Before Automobiles, Cincinnati’s Crosswalks Were About Fashion, Filth And Even Sex
Cincinnati neighborhoods are rather obsessed with crosswalks these days, with a rash of raised crosswalk installation underway. Much of this activity has to do with “traffic calming” and pedestrian safety, especially along major thoroughfares.
Back in the day, before automobiles dominated Cincinnati’s streets, crosswalks served very different purposes. Crosswalks had everything to do with fashion, filth and sex.
Sex? Of course! Where but a crosswalk could a young blade sneak a peek at a lovely young maiden’s stockings? A fervid glance that would inspire flights of delirious extrapolation? Here is an example from the Cincinnati Commercial-Gazette [19 December 1891]:
“A single fleeting glimpse of a woman’s stocking caught as she steps from her carriage or gathers her petticoats up at a muddy cross-walk suffices the skilled student in stocking psychology to determine to what part of the country she belongs, in what phase of society she moves, and where she does her shopping.”
Women back then were almost required to gather their petticoats at crosswalks because these pedestrian pathways were originally installed not to protect humans from wheeled vehicles, but to protect their clothing from Cincinnati’s filthy streets. The Enquirer [14 December 1881] raged about the alluvial detritus clogging our byways:
“The awful condition of the Cincinnati streets was never more apparent than yesterday. The mud on every street, on every cross-walk, and from curb to building, was sticky, and slimy, and greasy. A new cloak or overcoat worn out yesterday for an hour was spattered by passing horses, spattered by pedestrians, and involuntarily spattered by the wearers themselves as they walked. As adhesive as glue, it is never thoroughly removed, and a muddy old garment becomes a greasy old garment at once. Street-cleaning in Cincinnati is a lost art. The Board of Public Works lost it.”
The atrocious mire oozing from Cincinnati streets had much to do with the materials employed to pave streets in the past. Today, it is rare to see anything other than an asphalt or concrete pavement. The few cobblestone or brick streets left in the city are minor tourist attractions. Before the automobile, Cincinnati’s streets could have been paved with dirt, crushed rock, granite, or even wood.
Yes, wood. A glance through old newspapers easily uncovers hundreds of references to “Nicolson pavement” which means wood blocks pounded into the ground and protected by a thick coating of creosote, tar or oil. No sane person would waddle through such a morass – even when covered by a layer of oil-absorbing sand – so Nicolson pavements went hand-in-hand with gravel crosswalks, offering pedestrians a rubbly but dry pathway through the oil slick.
Despite the cost of installation and continual maintenance, Cincinnati employed Nicolson wooden pavements well into the 1900s. A 1916 publication of the Brooklyn Engineers Club described the drawbacks of Cincinnati’s then-new wooden streets “bleeding” oil:
“Numerous photographs were taken by the Bureau of Municipal Research in Cincinnati of pavements laid with blocks impregnated with this oil and they illustrate most accurately the frightful bleeding that took place. The writer saw Rose Hill and Beechwood Avenue shortly after they were laid with blocks treated with this oil. The surface of the pavement had about an inch of sand saturated with the preservative oil which had oozed from the blocks.”
Confronted with such impassable pavements, crosswalks were in demand to protect pedestrians and their fashionable attire from Cincinnati’s muddy, oily and dusty roadways. As far back as 1867, citizens demanded crosswalks near key attractions, as indicated by this letter [23 July 1867] to the Enquirer:
“Messrs. Editors, Will you be so kind as to ask the City Commissioners to place a double crosswalk from the two corners of Laurel street toward the gate of Lincoln Park? Please say that when the ladies are attired for an evening promenade they are much inconvenienced by the rough travel, dust and mud. By obliging, they will receive the thanks of both ladies and little ones.”
Even then, with automobiles far in the future, Cincinnati’s pedestrians had to contend with inconsiderate drivers of horse-drawn vehicles. Traffic jams and vehicles blocking crosswalks are not a new development. The Enquirer [25 December 1881] provides the proof:
“Pedestrians were at the mercy of reckless drivers in Cincinnati yesterday. There was not a cross-walk on any of the public thoroughfares that was not monopolized by vehicles in procession. So closely were they wedged together that people in a hurry to complete their preparations for Christmas were compelled to wait five or ten minutes till a procession of a dozen wagons, buggies and drays could pass by. If perchance there appeared a space as big as a man’s hand between the rear of one vehicle and the nose of the horse following, ladies, with skirts in hand, would fly over the cross-walk in peril of being crushed by other vehicles hurrying up to close the brief gap.”
As the automobile arrived to dominate the streets, crosswalks took on a very different role, becoming (at least on paper) safe zones for pedestrians. The United States Post Office even got involved with the Assistant Postmaster General, as reported in a special dispatch to the Enquirer [25 February 1923], insisting that “good continuous sidewalks and crosswalks” were mandatory if city residents expected mail delivery to continue.
As early as 1916, the transformation was in place. Crosswalks no longer involved fashion or lust. They had become a refuge from the mechanical monsters rumbling down our once-peaceful streets. And also, according to an editorial in the Cincinnati Post [19 January 1916] a lesson in moral hypocrisy:
“We tell others not to cross streets except on cross-walks, but often we cross streets in the middle of a square, and without taking the precaution of looking to the right or left.”
The Cincinnati Automobile Club papered the city with billboards in 1921 essentially blaming pedestrians for getting hit by automobiles because they crossed the street away from the crosswalk. Although crosswalks were intended as safe zones for pedestrians, it made news [Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune 14 June 1925] when a motorist actually stopped as required to allow a woman with a young child to cross Vine Street at a designated crosswalk.