The Over-the-Rhine Museum — inspired by New York City’s popular Lower East Side Tenement Museum — has been in the works since 2015. And the project came closer to reality when the nonprofit recently announced they had officially purchased a permanent home at 3 W. McMicken/12 Findlay St. for $165,000.
The museum aims to bring to life the stories of Over-the-Rhine and the people who have called the neighborhood home. The vision of the museum, as stated on its website, is to "be housed in a historic tenement" and "use the stories of that building's residents to explore the larger history of urban America."
CityBeat's Steve Rosen reported last January that Anne Delano Steinert, the museum's board chairman, announced they had acquired the buildings near Findlay Market. A historian and preservationist, Steinert said at the time that the acquisition was a "huge milestone" — and so is the recent purchase. (Major funding came from, in part, the Carol Ann & Ralph V. Haile, Jr./U.S. Bank Foundation, the Jacob G. Schmidlapp Trusts at Fifth Third Bank and a capital fund from the City of Cincinnati through the stewardships of Councilman Chris Seelbach.)
The two-building complex offers about 4,600 square feet of total space. The separate buildings — one is a single-family home and the other is multistory and tenement-style — back up to each other and have a shared connecting structure.
Though they have completed the purchase, the museum is not ready to fully open. Steinert estimated it would take a total of $2.4 million to do everything necessary — structural repairs; create usable bathrooms, office and event space; build a gift shop; and assemble period-accurate recreations of living quarters. The next step? Steinert told CityBeat in a recent interview that they are going to work to open the building's storefront enough within a year to 18 months so that they can have a public presence. That space, she said, could serve as pop-up retail or a starting point for their walking tours, as examples.
"But then really what we're going to do is just take our time to craft a really thoughtful, interpretive plan," Steinert said. "What we're going to do is fundraise to create this interpretive planning process where we'll bring together scholars in all the areas we need."
She adds that they will do as much research as possible to learn everything they can about who lived in the building, what their lives would have been like and what we can learn from the stories they tell. Slowly, with what she calls a "10-year interpretive roadmap" in their hands, they will then be able open to museum apartment-by-apartment as funding becomes available.
Steinert and the museum’s board members and volunteers have identified 131 families — at least 235 individuals — who lived at the addresses over the years. As Over-the-Rhine’s fortunes declined in the later decades of the 20th century, the stories of those individuals can be wrenching. For instance, one recounts a woman with children who lived in an attic room with just a mattress on the floor. Other tenants Steinert mentioned include an Italian immigrant who repaired umbrellas, an Appalachian family, a German carpenter and countless others.
But the future museum focuses on two main families. The first are German immigrants C.L. and Anna Fettweis, who emigrated here in the 1840s and bought the single-family residence in 1860. The second family is Solomon and Rebecca Kabakoff, Russian Jewish immigrants who came to Cincinnati and purchased the complex in the late 1920s from the Fettweises, who had already moved out. They then added the connecting building, already having established a dry goods store in Over-the-Rhine.
Most of the building, Steinert told Rosen, was used for their family. They rented out the Findlay Street building to other tenants, and eventually rented out more of the McMicken building as their children moved out.
The family sold the complex in the 1950s. From then on, ownership patterns were less long-term.
Aside from purchasing the building, Steinert also said that partial funding from the George and Margaret Mclane Foundation has allowed them to hire on their first full-time staff person. Having that person to move their mission forward is going to move them to a new level, she said.
"I think that part of our work moving forward with regards to doing lots of research and really living the part of our mission that interprets all the stories that Over-the-Rhine has to tell," Steinert said. "We'll be building really strong bonds and bridges to the current and recent resident communities.
"We've been working really hard on getting this building taken care of. And so now we have the liberty and the time to really build our network in a way that will allow us to be great community partners."
For more information on the Over-the-Rhine Museum, visit otrmuseum.org.
