Today I noticed this gem for sale: 3925 Spring Grove Avenue. It is in Northside (my neighborhood) and is only a block from Knowlton's Corner - the major intersection that marks the beginning of the business district. Knowlton's Corner is also a major hub in Cincinnat's bus system so excellent public transit is nearby. The 17,18,19 and 27 all come right by, and a bus to Clifton usually appears in less than 15 minutes. Nearby Knowlton's Corner was once the center of a thriving business district in Northside, which included a number of prosperous furniture, clothing, and other merchants. 3925 sits at the corner of Spring Grove and Cooper, where it is today surrounded by a mix of rehabbed and derelict storefronts. The architecture bears witness to a lost era of prosperity, if not greatness, on the block. When the Dooley Bypass was constructed to feed I-75 most traffic on Spring Grove was routed around oft-congested Knowlton's Corner. This resulted in the section of Spring Grove contained within Northside becoming simply a neighborhood street, no longer a part of one of city's major North-South arteries.
3925 Spring Grove is historic, built in 1890. I researched it (among others) as part of my summer research project last year and found that it served as a saloon for many years. Back when this was the Queen City's major industrial corridor - and Spring Grove Avenue its main thoroughfare - small workingman's pubs and lunch counters abounded. The building was the longtime home of The Idle Hour Cafe, which sounds like a likely place for machinists to gather for their lunch break in between hours of valve grinding. The Idle Hour Cafe disappeared forever sometime in the mid-80's, which correlates rather neatly with the era that saw most of the local industries and blue-collar jobs go the way of the dodo.
Since the Idle Hour passed on, 3925 has been largely vacant. County tax records indicate that the building changed hands in 2003 after a long period of neglect. I have walked by the place a few times and it appeared that a major, thorough, and costly restoration was under way. On the Cooper Street side of the building the almost totally disintegrated box gutters were painstakingly reconstructed and painted. I know from firsthand experience how costly, specialized, and time-consuming that kind of work is. Most handymen won't even do it nowadays. A walk around the neighborhood will reveal that many homes' wooden box gutters fell into similar disrepair and the problem was resolved by simply lopping them off at the outside wall and replacing the whole assembly with conventional aluminum manufactured gutters. The Cooper Street side of the building definitely looks better, as is evident in the photo below. The real estate listing also mentions that the building does contain a finished efficiency apartment, and I am fairly sure that this is the only part of the building far enough along to be the location of such.
Here's the really exciting feature of the place: it is for sale for $30,000! I know times are hard, but if somebody had the money that is a hell of a lot of building for roughly the price of a new car. 3925 is a large three story building; the County Auditor lists just over 6500 square feet under roof.This place is huge! And it has a yard behind it that would make an awesome garden, and provide room for a garage or parking pad:
The County Auditor's map also shows the size of the attached parcel of land. The entire parcel is 0.15 acre - about average for the area.
So if anyone out there is looking for a large, urban, cheap, unconventional, flexible, funky, design-and-build-your-own-pad-type building out there and has 30 grand just layin' around (check under the couch cushions) this place is worth checking out.
If anybody who reads this actually buys the place, shoot me an email and give a tour. I'd love to see the inside.
I can only fantasize about the day - circa 2014 - when I will hopefully emerge from grad school and be able to secure a place like this for myself to found an artists' colony/co-housing/commune/eco-village/urban tribe type of community.
The world needs more of that kinda shit.
Speaking of which, my friend Jordan sent me this link from NPR about the rising popularity of keeping chickens in metropolitan areas (photo above stolen from article). Apparently poultry-lovers have banded together to demand zoning changes that permit the keeping of small numbers of fowl in urban areas. The city of Denver simply charges a small annual fee for the permitting of this practice; the chicken-keepers are called 'cutting-edge locavores' in the article. Apparently in some places small underground guerrilla groups have been doing this quietly for some time, and are only now going public about their fowl habits. City chickens make a hell of a lot of sense to me. We are all concerned about food safety, food security, rising oil costs, rising food costs, and being told to eat more locally and sustainably. Chickens are east to keep, eat most any grain (and lots of other things), are basically quiet if you don't keep roosters, and provide fresh eggs daily with minimal work required. Personally I eat a lot of eggs and miss having them fresh from a chicken's ass every morning, so I am really excited about this.
I also just got all my seed catalogues and am fantasizing about the bargain prices I saw on lotsa plants and trees. Gurney's has a container-garden variety blueberry bush on sale for $10.75 plus shipping. This shrub could be raised in a pot on an apartment balcony.Fresh blueberries on your cereal anyone?
Gurney's was also running a deal in the paper catalogue (which I couldn't find on the website) where you can get 12 thornless blackberry bushes for something like $40 - which I find incredibly exciting. I have lots of find memories of eating wild blackberries fresh from fencerows as a kid and I would be willing to wager that the domesticated varieties are pretty close to zero-maintenance. Making your own preserves from these would be amazing.
They also have a dwarf banana tree that can be raised indoors with the aid of a grow-light (they do have uses other than drug production) that bears fruit within 3-5 years. Sells for $15.
And last but not least, someone has finally figured out how to domesticate the paw-paw. For those who have never heard of this fruit, it is a wild native tree found in the Eastern US. It is a smallish tree, usually found at overgrown fences and on the edges of clearings. It produces a large, mushy fruit that is very sweet. The ripe wild ones are hard to come by and can only be had through diligent watching, as raccoons are also keenly aware of their presence and usually feast upon them as soon as they ripen. But now you can plant one in your yard and do as you please with them. The people at Gurney's will be delighted to sell you a small twig of a tree for $19.95.
They also have persimmons and lots of nut trees that I have been fantasizing about. What better way to provide food security than planting trees that feed you in your yard? I hear that this idea has come into vogue lately. I read a piece a few weeks ago about how Australians are organizing themselves to plant nut trees in vacant land around subdivisions as as a food security measure. Future apocalyptic scenarios aside, it would be really cool to produce at least some of your own food. Free food is always good, and homemade everything is always better. I cannot see how this could go wrong.
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