From “Cincinnati Commercial Tribune”, June 15, 1924
The Park That Became A Castle
Don’t believe everything you read on Wikipedia. According to that communally edited resource, Loveland Park was created as a subscription gimmick by the Cincinnati Enquirer. Not true. It was the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune that offered, in 1924, a plot of land along the Little Miami River to anyone who purchased a six-month subscription to the newspaper. These lots were too small for building, measuring only 20 feet wide and 100 feet long. The newspaper played up their virtues as a summer resort because subscribers could pitch a tent and walk to the river. Buyers were mostly wealthy; that half-year subscription ran to $58.50. Many of the original buyers bailed. Lillie Gegner was one. On June 12, 1929, she sold two adjacent plots to Harry D. Andrews. Three months later, Andrews laid the cornerstone for Chateau La Roche, later known as Loveland Castle. The quasi-chivalric organization Andrews founded, the Knights of the Golden Trail, now owns more than 6 acres of land surrounding their castle. The Commercial Tribune created a real estate debacle when they subdivided the former Apgar farm into all those tiny parcels. The stunt properties extend beyond Loveland up into Warren County’s Deerfield Township and lawyers were still trying to sort out land ownership and street dedications well into the 1980s.
Iron Chest Company
By the 1830s, despite often violent repression, Cincinnati developed a small but influential Black middle class. Among these citizens were Samuel T. Wilcox, owner of the Dumas House, the only hotel catering to Black guests; Gideon Mercer Langston, who kept a livery stable and John Woodson, a barber who served as superintendent of a school for African American children. In September 1838, these men and others formed a mutual aid society called the Iron Chest Company. Each member contributed one dollar every week and with this fund the company built three brick buildings that they rented to white tenants. The company also helped fugitive Black people escape from slavery and assisted their less fortunate neighbors.
Oh, Susanna!
Among the most unusual property transfers in Cincinnati was accomplished in 1902, when Susanna Gibbs transferred a parcel of land at the intersection of Hewitt and Fairfield in Evanston, valued at $6,000, to Susanna Turner. The identical first names were no coincidence. Susanna Gibbs and Susanna Turner were one and the same person. She was born Susanna Turner in 1825 and became Susanna Gibbs when she married Joel Gibbs in 1849. The couple separated in the 1860s and eventually divorced. Her ex-husband took poison and killed himself in 1875 and neighbors said Susanna Turner/Gibbs had acted strangely ever since. When she herself died a few years later, it was hypothesized that Susanna had converted all of her property to her birth name to shield it from her son, a notorious gambler and spendthrift.
Black Real Estate In A Segregated City
From “Cincinnati’s Colored Citizens” by Wendell P. Dabney, 1926
On Easter Sunday in 1950, more than 6,000 people toured the brand-new and very elegant Manse Hotel in Walnut Hills. The Enquirer called the Manse “the finest hotel in the United States owned and operated by Negroes.” Because Cincinnati’s downtown hotels were segregated, the Manse for many years accommodated nearly every Black celebrity visiting the Queen City. The Manse was created by Horace Sudduth, a Black man born in Covington who built a solid real estate enterprise in Cincinnati against the considerable obstacles of a very segregated city. Sudduth opened the Creative Realty Company in 1910 on West Fifth Street. His company sold residential property and also provided investment counseling. The secret to Sudduth’s success was his emphasis on service over profits. Sudduth directed his staff to match each buyer with the most appropriate property, and wealth would follow. He counseled his clients to think of real estate as an investment, famously declaring “You do not buy a home like you buy a hat.” By 1950, Time Magazine noted that Sudduth had accumulated a fortune of more than half a million dollars.
Van Tress Empire
A farm boy from Waynesville, Roy Van Tress rose quickly from rags to riches. It is too bad that his rise was a fabric of scam and sham, lies and outright larceny. Tress wanted to build an empire out west, centered around a city named for himself. To establish this western empire, Van Tress incorporated in 1910 the McAlester Real Estate Exchange with offices in downtown Cincinnati at the Union Central Life Building. Van Tress enticed customers with options to purchase some of the Indian Lands the U.S. government had grabbed in Oklahoma. Van Tress promised oil rights, timber reserves and lush farmlands for a few dollars an acre. Investigators soon discovered that Van Tress sold options to buy twice as much land as he had authority to sell and that most of the land he actually had rights to were barren, already timbered, and thoroughly devoid of any oil reserves. Some were essentially vertical plots on the side of steep bluffs. Van Tress was arrested in 1913 and spent the next decade in court. The interminable litigation took its toll and Van Tress died from pneumonia complicated by anemia in 1924.
Hopple Street Mystery
In 1916, a city block’s worth of real estate at the southeast corner of Beekman and Hopple streets was, at least on paper, sold by Charles E. Miller of Northside to Ben Rubenstein, president of the Benn Lumber Company. What, asked the Cincinnati Enquirer [July 23, 1916], did Mr. Rubenstein intend to do with that property? Enquirering minds wanted to know because “sources” claimed the land could not be used for storing lumber. Mr. Rubenstein said he had no idea what the land would be used for. He insisted he had no financial interest in the transaction and only allowed his name to be used “as a matter of convenience” for other, unnamed, parties. The Enquirer never discovered who actually owned the land, but Mr. Rubenstein—at least on paper—sold part of it two years later to Hooven & Allison Company, twine manufacturers.
From “Harper’s Weekly”, July 24, 1858, Page 472
Nicholas Longworth’s Still
When he first arrived in Cincinnati in 1803, Nicholas Longworth was almost penniless. Twenty years later, he was the second-richest man in America, behind only John Jacob Astor. In 1830, he purchased what is now the Taft Museum as his home. Longworth’s rise to wealth began with a copper still. As a young attorney, he was engaged to defend a man accused of stealing horses. The defendant had no cash to pay the lawyer, but did have a copper still and a horse. Both were entrusted to the care of Joel Williams who, in addition to working as a surveyor, maintained a local tavern. Longworth suspected that both still and horse might be stolen but accepted the still as payment, the horse being more likely to be repossessed. Longworth won the case, his client rode off on the horse, and the attorney visited the tavern to collect his still. He discovered Williams boiling sour mash and unwilling to part with the device. Willliams offered instead fourteen and a half acres out on Western Row near Eighth Street. Longworth agreed. By 1859, that plot was worth $750,000.
One Bad Apple
Cincinnatians were introduced to the title “Realtor” in 1916, when Thomas Ingersoll, national secretary of the Real Estate Exchange, announced to a gathering of Queen City “real estate men” that, henceforth, they would be known by that trademarked title. According to the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune [17 June 1916] Ingersoll claimed “realtor” would “be synonymous with honesty, straightforwardness, and everything nice and pleasant along real estate lines.” Apparently Edna White didn’t get the message. Mrs. White, owner of Edland Realty Co., spent 1954 in court to face charges she had swindled at least 11 of her clients out of $13,000. Plaintiffs testified they had given Mrs. White amounts ranging from $900 to $1,300 as down payments on houses but, when unable to secure enough financing to complete the deals, Mrs. White refunded their money with personal checks that bounced. By the time she was sentenced to one to ten years in the Marysville Reformatory, 22 counts of embezzlement and additional rubber check charges had been added to the indictments.
What’s Hidden In Your Deed?
Homeowners in Hamilton County document their ownership of a parcel of land through a deed and that deed commonly references a prior deed, which references an even earlier deed, and so on. Follow that trail and it is common to find a racially restrictive covenant in the original deed to your property, something along the lines of: “No lots either improved or unimproved on the said subdivision shall ever be sold, leased, rented or occupied, except as servants in a household, by any person not of the White or Caucasian race.” Such covenants were declared illegal by the Supreme Court in 1948, but the language persists in the official records. For many years, The Hamilton County Recorder’s office refused to transfer racially restrictive covenants when a property was transferred. That practice was challenged in 1980 over a piece of registered land – property surveyed by and with boundaries guaranteed correct by the state. Removing the covenant could invalidate registered deeds, a land examiner claimed. The court sided with the examiner, but County Recorder John E. Held removed the covenant on his own authority. The Ohio General Assembly finally eliminated all remaining obstacles to erasing such covenants in 1998.
Friends of Joe
If you believe your property taxes are too high today, you may appeal to the Hamilton County Board of Revision. Before 1990, there was another, much more expeditious, method to get your property taxes lowered—you made friends with Auditor Joseph L. DeCourcy Jr. That year, an investigation by Cincinnati Post reporters Randy Ludlow and Molly Kavanaugh revealed that DeCourcy and his staff had improperly reduced the tax valuations on more than 1,000 properties, amounting to $1 million in lost tax revenue over the previous two years alone. The improper reductions were recorded on forms initialed “FOJ,” which, sources said, meant “Friend of Joe.” Although DeCourcy claimed to have no idea what those initials represented, he was indicted on 190 counts of reducing the taxes of his friends and political allies and eventually pleaded no contest to lesser charges, receiving a fine and a suspended jail sentence.