A Walk in the Park

The walk was a week ago Friday and the park was Smale Park, a large park in various stages of development on Cincinnati's riverbank, adjacent to downtown Cincinnati and immediately across the Ohio River from Covington, Kentucky.

The day started with a bus ride into the city. It had been nine months since I had taken the bus, and I planned to catch it at a different stop from where we had run after it in the mall parking lot last fall. This stop was a short walk from my garage door. I checked the schedule carefully, planned on getting there ten minutes ahead of time, since only one bus comes per hour, and allowed five minutes for the walk. The walk took one minute tops, and the bus came fifteen minutes after the published time. Still, I was in the city at the Government Square depot just 45 minutes after I got on, on time. The route passed through areas with which I was familiar, and I was glad to see that I could get to two grocery stores, historic Findlay Market, and the Music Hall by bus if I ever feel the need to do it that way.

Meeting up with my sister at Fountain Square was easy, and we walked down Walnut Street toward the riverfront. Our first stop was to look around at the various statues in front of and around the Great American Ball Park. We had heard the sculptor talking at an earlier OLLI lecture this summer, and there were still signs of the 2015 All Star Game that had taken place just three days earlier. The weather was good: bright and sunny, not humid, and still under the 91 degrees F. that would show up on the temperature gauges later in the day.

We moved on to the 45-acre Phyllis and John Smale Park itself and saw its welcoming water cascade and splash-and-play water fountains roomy enough for a baby stroller to be driven through, which was happening. On to a 19-foot earth-based piano with 32 bells and keys and chimes that ring out when kids dance on them--if they are big enough to trip the sensor (For very young children it takes a team effort). We stopped on the waterfront and observed how high the river has grown this wet summer, and my sister oriented me to the several towns along the other side, in Kentucky Walking  farther west we eventually came to Castellini Esplanade, with picnic table and benches recalling the names of many early farmers who came from what are now three states to sell their produce.

We never found the spiral labyrinth we had read about, but some people did, for that is where you can rent bikes, segways, and tandem or quad-cycles to navigate around on, and we saw lots of people on those, especially the bicycles for two side-by-side. We did find Carol Ann's Carousel, a lovely old-fashioned structure with paintings of Cincinnati landmarks, and watched as children found their places and whirled around, and as parents and grandparents watched them with enjoyment.

Then we made our way to Moerlein's--"the official after-game gathering place"--for lunch, and afterwards we walked back up into downtown and toured the Hilton Netherland Plaza and rode the elevator up to the 49th floor of the Carew Tower, the "highest elevated building in the city of Cincinnati," to get a view of the city and the winding river that separates it from Kentucky. Finally we walked back to the Government Square area and found our respective buses and returned home after a special day for me of learning about some of the highlights of Cincinnati history and architecture.