My first apartment did not count.
It was a roach-, flea- and mouse-infested studio apartment on Ohio Avenue, one of the worst streets in Clifton known even then for its flashes of violent crime, trash, out-of-control parties and the constant foot traffic of vagrants and dopeheads voyaging to Mecca, the city park down at the end of the street. The heat never shut off, the tub was half-size and the lighting was sallow.
Working sporadically for $3.85 an hour in the men’s sportswear department of the downtown Lazarus left me little money for things like healthy food, so I was always sick and my father more than once arrived unannounced on my doorstep with money and a bag of over-the-counter medicine and cans of soup.
All that was bad enough, but then there was the mentally disabled man with Tourette’s Syndrome who lived directly across the hall and barked and screamed all hours of the night. Once, in a fit of aggravation fueled by sleep deprivation, I opened my door and threw a cowboy boot at his door.
The shock of the thud startled him to silence.
I slammed my door without retrieving that boot and never saw it again.
After a respite in my father’s Forest Park basement and after landing a part-time job behind the Literature Department desk at the public library’s main branch, my father anteed up the first month’s rent on a one-bedroom apartment on Victory Parkway in Walnut Hills.
I still had roaches but the street was safer, the bus stop nearer and my next-door neighbor played the steel drums only in the late afternoons, which was much more soothing than barking and shouting.
I moved there in 1989 when the UDF across the street used to get robbed at gunpoint every other weekend, so to quell that vulnerability the store stopped its 24-hour cycle and started closing after midnight.
Up the street on the corner of Victory Parkway and McMillan, the good folks at the Skyline Chili also survived their fare share of armed robberies, only the stick-up men sauntered up to the drive-thru window and ran away on foot after getting the cash.
I was amused by all the urban shenanigans but I always kept my wits about me walking the two blocks home at night from the bus stop in front of the McDonald’s.
I had gotten used to seeing fire trucks and emergency rescue vehicles in front of the Alms Hotel during my nightly treks. Old and infirm black people sat in neat rows along the curved driveway out front. Their oxygen tubes running from their noses to their respective tanks, they appeared like little prehistoric figurines with elongated plastic trunks. They chatted or sat patiently while workers checked their vitals.
That building, I’d say to myself from the opposite side of the street, must be a fire trap.
Eventually, a firefighter emerged from the building and gave some sort of “all clear” sign, and the nearly nightly pilgrimage of pajama-clad old folks would begin again in earnest and they’d all return to their hovels.
One afternoon at the library I was running my mouth about the goings on of my neighborhood to a co-worker in the Lending Department when the department head overheard me saying something about Victory Parkway.
“Oh, that used to be a beautiful part of town,” she said. “And the old Alms Hotel? Wow! It used to be exquisite. It’s a real shame how they’ve let it go.”
It was the first I’d heard about the Alms. I was always clueless about what it was or used to be. I just assumed it was always a Section 8 housing tenement.
Somewhere in here in my personal history I started sitting in co-hosting Mr. Rhythm Man’s radio shows on WAIF with Darren Blase, who co-owns Shake It Records with his brother, Jim.
WAIF was then in the basement of the Alms in a few dingy, moldy-smelling rooms with old sound boards rescued from, it was rumored, either the old WCIN soul station or the old King Records studio and used by James Brown.
Either way, it was antiquated.
However, it wasn’t until a full decade later when I’d become a full-time writer and columnist for this paper that I got the full-on historical background of the Alms, which, by the turn of the century into the early aughts, had replaced its senior residents with armies of single mothers, their children and enough thuggish-looking young black men that the Alms looked officially like a slice of a big-city tenement.
I don’t know what spurred the idea, but I got the notion to write a story about just one family living in the Alms and was put in touch with a young woman who had a young son; the boy’s father was in the picture but I cannot recall if he was living in the Alms with them.
On my visits there I taught myself to breathe through my mouth walking the once-ornate lobby, past the fat, Big Mac-eating security guard and on the slow, filthy, dark elevator to my source’s floor.
Fifteen years ago, the hallways were dirty and funky, but my source’s tiny apartment was spotless and smelled like bleach. She desperately wanted out of the Alms and I could not blame her — it was loud, rowdy and unscrupulous characters wandered in and out.
The Alms’ current status as neighborhood eyesore has been a long time in the making, but unlike 15 years ago residing there now is a small group of diligent residents who, while forced to live there by economics, are working hard to force their absentee landlords to make the Alms more habitable because who among us wants to live with bedbugs, cockroaches, leaks, mold and heatless winters?
Cincinnati joined a lawsuit that could result in the owners losing federal subsidies, and it all started because a small group of residents formed a group, wrote a list of demands, went to City Council, spoke up and the police got warrants to inspect the building.
This tells me poor doesn’t equal stupid, gullible or animalistic. Poor can be proud, loud, clean and respected. We could all learn from life in the old hotel.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Apr 8-14, 2015.