Glendale: Plan On It!

The Village of Glendale’s Holiday Home Tour is this Saturday, December 6th, from 12:00 to 5:00 pm. Plan on it to be spectacular. There are 8 venues on the tour this year: 6 private historic residences, the Glendale Lyceum (built in 1892) and the Harry Whiting Brown Community Center, established in 1930. The community center sits at the corner of Willow Avenue and E. Sharon Avenue, consisting of variety of structures including the property’s original Victorian main house and the former St. Edmund’s Boys Chapel (built in 1922). The small chapel was moved 1.5 miles from Chester Road to its current location in 1994 by diehard historic preservationists. Tour proceeds benefit the community center. For more venue details and ticket info, check out the website: http://glendaleholidayhometour.org.

The Village of Glendale was, of course, planned from the start. Located midway between Cincinnati and Hamilton, Ohio, it was settled in the 1850s as a railroad commuter town–to escape 19th century city hubbub.

Glendale was Ohio’s first planned subdivision and one of the earliest in the United States. Designed by R. C. Phillips, a civil engineer from Cincinnati, its meandering streets were laid out according to topography instead of on a rigid grid. About half of the Village (392 acres) is part of the Glendale Historic District, listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 and consisting of 439 contributing buildings. Glendale is also the only village in Ohio to be declared a National Historic Landmark. These designations would not have been possible without strong local activism and a community that feels that the historic character of their Village is worthy of recognition and preservation. Glendale Heritage Preservation, in particular, was founded 40 years ago.

The Village of Glendale was incorporated in May 1855. Its historic homes encompass this long history well, being built from 1850s to 1935, with gorgeous examples of Federal, Italianate, and Victorian Vernacular, as well as Cape Cod and Second Empire styles.

The foreward of the centennial commemorative work by Angeline Loveland Faran contains an anecdote of 2 men examining an 1860s lithograph of the area: one man exclaims “Glendale! It’s still just like that, now.” (it is actually written that he exclaimed this in disgust but I like to think that that was just a sign of the times and we have come a long way since in terms of appreciating our historic properties). Here is that lithograph again but with some of the street names overlain. Judge for yourself how much Glendale is “still just like that, now”, with an additional 50+ years of history added. Glendale past and present measures up pretty well indeed!

References cited:

1955  Faran, Angeline Loveland

Glendale, Ohio 1855-1955. McDonald Printing Company, Inc, Cincinnati, Ohio.