sign up as soon as possible by emailing urbancincy@gmail.com or joe@teilenrhine.com.
Stories Around The Urban Campfire will take place next Thursday at 6:30pm, and it will take place again on Thursday, November 29 at the same time and location.
Thanks to a $450,000 donation from Duke Energy, the Cincinnati Park Board will be able to move forward more quickly with the development of what was previously called the Main Street Garden at the Smale Riverfront Park.
The area is located immediately south of Great American Ball Park, and is now called the Duke Energy Garden. The narrow piece of park space is expected to be completed by spring 2013, and will connect the Smale Riverfront Park with additional riverfront parkland to the east (Sawyer Point, Bicentennial Commons, Theordore M. Berry International Friendship Park).
The Duke Energy Garden will include 12 “family-sized” porch swings, walking paths, and will help connect the Smale Riverfront Park with additional riverfront parks to the east. Rendering provided.
According to Cincinnati Park Board officials, this connection will be further established with the completion of the Ohio River Trail to Paddlewheel Park in fall 2013.
“The Cincinnati riverfront is more than just an entryway into our community,” Julie Janson, President of Duke Energy Ohio/Kentucky, stated at a Monday morning press conference. “It serves as the front porch to Ohio. That’s why Duke Energy, through our foundation, is happy to be able to support the creation of the Duke Energy Garden in the new Smale Riverfront Park.”
According to park officials, the Duke Energy Garden will include 87 trees, thousands of smaller plantings, walking paths, a 150-foot granite seat wall, and 12 “family-sized” porch swings.
The porch swings will be suspended from “undulating” pergolas that will also offer park-users a bit of shade and protection from the elements while enjoying the swings, which have long been anticipated at the park due to their popularity elsewhere throughout the country.
Three additional phases of work are planned to follow the completion of the Duke Energy Garden at Smale Riverfront Park. Image provided.
“Duke Energy’s commitment to the vitality of this region has been demonstrated again and again by the company’s substantial investments in economic development, education, environmental and energy efficiency efforts throughout the region,” said Willie F. Carden, Jr., Director of Cincinnati Parks. “The establishment of the Duke Energy Garden in Smale Riverfront Park is another such gift that will provide a stunning new public greenspace in Greater Cincinnati’s grand new front yard.”
The majority of phase one work at the Smale Riverfront Park was completed in May 2012, but several features of phase one have yet to be funded or built, in addition to future phases of park construction to the west. Some of those features include a transient boat dock, playgrounds, additional gardens and tree groves, a carousel, and more promenades and fountains connecting the central riverfront park with the Ohio River.
Three additional phases of construction work will take place following the completion of the Duke Energy Garden, and it is expected that once fully built out that Smale Riverfront Park will attract approximately 1.1 million visitors annually.
The 2012 World Choir Games were long anticipated and oft-hyped, but now that the proverbial dust has settled, the event’s true impact is coming into focus.
According to a new report issued by the Cincinnati USA Convention & Visitors Bureau (CVB), the 2012 World Choir Games attracted 15,000 participants from 64 different countries, and drew more than 208,000 spectators at some 200 different events.
Some of the biggest events included four sellout performances at the Aronoff Center for the Arts, two sellout performances at Music Hall, the opening and closing ceremonies at US Bank Arena, and the Celebration of Nations Parade on Fountain Square which attracted an estimated 30,000 attendees.
The 2012 World Choir Games was a resounding success, but the lack of coordination at the MarketGarden left many mobile food vendors with a bitter taste in their mouth. MarketGarden photograph by Thadd Fiala.
“This was a once in a lifetime event for the city, and we left nothing to chance,” said Cincinnati City Manager Milton Dohoney. “The 2012 World Choir Games has changed us and readied us for better things.”
Thanks in part to all of the visitors for the international choir competition; Cincinnati’s year-to-date occupancy rate is up approximately two percent from 2011, while revenues are up nearly five percent, according to Star Travel Research numbers.
Out of the various sub-regions within the Cincinnati market, downtown Cincinnati remains the strongest hotel market with a 63 percent occupancy rate demanding an average of $76 per room.
While nearly all objective accounts point to a resounding success by city officials and community leaders in hosting the 2012 World Choir Games, some say the event had sore spots from which it can learn. One example, in particular, was the MarketGarden which was established to host local food trucks and carts in a centralized marketplace.
“People were really vying to become part of this, and we were thinking it would be a pretty substantial event with lots and lots of people,” explained Café de Wheels owner Thomas Acito. “Unfortunately it was really dead, and we discovered by the third day that there was food being given out for free at the Duke Energy Convention Center for participants.”
The lack of coordination left many of the vendors that signed up for the MarketGarden with a bitter taste in their mouth, wishing for better organization between the big event and the smaller food market.
The hope, Acito said, was that there would be a real density of potential customers as there is with events like Oktoberfest and Taste of Cincinnati. At this time, however, the city does little coordination between mobile food vendors with the larger events.
The struggles with MarketGarden notwithstanding, the Cincinnati USA CVB is touting the intangible effects of the games.
According to the report, the games garnered 1.4 billion impressions throughout the world, with approximately 900 million of those coming from throughout the United States. The combined publicity value of all of those impressions is estimated to weigh in at $32 million.
Without confirmation it is difficult to speculate about what might be the next major event Cincinnati will host, but all indications seem to be pointing at a Tall Stacks Music, Arts & Heritage Festival in 2013, or the 2015 MLB All-Star Game.
Developers of The Banks hope to break ground in early 2013 on the next major phase of construction work at the $600 million development.
Following the success of the $91 million Phase 1, newly revealed designs for the riverfront development call for an additional 300 apartment units, more than 60,000 square feet of street-level retail and more than 400 parking spaces at the block southeast of Race and Second streets, said Libby Korosec, spokeswoman for The Banks development team. The structure is one building, but appears to be two, sitting on a three-story foundation.
The next major phase of construction at The Banks is planned to get started in early 2013. Rendering provided.
The Banks development team has until now been quiet about the design for the second major phase. According to principals at the Preston Design Partnership, an Atlanta firm selected by Carter for Phase 2 design work, the designs have received approval from Cincinnati’s Urban Design Review Board after two “productive” meetings over the course of the summer.
“The review board liked the concept, but they thought we had watered down the idea across all of the elevations in terms of its 3D massing,” said Edsel Arnold, senior design principal with Preston Design. “They also wanted us to look at how the structure appeared within the city skyline view, and were worried that some of the original color on the building would look too cold in front of the city skyline.”
Taking the board’s comments into consideration, Arnold said that the team went back to the drawing board to better match color schemes with the surrounding cityscape and build upon their design concept.
Building reflects city’s grid, riverfront
The end results include more gray and light blue colors to match existing buildings in the Central Business District. With a strong emphasis placed by the UDRB on integrating the designs of Phase 2 with the city skyline in mind, the colors were considered a critical element.
Arnold said the three-story base of the building will include brick to match that of other nearby structures and also offer some variation in the building’s use of materials. The two structures that will rise from the base will largely be made up of grayish-blue glass and vertical white columns.
Preston’s concept was influenced by the unique convergence of Cincinnati’s orthogonal grid street system with the organic curves of the central waterfront, Arnold said. It was this design concept that led to an eye-catching curved glass façade on the north side of the 10-story structure.
“Being from Atlanta, we were struck by the way that the city comes out of the plain and comes out to the water’s edge,” Arnold explained. “We decided it would be fun to play a strong curve along one of the walls, and let the other three sides play up more of the grid system of the city.”
To that end, the remaining three walls will be flat, as is true with most buildings in downtown Cincinnati. And a popular design element carried over from Phase One, balconies, will be incorporated onto the building’s western and southern façades to take advantage of city and river views.
From here, the design team will return to the design review board for final approval later this fall.
“We don’t have a schedule set for Phase 2 yet, but we are pleased with the progress being made on the development overall,” Korosec said.
Developer still seeking hotel, office deals
Project officials also say that they continue to work on negotiations for a potential operator for a hotel tower and tenants for an office tower planned to be built within the footprint of Phase 1 work. Townhouses planned to front along the Schmidlapp Event Lawn are also pending financing.
Once complete, the $2.5 billion public-private development partnership will transform Cincinnati’s central riverfront with 3,000 new residents, 1 million square feet of commercial space and 300,000 square feet of hotel space. The first major phase of construction work was completed in 2011 and has been considered a major success by city officials and the development team, with 100 percent of its apartments leased and about 92 percent of its 96,000 square feet of retail space occupied.
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Billions of dollars of public and private investment has transformed Cincinnati’s central riverfront over the past decade. What was once a flood-prone industrial center turned unusable waterfront property, is now home to a new park, neighborhood, museums, and professional sports venues.
The investments made to date have been so successful, in fact, that they are creating spinoff investment in the Central Business District. A remaining hurdle, however, is the crossing of Third Street, Fort Washington Way (FWW), and Second Street.
The nearly 300-foot span of roadways was significantly reduced in width when Fort Washington Way was reconstructed in 2001, but the span remains a visual barrier for many of those in the Central Business District or at The Banks.
Cincinnati officials are looking to build off of recent success by capping Fort Washington Way. Photograph by Randy A. Simes for UrbanCincy.
The problem was expected by city officials, in the 1990s, during original planning efforts for the central riverfront’s transformation. As a result, city leaders worked to raise $10 million to construct pile foundations that could one day support a cap over the interstate highway running beneath street level on FWW.
The pile foundations are capable of extending 600 feet over the highway roughly between Elm Street and Main Street. According to engineers who worked on FWW’s reconstruction, the caps could support the weight required for a park, or built structures depending on height and building materials.
No specific development plan for the caps has been developed however, and now the city is launching a design competition called Connect the Blocks to establish a vision for space.
“The Banks is well underway, downtown is growing, and now we must begin thinking about what we as a community want to see over Fort Washington Way to connect downtown and the riverfront,” City Manager Milton Dohoney stated in a prepared release. “We must first have a common vision of what we want, then we can establish the roadmap to get there.”
The national competition is calling on architectural, engineering and design professionals to create and submit concepts and cost estimates for the caps that are to be built over FWW. According to city officials, three to five finalists will be selected and awarded stipends to further refine their designs.
St. Louis has dealt with similar issues as it has tried to bridge the divide created by I-70 between downtown and the Gateway Arch grounds. While I-70 will not be capped entirely, a one block portion is envisioned to connect Jefferson National Expansion Memorial with Kiener Plaza in the CityArchRiver 2015 plan.
In Ohio, the only similar example of such a project exists in Columbus where a $7.8 million cap was constructed over I-670 along N. High Street. It includes approximately 25,000 square feet of street-level retail and connects Columbus’ downtown with its Short North district.
The City of Cincinnati held the first of two public meetings, on the design competition, last Wednesday in Madisonville. The second meeting is scheduled to take place on Tuesday, October 9 at 6pm at the Main Public Library (map). The public is also invited to weigh in on the process by participating in an online survey going on now, and officials also say that the public will be invited back to view the finalists’ designs once they are selected.
Full details about how to participate in the eight-month design competition can be found on the project’s website. The implementation of any winning design, officials say, will be dependent upon the availability of funding.
