A three-story mural of President Barack Obama looked over the West End from Ollie's Trolley restaurant for more than a decade. It was one of dozens artist William Rankins Jr. painted.
The murals portrayed prominent local and national figures, pop icons and people who lived in communities like the West End and Over-the-Rhine. Most of them have now been lost to time and redevelopment.
It's painful for Rankins, who lost his eyesight after a stroke in 2014.
"Are you going to paint over me too? That's how I feel," he says. "You're just taking me off the map."
But he says he's not done creating just yet.
Rankins and Ollie's Trolley owner Marvin Smith chat below the stark black wall where the Obama painting once was. Smith had to repair the wall in 2019 and couldn't save the deteriorating mural.
The courtyard around Ollie's is one of the last places you can see Rankins' work. A painting of Robocop holding a hamburger on a tray greets you as you walk in. There's former Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory looking down from a second story perch. Another mural depicts a family from the neighborhood.
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The future is cloudy for these works too. Rankins asks Smith whether he'll accept recent offers he's gotten for his property.
"What are you going to do about the Trolley?" Rankins asks. "Are you going to move it?"
"I'm considering two options," Smith says. "Take the money and move it to another location, or redo this."
The places where Rankins did his painting have changed a lot. Many of his murals were in Over-the-Rhine, including a locally famous rendition of Robocop. They're all gone now. The last, a large-scale mural on Liberty and Race Streets featuring local residents, Steve Urkel, a giant dog and other features, was painted over in 2018.
Meanwhile, the neighborhood has undergone a profound demographic shift. Data from the U.S. Census shows Over-the-Rhine lost 43 percent of its Black population between 2010 and 2020.
Neighboring West End is changing, too. Most recently, crews demolished Liberty Tire, which is across the street from Ollie's, to make way for a $300 million mixed-use development by FC Cincinnati. That building had multiple murals Rankins painted.
Even as Rankins' murals began disappearing, Cincinnati's taste for murals has grown. You've probably seen newer murals on numerous buildings across the city.
Most are by nonprofit ArtWorks or were part of art and light festival BLINK. They're highly celebrated and well-executed, and many are by internationally known muralists.
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But curator, arts writer and educator Maria Seda-Reeder says there's something special about Rankins' work.
"Amazing muralists from outside of a neighborhood, they don't necessarily have that connection to the community, but Rankins did," she says. "He was from that community, in that community, making work about that community."
Those connections mean a lot to Rankins.
"When you're riding by, with your girlfriend or your family, 'Oh that's me right there.' That gives [you] a sense of pride."
Rankins says he's always been drawn to art. He remembers decorating his childhood bedroom in Evanston as a young teen.
Eventually, his friends started asking him to make murals in their rooms, too.
Rankins grew up, served in the Navy, and then got jobs around Cincinnati doing drywall as well as interior and exterior painting. Pretty soon, people started asking him to paint murals on their walls as well.
By the 1990s, he was seemingly everywhere around Downtown and other neighborhoods like Walnut Hills and North Fairmount.
He painted large-scale murals of musical legends near the corner of Reading and McGregor, a prominent mural for the Arts Consortium in the West End and many others. And then, in 2008, he painted the large-scale portrait of Obama on Ollie's Trolley.
Rankins says it's been very hard to adjust to losing his sight. But he's confident he can still create.
Deborah Clinkscale is a caseworker for a local nonprofit. She takes Rankins to appointments and checks up on him. She also helps him paint on canvas these days, mostly landscapes.
She mentions the large Black Lives Matter mural in front of Cincinnati City Hall. After it was painted, she took him to it and walked around describing it to him.
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"I hope there is an artist who will want to work with him and do something with him," she says.
In the meantime, Rankins has plenty of his work on his own walls — detailed, almost photo-realistic drawings of everyone from icons like Tupac to family members. Ollie's Trolley owner Marvin Smith also has rooms full of his paintings and drawings.
Rankins hopes to put together a book and perhaps a gallery show of his pieces — something that can continue to live on even as his murals fade into memory.