Northside’s annual Fourth of July parade took place on Friday with its usual quirky floats and oddball displays, but organizers tell CityBeat that the parade route’s abrupt ending point was not in their control.
“We regret to inform you that, in the 11th hour, the City of Cincinnati has determined that using any portion of Blue Rock for the demarcation (ending) of our Parade is unsafe,” reads a Facebook post from parade organizers on July 3. “Please know all organizers involved are devastated by this decision as it was not communicated to us in advance.”
The 2025 parade, which started on Ashtree Drive, was forced to end one block shorter than usual at Palm Avenue. President of Northside Community Council Bree Moss told CityBeat that this change could sound minuscule to outsiders, but it’s not.
“It sounds really petty,” Moss said, noting that the parade has ended at Blue Rock Street for decades for a reason.
“It cuts off viewing from Hoffner Park, and that’s a big, wide open space [where] a lot of folks come together,” she said. “You’ve got the Gantry building there on the corner, and there’s a lot of viewing there in front of Melt and Higher Gravity. There’s some different height levels on those sidewalks and eatery spaces that are right there – they also provide advanced viewing and some really nicely accessible spaces.”
Accessibility was an even bigger emphasis this year for organizers, Moss said, with the 2025 completion of the new Vandalia Point apartment complex at the corner of Blue Rock Street and Vandalia Point Avenue. Moss said Northside Community Council pushed for the 52-unit building to have “more accessibility, so more of the units could be rented to folks with disabilities.” The apartment complex has seven units that are accessible to residents with mobility issues. Another two units are designed for residents who have audio or visual impairments, according to Over-the-Rhine Community Housing (OTRCH), which is the developer, owner, manager and service provider for Vandalia Point. The city’s change to the parade route cut these residents out of the experience, Moss said.
“I feel terrible – Vandalia Point was so disappointed at all that they had prepared,” she said. “This would be their first parade, and they were prepared to be a viewing area for the residents, as well as anyone else who also needed some close and safe, quick access to AC and a clean and accessible bathroom.”
Claire Daugherty is the director of philanthropy and communications for OTRCH. Daugherty said operating in Northside is new for the organization. She spearheaded planning to utilize Vandialia Point’s first-floor community room for building residents and community members to use as a cooling station.
“We had tons of social media support, people who had posted and reposted and heard about it,” Daugherty said. “It didn’t really get utilized in the way that it was envisioned because the parade route was stopped short.”
What were the changes?
With the parade route being forced to end at Palm Avenue, Moss said it created parking issues for Northside residents and event vendors. Organizers were required to use Apple Street from Palm Avenue to Knowlton Street as the parade unloading zone, which Moss said created a congested area for parade participants trying to unload quickly.
“The parade participants were pretty backed up down there in that demarcation area,” she said. “There was not enough space for them to get off of their floats or to deboard like that.”
The new parade unloading zone also restricted parking on Apple Street before and during the parade – many residents on Apple Street do not have a driveway and rely on street parking. The Northside Rock & Roll Carnival at Hoffner Park also had to make last-minute changes to plans for food trucks, according to Moss. She said the food trucks normally set up on Palm Avenue.
“They were just told like, ‘you’re gonna have to keep this clear so their food trucks [have to wait] for the parade to end before they can come set up,’” Moss said. “So that’s really disruptive to their setup and process, and it impacts their business.”
Why was the parade cut short?
Parade organizers tell CityBeat they were informed of the shortened parade route in a last-minute directive from city officials about a week before the 2025 parade. Moss said she assumed the city was mistaken.
“It was not until our permit was issued that I was reviewing it and noticed that it contains a map from the year before, as opposed to the maps that we submitted,” she said. “We thought it was a mistake.”
But it wasn’t. In a statement to CityBeat, City Manager Sheryl Long said the “safety of our residents and all parade attendees” remains a top priority, but that the Northside Fourth of July Parade could not safely end at Blue Rock Street with the current police-to-volunteer ratio.
“Unfortunately, during a holiday weekend, we do not have the staffing capacity—specifically in terms of sworn police officers and Public Services personnel—to safely support an extended route,” the statement reads. “We are unable to meet the required officer-to-volunteer ratio, and we also lack the necessary resources to manage additional street closures that would be required for the original, longer route.”
This was an issue organizers ran into last year – the first year the parade was forced to end at Palm Avenue rather than Blue Rock Street – but Moss said organizers were given the impression that last year’s change was a one-time disruption.
“It was considered a very nuanced situation last year,” she said. “That’s why when we submitted our permit in March, we submitted it with [the full parade length].”
Last year was the first year the parade took place after the closure of Cincinnati Police Department’s District 5; Northside was reassigned to District 3 in 2023. It was also the same year that CPD changed a policy that previously allowed on-duty officers to staff special events. This is no longer allowed.
When were organizers told about the new parade route?
Ben Breuninger, deputy director of communications for the city manager’s office, told CityBeat that parade organizers were told the 2025 parade route would remain shortened as early as March. Moss said, “that’s not true.”
“We were under the impression that we were going with the proposed plan,” she said.
Moss provided CityBeat with a transcript of a March parade planning meeting between parade organizers, Cincinnati’s Office of Special Events, CPD and Cincinnati’s Department of Transportation and Engineering (DOTE). The transcript shows Office of Special Events and DOTE officials preferred leaving Blue Rock Street open, but when Moss asked if organizers were getting a “hard no” on the original parade route, the city reiterated concerns about traffic flow, but never made a clear statement.
“We were told that they could review it separate from us and consider the plan we proposed, even though it wasn’t their preferred option,” Moss told CityBeat about the meeting. “We discussed the many pros and cons of doing it the way we proposed and it was left with, ‘OK, we’ll get back to you after we meet separately.’ Because we did not hear, we proceeded. You figure if you’re not told otherwise – especially when you have 150 years of a parade legacy behind you – we felt if we were absolutely supposed to revise all the documents that we submitted with our application that we would have been informed of that.”
In that March meeting transcript, the city said everyone on the call could reconvene in a month to get on the same page about the event, but Moss said that meeting never happened. Instead, Moss tells CityBeat she received an email from the city on June 27 – one week before the parade – declaring that the route would not include Blue Rock Street:
“The DOTE map for this event (attached) is what the parade route will be, which is the route from last year, and will be the city approved route for future Northside 4th of July parades. What has been stated last year and this year is that Blue Rock will not be closed for this event. If there was a question about this, it should have been brought up before the permit was issued. There will be no more back and forth emails regarding this topic as the event is a week away,” the email reads, in part.
“It was told to us in a really unkind way that this was the decision,” Moss said. Looking ahead to next year, Moss said parade organizers will continue to push for solutions to bring the historic parade back to its original route.
“We’re definitely going to make sure that we engage in every way possible with every person who wants to talk about what can be done to avoid this type of scenario again and how we can move towards restoring that piece of the route,” she said. “We do not want to continue excluding Vandalia Point residents.”
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This article appears in Jul 9-22, 2025.