Our OKI Wanna Know feature is a chance for you to ask about the little things that may not be headline-grabbing. This week, we build on knowledge about local architecture.
Zoey Peach of Westwood is wondering about a particular construction material she sees in the area.
"When you're driving down, say Queen City Avenue, you see row after row of these pale yellow brick apartment buildings, all roughly the same size and same shape, but they're not all part of one community. So I'm very curious as to why they seem to be everywhere in the city, from Westwood to places on the East Side."
Ohio has long been a center for brick-making. It's because there's a lot of clay in this part of the world. The executive director of the Cincinnati Preservation Association says Cincinnati once had one of the largest brick-making factories in the state.
Beth Johnson says the chemical makeup of clay determines what color a brick is. "So in general, here in Cincinnati, we have shale clay, which makes our brick, and that is high in iron oxide, and that's why we actually have mostly red brick."
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She says the yellow, or buff brick, comes from fire clay. "That is actually mostly in eastern Ohio, so when you go to eastern Ohio, you'll actually see even more of the buff, cream, yellow colored bricks."
The Cincinnati Pressed Brick Company made both red and yellow bricks, she says, because they had access to both kinds of clay. The yellow was a little more expensive, and was used for higher-end commercial buildings, including many in East Walnut Hills.
"Now, the apartment buildings are more the Art Deco, Art Moderne-periods of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, and that's when they just started really experimenting with different colors of bricks," she says. "They really liked the gold, yellow brick, because it had this essence of gold and richness."
Johnson says it comes down to two things: supply and fashion.
A basement backstory
Another question we received deals with houses and historical construction. Fred Yaeger lives in a house in Oakley that was built in 1936, and he noticed something different about it.
"It has three or four steps up to the front porch, and then one step in. Almost all the houses in our neighborhood are the same," he says. "Ones that are built later have very few steps leading up to the house. Houses that were built in the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, have usually one step leading up to the porch and then one step in."
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Yaeger wants to know if that has something to do with basements. The Cincinnati's Preservation Association's Johnson says yes. Basements are more common in the north, because you have to dig below the frost line for the foundation.
She says a lot of local basements from that period aren't full depth.
"They wanted some daylight in there because while it was below the frost line, it also then acted as a refrigerator in the summer, but then also acted as frost protection in the winter," she says. "It had a much more steady climate, but they needed the daylight to be able to see into it."
Johnson says starting in the 1970s, the chemistry of concrete started changing.
"And so they were able to provide more additives into the concrete so they could do the surface level foundations. And basements were less of a necessity for the stability of buildings."
Fred Yaeger heard one theory houses may have been raised off the ground: for hygienic reasons. "Before the widespread advent of motorized vehicles, they were all horse-drawn. Horses create a lot of feces; a lot of poop. And when the air gets dry and warm, it dries out and becomes very fine and it turns into a fine powder."
The theory goes, houses were raised to keep people away from the dust. Johnson says there may be something to that.
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"I'm sure that was an extra added benefit — that you're out of the street dust — however, it really, I think, does come down to the stability of the buildings and the necessity to build foundations below the frost line."
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