NEWS ROUND-UP -- TUESDAY EVENING 31 JULY

THE RIVER CITY NEWS MORE COVINGTON NEWS THAN ANY OTHER SOURCE

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FACEBOOK: The River City News

@theRCnews on Twitter  

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by Michael Monks 

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CHECK BACK TONIGHT
Comprehensive coverage of the public meeting at Covington City Hall involving discussion of the future of the police and fire departments will be posted here.

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COVINGTON WOMAN'S EMAIL HACKED, REPORTER HELPS HER OUT

Via WKRC:

Local 12 News Reporter Rich Jaffe had a "conversation" with both the hacker and the victim. Rich was sitting at his desk this morning when he got an email that appears to be from a Covington woman named Karen Chambers. It said Chambers had been robbed in Madrid, lost everything and was headed back to her home in Northern Kentucky, but needed some money. It even gave Rich her home address in Covington along with home and cell phone numbers.

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COVINGTON BUSINESSES RECOGNIZED AS BEST OF NKY

NKY Magazine has published its August/September edition featuring the winners of its "Best of NKY" honors. The following Covington businesses were recognized:

360, Chez Nora, Covington Yoga, Dee Felice, Donna Salyers, flow - a shop for men, Geez'l Pete's, Jackson Florist, Joe Daniels - Daniels Fitness Training, Keystone Bar & Grill

Read about the winners here: NKY Magazine
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$30,000 GRANT TO RESTORE LINDEN GROVE CEMETERY POND
Good news:

Over the cemetery’s 169-year history, the site has fallen into various stages of disrepair and neglect only to be brought back to life with the help of caring citizens and the local courts.
Although the site is now more like a 22-acre park, Pete Nerone, Chairman of the Board for Linden Grove, says that the grounds lost its pond in the early 1960s when it was filled in during the construction of Interstate 71-75.
The pond once supplied a local brewery and provided a self-sustaining water source to the grounds. Thanks to the work of people like Nerone and former board member John Dietz, the pond is about to make a comeback.

Full story: Soapbox Cincinnati 
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QUICKIES
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US Judge strikes down EPA water rules for mines WKYT 
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Police capture naked man who fled Maysville hospital WKRC 
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NKY Chamber to discuss potential 2020 labor market Lane Report 
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KY Republicans may attack KY Democrats over national party's endorsement of same-sex marriage WFPL 
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Senators McConnell and Paul to speak at Kentucky Tea Party rally Herald-Leader 
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Editorial: Average Americans don't need assault weapons CNN 
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Old Enquirer building in Cincinnati to become hotel Business Courier 
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State Police accepting applications for next cadet class press release 
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KY Dept. of Education puts news on an app WKYT 
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Hey Kentuckians, register to win a FREE iPad press release 
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UK freshman Nerlens Noel gets advice from Massachusetts Governor Herald-Leader 
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NO NONSENSE SCIENCE ON GLOBAL WARMING THAT HAS SOMETHING FOR ALL
From an editorial published in the State-Journal (Frankfort):

CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

Read it all: State-Journal 
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DON'T MISS TUESDAY MORNING'S NEWS!
What cuts will be made to the City's police and fire departments? Your chance to weigh in is tonight; Group: KY school districts failing to protect kids from bullying; Plus, a drunken invitation to the Anchor Grill leads to fun exchange online.
The RC News: Tuesday Morning Round-Up 
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REGISTER FOR STATE PRESERVATION CONFERENCE
From a news release:

Online registration is now available for the 2012 Kentucky Historic Preservation Conference Sept. 20-22, with educational sessions primarily in Princeton and other activities planned in Dawson Springs, Eddyville and Kuttawa. For more, visit www.kypreservationconference.org 

This year is the first time the biennial conference is taking place away from a major metropolitan region, and this regional approach is reflected in the theme “Our Towns: Partnering Regionally, Preserving Locally,” which emphasizes the need to focus local efforts in neighborhoods and communities while seeking opportunities to work together regionally for the economic benefit of all.

Conference co-sponsors are the Kentucky Heritage Council/State Historic Preservation Office and Preservation Kentucky Inc., with presenting sponsors the city of Princeton, Princeton Main Street/Renaissance on Main, Princeton Tourism Commission, Lyon County Tourism, and the Dawson Springs Main Street and Preservation Program, with assistance from many other local organizations.
Guest speakers include Kentucky Supreme Court Justice Bill Cunningham, author of “On Bended Knees: The Night Rider Story,” “Castle: The Story of a Kentucky Prison” and other titles focusing on the region’s history; Art Jackson, Director of the Small Towns Economic Prosperity (STEPs) initiative for the North Carolina Rural Economic Development Center Inc.; economist Donovan Rypkema, principal of PlaceEconomics in Washington, D.C., who will discuss his new report “Historic Preservation and Rightsizing”; and Jane Turville, writer, director and producer of the award-winning movie “The Greenest Building.”

More details: Click Here 
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10 WAYS TO RESEARCH HISTORY OF YOUR HOUSE
Interesting stuff:

When we make friends we like to learn about them -- we ask them where they grew up, where they went to school, and when they were born.
Our homes are a lot like that. We spend time with them, value them, and take care of them. So it makes sense that we want to know more about them -- who lived there before, how it’s changed over time, and when it was built.
If only walls could talk, right? Instead, here are 10 ways to uncover the story behind your older or historic home (or any other building you’re interested in):

Check out the tips here: Preservation Nation

HOUSE GIVES FAMILY SECOND CHANCE AT HOME

THE RIVER CITY NEWS MORE COVINGTON NEWS THAN ANY OTHER SOURCE

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FACEBOOK: The River City News

@theRCnews on Twitter  

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by Michael Monks 

Email Michael

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After a dispute with neighbors in Newport that led to her house being shot up, police suggested that Merlyn Mabrey move her family from that street. The divorced, single mother says the shooting instilled fear in her three young children. "I got my kids out, they were scared to be there," Mabrey said. Housing Opportunities of Northern Kentucky (HONK) contacted Mabrey and told her that they may have something for her. The faith-based non-profit has rehabbed seventy-five homes and built thirty-six in Northern Kentucky over the past twenty years and on Wednesday unveiled its latest completed project on Cavanaugh Street near Linden Grove Cemetery in Covington.

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HONK offers prospective home buyers who need a little more time to fix credit scores or save cash for a down payment to participate in its lease-purchase program, as Mabrey and her kids are doing. Not only is Mabrey's family getting a second chance at home, the house offered a second chance at life for several youths, too. HONK collaborates with Youth Build, a program that is run out of the Northern Kentucky Community Action Commission to help young adults (ages 16-24) to earn their GED, enroll in college, and earn a carpentry certificate.

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“YouthBuild does such great work and this project has been no exception,” says David Hastings, HONK’s Executive Director. “The prior owners used the house as a good rental property for many years. Our goal was to take it up a notch and make improvements that would provide a quality homeownership opportunity to a local family.”

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The house on Cavanaugh was purchased by HONK last November and since then, young workers from Youth Build upgraded the kitchen and bathrooms, carved out a third bedroom, installed new ceilings and ceramic tile, painted the interior, and refinished the hardwood floors. Hastings calls the HONK/Youth Build partnership a great model to transform lives and improve the community at the same time. 

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Mabrey, meanwhile, expects to finish her master's degree in business by the end of the year and hopes someday to open her own bookstore. She has spent the past seventeen years as an instructor for children with behavior problems at Sixth District Elementary School in Covington. Looking around her new home, many visions for the future emerge. "I'm very excited," she said. "My kids have been through so much. This house has been a blessing."

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PHOTOS FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE BELOW, JUST CLICK THE LINK!

CLUES TO COVINGTON'S PAST UNCOVERED AT JACOB PRICE SITE

THE RIVER CITY NEWS MORE COVINGTON NEWS THAN ANY OTHER SOURCE

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FACEBOOK: The River City News

@theRCnews on Twitter  

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by Michael Monks 

Email Michael

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EXCLUSIVE

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In the late nineteenth century at the corner of Lynn and Greenup Streets, there likely lived a shoe repairman, a couple seamstresses, a butcher, carpenters, and steel mill workers. The homes of those people were torn down in the late 1930s, but many of their belongings survived underneath the former Jacob Price housing project. "Somebody on that block made or repaired shoes," said Jeannine Kreinbrink of K&V Cultural Resources Management. "We found a lot of shoes but they were shoes that you threw away because they were too worn to fix. We found scraps where he was cutting out heels and soles so we have the leather scraps."

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The cobbler had neighbors, too. "We've got a lot of thread spools, so at least two women who lived there were seamstresses, and we've got a bunch of cut tin scraps, so a guy who rented on the corner in the 1870s was a tin cutter, and big cut animal bones out of one the outhouses that certainly came from the butcher shop," Kreinbrink said. "We can actually match deposits with individuals so our hope is to recreate that neighborhood through the second half of the 1800s to the early twentieth century."

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Kreinbrink and her team spent twenty-two days digging beneath the former Jacob Price site where six outhouses, three cisterns and other items from four or five former homes remained relatively intact underground. She explained that in those days people not only used an outhouse as a restroom but also as a trashcan. "Outhouses are interesting in many ways because people threw things in there that they didn't think people would look at again, so you look in there and you see secrets, like people who wanted to grow their hair back or liquor bottles," she said.

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The items discovered underground, such as torch supports and trellises and lots of glass containers, are an important link to Covington's past. "They can be connected to households and certainly addresses and time frames, so, say the house is occupied from 1850 forward, we can trace the deed history so we know who owned it every decade and we can luckily in the urban area look at the Covington city directories and figure out who lived there," Krienbrink explained. "We have the occupation history of those lots and it gives us the background, the ethnicity, the religion, where they came from." 

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The lots on the site examined by Kreinbrink's team were the only ones not totally disturbed during the construction of Jacob Prince in the late 1930s. The historical underground investigation happened just before another development is set to take the place of Jacob Price: River's Edge at Eastside Pointe. Construction could not begin on that mixed-income housing development until the underground dig took place as part of a federal law connected to the Hope VI funds that are paying for River's Edge. 

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The new construction will be the third such major development on the site since the middle of the 1850s. Originally, the area was part of 370 acres owned by the Western Baptist Theological Seminary which purchased the land in 1835. Eventually the seminary sold most of its acreage for development, keeping only twelve acres for its school and public square and twenty-two acres for Linden Grove Cemetery. The site that became Jacob Price and will now become River's Edge was originally developed as three subdivisions: the First, Second, and Third Baptist. 

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"It's really interesting because we span that entire time frame of that part of Covington from when it was first laid out to when the first houses were torn down to make Jacob Price," Kreinbrink said. 

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Now that excavation and field work is over, Krienbrink and her team (which is subcontracted through Mid-South Cultural Resource Consultants which is contracted by the Housing Authority for these purposes) will begin work on a formal report. "We have two weeks after we're done with field work to put this document together," she said. "It says we got everything out of that corner that we could get in terms of artifacts and information, so let them go ahead and start building and then we have a year to finish our research and all the analysis and then put a report together that will be reviewed by everybody." She said that copies will be kept at the library and stored at the state level and that much of the information will be incorporated into an educational program for the schools. There will also be a public presentation on the discoveries at the conclusion of the research.

All photos provided by Jeannine Kreinbrink.

A PARADE THROUGH COVINGTON

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THE RIVER CITY NEWS MORE COVINGTON NEWS THAN ANY OTHER SOURCE

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FACEBOOK: The River City News

@theRCnews on Twitter  
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The Covington Memorial Day Parade weaved down Madison Avenue from Holmes High School, across the 19th Street bridge, then down Holman Avenue to historic Linden Grove Cemetery where veterans of nearly every American war are laid to rest. Here are photos from the event: 
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LOTS MORE PHOTOS BELOW, JUST CLICK THE LINK!

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