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December 1935. "Hamilton County, Ohio. Cincinnati slum dwellings." 35mm negative by Carl Mydans for the Resettlement Administration. View full size.
To the two folks who attached the pictures of Edgecliff (overview of the campus from Jeff and the postcard from Anonymous), can you let me know where I could obtain copies of these? I'm trying to assemble an archive of the old school. Thanks. LemminPie@aol.com
The big house on the hill belonged to Our Lady of Cincinnati College (later Edgecliff College). It looks a little like Emery Hall.
Why I find SHORPY so interesting: the research and analysis that sorted out the location of the subjects and the mystery mansion on the hill! Well done all! Proof that coming back later is always of value with Shorpy. A great educational tool.
Thanks to Jeff J. for pinpointing the location. This would be just east of Eden Park. Click below to enlarge.
The other photos of the same area gave a good clue with the railroad being in the background. Interestingly, the little neighborhood off Eastern Avenue that these houses were in was completely wiped out before 1956, and not even the roads remain. The house on the hill is a mansion that was part of Edgecliff College. That was absorbed into Xavier University and much of it was demolished in the late 1980s for construction of a new high rise condo building. Because of the house's setback from the edge of the cliff (har har) we can only see the second story and the roof, but you can definitely see what it is in the aerial shot I attached.
Jeff's comment below gives the clue that solves the mystery. The Mydans photo below is captioned "House at 1400 Block, Eastern Ave., Cincinnati." The next photo down shows the same tenement with a train behind it, plus, in the upper left, the "big house" we saw here at the top of the hill.
This one has me stumped. The building on the hill looks sort of like some of the incline houses, but it doesn't match up with any of them, or with the Holy Cross monastery or the art museum. We're already starting to climb up the hill where the photographer is standing, so this isn't Van Horne Street. Based on the density and type of buildings, I would guess this is somewhere around the base of Mt. Adams or Mt. Auburn, or it could be in Mohawk/Brighton near McMicken Avenue, but I can't find a record of any buildings that look like the one on the hilltop in those areas. It could also be somewhere in Lower Price Hill or Fairmount too, with some old hospital or hotel/resort type building up top. Many of Mydans' other photos are of areas along Eastern Avenue, so this could be any one of several streets that parallel it and back up to Columbia Parkway, with a Hyde Park or Mt. Lookout mansion above.
This is a view of Bucktown, a segregated and now demolished African-American neighborhood on the eastern edge of downtown. The hill in the distance is Mount Adams, and the large building is very likely the old Holy Cross Roman Catholic monastery.
[Below, the big house compared to the monastery and Immaculata Holy Cross. Doesn't look like either one. - Dave]
This was one in a series of pictures that Carl Mydans took along the now-vanished Van Horne Street (previously seen here on Shorpy -- scroll down to the comments), in what's now the Queensgate section of Cincinnati.
[In which case this may have been the area circled in red below, east of the Price Hill Incline. Click the map to enlarge. See the entire map here. - Dave]
That boxy looking contraption beside the little potbellied stove is a home built table saw, for cutting wood. Most likely it ran via belt power supplies by hooking a belt to a wheel of one of the vehicles. You can see the "belt pulley" coming out the side nearest the camera, but there's no other drive mechanism visible.
Interesting comparison between the falling-down, unpainted houses at the bottom of the hill and the castle at the top.
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