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Arts & Entertainment News

Fifth Annual Asian Food Fest Moves to Washington Park This Sunday

Lam Dang at Washington Park [Provided]

The fifth annual Asian Food Fest (AFF) is coming to Washington Park in Over-the-Rhine on Sunday, October 5.

Festival organizers say that the event aims to promote diversity through Asian food and culture, and features items from countries all over Asia including Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, China, Korea, Japan, Malaysia, and the Indian subcontinent.

This year the AAF has formed a food council to work with each of their vendors to put together a collective menu that organizers believe will provide a unique experience for festival attendees. With a variety of small plates priced from $2 to $6, they hope those who attend can take a thorough food tour of Asia in a single day.

An exciting change for AAF this year is its move from The Banks to Washington Park. Lam Dang, marketing director for AFF, says that Washington Park, with the help of 3CDC, will provide a lively backdrop and a more comfortable place to hose a festival of this nature.

“At The Banks there wasn’t any natural area to sit down and eat, or to hangout on the street,” Dang told UrbanCincy. “We brought in our own tent and tables there but still the overall feel was very rigid, though The Banks did have a nice view of the city.”

Dang also said the lack of mature street trees or buildings to naturally shade the festival also made it a bit uncomfortable at times. To that end, he expects the softer landscape at Washington Park to make for a great venue for the festival.

Dang says that the benches, chairs and tables in grass area and the fountain steps in Washington Park will make it very easy to find a place to eat food and enjoy the performances offered at AAF. And with Washington Park’s playground, interactive fountains and dog park, it creates a family and dog friendly atmosphere that was simply not possible on Freedom Way.

Along with food, this year’s festival will also feature a human foosball arena where people will be able to hop into an inflatable, life size foosball arena. As it to be expected, there will also be Asian beer, cultural dances, vocalists, and Asian inspired arts and crafts.

Admission to the festival is free, but donations are encouraged. Proceeds from Asian Food Fest are used to support the Asian American Cultural Association of Cincinnati, and to host future Asian cultural events throughout the region.

The festival will take place this Sunday from 11am to 9pm at Washington Park, which is well-served by Metro bus service. There are also dozens of free off-street bicycle parking spaces available, and there are multiple Cincy Red Bike stations within a short walk.

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Month in Review

Month in Review – September 2014

Afghan Whigs-5This month has been full of news about the new Cincy Red Bike system, the Ohio River Trail, and a proposed residential parking plan for Over-the-Rhine. UrbanCincy also looked into the history of the MidPoint Music Festival and how it evolved along with the city itself. If you missed any of them, check out UrbanCincy’s top five stories from September 2014:

  1. EDITORIAL: Cincinnati Should Embrace John Cranley’s Residential Parking Permit Idea
    UrbanCincy recommends identifying what the market rate for parking is throughout the city and establish districts where on-street residential parking permits can be purchased.
  2. With Membership Rates Set, Cincy Red Bike to Begin Operations Monday
    All of the 260 bikes and 30 stations throughout Downtown and Uptown are now up and running.
  3. Ohio River Trail Project Moving Westward from Center City
    While oft-viewed as an industrial stretch, it is a little known fact that Cincinnati’s western riverfront is actually one of the region’s largest green corridors with riverfront parks and wooded hillsides.
  4. Cincinnati Gentrified at One of Nation’s Fastest Rates Immediately Following Housing Boom
    “Another interesting case is Cincinnati, which barely changed in income ranking from 2000 to 2007 but has increased at a pace similar to Denver or Washington during the 2007 to 2010 period.”
  5. As Over-the-Rhine Evolves, So Does MidPoint Music Festival
    Unlike music festivals that take place in empty fields, like Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza, MPMF lives and breathes within Cincinnati’s urban core.

 

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Arts & Entertainment News

C-Change Class Hoping Interpersonal Challenge Starts to Break Up Cincinnati’s Provincialism

It’s a question that no one from outside Cincinnati has a good answer for. A question feared or reveled in by a native from the city. It is almost a code question determining a person’s origin, their loyalties, their location and even their net income or political affiliations. It’s probably the most daunting question anyone could ask in any random conversation here in Cincinnati: What high school did you go to?

And some believe that it needs to stop.

“Our story isn’t Skyline or the Reds. Our story is the different people that came here,” Aftab Pureval, co-chair of the Grand City Experiment told UrbanCincy.

The Grand City Experiment will feature daily challenges, throughout October, that will aim to plug people into what can oftentimes be Cincinnati’s insulated social circles. And Pureval says that the goal is to go beyond targeting young professionals and engage as many people as possible, even those that do not use technology.

The idea for the project project came from a team within C-Change, a program run by the Cincinnati USA Chamber of Commerce. This year’s C-Change class was challenged to come up with ways to better engage residents and newcomers to the city alike.

“You don’t have to be a part of the experiment for the experiment to have an affect on you,” Pureval explained.

So how does the experiment work?

Basically, participants sign-up through the Grand City Experiment website. Then, beginning on October 1, they will receive daily challenges via email that could be as simple as striking up a conversation with someone in line next to you, or something more involved like taking a trip into uncharted territory – things like westsiders going to the east side, Northern Kentuckians checking out areas north of the river, and so on.

Not every challenge, however, needs to be accomplished; only the ones participants feel comfortable doing.

Participants are then encouraged to share their experiences on social media with the hashtag #thegrandcity. The C-Change group will be tracking these experiences and sharing different stories of their own.

For people looking to participate that do not have access to the Internet, the group reached out to Cincinnati area Community Councils, who will then distribute challenges through the area’s many community councils. Organizers also say that daily challenges will be broadcast on the video board overlooking Fountain Square.

After the experiment concludes, the group says that they will collect the data to determine whether or not the effort was a success. If so, the idea could find its way to other cities throughout the country. But as Pureval explains, for now the goal of the experiment is to spark real connections with new people and places.

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Arts & Entertainment News

Relive Last Weekend’s MidPoint Music Festival Through These 28 Photos

Chromeo

The thirteenth annual MidPoint Music Festival entertained thousands of spectators over the weekend, with 150 acts spread out over 14 stages at a dozen venues throughout Downtown and Over-the-Rhine.

As you might expect from an urban music festival like this, where some stages are literally set up in the middle of the street and open to the public, as was the MidPoint Midway on Twelfth Street, the three-day festival brought scores of people out onto the streets and crowded nearby restaurants and bars.

One of the interesting new elements for this year’s event, although not officially related, was the emergence of Cincy Red Bike. Its presence allowed many festival-goers, as was evidenced on the ground and via social media postings, to get around from venue-to-venue by using the public bike share system.

Washington Park served as the main stage each night of MidPoint, and played host to such headliners as Chromeo (Toronto), The Afghan Whigs (Cincinnati) and OK Go (Los Angeles) – all of which put on powerful and memorable performances.

Now that this year’s MidPoint is in the books, it leaves everyone wondering who and what will be on tap for 2015. The rising popularity of Over-the-Rhine makes securing venues difficult each year, and festival organizers say that they will also have to figure out where, if at all, to locate the MidPoint Midway in the future once the Cincinnati Streetcar begins operating on Twelfth Street.

EDITORIAL NOTE: All 28 photos were taken by Jake Mecklenborg for UrbanCincy between Thursday, September 25 and Saturday, September 27.

Categories
Up To Speed

With Central Parkway cycle track complete, are raised bike lanes next for Cincinnati?

With Central Parkway cycle track complete, are raised bike lanes next for Cincinnati?.

While Cincinnati is the first city in Ohio to build a protected bike lane, it has a ways to go in order to catch up with the amount of bike infrastructure cities all across the nation are building. This, perhaps, says more about how far behind Ohio’s big cities are than how progressive Cincinnati is, but that’s a topic of discussion for another day.

As the U.S. DOT moves forward with new standards for protected bike lanes, some North American cities are now looking at raised bike lanes as the next bit of evolution for the infrastructure. More from Urbanful:

Raised bike lanes, popular in Europe and present in a smattering of streets in several U.S. cities, provide extra protection for cyclists, drivers and pedestrians thanks to a slight change in perspective—or in this case, elevation.

But more U.S. cities are trying out the idea: San Francisco is getting its first raised bike lane–higher than vehicular traffic, but lower than the sidewalk–on one block of Valencia Street as part of the Mission Valencia Green Gateway project, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition reports. Construction is scheduled to begin in early 2015.