CINCINNATI -- Fans of Over-the-Rhine have been enamored with its real estate for years, but in 2016, a band of historians and preservationists plan to shift some of that love to its real people.
Fourteen members of the nonprofit Over-the-Rhine Museum board of directors are putting the final touches on a four-year plan to establish a permanent homage to the working people of OTR, a 165-year-old Cincinnati neighborhood whose renaissance has netted millions in gentrification dollars.
The end goal of the group is to immerse visitors in the history of OTR’s people – the early immigrants from Europe, the Appalachians who replaced them and then the African-Americans, some of whom populate the neighborhood to this day.
The coming year will include quarterly lectures in which OTR history and related topics will be discussed and a support community for the museum will be built. The museum board will interview OTR residents, develop a website (currently, the OTR museum has a Facebook page) hold promotional and fundraising events, apply for grants, seek an endowment, consult with history and development experts and, likely this fall, stage a pop-up museum in a Findlay Market storefront.
If all goes as planned, a permanent home for the museum will be found and purchased in 2016. The projected opening date is 2020.
Ironically, it will be a real estate deal that will save the everyday stories of the real people of Over-the-Rhine.
Board chair Anne Delano Steinert and board member Carlton Farmer understand that picking the right building for the Over-the-Rhine Museum is the keystone to success.
“Every person I went to is very interested and asks me where the building is,” said Farmer, a historical exhibit curator and media specialist.
The group, said Northside resident Steinert, has viewed at least a dozen possible locations and actually found a suitable setup – an affordable, three-building complex in the far north end of Over-the-Rhine – but the group’s 20-member advisory board of urban experts and developers recommended against buying it.
“The feeling was unanimous that we need to be central in Over-the-Rhine,” Steinert said. “They said don’t worry about the cost, worry about the location …the money will come.”
The museum group established firm criteria before launching its real estate search. It is using the 13-year-old Lower East Side Tenement Museum in Manhattan as its model.
“If you connect people to the right building, you can raise money to that end goal,” said Farmer, who lives in Mount Auburn and owns a property in OTR.
Reinert, a veteran preservationist studying for a Ph.D. in history at the University of Cincinnati who knows the founders of the New York museum and has visited it about 20 times, said the group is seeking a structurally sound apartment building with a mostly original interior configuration.
Like the Lower East Side Tenement Museum – which was discovered intact and partially furnished the way it was when abandoned in the 1920s – the OTR museum building must have residential units that can be restored and filled with furnishings and household artifacts that show how people lived over the decades.
Steinert said the museum’s goal is to duplicate what the Lower East Side Tenement Museum has achieved.
The museum opened in Manhattan in 1992. Keiko Niwa/Lower East Side Tenement Museum
“Each apartment captures a different moment in time of the history of the building,” Steinert said. “You walk into these people’s lives. You actually know these people’s names, their life stories and how the stories are representative of the national struggle of immigrants.”
The building, Steinert said, needs to be on a street with lots of foot traffic and either have or be close to a parking lot. It also has to have a storefront for a gift shop, an area for ticket sales and space for interactive exhibits that enhance visitors’ experiences and share it for those who can’t climb stairs, as no elevator is planned.
Given that gentrification is accelerating into the north end of Over-the-Rhine, finding a spot that meets the museum board’s criteria is a stiff challenge, Steinert and Farmer agreed.
“You need people walking by, getting coffee and looking up saying ‘Wow, what is this?’ ” Farmer said.
Upcoming Related Events
The Over-the-Rhine Museum will host Lower East Side Tenement Museum co-founder Ruth Abram’s talk about “Museums as Vehicles for Social Change” on Jan. 22 at 5:30 p.m. in the Mercantile Library, 414 Walnut St., Downtown. There is a suggested donation of $5.
The third in a quarterly series of lectures supporting the Cincinnati Tenement Museum will be held on a to-be-announced date in March. It will feature three 15-minute talks on different subjects as well as snacks and beverages. To receive e-blasts about this event and other Over-the-Rhine Museum news, click on the “sign up” button at www.facebook.com/OTRmuseum.
