More free trailer park boys and my research project.

Howdy ever'body,

I found more free trailer park boys on the intro-net for everyone. This site has the bulk of the series - and its all free ladies and gentlemen!

QuickSilverScreen

I also began poring over the Haines Greater Cincinnati Cross-Referenced Telephone/Adressakey directories today. I am currently, with the support of UC's Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement program, examining the history of the changing economic geography of Northside from 1970-present. The Haines directories are available free at the Public Library downtown in the history department. They list all addresses on all streets in the metro area. The listings work chronologically and by neighborhood. For each address on a given street the directory provides the name of the occupant for all residential units, or the name of the business if it is a non-residential address. And their telephone number. The Haines directories go back to the early twenties - when telephone service became common for businesses. They were designed to function as a geographic business-to-business directory.

So using photocopies of the pages listing Hamilton Avenue, Spring Grove Avenue, and Blue Rock Street in Northside from 1973 - 2001 I am amassing a body of data about how the character of the neighborhood has changed.

So far I have only pored over the info from Hamilton, and I was slightly surprised by how slow and incomplete the transformation of the business strip was in the above time frame. I expected to see a massive drop in businesses, years of empty storefronts, and then trendy new stuff in the 90's and 2000's. That was what I found in Tremont in Cleveland last summer when doing a similar project using the same methods there.

Northside's business strip came into the 70's with a half-dozen used furniture outfits, a shoe store, two pharmacies, a shoe repair shop, a family-run bakery, a mom-and-pop hardware store, a couple used appliance joints, a gas station, an art theater, five banks, four doctors, two dentists, an optometrists' shop, a butcher, a jewelry store, and a host of similar mom-and-pop blue-collar, low-order good businesses.

In the early 80's a long-standing institution, the Crazy Ladies feminist bookstore, arrived and a few counterculture/alternative organizations followed suit. But the change was slow in the 80's . There was as much tricking out as tricking in. I know from informal research that the nearby industrial areas were still very much on their downward spiral at that time.

In the 90's we see real change begin. Tatoo parlors, trendy hair salons, a video store, the city's biggest collection of gay bars, a record store, a music shop, an art gallery and ceramics studio, coffee shops, hip restaurants, and eventually a sizable presence in the area representing Cincinnati's alternative lifestyle set. Artists, activists, GLBT folk, young academics and older college students, scooterists, skateboarders, the heavily dyed and tatooed set, musicians, writers, punk rockers, and all of their various friends, hangers-on, and associates became more than noticeable in Northside. We now have a handful of gay nightlife spots, a couple bars frequented by art students and their friends, a scooter gang, several tattoo shops, the gay community center, a yoga studio, a vegetarian restaurant, a design company, and two vintage clothing emporiums.

My eventual goal is synthesize my findings with the small body of urban sociology books I have read and asses whether or not Northside is a good model of an integrated neighborhood. It has white, black, poor, middle-class, educated, and every other indicator mentionable. The neighborhood seems to be tilting towards gentrification, but it still has a surprisingly mixed demographic makeup. I have neighbors with Ph.D.s who teach at local colleges and I have neighbors who can barely read and collect scrap metal to scrape together a living. There are white drag queens, disenfranchised black urban youth, and weathered long-time business operators like Bill at Ace Hardware - who has been behind the counter in his store since the late 40's I beleive.

More later.

More later.