Kathleen Smythe - Bicycling Through Paradise: Historical Rides Around Cincinnati

Bicycling through Paradise

Historical Tours around Cincinnati

Kathleen Smythe and Chris Hanlin

About the University of Cincinnati Press

The University of Cincinnati Press is committed to publishing rigorous, peer-reviewed, leading scholarship accessibly to stimulate dialog among the academy, public intellectuals, and lay practitioners. The Press endeavors to erase disciplinary boundaries in order to cast fresh light on common problems in our global community. Building on the universitys long-standing tradition of social responsibility to the citizens of Cincinnati, state of Ohio, and the world, the Press publishes books on topics that expose and resolve disparities at every level of society and have local, national, and global impact.

University of Cincinnati Press, Cincinnati 45221

Copyright 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to University of Cincinnati Press, Langsam Library, 2911 Woodside Drive, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221

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Published in 2021

ISBN 978-1-947602-75-5 (hardback)

ISBN 978-1-947602-77-9 (e-book, PDF)

ISBN 978-1-947602-76-2 (e-book, EPUB)

Smythe, Kathleen R., 1966- author. | Hanlin, Chris, author.

Bicycling through paradise : historical tours around Cincinnati / by

Kathleen Smythe and Chris Hanlin.

Cincinnati : University of Cincinnati Press, 2021. | Includes

index.

LCCN 2020020375 | ISBN 9781947602755 (paperback) | ISBN

9781947602762 (epub) | ISBN 9781947602779 (pdf)

LCSH: Cycling--Ohio--Cinncinnati--Guidebooks. | Cinncinnati

(Ohio)--Guidebooks. | Cinncinnati (Ohio)--Tours.

LCC GV1045.5.O32 C567 2021 | DDC 796.6309771/77--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020375

Designed and produced for UC Press by Jennifer Flint

KRS : To idealists past and present. You help me find paradise in this place
I live.

CH : For Dawn

Creating a cycling guide book in the twenty-first century requires publishers to move beyond the boundaries of a traditional book, while still retaining the permanence of print. Rather than create a website or a print book, we have integrated the two to provide the richest experience possible. The website invites authors, cyclists, and readers to share details and feedback of their rides. Updates to the tours can be easily incorporated online, allowing the print book to focus on more timeless informationthe history and culture behind the toursto enhance the cyclist experience.

Our goal at the University of Cincinnati Press is to provide readers with a richer, more engaging experience with all the books we publish. We are excited to present online turn-by-turn tours on the open-access Bicycling Through Paradise Community Page. The platform allows readers to view wayfinding directions, and download and export a specific tour. Each online tour combines a map with additional photographs of each stop to guide cyclists through the area. Together with the book, cyclists get personal and comprehensive guided navigation of the local landscape like never before.

The open-access Bicycling Through Paradise Community Page hosts nineteen tours for each chapter in the print book. From the Community Page, when you can click on a specific tour (listed under the heading Resources), you will be navigated to a page that directs to you that tour. That page is also a place for cyclists to comment on and communicate about the tour. We hope readers will frequently engage through the annotations to provide feedback on the tours. Nature is evolving, construction crops up, and restaurants and hotels open and close regularly. As these tours need to adapt to the current environment, we hope cyclists will use the comment section to providers other readers and cyclists with updates, tips, and new ideas. From the print book, you can use the QR code with each chapter to navigate directly to the related tour. The QR code at the bottom of this page will direct to the online Community Page for the book.

Our mission at the University of Cincinnati Press is to build a community around content, in this instance, engaging cyclists and authors with one another. Our open access platform serves as a jumping off point for exploration of and connection with the tristate area. By including the maps and tours in an online environment, the book remains evergreen for any adventurer who wants to develop a sense of place in this paradise we call home.

Happy riding,

Elizabeth Scarpelli

Director, University of Cincinnati Press

For me, this book has a long gestation. It began in 2012 in a hotel room at an Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities conference on sustainability as I proposed a new kind of history course to a colleague at home via emaila course involving readings, discussions, and bike rides, combining history and sustainability. I needed the encouragement of my colleague at the beginning and the encouragement of so many others along the way to pursue this project.

At Xavier University, where I teach, students who have taken my course Bicycling Our Bioregion over the last seven years have shared with me the ways the course changed them and have encouraged me to keep teaching it. To help inform them about what we were seeing and doing, I wrote what came to be chapter 1, Path Dependency, to use in the course.

I chose to write about the Mill Creek because of the time spent there with Stan Hedeen and others he inspired.

Joe Humpert came to my aid in the fall of 2016 to ride along on my class sessions, helping with any mechanical trouble with the bikes and helping the students learn how to ride safely. Since then, he has co-taught the course with me every fall and a few summers for less than adequate pay. His passion for cycling and sharing it with all kinds of people with all kinds of interest has been inspiring.

My deep gratitude goes to my co-author and project visionary, Chris Hanlin. His passion and gift for expressing the way individuals dreams make their marks on our landscape, combined with his love of getting to such places via bicycle, can be seen in every aspect of this book.

Shortly after we started working together, Chris created maps of many possible routes. He envisioned the scope of the book and the structure of the segments and tours. Chris is endlessly inquisitive and has an innate sense of what makes a good story and where to sniff one out. And he came up with this books title. Chris and I rode all of the tours together, often with variations and alternates. We spent hours discussing ideas, sharing our personal journeys, and trading drafts of chapters. Chris has helped me, and hopefully other readers and riders, to realize that we are bicycling through paradise.

Danny Korman encouraged me to reach out to a local editor who might be interested in the manuscript.

Karen F. Zeller read versions of many of these chapters and made them much, much better. Darryl Smith helped with some fine points of military history.