Glencoe Place
AKA Glencoe Hole
Here is one of the many hillside nooks in Cincinnati that contains architectural surprises. Glencoe Place sweeps downhill into the section called Little Bethlehem past rows of brick tenements with stoops, Baltimore style. A short way down the hill, cutting in from the south, is View Court, a short, dead-end street with a flavor all its own. It is flanked on the east side by a high wall of uncut stone and on the west side by a series of neat individual 3-story brick houses with not an inch of space between them. A mullioned bay window in the central structure adds to the quaint effect.
"The south end of the street is blocked by the STANDISH APARTMENTS BUILDING, a 5-story structure erected in 1899, and until 1939 known as the Glencoe Hotel. This building is the focal point of stories related to explain the oddity of the neighborhood. One is that Truman B. Handy, the ambitious architect and builder, wanted to erect a hotel on Auburn Avenue. When property owners refused to sell him land along the main thoroughfare, he put up the Glencoe Hotel a half-block away and in revenge filled the whole fancy neighborhood with brick rows. A second account is that the hotel was built not by Handy but by his son-in-law, Jethrow Mitchell, who vowed that he would construct a thousand apartment houses and a maze of streets on the hillside below genteel Auburn Avenue. The apartment dwellings number considerably less than a thousand, and apparently only a few streets were laid on the steep grade.
(American Guide Series, 1943)
Cincinnati has a rich history of architecture and neighborhoods that are no longer here or are in a state of disrepair. Mt. Auburn is no stranger to that history. Glencoe Place was a neighborhood that is now a part of the past, but it was unlike any other. Nestled in the hillside were complexes of housing that spanned the entire street up and down. A neighborhood that somehow remained intact, in contrast to the skeletons of neighborhoods that line the streets of Cincinnati.
Glencoe Place has a past of resilience, with the neighborhood having initiated Cincinnati’s first rent strike. It overcame neglect before the early 00s in the 70s when it was renovated with its brutalist details and distinctive street lamps. It saw a large resurgence of occupancy but was unfortunately not repeated. In 2018 the entire block was demolished.