Villages at Roll Hill

First of all, I missed that last week was the 26th flag, the halfway point!  That makes this the first flag in the second half of the project.

Maybe Cincinnati's most famous neighborhood, the Villages at Roll Hill, aka the Fay Apartments, aka Northwest Fairmount.  My obsession with the Cincinnati neighborhoods goes back longer than this flag blog.  3 years ago I created a Sporcle quiz on the official 52 neighborhoods of Cincinnati  I just went to check it for the first time in over a year because I thought this might be the most missed neighborhood on the list.  Surprisingly, it was not.  It was the 8th most missed neighborhood. 28.7% of game players guessed it, which is much higher than I would have guessed.  The only neighborhood that I have done a flag for so far that was more missed was East Westwood, the third most missed at 24.7% of game players getting that answer.  Anyway, the housing development formely known as the Fay Apartments is one of two housing projects that count as their own neighborhoods.  The other is English Woods, which IS the most missed neighborhood at only 22.7% of players guessing it.  The Fay, as it was often called, recently underwent a rebranding.  You can watch a video from Channel 5 News here.  Part of the rebranding was to create a new name, The Villages at Roll Hill.   Apparently it has been gaining national recognition for creating a dramatic drop in crime in the neighborhood.  On older city maps the area seems to be called Northwest Fairmount (like East Westwood) and if you search Northwest Fairmount news stories about crime in the Fay Apartments sometimes show up, so I don't know if all the Fairmounts, English Woods, Millvale, East Westwood, and The Villages at Roll Hill were all part of some city Fairmount.  Maybe a city historian could clue me in.  A map is below, still labeled as Fay Apartments.

Now being a housing development, there's not a lot of history to the neighborhood to work with.  My first attempt was a simple play of the name Roll Hill.  I used the pan-Fairmount colors that I used on one flag for East Westwood

FLAG 1

It is a ball Rolling down a Hill.  That is admittedly not very good.  So I went back to an old trick.  Look up a family crest.  There are several Hill family crests.  Two seem to show up more than others.  The first is below.

Hill Crest 1

I don't know why that square is in the upper corner, but this could make a good design for a flag so here is 

FLAG 2

Here is another common Hill Family crest

HILL CREST 2

That is very similar to the template I used for the West Price Hill flag.  So that could give

FLAG 3

Those are two pretty sharp looking flags.  But what about a Roll family crest?

The most common I found was this.

That could give a flag like this.

FLAG 4

Then I tried to merge flags 3 and 4 to create a ROLL and HILL combo by taking the leopards from Hill's family crest and the crescent moon from the Roll family crest and got.

FLAG 5

And a slightly different version, albeit a bit busier.

FLAG 6

Finally I thought that there had to be at least one person who was against the change of the name from the Fay Apartments.  So I looked up the Fay Family crest and it is great!  There are two similar versions, one French the other Irish.

First the French one.

French Fay Family Crest.  Two hands holding a sword stabbed piercing a severed dragon's head!  This might be a good symbol for those hanging on to the older more violent days of The Fay.

The Irish version is just slightly different with a severed boar's head replacing the dragon's

The dragon's head is a little less graphic I think because you couldn't really severe a dragon's head.  Or maybe just that it is worse graphics that makes it seem less gruesome.  Anyway, I included two Fay Flags for those longing for the old days.

FLAG 7

And

FLAG 8