 Hello, so do you like to introduce yourself? I'm Bruce Getsman, professor of emeritus, University of Cincinnati. Alright, so first question I'd like to ask you is, when did you come to UC and what brought you here? Well, brought me here because they offered me a job. I came in 1959. So what was the hiring process for you back then? Well, back then you applied for a job and if they responded that they were interested in you, they invited you to the campus. If you weren't from probably overseas or someplace, why did you go to the campus to get acquainted with them to look you over? I met with the dean of our college, which was called Applied Arts in those days. Then they brought in some other professors and they talked to you. If they were at all interested in you, they said, well, we'll put you up for the night. They put me up for the night at the Terrace Plaza Hotel, as it was called in those days, downtown. The next day they took me to see a vice president and eventually the president of the university for a final OK. But by the time you got to see the president they pretty much said, yeah, we guess what we wanted to do. So they made me a job offer and I moved. Very nice. A much simpler process in those days than it is today. Now you have to get a clearance from government and I know a few years ago I taught a course, I typed three or four years ago. And I had to apply and it took something like six weeks to get clearance from the government. Checking back on all past employers and all this and that. See whether they had any criminal record or not. I don't think they bothered in those days. OK, so did you teach like architecture when you were there, when they first hired you? Oh yes, I was hired to teach architectural design. Architecture, graphics, drawing, wrestling. Architectural students used a T-square in Triangle. Now they use a computer. So when you're at UC, what did you want your students to take away from your classes? Well, any teacher wants them to come away with a realization that they've learned something, hopefully. Not every student does, but we would like them to. But you hope that they've gotten something out of your time with them. Architectural design is a very time-consuming process and is very one-on-one other than a lecture program. So you get to know your students pretty well and their capabilities. In that respect, when I first started, we had 12 hours of contact with students in the design studio every week. Not that you saw each student every day, but you had a chance to sit with them and look at their work and talk to them and get to know them pretty well. What their strengths were, what their backgrounds were, which is a good thing. To a degree, of course, is a big lecture format that you have. It's hard to do that. So I'm guessing you like teaching. Well, I kept doing it for 40 years. So why did you like it? Well, again, I just like to be facetious. It's a friend of mine or colleague of mine at the office said that teaching was really a great part-time job, a lousy full-time job, as far as that goes for as far as economic rewards. But anyway, sure, hopefully people don't stay in academia if they don't like what they're doing. You have to. Okay, so another question I guess would be, what was like a relationship among your colleagues back then when you were teaching? Well, our college was quite small at that time. I think we had only 900 students. So we got to know all the faculty people in all the various disciplines. As time went on as the college got bigger, that became a little more difficult. We used to have a faculty lounge in our college and so we would meet faculty people there, and all the faculty mailboxes were there. So that's where all the communications came down to you. You went into the faculty mail room or lounge and got your coffee and had picked up your mail. And it was right across the hallway from the main office of the college. But basically it was a more collegial environment, I think early on. As the university grew and as the college grew, of course that changed a bit and became more departmental focused. This is, I think, true today. Things tend to be more grouper on the college or on the department, I should say, rather than the college. Okay, so since you were there, like you said, 40 years, what changes did you see throughout the vision of UC? Well, of course, UC when I came here was a city school. And that's where the relatively small and became a state affiliated school in the 1960s, late 60s. And the reason for that was they wanted to grow, they didn't have any money. The only levy support for the university was from the city and Gulf Manor, a suburb. The rest of the suburbs didn't have tax levies to support the university. So as the suburban areas grew, the population grew in that respect, they had to become state affiliated. That was the first step before becoming complete, becoming a complete state university. And state affiliation brought money, no question about that. It also brought bureaucracy. And what I'd like to relate, when I first came to my college, we had a dean. The dean had a secretary, and there were two secretaries in the outer office of the college. And there was a history student that came over two afternoons a week part-time and ran the mimeograph machine. Now you don't even know what a mimeograph machine was. Well, this was, of course, before computers or anything else. Everything had to be done on a special paper that imprinted it. And then that was run through the mimeograph machine and inked and things came out. So you couldn't run in and get a Xerox of something right away. You had to get it in a line, so either Thursday or Friday or Thursday was the day that the graduate student came over and ran it. And then we had one faculty member that was relieved of a class to do scheduling. And that was about it. We didn't even have a department chairman in those days, just a lead professor in each discipline. Also, the far cry from what administration is today in any college. In fact, there are more administrative people in the Department of Architecture and Interior Design in the college than there were originally in 1959 in the whole college. But, you know, that's one of the problems. I think of the university because the administration has ballooned probably at the expense of faculty. There are more part-time people teaching, although we certainly had part-timers in those days, too, teaching in various disciplines. So I guess this would lead to another question I had, which would be, what changes did you see over the university as it transformed throughout the years? With the buildings and how it expanded? Of course, when I came, Gap, or as it's called now, had an original auditorium portion on it. Have you been in the building, you know, the building hall? In that? Yes. Okay. That's my class name. And then, of course, the original part was built in 1954, I think, or 52. It was an auditorium and an art gallery and a library. I was there on the north side of University Avenue, which is that campus entrance now. But University Avenue was a through street at that time. In other words, that was before Martin Luther King was built. And in fact, that was the first building that went into what was then part of Burnham Woods Park. And there's a big controversy about that, jumping the University Avenue, because that day, before 1952, that had been the north end of the campus. So anyway, that was a change. And then, of course, Gap had said two subsequent major additions. But it was in 1958, the classroom part was built of the original college. That was a three-story portion. Interestingly, the library that was on the top floor of the first part didn't have handicapped accessibility. The elevator in the building didn't go up to the top floor. It had a walk. And eventually, they ended up putting in a chair lift. So we had a handicapped student that went and that they couldn't get into the library. And supposedly, the reason they didn't build another floor onto the Gap building, they could have, if you know originally, maybe you don't pay much attention to that, but there are round columns in the old part, sort of concrete columns. And in order to put a top floor on, which had been the library floor, which they economized and didn't put enough steel in the columns to support another floor. So therefore, you had to walk up to the library before they put the chair lift in. You might say that's false economy, but on those days, people weren't concerned about the handicapped particularly. One of the things we used to do and started to become part of architectural practice that you had to accommodate handicapped people, we used to put students in wheelchairs in the building and see how we would navigate. Then they realized that they couldn't get in toilet rooms because of the way they were constructed. Couldn't make the terms, which was a good lesson to them. They couldn't get in the building. They say, well, go to the library. Well, we can't go to the library because there's no waiting for somebody in a wheelchair to get up there. And steps up the buildings instead of ramps and things were not possible in those days. They only ramped into the original. That building was at the loading dock. Yeah, that's crazy. Which is hard to believe. But this is how the practice of architecture, certainly, are designed. Buildings have certainly changed because of the federal requirements to accommodate the handicapped. Very necessary. Even crosswalks, as you know, have ramps now. He didn't used to be there, so a curb was a major obstacle for somebody in a wheelchair. Or frutches or even old, doddery people. But the campus certainly has changed. We used to say UC for many years was stood for under construction. You've heard that one, I know. The main campus is pretty much done. Pretty much done. Probably with the exception of they really haven't come up with any real ideas made public anyway of what to do with the old library area and the MyMCA. Which is a fine building, but it's deteriorating. Talk about making it a sort of a reception center for the university and doing remodeling or new construction there. But that's probably going to be the one area where there's going to be some major changes over the year. But what's changed, a lot has changed physically. Of course, even the boundaries of the campus. You know Jefferson Avenue, of course. And Jefferson Avenue is an interesting street because it runs right into the Environmental Health Center building. Well, it didn't used to. It used to go, Jefferson there cannot connect it to Jefferson beyond the Environmental Health Center. That was an interesting exercise. And that, you see, you have to put the university as a city university in context with city planning and development. Cincinnati has been a leader one time in planning, urban planning. It had plans that were done for parks. Well, the reason we have a great park system in the city is because planning done back in the 20s. The 1930s planning was done. And after World War II, because there was no construction during that time, and relatively modest construction in the 30s because of the Depression, they decided that in order to expand cities, because the fabric of cities was old, getting older, they had to have a federal program for urban renewal. And at that time, urban renewal funds were primarily a competition. They had a fair amount of money set aside and then the cities applied for them. And based upon, to some degree, the merit of the application, depending on how much money they have. But mainly they were focusing on rehabilitation. A lot of it was also connected with the Federal Defense Highway System, or the Interstate, as it was called, or was generally called, the Defense Highway System. Pattern debt with the German autobahns, World War II, that Hitler built. And of course, our autobahns, Defense Highway Systems went right through the center of cities. German built theirs remote from the city, around the city, so they couldn't be put out of action by enemy bombing. But of course, that wasn't the point here. But the system was sold as the Defense Highway System, the Interstate initially. And of course, we all know what that became. When I first moved to Cincinnati, 75, ended at Ludlow Avenue in Central Parkway. That's when we came in, that's when they proceeded into the city along Central Parkway. Well, of course, it was expanded through the West End and the Bridge Across into Kentucky. And then tying it in. Circle Freeway, when I first came here. Their first spur of it was built off 75, and it went over to the shopping center. That was one short little piece. And that was it. That was, of course, drawn on paper. Naturally, they were going to build it, but that was what was constructed. Don't give you an idea of the scope. And of course, the highway system, as you know, led to a suburban expansion. Also, the highway system, as it penetrated cities and moved through, resulted in the clearance of a lot of areas. Just so happened, many of them were lower-income areas. No question about that. But on the other hand, they certainly tried to get as close as they could to the urban core. And unfortunately, most of the fringes of the urban core were where poor people lived. And so that was, if you were going to get as close as you could, you had to obviously tear down some of the deteriorated, supposedly deteriorated areas, not all of them necessarily were. But it led to a lot of displacement. And at one time, Cincinnati had the largest urban renewal clearance program in the country. And that was down in the West End. That's where Interstate 75 went through, and all that clearance was there. And one of the things that cities had to do when they were funding, they had to come up with it. I remember 10% of the cost of the funds they got from the federal government for renewal was a match. Well, this is where the university came in. And Jefferson Avenue has changed, because they bought land between what was the campus, and expanded to the east to Jefferson Avenue. And they also built three apartment buildings. You know, two of them were there. Now, the third one has been replaced. And that was the city's contribution to match the Federal Urban Renewals Fund, was to expand the university. Which is interesting. Well, the campus green, of course, at that time before that was a parking lot called Lot 1. That's where the students parked. Because basically this was a commuter school. It didn't have a lot of dormitories, residents of students that still don't have enough of the campus ground. But anyway, that was an interesting major change. And of course, another thing that was done to the east of the campus was the Avondale-Coreyville Renewal Project. That was the largest urban rehabilitation project in the country at one time. So you had Cincinnati had the largest project, the Urban Renewal Project, in the west end. And they had then the largest urban rehabilitation project. Both of them had problems. If you study the west end, maybe you have or haven't. But it's been characterized in some way as one of the largest urban parking lots in the country. Because what they ended up building was a low-density development. It was much more dense before the interstate was plowed through. And of course, before the clearance program. The problem with the clearance program was that they had a mistaken idea of the built-new infrastructure. New road, sewers, all the utilities were new. All these industrial sites that had been there in, you might say, multi-story or older industrial buildings were going to flock back. Well, that didn't make as much sense after the fact. Because if you have a company that is being displaced, the company's got money to move relocating. So where did they relocate? Out in the suburbs. Where they could get enough land for parking, which they didn't have when they were. And also where they could build factories horizontally. And also that they were able to have enough space for expansion. And so that when they rehabilitated the west end, the Kenyan borough was called, the west end, they said, well, move back in and said, we don't want to move back in. We don't want. We should move back into the center of the city. We like it where it is. The executives could get there from Indian Hill and high park easily. And of course, the workers, they've got to drive. They better have a car. And poor workers that can't afford a car, well, too bad. So anyway, that's part of the problem with the west end. What they should have done in retrospect, they should have done it in phases. And so it said to a company, well, we've got this nice site. We will move you from block A, where you are now, we've got block B ready for your new factory. But they didn't do that. They were all out a lot of time. And it just took too long. So they learned a lesson there. You can have urban renewal. If you want people to stay, you've got to provide a place for them to go to that's more or less close to where they are. But up on the hill top, we have a rehabilitation program. So the idea was an urban rehabilitation was a combination of new development and rehab houses, living places. Well, that's a good idea. And one of the problems that, of course, they wanted to combat was institutional expansion. Now you have to understand that Martin Luther King Highway was built because this was called Pill Hill. See, all the hospitals were concentrated in around the medicals. It used to be, of course, the UC's hospital, General Hospital it was called, where the medical school is. There was a Jewish hospital, children's hospital, right there. Bethesda Hospital was on Reading Road. We had Good Samaritan here. And Deaconess Hospital, it's gone now, tearing that down. And this was the hospital complex. So the idea was you built Martin Luther King to tie into Western and Northern Boulevard. And you pushed it across the city and tie it into 71, so that, which didn't get done initially, but so that people and, but, you know, was extended on into Walnut Hills. So people in the East side and the West side could get to the hospital complex. So what happened to the hospitals? Deaconess is closed. Bethesda is closed. Jewish hospital moved to Kenwood. And, you know, many hospitals have been established around the perimeter to better serve the suburban community, rather than having people run in. Now, I must admit that the most intensive care emergency room in the urban area is at UC's hospital. That's where all the gunshot wounds go and, you know, that kind of thing. If you want to see action on a Saturday night, camp out there and look at the problems that are there. But anyway, but you see, that was planning. So let's get back to Coryville, urban renewal. The problem was between the East and West Campus, there was residential development. And the university wanted to tie the two campuses together. That was a plan. You know where the old, or the nursing school is now? Okay. Procter wall. That building was constructed. There was a gift from the proctor, that Proctor Gable, to the university to finance a school of nursing. And they said, oh, it had to be right there on that corner. Well, that wasn't true. They didn't have any strings attached to it. It could have been any place, but the university wanted it there. As part of the change, one of the problems of doing that was the street between there, one down in where the Marriott Hotel is now. That was a gully. And there was a recreation building there, Coryville Recreation and a baseball field. And that was on Eden Avenue, which runs into the medical school now. And there was also another little street, I guess it was called Pam Street. And that street had the largest concentration of houses that had been rehabilitated in the whole Avondale, Coryville neighborhood. But an expansion, what they did, of course, was to tear down those houses and tear down, you know, the community center, which they rebuilt, of course, over the university avenue. And which kind of lives this question, well, we spent all this money to rehab these buildings for people, modest means, because that was the idea. And the university expanded into them, so all that money was wasted. Now, I'll give you one anecdote about that. I was a member of a group called North Cincinnati Neighbors at that time, which was a community group. It's no longer in existence, they have community councils and things, a little different makeup now. But anyway, we went to, there was a minister in an Episcopal church in Mount Auburn. And we went around and we're talking to people in the neighborhood about this expansion of the university. And Martin Luther King expansion was all part of that. And I remember two things. One group was a man, a black man, was sitting on his front porch this was Saturday afternoon. And he said, we asked him, what do you think about this, having to move? And he said, I don't want to, but I have to. Because he said, this is the third time I'm going to move. I had a house in the West End, which Urban Renewal took. And they told me where he is and where can I go. And they said, we'll go to Coryville. We've got some money for you there to fix up the house. So he moved to Cabana House, got a wall to fix it up, moved to Coryville. And now, once he was there a few years, not too long, he was told what you got to move again. And I remember he said, you know, I get older and tireder. But he said, you know, and I say, but this is for young people. He said, that's good. But anyway, that was one thing I remember from that. Then there was the other one. There was a drugstore in the corner of what is Vine Street. It was a commercial building. I think three stories high. And a house next to it. And we went to the house next to it, the drugstore at that time was closed. And the man was there. And his wife or sister, I can't remember, we went and talked. Why are you here? We're just trying to see what your feelings is about having to move. And the woman said, well, don't, don't mention my husband or brother. Because we grew up in this house. And we ran the drugstore next door, it was closed. And he said, but if you mention why you're here, if he, when he comes in, he's going to break down and cry. And so of course he came in. And they broke down and cried because he was being forced to move. So stories like that led to the fact that, okay, you've got to draw the line, how big is the university going to expand? Institutional expansion. Well, what's happened? The university do lines. Everybody said, oh, okay, we will continue the rehabilitation. Change is up to that. Well, planning is something that is not static. Planning is dynamic. Cities are dynamic. And so they changed. And what was a good idea at one time? Ten years later, well, not like such a good idea. Hindsight's wonderful. And I mentioned about the nursing school. The university said, well, they had to have the nursing school in that corner. That's where Miss Proctor wanted it. Well, that was not true. They didn't need to do it. But that's where the university wanted it to build the bridge between the east and west campus. And then subsequently they built the Marriott Hotel and Administration building. So these are changes that were made, not necessarily to the benefit of the people that were being forced to leave or forced to change. And we see that now you could, pressures of development in the university have changed. Look at the apartment buildings that are being built. And look at Straight Street as that's going to become. The developers there call it Straight or Grape Street. It's going to be. Well, they're talking about building a 15 story apartment building on part. Now, where the old deaconess hospital has been torn down, they're going to build an office building. And guess who's going to be the tenant? Of course, they're going to rent it from the developer because they need more office space. We don't have a faculty club anymore at the university. That's gone. Faculty club, we didn't have one when I first came to the campus. We had a faculty dining room in Macon Hall, a student union. And so basically that's where faculty, if they wanted to be collegiate, would go. Then they built a faculty club with where the new business school is. And then they built, as part of that, an expansion was an alumni center next to it. So they could use the kitchen of the faculty club. And that was built with faculty club donations. It was built with private money. It was donated to the university. And it was a nice place and it's fine. In fact, they used to serve dinner there too, as a matter of fact, as well as lunch. But this is before the library was built across the street from that site. But it existed in Timble. They decided to tear it down as an expansion for the business school. And anyway, so those are changes that were made. Of course, where the library is now, that used to be a hill. That was a bump. And there used to be what Snake Road is, where you enter the parking garage for DAP. Yeah, I think so. That road used to wind down around through the park and connect. And so that's where faculty parking was for DAP anyway, because you could get a permit to park there. It didn't allow students to park there. In fact, when I first came, faculty parking was free. Students had to pay a little bit to get in the lot one, but faculty was free. Then they gave us a raise, like $300 a year or something like that. And then they charged $300 for parking. And I remember one of my colleagues who lived in an apartment across Clifton Avenue. She pointed that out to her glee, because she said, I can walk to work and you drive. And then Aris goes, I get to keep my raise and then I have to give it back to the university. But basically, if you think about planning from urban point of view, what's happened, of course, the east and west campuses have come together. The latest big institution expansion has been Children's Hospital, of course, moving to the north, and that's created problems. But there's going to be more expansion as the new 71 exit to Martin Luther King has created an whole area of expansion there, and that's going to change radically. And the other thing, of course, is the phenomenon of gentrification of the whole inner city. Who would have thought that over the Rhine would be a place that people would climber to move into? I'll give you an example of that. I was offered a building in the corner of, over the Rhine one time, the corner of Orchard Street and the North-South Street. Anyway, for $12,000, Orchard Street's a little short street that runs between Main Street and a street to the east. And a friend of mine just bought a house on Orchard Street a couple of years ago and has put $800,000. Now, diagonally across the street, back in the early 1970s, I could have had a house that's still there for $12,000. That's crazy. Crazy. It is. It's crazy. But people are clamoring to come back in the city on this, but one time I was to go to the suburbs. Now, what's the reason for change? Well, for one thing, aging a population. Also, the fact that commute time, and the lack of any rapid transit that amounts to anything, was it doesn't help suburbia at all. So, an inadequate bus service, certainly. There used to be a man in our faculty, part-time, a lot of us lost Seagull, which was on a low order alive. But Mr. Seagull was one of the more prominent urban planners in the country, and they worked on the master plan for the city of Cincinnati in the 1940s. And his proposal for the interstate highway system as it came into the city was to put dedicated bus lanes that weren't for traffic, it was an extra lane. Well, they didn't do that. You see, they wanted to economize. So, they didn't build a sequence of the way you're going to need it. We've got all these people that are moving out of the country. Oh, well, we're going to ride in the cars. They say it's going to be too congested. So, what do we have, congestion? One of the interesting planning situations is one of the fastest growing cities in the country is Austin, Texas, which is the capital, and the University of Texas is there. And it's become a tech area. And one of the problems they have is they don't have any rapid transit. And people that live in the suburbs, many of them, have to have pettitare in the city so they don't have to commute an hour and a half each way to get it to work. So, obviously, people that want to work downtown, many of them say, well, I want to live downtown, that counts for the over the ride. And some of the changes. And, well, of course, that has led to, you know, displacement. The world was over the ride. Basically, there was people that had been displaced in the West End. A lot of moved over the ride. They also moved to Corrieville and Avenue. And a lot of this goes back to changing of zoning regulations so that, you know, World War II had some effect on that. Because it was a housing show, they weren't building any new. The industry was expanding. And they changed zoning regulations so they could take a neighborhood like Avondale and big houses and subdivide it into apartments. And that's one of the reasons it led to the decline of Mount Auburn and Avondale was because of the change of zoning regulations. But it was needed at the time. They weren't building any money for new housing. People had to live someplace. If you were coming into the city from the countryside, whether it's Kentucky or further south, to work in industry, because the jobs were here, they moved. They had a place to live. So it led to overcrowding and deterioration of people that had the money to move further out. So the university, you know, has expanded and continues to expand. Many, you know, many changes. And what we're going to see, probably the most construction is going to be along Martin Luther King over to the east between them. And they're going to build a new Environmental Health Center over there. So that's along with other development that's going to take place. So it's, you know, cities are dynamic. They aren't static. If they try to be static, well, it's Venice today. It's a tourist attraction. It's also sinking. And the problem in Venice is that people, you know, there's so many tourists no one wants to live there permanently, even though it's a desirable place. But that's been one of the criticisms. So that's another whole issue. You get into the idea of tourism. But, you know, these are all planning things. So the university has changed. The university has grown. And, of course, I've changed with it as I came to teach design and architecture. I became interested in historic preservation. And we started a multidisciplinary program back in the 1970s in historic preservation. You get a certificate in that, a certificate program, which I thought at the time it still believed it was a way that it should be taught. So it's interdisciplinary. And that it's a non-degree program at the present time. But I think that it should be part of the tools of any designer or urban planner or urbanist or even his imageographers and geologists and that, that they become acquainted with and knowledgeable about preserving what we've got. And that's important. And one of the Cincinnati, certainly over the Rhine, is probably the largest concentration of Victorian architecture in the country. You know, things are changing there, too, new constructions being added. There are rules and regulations to hopefully try to make it more compatible with what's existing in historic fabric. But that is an important thing. We don't have fabric buildings cropping up, you know, high-rises and things that change the scale, primarily. But the desires there, sometimes desires increase the pressures to build more houses. One of the things they talked about down there was eliminating much of the requirement for parking for them. Well, that's okay. And many people, you've got a driver's license. Yeah. Okay, you do, too. Well, and you've got a car. Both of you. Yeah. Okay. Well, not everybody's got a car, but most people, certainly, younger people and older people who depend on the car. I haven't ridden a bus in Cincinnati in decades. Although I live here because of the proximity of the university. In fact, for many years, almost a little over 40 years, I had an office over on Vine Street, Sharp Mine. Well, there's an interesting street. See, Vine Street used to continue on through Coryville and wasn't interrupted. Now it goes to Jefferson and then jogs back. So they built a shopping center, but there used to be a hill there. There was a water tower, water tank on the hill. Right about where the parking lot for Kroger's is. If you think about Vine Street coming up and going through, it was on the west side of Vine Street between there and Jefferson. Water tank. It's hard to imagine. And, of course, Urban Renewal for Heavendale-Coryville. Well, okay, well, we can get rid of that. And my office was a little house that's still there. 2606 Vine Street. They filled in a gully in the back supposedly with the dirt filled from the hill. That wasn't necessarily true, but that's what the myth was. That they were going to use that to fill and then they put a parking lot in there behind those buildings on the east side of Sharp Mine in the block. First block. So anyway, then they, of course, had a shopping center, but it's since been torn down and rebuilt with a new Kroger store and a new Walgreens, which doesn't have enough parking. If you've been there, yeah. Totally inadequate parking because they'd closed the Kroger store at Walmont Hills, which Kroger kind of knew had equipment business to warrant keeping it open, which is probably true. But the new store, and the idea was that if you have a pharmacy in your drugstore, you want drive-thru. That's the whole key. If you don't have a drive-thru pharmacy as part of your store or your drugstore, you can't compete. So, CPS built a drugstore up there on McMillan and Vine. They've got a drive-thru. Kroger didn't and Walgreens didn't in the old shopping center. So, there's an interesting problem or interesting change. Not necessarily. All change is not necessary for the best. But, anyway, the dynamic of the neighborhood will continue to change. Mount Auburn has changed. There used to be a church in the corner of Auburn Avenue and McMillan. Which was the oldest, that was the first church on top of the hill. And in fact, the developer bought it toward them. And he wants to build an apartment building. Because what is, the expansion is there and they can run them out. They have more restaurants as a whole, another story. They even got a target. Well, anyway, cities are dynamic. They change. And, not necessarily always better. But, Cincinnati, of course, has changed in many ways slower than others. I think that trying to preserve the best of the past is important. And that needs to be. And we need to serve to save the best of the past at the university. I mourn the loss of Wilson Auditorium. Do you remember where that was? Ah, well, you know where those temporary buildings are and Clifton Avenue and right across from Dappon. That was what Wilson Auditorium was there. It was a picture of it in here. So, Auditorium was building, built in the 30s. They used to do back before the college conservatory of music or moved to campus. That's where they had their theater. So, of course, the campus changed. The first part of it was they built the whole complex up there for the theater music and all of that up there. They built a building which is basically gone. Part of it was, of course, the second phase of it became the auditorium for the school, which has since been remodeled. The original part of the school was the college was a classroom building. Basically, built over a parking garage done by an architect in town at the time. His name was Ed Schulte. He was a prominent architect. That was his last project. And the joke was it wasn't a very good building design-wise. They said he should have retired one building earlier. Fortunately, they got a New York architect's I.M. Pay firm to do it. The expansion of it to remodeling all of that. The second theater was done before the last phase of the office building a classroom building part of it. But, you know, it was a major change in the campus when took the college conservatory Cincinnati conservatory of music and the university took it over and moved it to the main campus. I remember when I first came here we used to they would try to list faculty people to make telephone calls to people to get them to contribute. Have any of you ever done that? Well, you know. And, you know, I was a young assistant professor I thought I'd probably get extra points that way. And so I remember calling up one evening and I got this man and he said where are you from and what are you doing? He said, well, I'm calling Cincinnati University of Cincinnati and above contribution University of Cincinnati he said I used to teach at the college or at the conservatory of music. The university took it over but I didn't get a pension. He said I taught there for decades they took it over and I haven't got anything but social security. So, I said probably that will get stricken away from recording. But, you know, physical change goes along with changes of program. Programs are flexible some come, some go. Interesting architecture is interesting because the co-op program which is really Cincinnati's engineering and architecture and other programs is strong. That's one of the reasons success. I remember he used to go to conferences and he was in Boston and I met a man who we were talking and he said, well he said, you know, on my firm in Boston of course we were under pressure really to hire MIT and Harvard graduates and so when anybody else comes in looking for a job we haven't got anything except if the University of Cincinnati graduate comes in looking for a job I want to talk to him because he said they've had experience and that was in many ways opened the door for students. It wasn't easy always the co-op program in the 30's was very tough to find jobs because architects didn't have jobs but and I remember when I first came we had a faculty person who was part of the co-op program and his job was to find jobs for students and he was finding jobs in local firms and things for him because they had jobs for students back in the 30's even though they didn't have a lot of work some of the bigger firms tried to accommodate him it was a hard to find jobs for students in those days but it prevailed and fortunately it was the strength of the program a few years ago many years ago they changed the program to a not a professional program in other words now you have to get a master's degree in architecture for your professional degree you can get a bachelor's and I guess it's architectural studies which is a four year and the idea was that you would continue on and do more years it was a six year program anyway so you would continue on and get a master's degree well one of the problems they've encountered is that many of the better students don't continue on they stop going to UC and where do they want to go to graduate well I want to go to Harvard I want to go to MIT or Michigan and that's a problem and so some architectural schools are switching back to granting a professional undergraduate degree what you need is a professional degree to get a license and so that's again pendulum swing so what are you studying well you study urban studies yes and one of the real problems is finding jobs you know the poor English English major or the history major what do you do you want to be a teacher in a grade school or high school you've got to have your licensing for that so you have to continue on if you it's difficult humanities hard hit so computers are big everybody wants to be going to computer science but that may change so cities, education programs you know, medical care they're all change you know, move on and some people just stay in the same house for 50 years so you talk a lot about other stuff and then next about students themselves I'm guessing you notice a change in the diversity of the students and the staff about your years well I haven't faced it too much for 20 years so obviously serving students today are becoming much more computer literate it's an assumption it's almost made that you know, they come to school with a laptop remember when we first started to introduce computers this was a big deal we had a computer lab now everybody has a computer they take notes on their computer sitting there typing away well so there's a probably more and more I think higher education is going to become more you might say, computerized or packaged it doesn't make sense that if you have an outstanding historian and maybe on the faculty Princeton or Brown or Berkeley that they can't can't watch a lecture by them at their leisure not necessarily at the time and benefit from it and then go someplace where they can have which is important seminars with people faculty or upper level graduate students where they can discuss the topic in fact they probably could pack a lot more education into that kind of a program and I think it's talked about a lot faculty to a degree resists that replaced by somebody at Harvard that's never been in Cincinnati but what we've done of course at the university is unfortunately more and more graduate students or upper level graduate students are doing the teaching and relatively low salaries in fact they qualify for food stamps in some cases which is pretty sorry and to find jobs in academia it's very tough today it's tough to get tenure while that's a major accomplishment and in fact a lot of people in the state legislature would like to do away with tenure faculty people and all they do is sit around drink coffee and really work well that's I never fought that but on the other hand still those are changes and attitude of the public toward academics and students certainly that's students are better equipped in some areas maybe not in others like you know I don't know whether somebody has a knowledge of history of the city or a history of the state or the country they come from necessarily assumed somehow you get it but you don't unless it's you're forced to read it not that it can't be compressed but if you're not exposed to it or you aren't going to necessarily seek it out so what's the question so you talk like a lot of these questions I have and then so I have where do you like see you see going in the future well I hope that you see maintains the co-op program I think that's extremely important in higher education but I do think that you also need to have be exposed to the liberal hearts too you cannot just focus on a technical program but not have any philosophical background for life I think that's important without you have to broaden your experience and exposure I used to think as an architect that new buildings are new would solve all the problems all we had to do was build brand new and everything would be wonderful well that isn't the case it's not at all and in fact you can go on fairly well in old buildings but now I think that the university needs to respond to the fact that it's a dynamic situation and they're trying about aging population and of course we have programs for study for the aging or retirees I should say and that's very good continue education program we used to have when I first started we used to have a night school and you could get a degree from evening college which is interesting I used to teach some classes there they always regarded it quite up to standard not just to get to evening college but there were some engineering degrees you could get which was interesting and of course there were a lot of lawyers in this city that used to go to evening law school it was located in the old YMCA down in Central Parkway became Northern Kentucky's law school the idea that people can have an education that still work if they want to improve I think is something that is important and should be encouraged paying for its tough tuition is high and that's one of the real problems that university has is finding ways to keep students without forcing them to go bankrupt or their parents to go bankrupt so that's a whole problem another problem I just mentioned everything the emphasis on everything is new well things get old and when they get old they either get torn down there not taken care of or you got to spend money to take care of them and that's another problem we have in this country we talk about the state of Ohio roads and they just increase the gasoline tax to help pay for roads and some people are like wow I got to pay more to commute because you raised my gasoline tax you didn't give me any more money and you can also say there is a tax because if you make $150,000, $200,000 a year a few extra cents on your gasoline bill as you commute to your office or your campus or whatever it is or your medical hospital doesn't make any difference but if you're the janitor or you know has to commute to in a car it's not too good that extra 10 or 15 or 30 cents a gallon that's a big deal and the same thing is true of cost of education you can say well it's good to have co-op and that does help to some degree with expenses but in a way I think universities higher education needs to control the cost or some way that people can get an education not everybody needs to go to a university that's true they still need plumbers and electricians and things like that and painters and that to keep up the old buildings but these are problems that society faces the university is a microcosm of society in that respect so during your time at the university what were you most proud of that you accomplished well the place we had could start a preservation program I served on the old conservation board back in the 60's and other that are responsible for buildings protected by city ordinance let's go back the whole history of historic preservation which basically in this country to a degree well started back in the 1930's but I won't go into a history lesson of historic preservation but we realized that the city needed to protect certain historic areas so they established some historic districts one is the Dean street the west end the other was the Weill Park area these are the two main ones there are a lot more now and certain civic buildings city hall music hall on the board and basically I got appointed to that board part time faculty people that you see man named George Roth and I admired him and he taught history as a volunteer teacher taught senior architectural history on Saturday mornings and donated his money back to the college so he taught for nothing because he just enjoyed it and wanted to serve and had gone to UC as an undergraduate and became a partner and a prestigious firm but anyway so I was on that board and then I got appointed to the State Historic Sites Preservation Advisory Board which was a board that reviewed all the things that were put on the National Register of Historic Places which was a process that was creating national historic places back in 1965 and so the state had a board that would review those and that's a complicated process under the auspices of the National Park Service anyway so I served on that board for a long time and then I started because of that I was chairman of that board for five years and I first started teaching preservation courses as a freebie I was interested in it and served the students and said well I'm enjoying this one and I said okay there's a way a couple of courses that got started at UC and the architectural program when I first went there we didn't have a course I'd call building construction which was kind of strange because it was assumed that the students would get their hands on construction working in an architect's office and we didn't need to teach building construction well architects are like well it would be nice when they started to co-op in their second year second half they had some knowledge of how buildings are structurally put together and so we started a free course building construction and that they finally hired somebody to do that we'd have structural courses but it was not actually how to put a couple pieces of wood together but anyway those are changes but in putting in the story of preservation program there was interest in the planning professor who was interested in the planning because I got a degree in graduate planning from the University of Cincinnati back in the 1960s after I came here with a part-time student at that time there was a graduate program in city planning or community planning the undergraduate program was the TAAP graduate program was in the graduate school sort of an offshoot of the geography department that's what really got us started and so we started a program and one of the things was that our graduates were getting jobs in planning because it was a hot thing the federal government said if you want to get money from us you have to have a planning program and have a plan developed for communities so many said well hey so that is still an operation so that's an important so we had planning people were involved in their process and historic preservation was important there was a man in the geology department that was interested in it because part of the preservation program was for the feds that archeological sites a lot of historic archeological sites are on there not all in ancient Greece that's under the auspice of the classics program but we had we might say two archeology programs at the university one in classics which is just that classical investigation then we had North American archeology and we had a jar of people in the business school and they realized that real estate is important so we said well let's establish we all got together as faculty people decided let's try to develop a program that can bring students from various disciplines together to study this problem of historic preservation of saving old buildings or as we like to say saving the best in the past and how to protect them and so that's how our certificate program came about and it isn't when I say again it's something I feel that certificates are some kind of an extra thing that you do for my way of thinking architecture graduates should have a knowledge of saving old buildings not just tearing down everything and building new because a lot of architectural practice and firms is involved in working with old buildings or existing buildings well it's like everything and was there anything else you'd like to tell me that we haven't really talked about it anything like that? then is there anyone that you would like to recommend for like a future interview for us? that's a good question well let me think of D&A people so many of the people that I do they're retired you see and gone the Hilton head and their bounce or Florida but not too many Gilbert born Gilbert as a man he teaches industrial design he lives in Cincinnati in Hilton he would be a good contact person because he can give you and he's also got a degree in graduate degree in planning as a matter of fact he's certainly one person that I could think that would be you know a big person to talk to that David Lee Smith another person I was a retired faculty person who lives in Clifton so I don't know too many of the other retired people so many of them have moved away one way or another you know one of the issues of course being elderly is only a few more friends you have left anyway but those are two people I think you should possibly contact and I think they'd be happy to talk with you if they aren't being interviewed already Gilbert born and then I have David Lee Smith David Lee Smith we're both living in Clifton so that's what you're going to do Heather in the city I think that's it thank you pleasure