Notes from the past

· by · in Cincinnati, Contrasts, Historical. ·

All around Cincinnati there are messages left for us from our predecessors. They are a glimpse of what used to be.  Many have been painted over, forgotten, and lost.  Yet, some still remain, reminding us that we were not the first.

Watches and shotguns.

Watches and shotguns.

A nice place to stay.

Old luggage.

The friendly store.

Art.

Cincinnati Color Company.

Post Office-1911 style.

A&M Enterprises.

Location: Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati, Ohio

77 responses to “Notes from the past”

  7. I grew up in Bridgeport, Ct. It’s an industrial city that sported the same types of buildings your pictures display. They are probably all gone now, but I remember loving the look of them!

      • I haven’t been back in 25 years..so I imagine that it’s changed quite a bit! At least, I hope so! Every election some new politician would promise renovations for the downtown area..and they never happened. Maybe, by now, they have. But, yeah, check it out.

        By the way, Bridgeport is the home of P.T. Barnum, the great circus legend!

  8. Very nice work! I really love ghost signs and have tried for years to feature them in my watercolors. I don’t usually get the effect I’m after, but I certainly get lost in the textures and layers of color involved in trying to capture their look. I really enjoyed this, thanks!

  9. Cool post. Always dug these in NYC. There was a massive faded one for an obsolete store right outside my office window in Murray Hill.

  16. these are great photos Seth, these buildings ad such character to a city…I’m always intrigued by the narrow houses I see on my way through Cincinnati…..took a few photos as I went through the city on my way home…haven’t looked at them yet so I don’t know if any are worth using…

    • You should stop Heather and take a tour. 🙂 Now we have a downtown Casino right across the street from this area. You could have lots of fun. 🙂

      • you know we always say…we should take a couple of weeks extra(who has the couple of weeks extra)and tour around the different cities that catch our attention…it might even take longer than 2 weeks…but I do enjoy a few hours in a casino on occasion! the thing is the pull of the warmer weather is like a magnet and stopping for anything other than necessities becomes a delay… 🙂 …wouldn’t it be great to stop everywhere you saw a photo op…I’d love it…someday!

  17. The signage has changed so much, in style and size. All pictures show, how buildings don’t tell us anything but signage does.

  23. Seth, expand this through other Ohio cities and you’ll have an excellent photo coffee table book. Wonderful Job indeed. Impressive . Impressive.

  26. so beautiful to see these traces of the lives of the building. fortunately buildings in Melbourne with these signs are now more respected and are being retained and in some cases revealed again when they are uncovered.

  27. Our downtown has been working on peeling away facades and restoring the paint on the sides of buildings. JUST this past weekend I was noticing some of the amazing signage…this post was just awesome, Seth! Beautiful work.

  30. I started working at a bicycle shop in Peoria Heights, Illinois, in 1981. Down the street, on the other side of the railroad tracks, was a two-story building with the letters R-O-U-S-E H-A-Z-A-R-D spread across the upper portion of the facade. Rouse, Hazard & Co. built the structure to make bicycles in the late 1890s. Today, the repainted building is mute, but I still think about those letters and what they represented.

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