If you don't know already, I'm a big fan of trips to places that no one else cares about Today's trip to Cincinnati with friends was a great break to an otherwise stressful week. The street-level pictures are from the increasingly gentrified Over the Rhein neighborhood just north of downtown, which was settled in part by German immigrants who fled Europe after the failed revolutions in the late 1840's. Findley Market is also in O.t.R. The other pictures are of Carew Tower, which in it's heyday was one of the tallest buildings in the U.S. You can see the ornate architecture of the old Arcade, followed by the drab and nearly-vacant mall that was connected to it in the late 1980's. (You'd think the mind-numbingly bland architecture and impending desolation of such cookie-cutter malls would have served as a warning for city planners, but alas there is no logic to the flows of capital.)