Cedric Rose

FIRST PLACE ENVIRONMENTAL WRITING from the 2023 Press Club of Cleveland All Ohio Awards.

The next time you see a barge churning low in the broad, brown flow beneath our downtown bridges, consider the river. That water made Cincinnati. It carried millions of settlers and their belongings west. Thousands more, with less than nothing, crossed it toward freedom.

We’re proud to call the Ohio River’s curvy banks home, and they continue to enrich our region. The Ohio and its tributaries carry more than 180 million tons of freight each year, cool power pl...

Laundromats are usually places you want to forget. Wash, dry, repeat. Yet when Sudsy Malone’s Rock ’n Roll Laundry & Bar closed in 2008, the mourning began. It’s been collectively remembered with unusual intensity ever since, and not for its coin-operated Maytags.

Sudsy’s, as we knew it, was also a bar and music club that grew in the 1990s to national and legendary renown. The Afghan Whigs, Beck, Better Than Ezra, Jack White, Stereolab, Sleater-Kinney, Modest Mouse, Superchunk, Yo La Tengo, G...

Get to know the invisible fungi that work wonders to make soil healthy and life-sustaining.
Spore Prints by Maureen Fellinger / Agraria Center for Regenerative Practice
Beneath woods, fields, gardens—wherever plants grow—tiny filaments thread through the soil, seeking their roots. These are mycelia, colonies of fungi called mycorrhizae. You know them by their fruiting bodies: morels, truffles, chanterelles, and more, mushrooms edible and deadly.
While mostly invisible, mycorrhizae are everywh...

I live in Mount Washington, on the east side of Cincinnati, roughly the midpoint of the 981-mile Ohio River. Below us, near the mouth of the Little Miami River, marinas, barge terminals and Cincinnati Water Works’ Miller Treatment Plant line the river’s bank. The Water Works has these old red-roofed castles on both the Ohio and Kentucky sides that seem to stand sentinel over the water. The plant draws 88% of Cincinnati’s water from the Ohio. Next door to the Water Works lies a long building, ...

In a valley off of the wide bowl that cradles downtown Cincinnati, a long-buried creek has returned to the daylight. Where blighted buildings stood shoulder to shoulder along Queen City and Westwood avenues, a stream again runs, riffles, falls, and pools. It undulates past a playground, basketball courts, and a community space.

Photograph by Deb Leonard

The creek is both ancient and new. And the next chapter in its life could welcome a brighter future for a neglected neighborhood.

Welcome to ...

I’m standing over my bike, breathing hard, just a few hundred feet from where the Beechmont Levee crosses the Little Miami River. I’ve ridden here with Wade Johnston, director of Tri-State Trails. With his soccer player’s build, he set a pace around the Lunken Airport bike path to this spot that my desk-set physique struggled to match.

We’re here to see construction on a new bike and pedestrian bridge, dubbed the Beechmont Connector, which broke ground in early March and is slated for complet...

Built by indigenous people thousands of years ago, the Newark Earthworks are part cathedral, part cemetery, and part astronomical observatory. But today, this ancient ceremonial site is part of a golf course in Ohio.
Read Cedric Rose’s article: https://www.cincinnatimagazine.com/article/will-ohios-earthworks-become-a-world-heritage-site/
Learn more about the Newark Earthworks: http://worldheritageohio.org

One breakfast food from my youth in Colchester, England, remains, in its simplicity, almost impossible to improve upon: the soft-boiled egg, standing at solemn attention in an eggcup. My eggs were prepared by Mrs. Szymbra, a member of the village church where my father served as minister. She and her husband, a Polish immigrant named Roman, often had us over for breakfast, where, along with eggs, they occasionally served fresh jelly donuts. Despite the sweetness of the latter, I remained most fascinated by the former. As Mrs. Szymbra lowered the eggs into her pot of swiftly boiling water, I was sent to the cupboard to select an eggcup.

A radio play about a trumpet player who really, really hates mayonnaise.
WVXU and CCM Radio Theatre Playwright Contest First Place Winner.
Cincinnati Public Radio (CPR) and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) have named UC alumnus Cedric Rose winner of the inaugural CCM Radio Theatre playwright competition. The top three winners will receive a cash prize for their work, and along with the honorary mention winner, have their play produced by CCM for broadcast on 91.7 WVXU-FM.

Thomas Jordan began with the death of his aunt Mildred, the last member of his father’s generation. With her went a houseful of family mementos, clues to his family past. Jordan felt “a void,” he says, that eventually sent him to Ancestry.com, to libraries, to cemeteries, and to courthouses across several states seeking his relatives, living and dead.
Photograph by Jeremy Kramer
Jordan became hooked on genealogy. Over the years he’s discovered more and more cousins, including Jo Ann Gibson Ro...

housands of years ago, people sculpted massive shapes into the face of what we’d one day call the Ohio River Valley. They raised sprawling geometrical complexes, elegant mounds, and earthen animals in silhouettes, for reasons we still struggle to explain.

At Newark, east of Columbus, they built the largest known set of ceremonial earthworks anywhere on the planet. At Ft. Ancient, near Lebanon, they enclosed entire hilltops. In Adams County, they crafted the curves of Serpent Mound. Early sett...

Interview with blogger Jenny Lawson, The Bloggess

Dawg Yawp's Magical Mystery Tour Hits its Stride - ...

Greater Cincinnati Society of Professional Journalists 2016 "Excellence in Journalism" award finalist

In 2013, Clermont County’s commissioners set out to break the cycle of chemical and physical imprisonment filling its jails with repeat offenders caught in the opioid crisis. They created the Community Alternative Sentencing Center (CASC) treatment and rehabilitation program as an alternative to jail for persons convicted of nonviolent drug- and alcohol-related misdemeanors. Judges give offenders the option of entering this program, where they live from 5 to 90 days in dormitory-style “recove...