Does Cincinnati know how good it has it?

I didn’t really set out to spend time in Cincinnati, Ohio, and my colleagues were pretty confused as to why I’d asked for the time off to go there. An old friend of mine lives there. We’d previously lived together in Boston (where I still live), and she has since lived in Florida, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. My wife and I had visited her in all of those places, and had predictable responses to each (in order: vom; wow; cars-and-famous-people-are-everywhere). I’ve kicked around a lot of American cities over the years, and have consequently gotten pretty good at assessing places before I get to them. I had read up on blogs and Yelp, looked at maps, googled bars, cafes, and cultural institutions, and spied a Flcker account or two. I was not anticipating a particularly good time in the land of Johns Cranley & Kasich, and maybe those low expectations helped. But hot damn, if Cincinnati, Ohio isn’t one of the most promising places I’ve visited!

I should clarify: I spent almost all of my time in Over-the-Rhine (OTR), which, I suppose, most closely parallels Boston’s Back Bay/Downtown. This comparison is far from perfect. “What about the other neighborhoods?” you might ask. “The higher end part of town is all well and good, but what about where people are struggling?” This is a fair question, and one that people I spoke to in OTR were definitely talking about. But let’s talk about what “higher end” means in Cincinnati: the friend we were visiting lives between the 12th and 13th Streets, flanked by Main and Vine. She walks to work, can walk to baseball and football games, art galleries and museums, cafes, bars, clubs, theaters, parks, the river, and an array of (mostly local) stores offering everything from freshly made dog food to high end appliances. The big complaint is the absence of a good grocery store (though there is a pretty terrible Kroger’s nearby). While the lack of a grocery store is a big problem, it is also one that the residents of Downtown Boston suffered from until a Roche Bros. finally opened up in Downtown Crossing just over a year ago.

The above amenities make OTR a desirable location by most urban living measurements. It is also a location she pays less than $800 for. Sure, her apartment is technically a “studio” with an attic and it’s below market rate, but it also costs less than half of what I pay for a below market apartment seven miles outside of downtown Boston, and while I technically live in a one-bedroom with an office, her apartment was actually bigger than mine, and if it were in Boston, it would be advertised as “huge open floor plan with secret office space.” Comparable apartments are available in Over-the-Rhine for around a grand, which will get you a room with some roommates in Boston. While the clear drivers of Boston’s housing discrepancy with Cincinnati are colleges and jobs, it’s worth noting that Cincinnati’s unemployment rate (4.5%) isn’t much higher than Boston’s (3.7%). It is also lower than the national average (5%). Boston’s glut of students, compounded by higher paid hospital workers, is causing a housing crisis. Meanwhile, Cincinnati has a sea of vacant buildings begging to be filled.

But let’s skip the economics for a bit. Let’s assume that you’re young(ish), educated, and employable. In Cincinnati, you can afford to live in the middle of everything, and despite what you might think (and what I definitely thought), the middle of everything is actually a lot in Queen City.

Day-to-day stuff to do

Neon's Famous Unplugged. Dogs welcome.
(photo credit: Neon's)

First, nightlife: There is a dizzying number of good bars and restaurants in OTR. Places like Neon’s offers a huge patio that welcomes dogs and giant Jenga games. Instead of a regular menu, owners invite different local restaurants to use their food prep space. We chowed on some excellent tacos there and drank a few Nati-native beers among punks and parents of more races and ethnicities than any bar or restaurant I’ve been to north of NYC. Motr Pub handed us live brass bands, turn-of-the-century hardcore, and beat poetry within a 72 hour span, all for free. There were tasty bowls of ramen, weird Mexican food-concoctions called “turtles,” and better pizza than I’ve had in most of Boston. Almost everything was available at later hours than anywhere in my current neighborhood is open. It's like closing before 1AM wasn’t allowed in most of the town. I also saw groups of ladies in dance club uniforms, so I assume that kind of thing is available, if you are into that sort of thing.

A Whirlwind through Arts & Culture

But how’s the culture game? Well, it’s stellar, actually. Cincinnati is crawling with art galleries and studios, featuring some really great stuff. Places like the Contemporary Arts Center may not be able to keep up with the MOMA or Boston’s ICA, but they do a pretty damn solid service, and they’re right downtown. Plus CAC is free. You know what else is free? The Cincinnati Art Museum. This place is genuinely impressive. While it also doesn’t quite have the star power of a Boston Museum of Fine Arts, it does feature some minor works of major artists. It’s real glory is in its major works of minor artists. While CAMs Van Goghs and Picassos aren’t going to floor you, the 30 Americans exhibit, featuring works by people I’d previously never seen or heard of, is more than worth a look. The Cincinnati exhibit is also aces, highlighting the city’s dedication to the coexistence of arts with labor and the importance of philanthropy. While it could be said that Cincinnati’s mayor and governor could both use a refresher course on those ideas, the same is being said in some corners of the art community about Mayor Walsh of Boston and Governor Baker in Massachusetts. All of them might consider taking in the message of Clement Barnhorn's Industry Protecting Art and Music, which beautifully and concisely captures the relationship between art and labor viscerally.

Industry Protecting Art and Music,
Cincinnati Art Museum.
(Photo credit: Wikicommons)

The museums housed by the Cincinnati Museum Center may not have been quite so excellent, but even here there are praiseworthy moments, starting with the beautiful art deco building that houses them and including a reproduction of a city block of 19th century Cincinnati’s Main Street that literally lets you walk into a lost world. Where these museums fall flat (likely due to lack of funding for updates), the Cincinnati History Museum’s volunteers certainly step up. Both friendly and knowledgeable, they guide visitors to some easy-to-miss must-sees like a real shrunken-head or the operational 19th century printing presses operated by an equally ancient printer.

Bibliophiles will also find their havens throughout OTR. The Ohio Book Store is reminiscent of Boston's Brattle Bookstore, but in a much larger space, and lovers of the Atheneaum will find highbrow solace in the Mercantile Library, well hidden on the 11th floor of a business district building.

And can we talk about murals for a second? Being from Boston, I do not like them. Every once in a while we get a good one, but the conservative tastes of our City on a Hill have worked against interesting work with even a hint of perceived controversy (see examples here and here). Instead, Boston's walls are often left with neutral and often amateurish themes. While there is certainly a place for encouraging children to make art, that place might not always be on the walls of heavy traffic areas.

Cincinnati's murals do not suffer from these problems. Predominantly created by a group called Artworks, Cincinnati's murals touch on a variety of themes and figures, including one of local political semi-crank Jim Tarbell in a top hat. Having this figure on a main street seems, if I understand the local explanation of Mr. Tarbell correctly, would be similar to Boston putting up a monument of Maura Healey arm-in-arm with Vermin Supreme.

Cincinnati puts its fringe politicians and
championship boxers on buildings.
(Photo credit: Artworks Cincinnati)

These bright, well-executed works of art combine with colorful row houses to make virtually every street pop. Even on streets with multiple vacants, boards over windows and doors are painted to look as if they are occupied. It's a little thing, but it's the difference between feeling like you're in a post-apocalyptic city and one that is being lived in and improved upon.

The real win for Cincinnati

All of this stuff is great, but it’s also just a collection of the impressions of a tourist. The question I kept asking at these places was “can someone really live here.” That’s what I really wanted to know. It seems that the answer is “yes” for a certain kind of person: the I-want-to-do-something person.

From the coffee shops to the galleries to the stores, I found the same thing -- the owners were there and they were working. People in Cincinnati who want to do something seem to be able to do it pretty easily, or at least more easily than in Boston. With what seems like very little capital, people can start up shops and stops that may not be able to generate the revenue to be sustainable in the Brooklyns or Jamaica Plains of America. And whereas many cities don’t have the populations to support art galleries, specialty cafes, locally owned bookstores or letterpress shops in any form, Cincinnati appears to be in that sweet spot where people who want to do stuff can afford to and people who would enjoy that stuff are there in numbers large enough to support those makers-of-things. This is a rare and special special thing -- many cities never experience it and those that do can only do it for a few years. Cincinnati may be in that latter camp. Nothing gold can stay. But for now a good, hearty bronze crown is on the Queen City. It didn’t make me want to move there, but it certainly made me wonder why I was still here. When other cities could so illustratively offer so much more bang-for-buck, what's the incentive of the Bostonian to stay? Unless you're very rich, very connected, or have some kind of super-understanding I can't fathom, Boston seems to be pretty well shaped, its residents end up bystanders who pay top dollar for the privilege. In Cincinnati, a few bucks and a whole lot of hustle might just be enough to pursue your dreams, or at least your business. And that's worth quite a lot.

We were the gentrifiers

The story is almost cliched at this point: rents are getting too high in a neighborhood, and so the people who have lived there forever are starting to get pushed out by landlords who are cashing in. For me, this happened about three years ago, when Jamaica Plain became impossible to afford. So my wife and I moved to Roslindale, which is starting to see its rents go through the roof. A number of friends are making the same complaints. One claimed that an apartment on her street was being emptied out so the investors that bought it could turn it into a full-time Airbnb.

Walking through Fort Point yesterday, a neighborhood that has transformed from industrial wasteland/bohemia to something akin to a Miami tourist strip in just fifteen years, got my blood up on the same issue. As I strolled toward the Boston Design Center past the lofts, cafes, bars, and internet start-ups, against a steady stream of affluent, beautiful joggers and graphic designers, I seethed at these people and their wealth. I loathed that they turned a wasteland into a liveable, interesting place, like the coolest Mormons ever. “Why do these people deserve to stay, while I’m getting pushed out,” I thought. This is a common refrain in my head. I think it’s getting more and more common in a lot of people’s heads. With a household income of $100,000 necessary to pay the median rents in Boston, average folks are going to feel the pinch and look to blame someone.

Yesterday was different, though. I had a moment of self-reflection, and I’m not sure what brought it on. After my incredulous question, “why do these people get to stay,” I answered my question with another question. “Why do I get to stay?”

The truth is, this has never been my city. I’ve thought of it as mine for almost 14 years, but in truth, I’m not from here. I’m from a medium-sized town outside of Boston. It has a small common that I used to meet my friends at and a football stadium I’ve never been to. It’s very white and very middle-class, and growing up, I very much wanted to leave it. In total, I lived there for eight years. I was born in another town nearby, and moved there when I was five. I bounced around other suburbs through high school, and when I showed up in Boston with nothing but a milk crate and a duffle bag full of stuff I don’t have anymore in late September of 2001, I decided that this place was my destiny, and that I could make myself of it - from it. I paid $300 a month to share an 8x8 room, and had five housemates. I have no idea what the rent was in total, but it was around $2000 for an apartment in a neighborhood that had not yet shaken its old nickname of “Mission Kill.” Before the year was up, the building was condemned.

I moved to Allston. I don’t remember what I paid there, but I remember I didn’t like it much, and a year later, 2003, I moved to Jamaica Plain, where I’d stay pretty much continuously for the next nine years. I lived in a few places in JP, including a three-bedroom (really a two-bedroom with an office) that I paid $1300 for, which was in terrible shape, but that we thought was a steal. The landlords jacked the rent up after 3 years, and so we moved to a small one-bedroom basement apartment for $1000. After that, we rented out the attic of a decrepit mansion near Forest Hills Cemetery and paid $900. That was quite a grab, though a bit unconventional.

After a few years that house got a bit too crazy. It was known as a party house, and I was married and wanted to not share a house with five or six other people anymore. My wife and I, along with a friend who was in grad school and needed housemates, went looking for a two-bedroom apartment in Jamaica Plain. We couldn’t find one for less than $1800, and at the apartment tours, the realtors always had a dozen or so other people looking at the apartments. The other couples seemed a lot more “together” than us. They didn’t live in Jamaica Plain yet, but they wanted to. They’d heard about it. They’d read about it. Their friends lived there. Some of them had strollers.

We ended up getting a good deal on an apartment just outside JP, in Roslindale. Our landlords are great and keep the rent reasonable, but I’m hearing about rents around the neighborhood, and the Boston.com is speculating that costs here might get unreasonable sooner than later. We’re a house sale away from getting pushed out of here, too.

But here’s the thing: I already did this to someone else. In 2001, I came here and paid way too much money to live in an undercode building in a neighborhood that just a few years prior was so dangerous that the universities in the area made sure classes got out before dark so the students could get home safe. Some slumlord pushed people out of Mission Hill to let the kids take over, and eventually, enough of us didn’t get killed that it became a feasible place to invest. So then they pushed us out and now that condemned apartment on Mission Hill is a half-million dollar condo. I was an early gentrifier. Not the first, but part of what turned Boston from the stuff of way too many movies into a place you’d want to raise your kids. I did that at the expense of other people who were already here, and I didn’t really ever think about it too seriously.

So now I’m the person being pushed out. Part of a middle-class that has found himself in the midst of an unstoppable combination of wealthy people who want the city life and college kids who are willing to pile into places so they don’t have to live in dorms or with their parents. Boston seems reluctant to build enough to accommodate the demand for city living, and so I’m getting screwed.

This is at least partially my fault, and I feel like I should take responsibility for it. Over the past fifteen years, I have been part of a nationwide effort to live where I want and do what I want for less money. This has given rise to companies like Amazon.com, which has put so much brick-and-mortar business out of business that all but the cities are essentially hibernating dens between work days. I helped put out the record stores with iTunes. So the two places where you’d see human beings in the world, and talk to likeminded people in a consumer setting, are gone from pretty much everywhere, except the cities. 

I used Foodler and GrubHub, who take a piece from the food I ordered, which lead the take-out places to raise their prices, but also made it so I didn’t have to talk to a person. I used Airbnb, because it was cheaper than hotels. Never mind that this perfectly nice apartment I stayed in clearly didn’t have a resident in it anymore, and was being turned over for visitors like me. I used Uber, because they are cheaper than cabs. Never mind that they are ruining a working class industry with their part-time “sharing economy.” I did these things because they took the Walmart model of “so cheap it hurts people” and made it feel hip and valuable. And it screwed us. It made some people rich, it made some other people a little extra pocket money, and it made Greater Boston unlivable.

I don’t “deserve” to live here any more than anyone else. Certainly, I deserve to live here less than the people I often scoff at, who have lived here their whole lives. I didn’t want to live in a dump. I wanted to live in a beautiful city, with fancy restaurants, and good coffee, and subways, and bike lanes, and farmers markets. I got those things, and it turns out everyone else wanted them, too. That I’m so indignant that I’m getting bumped for richer or more financially responsible people might be a bit unfair, but it’s also an important life lesson: you reap what you sow. I did this. We did this. We were the gentrifiers. Now we are being gentrified.

Why I want Republicans to make good on their threats to boycott CNN and NBC

Who is the "liberal media?" Anyone that isn't Fox News!

If you follow the Republican National Committee on facebook or Twitter, you've likely seen their campaign trying to guilt CNN and NBC, which they characterize as "the liberal media" into dropping documentaries about Hillary Clinton. Their mechanism of enforcement? They're threatening refuse to let those networks host 2016 presidential debates. 

Here's why I think CNN and NBC should air the documentaries and make the Republican Party boycott them: There's no way the RNC can do it. If the RNC prohibits their candidates from appearing on CNN, a station that Democrats trust more than most, and NBC, they'll be stuck with PBS, a station the party wants to defund, ABC, or CBS. Since neither of the latter stations have a cable news presence comparable to Fox, NBC, or CNN, what the RNC is essentially saying is the only major cable news station that can host a debate is Fox News. This presumes that a Democratic candidate will appear in a debate on that station while stations more sympathetic to him or her are blacked out. Ultimately, it makes it very easy for Democrats to not deal with Fox News, while Republican candidates would have to boycott all stations except Fox News to protect themselves from a similar kind of criticism. 

We can't talk about the reality of American politics on TV because David Gregory's kids might have dick-pic nightmares

Not worried about his kids hearing questions about

whether the president is legitimate, but super concerned

about dick picks

The August 4, 2013 episode of Meet the Press was pretty uneventful all things considered. To me, the most interesting thing said was a question by host David Gregory, who asked former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani - himself a sex scandal survivor - "is there something disqualifying at a point when I can't even turn on the news, that that's going to create a bigger conversation than I want to have with my eight year old?"

Giuliani, in typical MTP form, dodged the question. For once though, I agree that a politician should dodge the question. It's a stupid question. David Gregory, host of the longest running news show on television, just asked if a politician should be disqualified from office for private indiscretions because he was afraid his kid would see David Gregory, who chooses to give coverage to this local non-story coverage, talking about it. 

Mr. Gregory, let me give you a quick rundown on American politics, the media, and children, since a life in Washington and being a father has apparently taught you nothing about them. 

Exhibit A. 

1. American politicians frequently do things with their penises that their wives would not approve of. Joy-Ann Reed had JUST EXPLAINED THAT to you. The only difference between the sex scandals of Anthony Weiner and Bill Clinton and those of John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt is that in the past the press had the common decency to leave public figures' personal lives alone, and now people like you circle it like carrion birds. 

2. Your eight year old knows about sex. He's probably heard you having it. He's seen it on TV and read more detailed explanations of it in issues of Spider-man. At the very least, he goes to school with someone whose parents aren't as afraid of talking to them as you are and he now knows a way more vulgar and detailed version of sex than any news show has presented. 

3. Your concern with how these scandals might lead you to have an uncomfortable conversation with your kid leads me to a statement made my comedian Louis CK about gay marriage: "'How am I supposed to explain to my children that two men are getting married?' I don't know. It's your shitty kid, you fucking tell'm... Two guys are in love and they can't get married because you don't want to talk to your ugly child for five fucking minutes?" 



I understand this isn't an exact parallel and that being gay is not the same as deviating from your marriage on company time, but the point remains valid. If we have decided that the sex lives of politicians are news (which David Gregory has), why can't we talk about it just because somebody doesn't want to have to explain a real world situation to his kids? If David Gregory is so concerned with the moral fortitude of political candidates, he should not vote for those candidates. If he is concerned about how their sex lives might scar children, he should make an effort to stop talking about it so much on his very frequently watched show.

4. I've been eight years old. No eight year old is intently watching Meet the Press. It's what my parents used to put on when I was being bitchy about nap time. I conked right out. Further, if they are watching the news, there is way worse stuff on it than discussions about Mr. Weiner's self-titled selfie. I don't know if you've heard, but Northern Africa and the Middle East have been in a perpetual state of war for a while and maimed children have been making pretty regular appearances on TV. Football players have murdered people. Baseball players are being suspended for drug use. A huge child prostitution ring was just broken up in America. Boy Meets World is getting a spin-off. All of these things are more important and will have a bigger impact on your children than the sex scandals of municipal politicians.

It is astounding to me how much the media talks about how terrible all these non-stories are while putting past political figures who did the same things but who weren't persecuted by the same media. Anthony Weiner might not be a particularly good or effective politician. He may not have a very good platform in is run for mayor. If he's not the right guy for the job, it will be easy enough to prove that without talking about his phone sex habits. If you find yourself forced to bring it up though, you might have to explain to your kids that when a man and a woman love each other very much, they send each other digital representations of their affections in the form of lecherous sexy-texties that sometimes give birth to a scandal. If you have to have that conversation because you talked about it yourself on a show you let your kids watch, it's your own damn fault.

Geez. Leave Colin Powell alone.

He's denying it, but it appears from emails released by a hacker that Colin Powell had a pretty personal relationship and possibly an affair with a Romanian politician. I won't bore you with the "why do we care about public figures' sex-lives" diatribe, as that's been well-tread. What I want to know is why this should be considered a strike against citizen Powell, who is not currently employed by the American people.

How do you not have an affair with this guy?

Colin Powell has made a name for himself for being a moderate and generally trustworthy (except that one time) military and political figure. He most recently raised the ire of conservatives over his endorsement of Barack Obama over Mitt Romney, which was, according to some douchebag on the radio, obviously because they're both black. Before that, Powell had served in the Reagan and Bushes 41 & 43 administrations, not to mention that whole 4-star general thing. While in those capacities, if it had been exposed that he was having or had had an affair with a foreign politician of an allied nation, it would have been nobody's business unless national secret swapping was part of some weird pillow-talk ritual. Maybe his wife would have been rightly pissed, but it wouldn't have been anyone else's business unless government money or national security was involved.

That would have been the case when he was in the employ of the United States. He's not now. Now, Colin Powell is a pretty smart guy whose sex life, like the rest of his life, is entirely private. The way this information came to public attention was itself illegal and, unlike the Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden leaks, which one could argue at least had some semblance of public interest, it has nothing to do with government policy, national security, or even have to do with how government works. They're private emails on an American citizen's private account.

While the whole nation is losing their goddamn minds over whether the NSA is spying on us, there seems to be no outrage toward the personal information of private citizens being made public. What this hacker did to Colin Powell was worse than anything the NSA has done to anyone reading this. If you're concerned with your own privacy, you should be shaming the media for running these stories and calling for serious consequences for hackers of this type.

If this kind of thing continues, it will further discourage good people from running for office in fear that the things they do privately will lead to their names being dragged through the mud. Then all we'll have left are the Anthony Weiners and Mark Sanfords of the world - public figures who don't have any dignity, and so don't care when it is sullied.