Jim DeBrosse worked at both
The Cincinnati Enquirer and
The Cincinnati Post in the 1980s when reporters from our two daily newspapers fought tooth-and-nail for scoops, attention and readers and then drank at Arnold’s. He borrowed from that experience to create three mystery novels starring a scrappy, nosy Cincinnati newspaper reporter named Rick Decker:
The Serpentine Wall (1988),
Hidden City (1991) and
Southern Cross (1994), all published by St. Martin’s Press.
DeBrosse went on to spend several years teaching at UC and advising the school newspaper,
The News Record, before moving to Dayton to embark on a celebrated 17-year stint at
The Dayton Daily News.
He retired from newspapers in 2010 to teach and pursue a doctorate degree at Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, and today he teaches reporting, writing and academic research at Miami University.
DeBrosse moved back to Cincinnati after 20 years away, and he and his wife Kathy recently took an apartment in Over-the-Rhine — even though he commutes to Oxford and she to Dayton. That decision surely is connected to his current efforts to self-publish
Hidden City as a paperback, the first of his Rick Decker novels to be reissued.
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Hidden City is set mostly in Over-the-Rhine and revolves around an outbreak of the plague in the city’s largest homeless shelter. Decker is chasing a theory that Cincinnati power brokers conspired to plant the disease as a pretense for closing the homeless shelter, enabling them to build a new office complex and jumpstart redevelopment in Over-the-Rhine.
Decker ends up spending lots of time in OTR’s abandoned subway tunnels and beer storage vaults, which most Cincinnatians at the time didn’t know about. The book’s action, landmarks and characters based on real-life figures are fun reminders of how Over-the-Rhine has changed (and not changed) over 25 years.
You teach at Miami University and your wife works in Dayton, so why move back to Over-the-Rhine?
We both decided it was well worth the commute to our jobs. We love the diversity, the excitement and the friendliness of people in the neighborhood, black and white. Before moving to OTR, we spent a year in Hyde Park where we hardly knew any of our neighbors. Here we made friends from the first day. And we can walk or bike to nearly everything we need: restaurants, bars, shopping, parks, the arts scene, both downtown and in OTR.
We also discovered that our fears about crime in OTR were greatly exaggerated. We walk the streets day or night without hassle. Yes, both of our cars have been broken into, but only because we didn't know enough to keep them free of anything of value.
Main Street was the one area of OTR coming alive back in the late '80s/early '90s, when Hidden City is set, and the momentum crashed after the 2001 riots. What's your impression of Main Street now?
Back when I wrote the book, Main Street was one of the first outposts for Cincinnati's urban pioneers. Just a couple of trendy bars, a few art galleries and some adventurous young whites who weren't afraid of living in a neighborhood of mostly black faces. Today there are restaurants, bars, shops and entertainment venues on Main Street stretching from Central Parkway to Liberty Street, and more sprouting up every month.
There are fewer black residents, unfortunately, because of the renovations and the rise in housing costs. Many of the black people you do see here are either the homeless or the more affluent who come for the shopping or the night life, the same as whites. But Main Street still has a funkiness and vibe you won't find on Vine Street. It's less commercialized, less glitzy and less frequented by folks from the 'burbs looking for the latest "in" restaurant or bar.
What about OTR in general — not just the physical changes, but your sense of the area as a community or a neighborhood?
Blacks and whites get along just fine and are friendly to each other on the streets and in the bars. But you won't find many whites inviting blacks over for dinner, and vice versa. They travel in totally different social circles.
But that doesn't mean there isn't a strong sense of community here, regardless of race. Both blacks and whites have an interest in maintaining the quality and safety of the neighborhood. Everyone has a sense that we're all in this together and that together we can make it work. I just hope that 3CDC lives up to its promise of maintaining low- and middle-income housing in the area. To hand over the area to rich developers and affluent whites would destroy what brought most of us here to begin with.
Much of the narrative of Hidden City revolves around a supposed plot to close the main homeless shelter in order to build a huge office/residential complex and redevelop OTR. Can you describe the "us vs. them" mood back then in OTR?
People were less tolerant and more fearful of the homeless back then. And, perhaps because of a lack of social services, there seemed to be more of them on the streets, especially those with mental illnesses. But what was really different back then was the political context. Community activists and advocates for the homeless were much more determined to keep the neighborhood the way it was, and they still had enough clout in City Hall to make that happen.
Two things changed the context. First, the riots, when most people, even OTR residents, came to realize that no redevelopment at all would simply allow the social problems to fester there — drugs, prostitution, slumlords exploiting the poor, the housing stock going to hell. Who benefits from that?
Then came 3CDC, which had the political and economic clout to take redevelopment out of the city's planning process and away from the heated confrontations at City Hall. 3CDC has been something of a juggernaut, but the alternatives look so much worse.
Was there hope back in the '80s/'90s that OTR would ever regain its original role as a thriving neighborhood, or was everyone resigned to it a place for only low-income and the homeless?
People with vision and determination never lost hope. Jim Tarbell was and is the perfect example. Everyone knew that OTR was Cincinnati's gem in the rough — block after block of housing stock with the potential charm and historic feel to draw the young, the artistic and the affluent back to the inner city.
Even Hollywood recognized the unique potential of OTR back then — many compared it to Brooklyn or Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. That's why John Sayles filmed
Eight Men Out there years before there was any significant redevelopment.
Coming back here 20 years later, do you think the "us vs. them" mentality has been solved or at least addressed? Or is it still there?
It's still there, only it's less open and less political. I think most black people in OTR like the changes that have happened here — it’s meant safer streets and, for some, more job opportunities. But they don't want to be kicked out of their homes and businesses because of rising property values.
I go to a black-owned barber shop on Main Street. It's a social center for many blacks who still live in the neighborhood. But whenever I get my hair cut there, I can almost feel the fear that people like me are going to take away what little they still have.
The subway tunnels under Central Parkway play an important role in Hidden City. They were a relic of a transportation system Cincinnati tried to build when subways were all the rage. Now we're building a streetcar line, the current rage among cities. Any lessons or warnings for 2015 Cincinnati from the subway fiasco?
It's hard to make a comparison. Some historians believe Cincinnati's political hacks at the time never really intended to build a working subway system, just hand out pork to their cronies. Think about it: How could anyone in city government honestly plan and build subway tunnels with curves so tight that custom-built subway cars would be needed to negotiate the turns? But that's exactly what they did, and at a time when most people realized that cars were coming into their own.
The $10 million bond issue for the subway system wasn't paid off until a decade or so ago. Remember, it was the subway fiasco that led to the Charter movement and political reform in Cincinnati's city government.
In Hidden City Cincinnati had two daily newspapers, and they competed to break news and cover beats like City Hall. Was the competition really as you describe it in the book? What was that like?
It was exhilarating for reporters, and it brought out the best and sometimes the worst in both newspapers. I worked at
The Cincinnati Post at the time, the afternoon daily and the #2 paper in town. I would have done anything short of outright illegalities to scoop
The Enquirer. And although the
Enquirer reporters would act as if we didn't exist, I think they felt the same way.
The challenge for an afternoon daily was that our deadlines were so early in the day, something like 7:30 a.m. for the first edition and just before noon for the final. If we wanted to beat
The Enquirer to a story, we had to scramble like hell trying to reach people who would rather not be bothered that early in the morning. Too often we went to press when we didn't have all the details nailed down. We called it "being first with the worst."
What would Rick Decker be doing today? Teaching journalism, running a blog, working in PR?
I'd like to think he would still be at a newspaper somewhere, still fighting the good fight. Yes, probably with fewer resources and less time to dig out the real news — the kernel of truth that lies hidden beneath the press releases, the corporate and political spin and all the bullshit out there that gets passed off as news today.
What would you recommend the current Rick Deckers do these days? Are there many Rick Deckers left?
To tell you the truth, I haven't seen many among the journalism students I've been teaching lately. There's a deference to authority in this generation that frightens me and a lack of passion about words that depresses me. But media outlets of all kinds are still looking for good investigative reporters — survey after survey shows that readers and viewers want the media to watch their backs against government and big business.
What are your plans for publishing paperback versions of your other two Rick Decker novels? Other writing projects?
If
Hidden City does OK, I'm sure I'll be putting the other two Decker mysteries out there as well,
The Serpentine Wall and
Southern Cross. But those might be a harder sell. Younger readers may not relate to
Serpentine's anti-porn crusader as a villain when there's porn all over the Internet these days, and
Southern Cross is all about hatred of gays, another soon-to-be historical artifact.
For new projects, I've been working on a couple of screenplays, including one based on my book about the U.S. role in breaking the Nazi Enigma codes,
The Secret in Building 26. With the recent success of
The Imitation Game, it might just have a chance.
Few people realize that in late 1943 the Germans upgraded their Enigma machines so the British could no longer break their submarine codes. The NCR company, then just up the road in Dayton, came to their rescue by designing and building a computer-like machine that got the Brits breaking the codes again.
Jim DeBrosse will sign copies of “Hidden City” at 7 p.m. April 8 at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in the Rookwood Pavilion. Information about the book and his other writing can be found at www.jimdebrosse.com.