About 65 years ago, Covington was gearing up for big changes. A new bridge that would carry I-75 across the Ohio River was on the horizon. And there was movement toward tearing down a neighborhood along the river for an IRS facility built by the federal government.
Today, crews are just months away from starting a new companion span to what we now call the Brent Spence Bridge — an enormous $3.6 billion undertaking. And that IRS building recently came down as Covington leaders envision a new neighborhood in its place.
It's a full circle moment — one Mayor Joe Meyer says comes as people continue to rediscover the joys of living in cities like Covington.
It's also a chance to reassess past decisions — and potentially make different ones this time around.
"Like people, cities have lifecycles too," Meyer says.
Once 'the most blighted city in America'
The construction of the highway and other factors were part of a huge national shift that enticed many people out to the suburbs and signaled an era when cities like Covington began to decline.
Meyer notes that in 1983, 20 years after the Brent Spence Bridge opened, the federal government declared Covington the most blighted city in America due to its aging housing stock.
Much of that housing stock still exists — and now it’s an attraction, not a liability.
"Old houses in 1983? Bad. Old houses in 2024? Good," he says. "Have the houses changed? Not a bit. What has changed? The popular attitude. That's all it is. You got swept up in getting out. Now people are wanting to come back."
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The massive projects the federal government funded in Covington more than six decades ago had some big impacts on the community. They wiped whole neighborhoods off the map, for one thing.
Retired Northern Kentucky University basketball coach Kenney Shields lived at 616 Elm Street in one of those neighborhoods, right where the Radisson Hotel is today.
People at the time called it Covington's West End.
"I liked it there for sure," he says. "There were a lot of Irish people who had settled there. I lived there for the first 14 years of my life, and I could tell you the name of every family that lived up and down that street."
Shields says it was a pleasant, tight-knit community full of parks, grocery stores, bars and homes, many of which are now under the highway or the parking lots around it. When the highway came through, it also took many of the ballfields he spent his youth playing in.
Not everyone was sold on urban renewal and highway projects in Covington at the time. Then-City Manager Joseph A. Dressman lamented the demolition of property and parks to the Cincinnati Enquirer, saying that expressway engineers didn't understand urban areas well enough.
"They're not the things people come downtown for," he said of the parking lots and garages popping up in cities seeing urban renewal.
"It's a mistake to try to create model new cities," he said. "They're beautiful things, but they have no souls."
Around the same time Shields' old neighborhood was being demolished for the highway, another area just blocks away was coming down for the IRS site.
Work on that project started Aug. 10, 1962, with the demolition of a home of a man named Frank Seeds at 102 West Third Street. The city bought his property — as well as the rest of the land for the IRS site — in the months prior. Seeds relocated to the far southern part of Covington.
Meyer says the demolitions chipped away at Covington's urban core.
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"It was a whole neighborhood, densely packed with houses and streets," he says. "Those houses were all torn down and those streets and facilities were all removed to create a suburban-style campus. It benefited the city for many, many years because of the jobs and the work opportunities and the payroll taxes that it generated. But it was in the city, but it wasn't part of the city."
What now?
Meyer says the city now wants to change that by restoring the street grid there and bringing in more housing. Covington paid the federal government $20 million for the 23 acres the IRS site occupied. Recently, Kentucky lawmakers floated funding that would build a new home for Northern Kentucky University's Chase Law School and a University of Kentucky medical campus there. Meyer says talks about commercial and residential development are ongoing.
One is likely close to finalization: A plan by Drees Homes to build 16 townhomes on a roughly .9 acre plot in the former IRS footprint on Fourth Street. Drees would like to break ground later this year pending final Covington City Commission approval.
The IRS site was just one area left disjointed by the big federal projects of the 1960s. What about the area where Shields once lived, and the areas around the coming companion bridge for the Brent Spence?
Meyer says the city has worked with the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet to redesign the original plans for the companion bridge for better connectivity and less disruption. There won't be any wholesale destruction of neighborhoods this time around, though four individual homes and about eight businesses will need to see the wrecking ball.
But some worry the lessons from big changes in the past haven't all sunk in.
Nate Weyand-Geise lives in West Covington, which he says is separated from the rest of the city by I-75. He's concerned the coming Brent Spence companion bridge will only make that divide bigger.
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"When we talk about reconnecting our communities — there's a stark difference between Main Strasse and West Covington," he says. "You come over sections of West 3rd, and it doesn't feel like the same community. We're very isolated. How do we start bridging those gaps? I feel like the missed an opportunity to start sewing the city back together, the damages the original 75 did."