Any complete account of the changing West Side must also reckon with Westwood − the city’s largest neighborhood and perhaps the clearest example of how profoundly the West Side has already changed.
Here’s why people love Price Hill, Westwood, Green Township and other West Side neighborhoods
Cincinnati’s West Side isn’t easy to get to. But those that make the trip, and those that live there, say it is a special place.
Enquirer reporter Scott Wartman’s recent article about Cincinnati’s West Side tells a warm and generally hopeful story. The writer describes the West Side he knew − geographically isolated, fiercely proud, heavily Catholic and resistant to rapid change. He then takes readers through Price Hill, where Latino families are opening restaurants, grocery stores, markets and other businesses in storefronts that had sat empty.
It is a worthwhile story. But it is not the whole West Side story.
The most striking omission is Westwood.
Westwood’s transformation
Westwood is not some small neighborhood at the edge of what Cincinnati traditionally considers the West Side. It is Cincinnati’s largest neighborhood, with 33,774 residents in the 2020 Census. More than half of its residents identify as Black or African American.
That represents one of the most consequential demographic transformations anywhere on Cincinnati’s West Side.
Westwood was once closely associated with the culture described in the article: German-American families, Catholic parishes, modest but carefully maintained homes, local businesses and a strong sense of neighborhood identity. Westwood, Cheviot, Covedale, Montfort Heights and Price Hill did not seem like unrelated dots on a map. They were connected through churches, schools, family relationships and class. They were almost Catholic parishes with ZIP codes.
But Westwood today is not the Westwood of several decades ago. It has changed substantially, not principally through the Latino immigration that is reshaping parts of Price Hill, but through its development into a large, majority-Black and increasingly diverse neighborhood.
That story deserves to be told.
It should not be told as a story of one population “replacing” another. Nor should anyone assume that Westwood’s present Black population can be traced to a single migration or historical event. Neighborhood change is rarely that simple. People move for employment, housing, schools, family, affordability and countless personal reasons.
But the absence of a simple explanation does not make the transformation less important.
Wartman’s focus may reflect the natural limitations of a personal essay. Every writer chooses a lens. Latino business development in Price Hill offers an appealing story of vacant storefronts coming back to life and new families carrying forward older West Side traditions of faith, family, work and neighborhood loyalty.
Yet the title promised readers the changing face of Cincinnati’s West Side, not merely one part of it.
Westwood complicates the narrative. Its transformation raises difficult questions about housing, ownership, neighborhood investment, schools, race and the westward movement of earlier residents. It may not fit as easily into a reassuring story about continuity. But history is often more complicated than the story we would prefer to tell.
A more complete West Side story
The modern West Side does not have a single changing face. It has several.
There is the growing Latino presence in Price Hill. There is the majority-Black population of Westwood. There are the older communities of Cheviot and Covedale. Farther west are the large populations of Green Township and Bridgetown, where many families continue to identify culturally as West Siders even though they live beyond Cincinnati’s city limits.
All are part of the story.
The article offers a valuable chapter about Price Hill. But any complete account of the changing West Side must also reckon with Westwood − the city’s largest neighborhood and perhaps the clearest example of how profoundly the West Side has already changed.
Leaving out that transformation does not make the article wrong. It makes it incomplete.
Dennis Doyle lives in Anderson Township and is a member of the Enquirer Board of Contributors.
