Here’s a question to add to the list of mysteries left unresearched by my master’s thesis on the origin and transformation of Bond Hill: how was the housing cooperative and building association impacted by the financial crash and panic of 1873 and the resulting depression? There were hints of decline but I could only speculate as to their cause. Now I’m reading this article by historian Scott Reynolds Nelson, “The Real Great Depression” and I am seeing for the first time the hurt initially felt by the railroads and their investors. Given that Bond Hill was likely developed with the help of the Cincinnati-Marietta Railroad Company along the Loveland line built in the 1860s (and financed by railroad bonds) and the great faith in the railroad exhibited in the real estate literature preceding the crash, I am even more curious now how the bank crash immediately impacted Bond Hill’s nascent housing cooperative and building association — the repository of its investment capital.

And while I’m wondering, wouldn’t it be interesting if Bond Hill wasn’t named after some apocryphal Bond’s Mill (as George Patmor explains in his oral history) or even after a Colonel Bond who was active in promoting new railroads through Cincinnati and its environs (including the Mill Creek Valley next to Bond Hill). Perhaps, Bond Hill was named after the railroad bonds used that the Cincinnati-Marietta Railroad Company sold in order to aquire the land for its right-of-way? Since the newspapers of the time parrot the Bond Hill developers in stating that the name “Bond Hill” was an older place name the building association had rehabilitated, and since there’s no record on old maps or land title records of that name in use, I’m left with the feeling that Bond Hill was a catchy name that was invented when other new suburban names such as “Pleasant Hill” and “Price Hill” were in vogue. The test of this would be to look at the archives of the St. Aloysius Orphanage (established in 1860) to see whether the name was in use in any of its founding documents. I have a record of calling the current incarnation of St. Aloysius concerning the location of their archives but I failed to follow up before my thesis was due. For folk interested in Bond Hill history, taking a look at what the orphanage might have in is archive should be high on their list of research projects — right next to locating the business records of the Cincinnati-Marietta Railroad Company.

Categories: Bond Hill
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This is the last day of Golden Week, the week in Ohio when the periods for voter registration and early voting overlap allowing new voters to register and vote on the same day. Our teams are working hard to make one final push to get out the vote. I made posters like the one above for Xavier University. (If you like it and want to use it feel free. Here’s the download: Election Day Is Now (poster art)).

Friday night our volunteer groups met up at Baba Budan’s Cafe near campus. There I made the acquaintance of Erik Crew, another local Cincinnatian working on this effort. He’s been writing at rubyhornet about Golden Week (“Golden What?“), his experience registering the homeless, and the issue of ex-felon disenfranchisement. Erik and I are an exception. Most of the volunteers have come in from other states (California, Michigan, Kentucky, etc.) and two are international; one traveled from Canada and another flew all the way from the UK. Their efforts are testament to the global concern for the future of this nation’s leadership.

The party at Baba Budan’s was co-sponsored by the Hip Hop Congress. Spoken word artists delivered poetry, some with dj backing. The emcee was the Divine Prince Hakeem. My ears perked up when he mentioned his connection to the Artistic Order of 144,000. The latter was the collective of my friend Obalaye Makaria. (Obalaye helped direct some funding for my research into Bond Hill’s history four years ago.) Hakeem informed me that Obalaye’s since moved to Seattle but calls in weekly to Cincinnati’s black radio station, The Buzz. I’ll be tuning in to hopefully hear from him.

Sunday morning I went with Erik to the A.M.E. Church in Bond Hill. (This is the church built at the corner of Reading Road and Seymour Ave. on the parking lot of what is now Jordan’s Crossing and formerly Swifton Commons.) Our mission: to respectfully offer our shuttle services to any congregants come later today. We stayed for the 11am service. Rarely have I known a warmer and more welcoming community. After introducing ourselves, the congregants were invited to greet us personally. I really felt their love. I also enjoyed the relaxed yet uplifting spirit created by the church choir and its excellent band. The band leader and piano player informed us that the bassist, a young fellow, would be playing with Wynton Marsalis pretty soon and everyone gave him a nice applause. The band leader also announced a group of black youth called the Ritz Chamber Players who will be performing with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra on October 9th. He invited everyone to attend the concert and udged everyone to develop an eclectic taste in all sorts of musical styles including classical and hip hop in addition to gospel and rock and roll.

Reverend Alphonse Allen preached about the necessity of striving to improve even when you feel comfortable where you’re at. In developing this idea he used the story in Deuteronomy of God commanding the Israelites to prepare to take possession of the land of Canaan while they camped on the east side of the Jordan after their 40 years of travel in the wilderness. In Jewish circles I think I’ve heard the same idea developed but from the command of God to Abram to lech l’cha l’artzecha, go out to a land that he will show you. Thinking about it, there’s a good parallel between the two stories in Genesis and Deuteronomy. Below is an image I gleaned of their lovely sanctuary.

Tags: Election 2008
Categories: Aharonium and Bond Hill
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By the end of the summer my interest in publishing with Arcadia slacked. The editors were great to work with but Arcadia was very interested in publishing the book with original scans of images of old Bond Hill photographs. Unfortunately those photographs may no longer exist. The images of buildings and streetscapes in Bond Hill: Origin and Transformation are mainly images I managed to locate from newspaper articles postcards, and souvenier publications. Arcadia was also hopeful that I could rewrite or reorganize the text for non-academic readers. I’ve tried to do this for my most recent edition. It incorporates all the new information I’ve uncovered concerning Henry Watkin and his family over the last year. I’ve also changed the text in the preface and introduction quite a bit. With a work like this (my first) the inclination to constantly tinker with it, rewriting sections, and adding new material, will always be there for me. But I truly hope that this edition will be my last one, at least for a while.

Categories: Aharonium and Bond Hill
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Self-Publishing Bond Hill with on-demand printer lulu.com has been great but I haven’t been as inclined or motivated to self-promotion as I might have been only a few years ago. So the idea of finding a publisher to pick up my book to promote and distribute seemed like a great idea. Good thing for local historians there is Arcadia Publishing. A professor friend of mine from the University of Cincinnati published his lecture ntoes on the history of Cincinnati with them and I’ve generally been impressed by their packaging and honored for my work to be listed in their catalog. There will likely be a trade-off of course, and I will be keen to see what compromises I may have to make with my book as it currently stands with how Arcadia wants to develop it. I’m especially interested in continuing to offer Bond Hill through lulu.com as the edition closest to my raw thesis research.

The process for publishing with Arcadia has been fairly straightforward. I emailed the publisher with a description of my work and in the publisher’s reply I was asked some questions such as where I was from and whether I was niterested in attending book signings and had a relationship with any local historical societies. Passing the questionnaire back over email, my answers were reviewed by the publisher and after a little back and forth (there was some concern that since I was currently working post-graduation in Washington, DC that I wouldn’t be able to help promote the book effectively in Cincinnati) I was sent by mail an official Arcadia Publishing Book Proposal to complete and mail back to them with 20 sample images and illustrations. Arcadia moves very quickly! Just about a week after receiving my book proposal they callled me that they were interested in publishing and were wondering how quickly I could get all the materials ready for publishing. Thanks to my work with lulu, my answer was that all of my materials are ready. The book may be published as early as July 2005! I’ll probably add a few more things to my text about suburban history, building associations, 19th century commuters and the aspirations of country living, and cooperatives before submitting the draft to them.

Categories: Aharonium and Bond Hill
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I’ve updated the title of the book. I’ve relaced the ambiguous term, Metro-Suburb with the more historically accurate term Railroad Suburb. I’ve also created a barcode for my ISBN for bookstores that only carry books with barcodes (for trackng sales at the counter). Also, an actual publisher looks to be interested in my history of Bond Hill, so a new version may be out in about a year’s time with some modified content and layout.

Much else to report: I’m nearing the end of my internship at TPL in DC and am looking at the doctoral program in urban studies at the University of Maryland. There are also other job leads I’m pursuing.

Categories: Aharonium and Bond Hill
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