It's a warm May afternoon and Wyoming's business district is buzzing. There is a festival going on with music and games. Restaurants and shops with freshly painted storefronts are doing brisk business — right up until you cross the railroad tracks into Lockland.
There, a gas station stands abandoned on one corner. There's a vacant lot on the other side of the street.
Another block down, a hardware store, some markets and restaurants are busy, but they're sprinkled in between empty storefronts with boarded-up windows.
Lockland Mayor Mark Mason acknowledges the contrast.
"There is a big difference in the economics," he says. "You wouldn't think that, just crossing the tracks. But there's a big difference there."
The two towns share a 1.5-mile border traced by those tracks. Despite being neighbors, the disparities are stark.
Lockland's median household income is about a third of Wyoming's $138,000 a year, and its 30% poverty rate is well above Wyoming's 1%.
Fueled by a much higher property tax base and its own foundation, Wyoming City Schools are among the best in Ohio, scoring five stars out of five on the last state report card. Lockland schools scored 2.5 stars — and that's an improvement over past years.
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The numbers and the contrast presented when you cross the railroad tracks tell a classic American story: how blue collar and white collar communities have diverged in a global economy that has vastly shifted over the past few decades.
But the statistics — and a few blocks on one street — don't tell the whole story.
'The rug pulled out'
Jon Boss chairs Wyoming's Planning Commission. As we sit in a restaurant on the Wyoming side of the tracks, he recalls walking to Lockland as a teenager to his first job at a cardboard factory. Back then, Lockland was different.
"Lockland was the envy of us in Wyoming," he says. "Because we didn't have that tax base."
That tax base came from a number of big manufacturing facilities like the one Boss worked in, as well as Fox Tissue Company and the Stearns & Foster Mattress Company.
But Boss points out the people running those factories built their stately homes next door, establishing Wyoming as an attractive residential area for white collar professionals.
"The gentlemen who managed or owned the companies, like [Edward] Stearns of Stearns & Foster, lived in Wyoming. It was easy to get back and forth. That's how Wyoming grew. And Stearns' estate is still there."
Stearns built his massive estate in western Wyoming at the turn of the 20th century. Members of his family — most notably another Stearns executive named William Stearns — did the same. Other industrialists followed suit.
This situation worked well enough for Lockland until companies began leaving in the 1980s to find more space in the suburbs or cheaper labor outside the U.S. That devastated the village's economy.
Mert Fritsch has lived in Lockland all her life. Like many Lockland residents, she took a job at Stearns & Foster after she graduated from Lockland High in 1970. She later got work with the school district, which took a huge hit when Stearns and other companies left.
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"The rug pulled out," she says. "By the late '90s and early 2000s, we were just holding on. And I hate to say it like this, but things just got worse and worse. We just declined and declined and declined."
But now, a slow recovery might be under way.
A new energy comes to town
Kendall King lived a few blocks from the tracks on the Lockland side in the 1990s. He left to try and find better opportunities, but returned to the same street a couple years ago.
King says he's happy with the changes that have happened in his absence, including some newer houses built by Habitat for Humanity.
"It's really changed a lot," he says. "They put a lot of new homes down here. It got safer. It got cleaner. People seem like they care down here."
King's neighborhood used to be called West Lockland, or Greenwood — an unincorporated area home to mostly Black residents. It wasn't always treated very well.
Stories from the late 19th and early 20th century in the Cincinnati Enquirer and other papers like the Miami Valley News and the Commercial Gazette relay lurid tales of crime, gambling and prostitution.
But West Lockland residents felt those characterizations — and accounts blaming Black residents for racial tensions with neighboring communities — were unfair. In 1886, a group of citizens (who rejected the name Greenwood as "vulgar") wrote a letter published in the Enquirer.
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"We, the citizens and property owners, protest against these articles as being detrimental to the material interests of our community," the letter read, calling out the Miami Valley News and Commercial Gazette by name.
It still took decades for the community to get respect. Lockland annexed Greenwood early in the 20th century, and the neighborhood got its own school — Lockland Wayne High School — that won two state basketball championships in the 1950s. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke here at the Mt. Zion Baptist Church in 1967.
The loss of industry and disinvestment hit this part of Lockland especially hard. But as King observes, things have picked up a bit recently.
He attributes some of the new energy in this part of the community to a recent wave of immigrants.
While the sheer number of those arrivals from places like Guatemala and Mauritania has overwhelmed the village's housing and social services at times, King sees big upsides to their presence.
There are African and Guatemalan restaurants and markets dotting Wyoming Avenue, for example, and more people in the houses around him.
"You get to see all these cultures get along, and everybody just trying to make a living," he says. "I think it's a good thing."
The village is working with planning consultants to figure out ways to boost the west side near its border with Wyoming.
Daniel Ferguson is one of those consultants. He's spent more than a decade working on planning and development in Lockland, first for Hamilton County and now for consultants Alloy Development. He points out that Lockland's historic character is a big asset.
There have been a number of recent high-profile renovations — Lockland high school, Pepper Construction's repurposing of a Stearns & Foster administrative building — in and around the Mill and Dunn historic district on the other side of Lockland, for example.
"This village is more historic because things have happened slowly," Ferguson says. "That's part of what makes it so unique. The stories are already there — you just have to tell those stories. And there's a lot of exciting stuff happening here that makes a difference in peoples' lives."
Mason says a big piece of the puzzle is finding industry to fill vacant land called the lock site, which was once occupied by Stearns & Foster. He believes bringing jobs to that area will help Wyoming Avenue and the Mill and Dunn district grow again.
"The genesis of developing both Mill and Dunn and the west side is getting something on this lock site," he says. "I just really think it's going to be a snowball effect."
Over in Wyoming, Jon Boss says he's sure great things are coming for Lockland. He points to a tree-lined path along the tracks between the two communities.
Not long ago, it was the site of abandoned shacks. Now there's a park the towns built together. Boss says that kind of cooperation is vital for both communities to thrive in the future, and something Wyoming's planning commission actively looks for opportunities to do along the border.
"I hope as you come back, say, 10 years from now, you'll see what Lockland has been able to do," he says.