NEWPORT and COVINGTON, KY
Mar. 2007
Newport and Covington are the heart, soul, and brains of Northern Kentucky, and I just had to take my trusty velocipede out for another Roads Scholaring session in this set of cities. So enjoy this batch of Roads Scholarin' pictures...
This sign is at the park off Nelson Place in Newport. It admonishes folks to clean up their dogs' poo. Unlike most other signs to this effect, this one actually gives illustrated instructions. Hilarious, huh?
Boo! A ghost ramp! Nelson Place - which (contrary to popular belief) was not named after the early '90s band (which was wi) - was supposed to feed into a ramp to southbound I-471. This idea was killed because of its unpopularity, but not before part of the ramp was actually built.
Continuing through Newport, this beautiful old building at 5th & Saratoga was in the process of being demolished.
Now we're heading onto the bridge that carries KY 8 between Covington and Newport. This is one of several signs in this area on which someone had placed a sticker featuring a roll of toilet paper.
In the eyes of today's political "leaders", there's only 2 types of people: 1) the rich; and 2) corporations. From the KY 8 bridge, we're looking back at a spot in Newport that only months earlier had featured a large housing project. But these homes for the poor were leveled to make way for...homes for the rich! That's BushAmerica for ya! The street you see in the foreground is Southgate Street. You can see the Campbell County Courthouse off in the distance along 4th Street.
This is from the bottom of Garrard Street in Covington, looking into Cincinnati towards the former site of the now-defunct Riverfront Stadium. It's hard to see in a photo, but Garrard Street lines up with Main Street on the east side of downtown Cincinnati. Main is straight ahead betwixt those blue spires, and has been extended south through where the ballpark was. A barge with a red base is sailing down the river. The tallest building that is clearly pictured here is Scripps Center, owned by the company that prints the Cincinnati Post (since we're on the topic of things becoming defunct).
No pet business? I didn't know pets knew how to run a business. Oh, wait, that's not what they mean on this sign posted outside the Kenton County government building in Covington.
If you go off Linden Avenue just south of Linden Grove Cemetery, you end up here. This is still the city of Covington, but these streets trail off really quickly. The sign is confusing, but some good map overlay work helps us confirm that South Linden is on the right and Old Lexington Road is on the left. (These streets are usually mislabeled or omitted on even the most reliable maps.) As the name implies, what was then Lexington Road was replaced by Dixie Highway, which became US 25. This is where Lexington Road emerged. Most of that route was abandoned by 1914, though there were plans to revive it in the 1930s. They could have made a good bike path along the old road (to avoid the steep incline of US 25), but now I-75 is in the way. In this photo you can almost see I-75, which runs horizontally to the right of the NO OUTLET sign.
Now we're on what I've confirmed to be Old Lexington Road. You can probably see why modern US 25 doesn't use this route. This is facing into town, and this is an approximation of what travelers heading into Covington decades ago would have seen.
Over in the Cov, Euclid Avenue and Jefferson Avenue are a pair of parallel one-way streets. They used to feed into an interchange at I-75. All I remember of this exit, however, is that it was always closed. From about 1980 into the 1990s, I don't think I ever saw it open (although it appears to have been open previously). When I-75 was reconstructed in the '90s, this exit was torn down altogether. This picture is looking from where Jefferson and Euclid end towards I-75. This field is where the interchange used to be. When the city kept heartlessly bulldozing homeless encampments along the river, I suggested that this empty field would make a great site for a homeless village. A medical center is now planned along I-75 near here, but I don't know if it's on this side of the freeway or the other side.
This is where the ramp from I-75 emerged onto Jefferson Avenue, which is straight ahead. The ramp fed straight into Jefferson.