This week The Extraordinary Times caught up with Anne Delano Steinert, founding Board Chair and Vice President for Fundraising at the Over-the-Rhine Museum. The Over-the-Rhine Museum is a new immersive urban history museum soon to open to the public on Cincinnati’s West McMicken Avenue. Steinert was recently featured on WVXU’s Cincinnati Edition, where she and fellow guests discussed the mission of this exciting new museum housed in a historic tenement space. Steinert is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Cincinnati. She holds degrees in historic preservation from Goucher College and Columbia University, as well as an M.A. and PhD in Urban History and Public History from the University of Cincinnati.
* Describe how the Over-the-Rhine Museum got started Up until the most recent wave of newcomers, history had been well preserved in Over-the-Rhine. Very little change had taken place since the Great Depression, so the buildings were these little time capsules going all the way back in the 19th century. Things like heating and plumbing and furniture in the buildings were preserved because so little had been updated. As Over-the-Rhine evolved, a more affluent population wanted bigger kitchens, more spacious bathrooms, and larger apartments. As all that change took place, the buildings were being drastically altered. The long-term residents of Over-the-Rhine, meanwhile, saw their rents increase and their taxes go up, so a lot of those people also were being lost. The Over-the-Rhine museum is an attempt to preserve and protect and celebrate all those stories that Over-the-Rhine has to tell, embedded in the physical fabric of the neighborhood, the buildings, and the streetscape, but also the stories of to residents who may or may not have been able to stay in the neighborhood. * What makes the museum unique in Greater Cincinnati? One thing that stands out is that it tells the story of everyday ordinary people. It's not—for example—the home of William Howard Taft, who was wealthy and prominent and powerful. It’s the story of folks who are living their everyday lives: people who immigrated, who worked hard every day for a living, people suffering with poverty or health care, issues people who suffered discrimination of one sort or the other. The other thing is that it's immersive. It's not the kind of place where you read things on a wall. You will instead feel like you’ve traveled back in time, like you're immersed in someone's life. We’ll be creating six different spaces for six different moments in time, where you'll experience what life was like for different families. You'll see what their furnishings look like, you'll see how big or small their apartment was. You might hear the kinds of music that they were listening to. It will be experience rather than something mediated by a curator or where there's something between you and the experience—you will be in the experience. * What is the role of oral history in expanding the impact of the museum? In our research we identified over 150 families and businesses that have occupied the building, which was built in the early 1860s and was occupied until around 2008. As we've been doing that research, there are better archival or documentary sources for the deep history of 1860s through the 1950s, but the closer we get the present, the harder it is to find written sources that have been archived. So oral history allows us to capture the memories and stories of folks who lived and worked and played in Over-the-Rhine. We have some oral history stories going back to the 1940s and 1950s, so we can capture this world in a way that we could not really do from what's otherwise available. The United States Census is a great source, for example, but the full records are only publicly available to researchers up to 1950. Oral history also adds significant richness to the story. Even when we look at, say, the Fettweis family who built the two buildings where the museum is housed in the 1860s and in the 1870s, we have lots of archival information but it's still very flat. lt isn't rich in the in the same way you get from an oral history of someone’s story, which pulls you in and gives you a kind of a sensory connection—I feel like that way of learning about the past is just so much richer. * Is there anything you would like to share finally with the readers of this blog about how they can find out more or get involved? One thing I would add is that we have a wonderful walking tour program, “Walking the Stories.” I really encourage people to sign up! The other thing is that this project is a labor of love pulled together by history enthusiasts. We really are a grassroots effort and rely on funding from the public. If this project sounds exciting or interesting, we encourage people to donate or to get involved. They can reach out to me or get in touch by email: [email protected].
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AuthorMatthew Smith, PhD (History). Public Programs at Miami University Regionals. Historian of Appalachia, the Ohio Valley, & the early American republic. Archives
February 2024
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