NEWPORT, KY - SOUTH SIDE
Oct. 19 2009

As Alicia Keys was singing at the time, "In Newport...Concrete jungle where dreams are made of..." Years after many travails that plagued the Cincinnati region, folks were learning to live again. Life was moving on from years of sorrow. This bike tour of Newport's hilly south side yielded some of the year's better road-related items.






Here we're looking down John Street from 14th - the very tippety-top of John. (The skyline of Cincinnati is merely a bonus.) John appears to end as it turns right and becomes 12th - but there is a disconnected stretch of John beyond that. Into the 1980s or later, that stretch ended right across the tracks from 12th, but now it ends at 11th.




Yes, peeps, there is a 14th Street in Newport. Most maps skip from 13th to 15th, but this tiny, narrow road is East 14th. We're looking southwest, as 14th trails off into grass. An old map shows that 14th used to continue straight ahead past the dead end.




From 14th, a view into central Newport. The street straight ahead is Orchard.




West 14th is as small as East 14th. Here we're looking northeast. That old map shows 14th continuing straight ahead where the dead end is.




At Central Avenue, 14th becomes Grandview. Here we're looking down Central from that intersection. Notice that Central feeds into the viaduct over the rail line. That span (dated 1989) goes to 12th & Patterson and was built to replace an older bridge. In the background, Central resumes and goes straight ahead. Much of that stretch is KY 9. You can see Central running all the way to its north end, past 3rd.




This moving picture show starts where Grandview, Broadway, and Main meet. We go down Grandview, where a HIDDEN STREET sign refers to tiny McHenry Street. We go to the end of McHenry and down the abandoned Clifton Avenue, which is nothing more than a rocky path now. The abandoned Clifton was the highlight of this outing. (The driveway at 1:52 is the other way on what used to be Clifton.) Then we go northeast on 13th (the former McCracken Avenue), and across the aforementioned viaduct to 12th & Patterson. The bird chirping at 3:35 reminded me of a long-forgotten sound made by an imaginary Roads Scholar in my youth. (The guy had problems.)

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