Local author’s history of Cincinnati’s incomplete subway looks to future developments
When Jacob Mecklenborg set out to write a book about the two miles of empty subway tunnel that lie beneath downtown Cincinnati - a catacombish network of concrete that has never heard the clang of a rail car - he had no idea how much history he would uncover."I made the mistake of thinking because I had written an article on it ten years earlier that I had a really big head start, but that was not the case," he said at a book signing at Neon's in Over-the-Rhine. "So much of this story had never been told," he added. His new book "Cincinnati's Incomplete Subway; The Complete History," covers 150 years of rail development in Cincinnati, most famously one called the Rapid Transit Loop which included the two-mile subway tunnel. The bond issue that funded it did not provide enough money to complete the project once material costs skyrocketed after WWI and, as Mecklenborg's book follows in meticulous detail, repeated efforts to resurrect the tunnel over the next 90 years failed as well. Mecklenborg argues that while pro-automobile federal policy exacerbated efforts to build the line, local smear-campaigns and inaccurate media coverage were what effectively killed it.A photographer and graphic designer by training, Mecklenborg was commissioned by the History Press to write the book after one of their editors read an article about the subway that he wrote and published on his website, Cincinnati-transit.com.A transit-enthusiast, Mecklenborg warned that the same problems that kept the subway from being built still threaten transit issues in Cincinnati."The struggle for all of us who are interested in improving the public transportation situation in Cincinnati is that the local media does not report state law, federal law, and the transit situation here in an accurate way," Mecklenborg said. "People can say whatever misinformation they want, and they don't get rebuked or fact-checked."One common misconception that the subway failed because rail cars wouldn't fit, is entirely false but still persists, he said. That particular myth was promoted by a group of young politicians who were trying to embarrass the political establishment that built the tunnel.Mecklenborg attributed the recent success of Cincinnati's streetcar campaign to the advent of "fact-checking" web sites that informed local voters about where funding for the system would come. He believes the original subway tunnel might still be used to house light rail transit someday, and tells his readers what infrastructure improvements would be required to do so.Mecklenborg, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of local transit history, sums up his hopes for the future in the book's introduction: "I believe that this book will help clear the fog surrounding the subject, and in doing so remove the subway's construction and nonuse as a dependable "argument" of anti-rail, anti-city forces."Mecklenborg's book is available through History Press.Writer: Henry SweetsPhotography provided.
