My wife and I took full advantage of the conditions...and the breaks in our schedule. Yesterday, we took a walking tour through portions of Cincinnati's Eden Park and Walnut Hills areas.
For those unfamiliar with Cincinnati, Eden Park and its surrounding area is a gorgeous place that sets atop one of the city's many hills. It provides great views of the Ohio River. There are majestic urbanscapes rivaling anything you might see in places like San Francisco. (A city I really love, by the way.)
Walnut Hills is an area with a rich history. While it has lots of bright spots, it's also afflicted with urban blight. There are also friendly people there, as my wife and I saw yesterday when many residents, sitting out on porches and front lawns said hello.
Walnut Hills is the place where Reverend Lyman Beecher lived with, among others, his daughter, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Beecher was president of Lane Seminary, a Presbyterian institution active in the Underground Railroad, which helped blacks escape slavery in the South.
The activities of the Beechers underscore a fact that seems often overlooked by contemporary social historians. And that's the absolutely essential role Christian faith has played in calling society to more humane and moral ways of living. Granted, many people misuse Christian faith to uphold dehumanization. But authentic Christianity always calls us to love God and love neighbor.
Close to the Beecher home, which can still be toured on three days each week, is the first African-American neighborhood in Cincinnati. Its original residents were former slaves. A prominent resident there, the son of a slave who had bought his own freedom, was Wendell Phillips Dabney. You can read more about him here.
The tour we took is one outlined in a fabulous book I've mentioned before, Walking the Steps of Cincinnati by Mary Anna DuSablon. And therein lies an interesting tale. Cincinnati is built on what appears to be hills. But as du Sablon writes:.
..Cincinnati is really a City of Valleys; valleys carved in a rolling plain formed more than two million years ago. This "indented edge" of the midwest plains, higher than [the Ohio River] Basin, is the crest of an upward fold in the rock called the Cincinnati Arch...Starting in the 1800s, Cincinnatians began building stairways to facilitate going on foot from community to community in the area, putting them on the sites of footpaths that had already been established. Later, trolley cars and "eventually...five inclined railways" went up and down the Cincinnati "hills."
The steps, of course, were replaced by the automobile as a major form of transportation in the area and they largely fell into disuse, except for those used by hundreds of religious pilgrims who ascend Mount Adams each Good Friday.
Fortunately, the city of Cincinnati is committed to maintaining the more than 400 stairways that criss cross the area and they make for fabulous walking tours of city and its diverse neighborhoods.
This morning, as we prepared to go to worship, my wife, no baseball fan, suggested that we head down to Great American Ballpark for this afternoon's game between the Reds and the Cleveland Indians.
Our son went with us and what a great game we saw! It was a pitcher's duel that began as a battle between each team's ace: Aaron Harang for the Reds and C.C. Sebathia for the Indians. The game went into the 12th.-inning before the Reds won it, when Alex Gonzalez hit a single driving in Chad Moeller.
I mentioned to my wife as we drove home that we probably did more of Cincinnati this weekend than we have in years, partaking of the particularities of the core city of the area in which we've lived since 1990. It was fun!
In a world that's become increasingly homogenized, it's great to remember that communities and countries can still retain their unique characteristics and that often, it's differences that make them...and even individual people...special!
[THANKS TO: blognetews.com/Ohio for linking to this post.]
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