The project that was supposed to be the “it” project for 20th century Toronto.

Capturing the story of a city where the impossible happens every day. #wherepigsfly #makecincyyours #cincinnati

In Cincinnati, things happen every day that would be impossible elsewhere. Make Cincy Yours is a central place to share these stories: the unique, inspiring, against all odds tales of our place. The reality is that if you dream here, you can happen here: you have the power here to make your mark in Cincinnati, to shape this city. You’re making the stories, we’re just helping to tell them. Help us spread the word. Share these stories, tell us your own. And every day, in your own small ways, Make Cincinnati Yours.

Cincinatti from across the Ohio River. Photo by Nickel Plate on Flickr.

—
Music:
Evidence Of Things Unseen
by Salomon Ligthelm
licensed from themusicbed.com
themusicbed.com/#!/Evidence-Of-Things-Un­seen-5324/

—
Special Thanks to Our Friends who helped make this video possible:
Ship Shape Studios — shipshapestudios.com/
Steam Whistle Press — steamwhistlepress.com/
Noble Denim — nobledenim.com/
Peanut Butter & Jelly — makepbj.com/
ArtWorks — artworkscincinnati.org/
Arnold’s Bar and Grill — arnoldsbarandgrill.com/
Grayscale Cincinnati — grayscalecincinnati.com/
Rhinegeist — rhinegeist.com/
The Art Academy of Cincinnati — artacademy.edu/
TEDx Cincinnati — tedxcincinnati.com/

—
Poetry:
Where Pigs Fly
(written & narrated by Dan Barczak)

Welcome to my city, bright and strong,
wide-eyed with potential,
a city of young and old,
of truth and kindness, and risk, essential.

Full of creators, makers,
a youthful vibrance within,
I humbly ask you,
where have you been?

Welcome to my city, come in, sit down,
have you come here to stay?
To the Queen of the West,
please tell me what brings you here today.

For work, to fulfill a dream,
to raise a family, for long, winding tours.
Come tell me your story,
and make this place yours.

Welcome to my city, roll up your sleeves,
where our heart is as big as our vision.
Come take a risk, come one, come all,
and hone your craft with unbridled precision.

With passion, commitment,
and folks who ask why,
sit back, listen, and welcome
to a place where pigs fly.

—
facebook.com/makecincyyours
twitter.com/makecincyyours
instagram.com/makecincyyours
email: makecincyyours@gmail.com

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQdL8bm1368[/youtube]

The story of Buffalo, New York’s world class urban design and how today’s generation is rediscovering and restoring ‘America’s Best Designed City.’

Produced / Directed by John Paget, Paget Films
LIKE US: http://www.facebook.com/PagetFilms
FOLLOW US: @pagetfilms

Executive Producers – Dottie Gallagher Cohen & Ed Healy, Visit Buffalo Niagara
http://www.visitbuffaloniagara.com/

Presented & Sponsored by
Visit Buffalo Niagara, Larkin Square, Buffalo Niagara Enterprise, Houghton College, Erie Canal Harbor Development Corp., The John R. Oishei Foundation, The Campaign for Greater Buffalo and Block Club.

Visit the official website to explore more – plan a visit, plan your move, or get involved
http://www.bestdesignedcity.com/blog/

CREDITS
Directed, Shot & Edited by John Paget

Executive Produced by Dottie Gallagher Cohen, Ed Healy, Visit Buffalo Niagara Foundation

Historical Images courtesy Buffalo History Museum, Used by Permission

Interviewees
Justin Booth
Stephanie Barber Geter
Chris Hawley
Jill Jedlicka
Dana Marciniak
Bernice Radle
Robert Shibley
Rocco Termini
Tim Tielman
Marcus Wise
Howard & Leslie Zemsky

Original Music by Nelson Starr & Eric Starr

Additional Camera & Still Photography – Nate Peracciny

Gaffer – Nick Earley

Stylists – Dani Weiser, Chary Robbins

Sound – John Davis, Dave Bull

Production Associate – Robin Douglas Paget

Cineflex Aerial Cinematography – Cherokee Walker (Pilot), Travis McMunn (Cinelfex operator)

Remote Control Aerial Pilot – Phillip Johnson

Archival Research – Dana Saylor-Furman / Old Time Roots

Editorial Consultants – Tim Tielman, Chris Hawley, Chris Elisara, Chuck Banas

Title Art & Web Design by Block Club

Title Art Animation by Ben Porcari / IBC Digital

Legal Services – John Horn and E.J. Snyder / Harter Secrest & Emery LLP

yt:crop=16:9

Video screenshot

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBsi5FGbY2Y[/youtube]

• Music

  • “Master Jack” by Pilot Scott Tracy ( • • )

• Artist

  • Pilot Scott Tracy

Johannesburg Trolleybuses, 1984. Photo by Martyn Hearson on Flickr

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwZh8acn_Fk[/youtube]

Cities and the Sky

A short music video from the new FIELD WORKS album.

Follows artist Stuart Hyatt as he documents life on Washington Street for the Indy Sound Map:
indysoundmap.com

Film by Jonathan Frey.
jonathanfreyphotography.com

Music from the new FIELD WORKS album “The National Road”.
Available at TEAM Records:
teamrecords.org

The Elevator: Cities and the Sky
Written and Performed by Forrest Lewinger based on field recordings from the Indy Sound Map.
Produced by Stuart Hyatt

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/86160466[/vimeo]

agour.co.uk

I recently embarked on a three week trip to Paris, to try and capture the city in all its glory. I had never visited the city before, and was quickly struck with how beautiful it is. My aim was to capture the classic sights; ornate buildings and typical Parisian activities, and contrast that to the modern business side, towering glass glad skyscrapers and fast paced life.

I felt very lucky to have been in Paris when the massive thunderstorm started. I had seen the weather forecast, and made sure to position myself in among the skyscrapers. The storm started off slow, but very quickly built up to be absolutely ferocious. The lightning was hitting almost every other second, and some bolts were taking up the entire sky. The following night another huge storm hit Paris, and I spent the night furiously cycling around whilst grabbing as many shots as possible. I would set up, grab a sequence and as soon as the lightning moved away I gave it warp nine and cycled to my next spot as quickly as possible. By the end of the night I was freezing cold and completely soaked.. but content with what I had managed to capture.

Cue three weeks of shooting, followed by roughly 5 weeks of editing.. I think in total I spent over 400 hours working on this project, which means that every single second of video took two and a half hours to produce. The video was entirely self-funded, and shot purely out of my love for timelapse. If you enjoyed the video, please pass it along to a friend.

To keep up to date with my latest work, you can find me on facebook at facebook.com/paulrichardsonphoto For the tech-heads, I used a Canon 6D, 17-40 f4, 50mm 1.8, and a 70-200 f4. The motion control sequences were shot on a home built dolly, coupled to a emotimo TB3.

Most of the footage is available to license in 4k. If you require any custom sequences, I’m also available to work on commissions. For any enquiries, please contact me at paul[a-t]agour.co.uk

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/103223164[/vimeo]

The unbroken pavement stretches on for at least a half mile before the leafy top of a silver maple pops over a gate, casting a rare bit of shade onto Flushing Avenue. You can see the foliage for blocks, and I’m always happy to be heading toward it—and the small farmhouse with the gambrel roof, green shutters, and white-picket fence that I’ve come to call home. A child learning how to categorize objects might say this is the one building that doesn’t belong in this part of town. And she’d be right—sort of.

First built around 1662, the Vander Ende-Onderdonk House—where my boyfriend Keith and I have been caretakers since May—was here long before the factories and warehouses. In fact, it’s the oldest-remaining Dutch colonial farmhouse in New York City. All this month, OnEarth writers have been exploring ideas in sustainability by seeking “Answers from the Past.” Well, I live in a place that gives me a special look into how cities evolve, how Americans once lived, and what progress really means.

For centuries, the Dutch Colonial was part of a working farm. But as time went on, the owners sold off small parcels of land here and there and carved up the initial 108-acre property among family members. Finally in 1912, Gertrude Onderdonk Schoonmaker sold the family home, three years before her death at the age of 90. By then, industry had been rapidly intruding on the fields of Gertrude’s childhood, and soon after the sale, the farmhouse itself transformed into a glassworks. (In certain parts of the yard, you can still see broken shards of colorful glass peeking through the soil and grass.)

For the next 60 or so years, the Onderdonk property served several industrial purposes: lumberyard, steel storage, greenhouse manufacturing. One company even fabricated small spacecraft parts for NASA’s Apollo program. Strange to think that something produced in this 17th-century home might have ended up on the moon.

But back on Earth, the Onderdonk House fell into ruin and vandalism after the last industrial owners deserted the home in 1973. “This neighborhood was really not a good place to be back in 1970s,” historian George Miller told me. Squatters broke into the home, and soon the colonial farmhouse blended in with the area’s general décor of urban decay. The following year, the New York City Housing and Development Administration scheduled the Onderdonk’s demolition.

A handful of residents, who later formed the Greater Ridgewood Historical Society, had a different idea. Where the city saw an unsafe, run-down house, the community saw an opportunity to conserve the last bit of agrarian heritage on the landscape. After fundraising and gaining support from local politicians, the GRHS bought the Onderdonk and saved the 300-year-old home from the wrecking ball.

Second chances, however, rarely come easy. In January 1975, a short time after the police forcibly removed the group of squatters from the home, someone lit the Onderdonk on fire. The gasoline-fed flames consumed much of the building’s wood and historic design details, such as the mantels over the fireplaces and the sloping roof. Once again, the city called up the bulldozers to raze the Onderdonk. And once again, the community came to the rescue.

Luckily, enough of the stone farmhouse remained to make a case for restoration. And importantly, meticulous notes on the house—taken in 1936 by a government program called the Historic American Buildings Survey—gave architects what they needed to return the building to its colonial splendor.

Vander Ende-Onderdonk House. Photo by @imjustwalkin.

As our country’s 200th birthday approached, the Onderdonk made the short list ofplaces to be funded by the Queens Bicentennial Committee. Six years later, with the help of city, state, and federal grants and a lot of local fundraising, the farmhouse opened to the public. The troubled neighborhood had needed a place for residents to throw church picnics, to take pride in, and to simply gather. This is exactly what happens at the Onderdonk today.

Just about every time I walk out my attic apartment door, something’s going down in the museum or out in the yard. Several times a month, school field trips, youth groups, or Girl and Boy Scouts take over the grounds for quick lessons in early American self-sufficiency. (Last month, I came home to a house teeming with 400 Brownies learning how to build a campfire.) On summer weekends, the music from festivals, weddings, and birthday barbecues reverberates off the warehouse walls surrounding the two-acre farm.

During one party last June, I was on my hands and knees in the garden at the top of the property when I realized I was being watched. I looked up to see a third grader hanging over the fence. She got straight to business. “Can I help you? You should say yes. My momma says I’m a big help. She always says it. I’m good at it,” she asked very directly. “Sure…,” I said.

I wasn’t surprised when seven other boys and girls dropped their wiffle balls and Frisbees to join my new little friend. She was a clear leader—a future CEO, I remember thinking—and I know when you invite one child somewhere at a party, you invite them all. But how long these kids stayed in the garden and actually went to work made an impression on me. For over an hour, they filled pots with soil, asked me which plants were weeds (they were extremely enthusiastic about pulling them up), and fought over whose turn it was to carry the bucket of water, which we drew from a spigot on the side of the house. Like little ducklings covered in dirt, they followed me up and down the hill, spilling water all the way. I rewarded them with a peek inside the chicken coop. Again, they couldn’t get enough.

City kid or country kid, we all carry around a bit of agrarian heritage within us. And places like the Onderdonk help us tap into it—if only for an afternoon. What any of these young visitors do with what they learn here is up to them, but three decades worth of field trips has given them a chance to think about their homes and cities a little bit differently—not only about how things used to be, but what they could become.

The National Register of Historic Places officially declared the Onderdonk a “place worthy of preservation” in 1977, but to the community members who fought against its destruction, this strange old house on the corner was already a landmark. By saving it, they helped secure a foothold in the neighborhood’s future. This stretch of Flushing Avenue is no longer such a bad place to be.

A Collaboration Across the Nation – The Documentary

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/60905729[/vimeo]

Documentary about new sustainability pushes from Williamson, West Virginia

This month, Esquire dubbed Detroit “Bar City of the Year.” Model D’s John Notarianni called up Mr. Wondrich to discuss his visit to Detroit, his personal experience with the pitfalls of gentrification, and the future of Detroit’s ascendant drinking and dining scene.

Detroit: Bar City of the Year

John Notarianni: You chose to feature Detroit as Esquire’s ‘Bar City of the Year.’ What is it that appealed to you about the culture of this city?

David Wondrich: When you tell people in New York that you’re visiting Detroit, everyone’s like, “Why would you go there?” They just really don’t get it. They think this place is just like something out of “Mad Max”: deserted and empty and abandoned. But you go to Detroit and there’s a lot of life. Bars are central to that. Bars are meeting places; they’re stress relievers. They’re a really good place to get a sense of the energy of a town.

The bars in Detroit were very lively. It’s similar in Milwaukee and Cincinnati and Cleveland: all those cities are much more alive than people in New York and San Francisco give them credit for. They’re more alive in some ways than Manhattan, which is very interesting to me.

JN: How do you mean?

DW: In Manhattan, they’re sliding into a monoculture. It’s very prosperous and everything else is being sacrificed to that. There are great cocktail bars in New York because there’s the financing for it, but the owners are not the people who are working there, for the most part. Then you go into a bar in Detroit and you see that there are older people there, there are younger people there. You can still run a family business. It’s not going to be developed out from under you like what’s happened to bar after bar in New York. So many of the old bars have closed in Manhattan. That’s coming to Brooklyn, too, and it’s really sad. There used to be neighborhood places where people from all walks of life would be in there. I find bars without old people in them to be boring because there’s nobody in there to talk to.

JN: One of the places you seemed very excited about in your article was the Old Miami, an old veterans bar in the Cass Corridor. What do older places like that offer to a city?

DW: (Laughter) well that’s what we’ve lost in New York, you know? It pains me to see that go. Those are real places of education and of generational transfer of knowledge and wisdom. The new stuff is great, too — you’ve got to have both — but I hate it when the new comes at the expense of the old. Detroit has an opportunity now because it’s so un-dense. Some of this old stuff can still stay around; it’s not like suddenly all the property values around it are going to shoot up and these old businesses will get torn down and replaced by a bank.

In Defense of Hipsters

JN: You wrote an article in Esquire last year charting the changes in your neighborhood in Brooklyn.  It sounds like you’ve seen the full life cycle of urban gentrification.

DW: Yeah, I’ve been in the same house in Brooklyn since 1986. When I moved in, there were hookers on my block. Cab drivers wouldn’t take us there. It seemed far from civilized New York. It took my girlfriend and me a long time to come to grips with the place. We wanted to move into Manhattan but couldn’t afford it.  But over the course of years we came to appreciate what was there in front of us, the local culture.

At the same time, other people like us started opening businesses. They were filling up empty storefronts, not kicking anyone out; they were filling in the neighborhood, not changing it. That first wave of gentrifiers was pretty benign. But that of course drove up property values and drove up rent and some of the old stuff started closing.

For a long time there was enough of the old stuff left that it wasn’t much of a problem. Eventually, though, it got to the point where they were not just kicking out businesses, they would kick them out and then tear the building down. That was different from the hipsters: the hipsters were always very respectful of the physical space. They were renovators, not constructors. Now we’ve got the developers coming in and it’s looking like we’ll never be able to go back to having a balanced neighborhood with more prosperous and less prosperous people, old and young, families and old men.

JN: Do you see neighborhoods in Detroit going through a similar life cycle?

DW: In Corktown I saw the “let’s fix up empty businesses, let’s revitalize the neighborhood, let’s not destroy it” attitude. But it also looks like there’s a lot of failed urban development downtown. And the problem with that is that they tore down so much that it’s hard to recover.  Indianapolis is also a very good example of that, where downtown is all parking lots. You can walk in Indianapolis for 45 minutes until you see a pharmacy. People a generation ago saw these downtowns and didn’t see them as an opportunity. They saw them as a problem and needed somewhere to park because they were living in the suburbs, so they said ‘lets tear it down, build a parking lot and it will be fine.’ It’s not fine.

Detroit’s New Blood

JN: Detroit’s experiencing a surge of new bars and restaurants planning to open in the next year: Wright and Company, Rose’s Fine Food, Gold Cash Gold,HopCat, and many more. What does a new bar need to do to survive?

DW: You need to be flexible. You move into a neighborhood, you’ve got a business plan, and suddenly you’re attracting different people than who you were planning for. You can either embrace them or say no, I’m going to stubbornly insist on going after this one style of bar. I think it’s really feeling like you belong to the neighborhood and treating that neighborhood like it’s your home. When I think the most successful bars I’ve seen — the ones that have found longevity — I think of Clover Club in Brooklyn that was going to be opened as a destination craft cocktail bar and it’s now the greatest neighborhood bar.

JN: What advantages do you see for new a bar that’s opening in Detroit?

DW:  I talk to a lot of young people around the country and a lot of people are thinking, “You know, I could go to Detroit and I could get a building and I could actually start a business,” and that is extremely exciting. It’s so hard to open a business in New York, for instance. You need a lot of money. For that, you need partners. And those partners are going to be money guys and they’re going to want to drive the business one way. A place where you can have that freedom to open it up and do something your own way — I saw that at the bars in Detroit:The Oakland and The Sugar House; they seem to be doing it. I saw PJ’s Lager House, a unique place. It looks like this young takeover of an old neighborhood bar, but it’s still a neighborhood bar and they’re still doing their own thing. I thought that was very cool.

JN: One of the things you said in your article about the Oakland in Ferndale is that a city needs ‘new blood;’ otherwise it’s only playing defense.

DW: You can’t JUST preserve the old. You need new businesses; you need new approaches. The Oakland and the Sugar House are national-grade, state of the art, modern cocktail bars. It’s cool to see them there. They’re not kind of half-assing it; they’re doing it right.

JN: At the same time, though, you seem convinced that a city needs to preserve its neighborhood dives alongside newer, flashier restaurants. It seems like you have a sense of loss about the Brooklyn of the ’80s. Why do those relics of the past go away, and what do we lose?

DW: These things go away because of market forces. You want market forces, but they’re very undiscriminating. We lost a lot in Brooklyn near me. There’s only one of our Old Miami’s left, a true neighborhood dive, and the building is up for sale. The bartender’s been there 25 years. It used to be a Mohawk ironworkers bar. There are old guys in there and civil servants who go there to drink their lunch, but you get to talking with them and they really know the history of the city. When they go, you’re just left with yuppie bars.

JN: So when you’re back in New York and you’re telling your friends about your time in Detroit, what’s the one bar moment you would recount to summarize your time in Detroit?

DW: I loved how when I was at the Sugar House, half the bar staff left their shift and came with us over to the Bronx Bar, just because they could. That was cool. That’s like this casual “alright, we’re open but it’s kind of quiet — we’ll leave a couple bartenders here.” You can’t do that in New York. There’s not that sense of freedom. Everybody’s so driven by the bottom line because the bottom line is such a heavy responsibility.

JN: And the best drink you had?

DW: (Pause) Actually, it was the beer I had the next day (laughter). I had a pint of Motor City Ghetto Blaster while hung-over. Very good.

Dave Wondrich is a cocktail historian and author of several books including Imbibe!: From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash, a Salute in Stories and Drinks to “Professor” Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar, and a regular correspondent for Esquire Magazine. His article “Detroit: Bar City of the Year” is available in the June/July print edition of Esquire Magazine.