What lead to the decline of South Fairmount?(Source: http://www.projectgroundwork.org/downloads/lickrun/lick_run_master_plan.pdf)
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Tucked in a basin on the outskirts of Cincinnati lays South Fairmount — a place filled with working class families, all looking to settle close to downtown. This is the 1950's and things are going well for the residents. That is until Cincinnati installs its twisting webs of train tracks, a necessity for industrial growth but a curse for the community here. Who would have known that the town on the edge of the tracks would have been severed by the trains, left on the west side out of the rippling affects of the city's industrialization?
Time moved fast for Fairmount citizens. Train tracks turned to viaducts, rocketing cars through a funnel from the West Side to their offices in downtown skyscrapers. The outcome of South Fairmount becoming an almost-highway rest stop was devastating to the economy. "These streets didn’t serve South Fairmount well", said Liz Blume.Blume, the executive director of the Committee Building Institute at Xavier University. "Traffic moves so fast one cannot not even imagine South Fairmount being a neighborhood business district."
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When developers started building up the outer suburban rings of Cincinnati, like Westwood, people started to bypass South Fairmount and then with increased traffic, city planners created even bigger roads for people to bypass this nuisance on their daily commute.
One of the big efforts of the Lick Run project would entail reimagining the roadways of this area to create a commuter traffic that is steady and yet also conducive to economic growth in the interior of the parallel roads that outline the stretch of South Fairmount. "One of our aims was to create a more walkable community," said Joseph Danyluk— environmental planner for Human Nature Inc. “Cars going by at 30, 40, 50 mph doesn’t make it a very desirable place to walk around.”
Human Nature was the brains behind the green architecture being put in place for the Lick Run Project. The landscaping architectural company started with an emphasis on public open spaces and open-space systems, working mostly with cities and other governments, but over the past 15 years, it has grown and evolved into working with other public agencies, universities, and non-profits with similar interests. For this project, the team behind Human Nature collaborated with the Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati to develop and design an ultimate greenway to solve to excessive CSO's while also improving the environment for a long time to come, and possibly even the economy of South Fairmount.
One of the big efforts of the Lick Run project would entail reimagining the roadways of this area to create a commuter traffic that is steady and yet also conducive to economic growth in the interior of the parallel roads that outline the stretch of South Fairmount. "One of our aims was to create a more walkable community," said Joseph Danyluk— environmental planner for Human Nature Inc. “Cars going by at 30, 40, 50 mph doesn’t make it a very desirable place to walk around.”
Human Nature was the brains behind the green architecture being put in place for the Lick Run Project. The landscaping architectural company started with an emphasis on public open spaces and open-space systems, working mostly with cities and other governments, but over the past 15 years, it has grown and evolved into working with other public agencies, universities, and non-profits with similar interests. For this project, the team behind Human Nature collaborated with the Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati to develop and design an ultimate greenway to solve to excessive CSO's while also improving the environment for a long time to come, and possibly even the economy of South Fairmount.