NEWPORT, KY
Aug. 31 2007
My Internet access was cut off again, so I goed Roads Scholaring!
I had to piece this photo together after my new memory card shredded it with its merciless talons. (Every time it does this, I'm reminded of the video for "I Missed Again" by Phil Collins in which the singer gets split in two at the waist.)
This empty building south of 6th & York was a Thriftway supermarket. When it closed in 2004, the city decided it would make a great space for a new commercial development and...oops, wait a minute. Actually the city didn't want this space to develop. Instead they condemned an entire residential neighborhood to be developed, even though this space was staring the city in the face. This is in downtown Newport, where a commercial complex would do the most good, yet the city let the building sit empty for 8 years. (It was still closed in 2012.)
A hidden gem! I've seen this thing for decades, but never thought to get close to it to see what it is. This is that thing down at 12th & York. It's a set of steps that bips up into a footbridge over the rail line. There's a lot of steps, but it's still open as of 2007.
From the footbridge, looking north on York towards Cincinnati. If you look closely, you can see the I-471 bridge on the right. (Actually, in Newport, north means northwest and east means northeast, because the street grid is based on the Ohio River, which runs diagonally on a map.)
Also from the footbridge, looking west on 12th. (One of the last yellow stop signs in Newport was on a street off the south side of 12th, but it's been gone since about 1980.)
Eek! It's the footbridge! Get it away from me! Seriously now, we're looking south on the footbridge, which tunnels through this fence and has a metal grating as its surface. The south approach has no steps and just meets 13th Street at level.
Now we're on a curvy road bridge that runs over the rail line. It runs from 12th & Patterson to 13th & Central. This span has only been here since 1989. It replaces an older bridge that ran from 12th & Columbia to the current bridge's end at 13th. If you look straight ahead on the rail line, you're looking right into a bridge over the Licking River. Notice the lights of a train heading towards us. Choo! Choo!
The train looms closer, but I'm panning to the right to show you more of the bridge. I think the water tower in Fort Wright is the white speck on the horizon to the left of the center of the picture. Under the horizon just to the right of the middle of the photo, you can see a big area that's cleared out. That's probably along I-75 in Covington near where the Jefferson Avenue exit used to be.
Looking east on 13th at Central. No thru traffic? How I fooled the forces of doom! I had heard some houses on this street were endangered, but I saw no indication of this.
I wish I had gotten a better picture here, but there's not much left of what I wanted to photograph. This is overlooking the shopping center on Carothers Road. The item I wanted to get a picture of was just above Sears, which has the pointed facade near the left end of the shopping center. The pile of debris on the hill behind Sears was a house on Grand Avenue that I planned to photograph because it was about to be demolished. But I didn't get there in time, because the summer had so much heat and rain.
I dipped a bit into Fort Thomas. This is facing north on the hated I-471 from the Highland Avenue overpass (the one with the arch-shaped underside). The span was built around 1977 or 1978 (before I-471 opened). (I remember going to the barricade on Highland when it was temporarily closed when I-471 was blasted out.) You can clearly see Cincinnati, and you can vaguely see Covington, but Newport is buried in the trees.