what do people think of st. bernard?

[hillside]

Originally Posted by Ohiogirl81

IAnd for heaven's sakes, every single one of Cincinnati's "nice" neighborhoods is adjacent to a high crime area!

one of the truest quotes of all-time about cincinnati.

[CincyExpert]

Originally Posted by goyguy

St Bernard is one of the places I "steer" Cincinnati relocators to, but with a cautionary note if the person(s) aren't Caucasian. I don't sense that there's a racist overtone to the city, but it didn't get to be 98-or-so percent White and stay that way by accident.

St. Bernard-Elmwood Place Schools are now more racially diverse (over 20% minority I think) than Wyoming. The hispanic/black movement appears to be heading south down Vine from Hartwell/Carthage and not north on Springfield Pike.

[soozycue520]

Without the larger Proctor & Gamble tax base they use to have, you probably pay more taxes in St. Bernard, but they had a number of perks.

I don't know what has changed, since I, and others I know, do not live there anymore, but they had Dial-A-Ride, a bus that would take you around town for a quarter {probably more now}. They also used to provide trash bags to the community. The pool gave very cheap passes to residents, and they had a community "meeting room" that you could use for free, with sufficient notice. They also had some great festivals that were not advertised anywhere but inside the town [not that outsiders weren't welcome}.

The school system was rated very high. When my kids went there, there was an incentive program for students that gave "school dollars" to the children as rewards for good behavior/grades, etc., that could be used to "buy" school supplies in the school store. I didn't have to buy many supplies, which was great!!

There was also an indoor pool at the community center that had a free swim on one night a week that my son always took advantage of during the winter months.

I am not sure, without P&G's money, that the services are still offered, but St. Bernard is still a very small, quaint community with it's own police & fire department, and services independent of Cincinnati.

I live in Clifton, pretty close to St. Bernard, and still go there occasionally, but do not talk to anyone who lives there about what services they currently offer.

[StB]

Good post goyguy, you pretty much hit the nail on the head, haha. St. Bernard has fallen on rough times in the past few years because of people moving and the reputation that it is "ghetto". I personally do not think that the areas surrounding us are THAT bad...I truly believe that St. Bernard will make a comeback...An economic developer was hired a few months ago and the plans that I have seen for Mitchel and Vine and other areas around the city are really awesome. I think we have a lot of good things going for us, and I hope that people start moving back to neighborhoods closer to the city, like St. Bernard.

[goyguy]

Originally Posted by CincyExpert

St. Bernard-Elmwood Place Schools are now more racially diverse (over 20% minority I think) than Wyoming. The hispanic/black movement appears to be heading south down Vine from Hartwell/Carthage and not north on Springfield Pike.

Ahhh, Cincinnati, racially conscious in all the wrong ways.
The only time I ever see "persons of color" in St Bernard is in the IGA or at Long John Silver's or another take-out place. Not so in Elmwood, definitely not in Carthage or Hartwell. There has been a small amount of AA influx to Wyoming, which has contained a segregated section from the beginning and has also always contained more affordable apartments and houses than is commonly known. But it's statistically insignificant, maybe changing the percentage of the population from 12% to 14 or 15. The first Black family on the street where my folks still live moved in toward the end of the '90s. Not everyone standing around outside the roomy two- and four-family houses near Hartwell - chatting, grilling, doing other neighborly stuff - is White any more. Why too many pale folks in Cincinnati continue to see this as something to be rued and feared is beyond me.
I want to re-emphasize that I don't sense a racist overtone to St Bernard. This may sound presumptuous coming from a Caucasian, but this one spent three years of his adolescence as a "P & G brat" in an Asian country. Once you've experienced life as a member of a minority over any length of time, you get a stronger sensibility about the atmosphere of places. You can literally feel in the air what people's reaction to you is regardless of whatever facade they may put on. And when it's not you who's affected, you can still tell what's being thought about someone who is. There's a coldness, a mental distancing, forced (if subtly) niceness. When doing business in St Bernard I've never caught this vibe being projected toward any Hispanic or AA folks who might be sharing the space. I think the town probably has a reputation preceding it which makes non-Whites think twice about establishing a home there. Few parents of any ethnicity want to be "pioneers" in a community when their kids could easily be prey to bullies looking for an easy target. And St Bernard is very much a "family" sort of city. Ditto for Norwood all around.
BTW there are still Dial-a-Ride buses! They're probably the exact same ones that started roaming St Bernard around 1972, LOL.

[Hartwell Girl]

I personally love the look and feel from St. B but I have experienced some undertones of problems in the area being from "those outside the City". I do like StB's post saying they dont think the areas around them are that bad, although that interestion at Vine & Mitchell has been a discussion of concern in the past. I hope St. B find ways to motivate the City of Cincinnati to work with St. B to bring fresh life and businesses to the area that will benefit the entire area.

[goyguy]

The signs of life are definitely there. I have mostly negative views about national-chain stores, but one thing they do that's positive is that they invest in "marginal" areas. They recognize that everyone has needs to fill in life regardless of where they live or what they look like, and they have the means to absorb the expenses (security details, comparatively low sales figures) that go with moving into communities which are sketchy or worse. Now that there's a Walgreen's on Vine at Mitchell, the old corner grocery at the southeast corner of that intersection has slim-to-no chances of gaining a comparable new tenant. But now the people living south of there don't have to go all the way to St Bernard or Clifton or Corryville to fill a prescription or pick up a box of Pampers. It also gives a better sense of safety to the surroundings to have a megadrugstore on that side of the street instead of just a gas station.

Although a nice old house with good yards had to be bulldozed for it, the Holiday Inn Express is strategically located and also sends the message that the vicinity is OK. Love or hate White Castle and KFC, they're there now too, and wouldn't've stayed open long if the neighborhood had too little traffic or too much crime. If I owned a house on Kessler I'd be crying in my beer, lol, but Mitchell between Vine St and the expressway is looking tons better than it did even 5-10 years ago. What really needs fixing are those two-story apartment houses lined up along Mitchell between Vine and the Bacon stadium. They're clearly being slumlorded by absentee owners, one look at the grimy buildings with their crumbling porch railings is all you need to know this. North(ern) Avondale around those parts was never anywhere nearly as well-off as the "estate" section closer to Reading Rd. But even 40-50 years post-White-flight, reminders of its solid middle-class past are all over the place. It's almost the identical scenario along Dana Ave a couple of miles east of there - stable but aging Norwood on one side of the street, rotting Evanston on the other. And this is not going to change until there's an expansion of the AA professional class and White folks get over being scared to death of even driving through areas where "they" reside. Serious and focused effort to improve the school system, sustained collaboration between community leaders, everyday people actually getting to know one another? Cincinnati may yet see that happen; am I holding my breath for it? No.

With gas at and above $4 a gallon, close-in neighborhoods like Avondale and Evanston and the independent cities which adjoin them can more than ever play the ace in the hole they've always had. Despite all the suburban "office parks" and company relocations, thousands of people continue to travel downtown or to the universities or hospitals to earn their keep each day. Much fewer of them would willingly sit in traffic jams that can last for hours if they could live in an area with decent public education and safety and hop a bus or drive for 15-20 minutes instead. Based on that premise, I think St Bernard's prospects are good.