Mehring Way is the street where Cincinnati's past meets its future. It's a long way from love at first sight.
There's enough broken glass to replace the windows in boarded up buildings. Roads wander God-knows-where with railroad tracks down their backs. Old paving bricks eat their way up through the asphalt like rocks in a dried out river.
Down here, you get the feeling that a wrong turn could be a serious mistake.
You could find yourself in a metal scrap yard, for instance, trying to dodge a monster magnet before it picks up your car and crushes it into a lump that fits in a mailbox.
You could get flattened by a cement truck, for instance. Driving an ordinary car down here is like walking in L.A. - you might as well be road litter.
These acres of asphalt, steel and moving parts are Cincinnati's loading dock, where 18-wheeler trucks look out for trains, and trains stand back for river barges. Down here, they recycle refrigerators like pop cans and misplace old railroad depots in the shadows of highway overpasses.
East of the I-75 bridge is our regional truck garden - warehouses circled by waiting semis like feeding piglets, loading and hauling produce for companies that sound like Italian restaurants in the Yellow Pages: Caruso, Degaro, Squeri, Gentile and, the big zucchini, Castellini.
West of the bridge is the historic Longworth Hall and new Cincinnati Children's Museum, surrounded by scrap yards, abandoned buildings and 17 acres of silos, conveyors and coal. Lots of coal. Cincinnati Bulk Terminals was fined $6,750 last year for pollution, but has a permit to shovel 9 million tons a year.
That's a problem.
''The present operation of the Cincinnati Bulk Terminals is a flagrant public nuisance and a cancer that must be removed from Riverfront West,'' wrote Longworth Hall Manager Paul Hansman last year, after gathering 104 names on a petition in one day.
Mary Kay Frebis, a secretary at nearby Queensgate Warehouse Ltd., said, ''We breathe this stuff, it settles on everything. You could dust several times a day. If you park your car outside, every day it is covered in coal dust.''
Her boss, Queensgate Warehouse President Lloyd Makstell, says he had to stop storing bagged sugar on Mehring Way 15 years ago because of coal dust contamination.
And that's a bigger problem.
City Council is considering a $10 million Queensgate South Urban Renewal project to spiff up the west side of the bridge and find a home for all those produce warehouses - right next door to the coal yard. The plan would evict scrap yards, but not Cincinnati Bulk Terminals, which just signed a new land lease with the city in June.
''The produce people have said point blank that they will not move there,'' said Mr. Makstell. ''The city's going to lose another thousand (produce) jobs because of their incompetence. The city just doesn't listen.''
City Manager John Shirey said it's not that simple. He's right. At city hall, nothing is ever that simple.
''What's got everyone riled up is just a plan,'' he said. ''It's just that, a plan.''
He says the answer may be to move the produce companies to another site with highway and rail access. ''But the 600-pound gorilla is Bob Castellini. By himself, he's 60 percent of the produce industry.''
And Mr. Castellini is entangled in negotiations with the county to sell his riverfront land for a new stadium.
''That's what's pushing everything,'' said Mr. Makstell. ''Nothing was done for 10 years until the stadium tax passed.''
And now all that riverfront remodeling could choke on coal dust.
City Economic Development Director Andi Udris accused Longworth Hall owner Roy Schweitzer of trying to evict Cincinnati Bulk Terminal because he leases a half-acre of land to a competing coal company downriver. ''That's a conflict,'' Mr. Udris said.
No, that's a reach. ''We told them very clearly we're willing to give that up,'' Mr. Schweitzer replied. ''This isn't just an issue for people downtown. It's an issue for the whole Cincinnati area. If they don't take that coal company out now, it will never move. They're jeopardizing 254 acres in that renewal project for one company. It doesn't make sense.''
Mr. Udris said the city health director will decide if coal dust would be a hazard on fruits and vegetables. ''We've been told coal dust is no different than any other kind of dust,'' Mr. Udris said. ''When you get your produce home, you need to wash it.''
Sure. Cincinnati can pioneer a new local delicacy: Tossed salad with coal-dust dressing. Ingredients, according to a microscopic analysis of dust at Longworth Hall: glass shards, asphalt, mold spores, animal hair, trichomes (plant hairs), diatoms (skeletons of small multicellular organisms) and more than 50 percent coal dust. Yum.
Queensgate looks like Queensdump because the city took a wrong turn on Mehring Way and got caught in a scrapyard tangle of greed and need. The stadiums won't move in until the produce guys move out, and they won't go west until the coal dust is settled - and that could mean more millions from taxpayers.
Here in the city named for civic virtue, it's not about coal dust, it's about gold dust. The future is meeting the past on Mehring Way - and the future is getting mugged.
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. If you have questions or comments, call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
