BELLEVUE, KY
May 2007
It's the Belv! Bellevue is an old river city with 7,000 people across from Cincinnati. Despite it being urban, you won't believe how right-wing the city government is. They won't pass a law to protect store cashiers from being forced to take a drug test, because they consider such a law to be "communist" interference with the economy - yet the city interferes with the economy by seizing elderly residents' houses and turning their property over to a developer to build condos for the very rich.
But hey, that's BushAmerica for ya!
Almost everything in this photo set is probably endangered to some extent, thanks to city officials' rightism. I had to assume the worst, so that's why I got these photos before it was too late. This is looking southwest on Eden Avenue from Washington Avenue.
Looking up from the bottom of Lafayette Avenue. This scene is desperately endangered!!! I know the city is a historic district, but that doesn't stop the ravages of the new economy. Apparently, the only reason they made this a historic district was so they could justify replacing perfectly good street signs with ones that have a serif font (that's harder to read) because it "looks quaint" (even though street signs never used that font). This is right where the city is trying to use eminent domain to steal houses and transfer the property to the developers. (Bellevue didn't learn a lesson from the eminent domain disaster that happened in Newport.)
Also, I don't know for sure if the development that's planned here is from the same company that built another condo building nearby that ran a noisy pile driver you could hear a mile away at 6 AM all through the winter of 2005-06. (More hypocrisy: The city puts up signs banning loud music from AM car radios that are audible for 3 seconds, yet it wouldn't do a thing about the noise generated by the pile driver almost 24/7.)
Facing northeast on Union Street from Lafayette. This will probably vanish once an opulent resident of the new luxury condos complains that they can't fit their 12-foot-wide SUV through here. As narrow as this street is, it's still not as narrow as the minds of whoever decided to demolish Bellevue's historic neighborhoods.
From Fairfield Avenue, looking down towards the river on Lafayette. I don't know when the left side of this street became a parking lot, but I think it used to look something like the right side until not terribly long ago. (To the left of here, Hallam Street is gone.) The hill in the background is in Cincinnati. (An elevated part of Columbia Parkway, which carries US 50, is visible.)
Going southeast in the highly appealing 200 block of Lafayette. This area is probably safe from the wrecking ball for now, but the way things have gone, you just never know.
Looking east on the infamous Covert Run Pike, which goes through a wooded area up to Fort Thomas. The rail line that runs through Bellevue and Dayton forms an old overpass over Covert Run Pike here - right where Covert Run Pike itself goes over a tiny creekbed (which is in the woods on the right). Covert Run Pike was actually the last of the old toll roads in Campbell County, remaining toll until the 1920s.
Finally, we're standing on Berry Avenue, looking southwest on Tiger Lane, which meets Berry opposite Covert Run Pike. I think this goes to Bellevue High School. According to old maps, Newport's 7th Street used to come out right here (to align with Covert Run Pike), but that was probably before 1950.