Bucktown
Highway Erasure
Before and after the Civil War, the city's most notorious neighborhood was Bucktown, a noisome hollow between Broadway and Sixth, Seventh, and Culvert Streets. The decayed shacks and foul odors of this wretched bottom were no worse than the inhabitants, who stole, fought, made love, and got drunk with unfailing regularity.
For years Bucktown's denizens endured filth and squalor to pursue strange loves and worse vices. Violent deaths were commonplace; there were so many murders at Sixth and Broadway that the place was called "Dead Man's Corner."
Bucktown was beginning to lose its tropical flavor in the 1870's when Lafcadio Hearn explored its haunts. Death took many of the old habitues; the police bore down, sending many of the toughs to the hospital, many of the harridans to the workhouse; some semblance of order appeared. By 1890 Bucktown had become almost civilized. "It still had many dissolute women and gambling men,” wrote W. P. Dabney, “but gradually murder became a lost art, and sometimes several nights would pass without any one being killed .”
Slowly Bucktown disappeared. One by one the shacks came down; sewers carried off the hellish odors; fills obliterated dirty scenes. Today large factories cover the site, and Bucktown is merely a livid memory.
(American Guide Series, Cincinnati, 1943)
Eggleston Ave looking North , 1938
Today the area that was Bucktown is nothing but a highway interchange. The Factories that replaced the seedy neighborhood became relics themselves
Gibert Ave Viaduct looking South, 1945
Few buildings survived the construction of the highway. To the right is the Times-Star Building, one building in this area that predates it. Bucktown, like many neighborhoods in Cincinnati, was erased by the onslaught of car infrastructure. A city built long before the idea of automobiles, many communities were displaced and their neighborhoods hollowed out to make room for wider streets, vast parking lots, and high-speed traffic lanes. Creating the appearance of Bucktown today, with seas of parking lots broken up by highway overpasses and scattered ruins of brick and mortar.
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