While living in the now-demolished Friar’s Club in Cincinnati, Ohio between 1941 and 1944, Lumen Martin Winter painted murals on the walls of the residents’ lounge. The 1,600 square-foot scenes, painted in tempera emulsion on a casein ground, depicted regional highlights of industry, music, religion, and literature.
Some time back, I was afforded an opportunity to view the private collection of airplanes of the late Walter Soplata in Ohio. Over the ensuing decades, he saved countless aircraft from being sold to the highest bidder and scrapped.
Amazon.com has been called the killer of the American indoor shopping mall in countless articles. But it’s been no secret that traditional shopping centers have been struggling long before the advent of online shopping, with the United States boasting more square feet of retail than any other developed nation by far. It’s with some irony that Amazon.com is building new fulfillment centers on the grounds of two dead malls.
The end of 2016 is fast approaching. 9,000 photographs were snapped, 35,000 miles traveled, and 200 locations explored. Here are the top 35 images of 2016.
The Longaberger Company is a manufacturer of handcrafted maple wood baskets based near Newark, Ohio. Once employing a thousand manufacturing baskets, the company has just 35 on payroll today. Sales peaked at over $1 billion in 2000, declining to just about $100 million today.
East Liverpool, Ohio is the classic definition of the Rust Belt. Historically, it was referred to as the the “Crockery City” and “Pottery Capital of the World” due to a large number of potteries in the region.
The former St. Joseph Riverside Hospital in Warren, Ohio nothing more than a scrapped, flooded, and fire-damaged carcass of a building.
When the Dennison Hotel on Main Street in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio closed in 2011, it marked the end of a hoteling era. The single room occupancy extended stay facility once competed with the Browne Hotel, Fort Washington Hotel, Fountain Square Hotel, and others — all of which are long closed and demolished.
Several years ago, I was able to visit the former printing operation for the Crowell-Collier Publishing Company, once the world’s largest magazine publishing house, in Springfield, Ohio.
National Acme, located in Cleveland, Ohio, was one of the largest manufacturers of machine tools in the United States. National Acme began as the merger of two notable machine tool manufacturers, the Cleveland Twist Drill Company, and the National Acme Company.