Corryville

Let's get one thing straight. Corryville is not Clifton. Clifton Heights is not Clifton. All those hospitals are not in Clifton. U.C. is not in Clifton!. Most residents of this city collectively refer to anything withing a 2 mile radius of U.C. as Clifton. Even most of the students living around the area don't know what neighborhood they actually live in. I know this blog is about Corryville and not Clifton, but this is the first of the neighborhoods that is often erroneously referred to as Clifton that has come up in this blog. As stated in the Mt. Auburn post, the proper way to refer to these neighborhoods collectively is Uptown, although hardly nobody but signs use that term. It's not just me that is a stickler, the Enquirer did an article on the whole darn issue called "So where exactly is Clifton?" The experiences related by Clifton residents in the article were similar to the ones I had for 8 years living in Clifton. My students at both Elder and Purcell would hear I lived in Clifton and they would say "Oh yeah! It's dangerous! My brother lives on Wheeler." Me-"That's Clifton Heights. I live in Clifton." I once had a friend from Oregon who said "You live in Clifton, I don't want to come over to your place, I almost got mugged on Vine Street outside of Bogart's". Me-"That's Corryville. I live in Clifton!"

It is still tough from that map to tell where it is exactly so look at this map below with the lines marked out.

The red lines show it is basically boxed in by East McMillian, Burnett, Jefferson/Vine, and Erkenbrecker. As is often the case, I've seen these boundaries disputed. I've seen the southern border moved up to William Howard Taft, the welcome to signs don't even appear till north of there anyway. I've also seen the University Hospital Complex given to Avondale.

But I digress..When I was in high school, Corryville was the epicenter of the 90s punk scene, it was kind of skeezy but your biggest danger was some purple haired teenager trying to bum a buck or a smoke off of you. In the 2000s it hit upon hard times and many businesses closed and crime greatly increased. But Corryville has been making a comeback in a major way. They've got several huge new rental and condo complexes up, their own Taste of Belgium, and many other hip restaurants opening up.

The first few flags I made were based on the Colorado flag. It's got a C on it like the Cincinnati flag but it's a little different in style. Here is a picture of it below.
Flag of Colorado.svg

I swapped the colors for UC's colors because the neighborhood (especially it's business district on Vine) are often associated with UC. I also moved the C into the center and then put the buckeye leaves from the Cincinnati flag onto this Colorado C.

FLAG 1

And swapping some colors.

FLAG 2

Then I took the same basic pattern and tried to make it look a bit more like the U.C. logo

FLAG 3

And a color swap

FLAG 4

I was trying to use a flag with a C for Corryville because I didn't know what else to do for it. At first I didn't just want to do a different version of the Cincinnati flag because I already did that for Covedale. But then I was curious how it would look so I quickly made the flags below.

FLAG 5

FLAG 6

FLAG 7

and finally

FLAG 8

Flags 5 through 8 would really work for UC, but for the neighborhood of Corrvyille, I think they look TOO much like a UC flag. The waves even look like they could be scratch marks from a fearsome bearcat. I wanted some uniqueness for the neighborhood.

Then I tried one more thing. Remember, from Mt. Auburn I came up with the idea of the Pan-Uptown colors. This is especially apropos for Mt. Auburn and Corryvile, because Corryville used to be considered part of Mt. Auburn. If you go to Mecklenburg Gardens, you will see in the history of the restaurant that it used to be called the Mt. Auburn Garden Restaurant. If you look at the map of the neighborhoods, you can see that Corryville is running straight on northward from Mt. Auburn so this makes sense that they were once the same neighborhood. At some point, much like Kentucky cleved from Virginia and Tennessee cleaved from North Carolina, Corryville cleaved from Mt. Auburn. So I tried the flag schemes from above one more time but in Uptown colors.

First, emphasizing the slate blue.

FLAG 9

I couldn't easily get in to the red coloring of the leaves, but ideally, this would be orange too.

FLAG 10

FLAG 11

FLAG 12

My biggest problem with flags 11 and 12 are that I've already used the simple recoloring of the Cincinnati flag and it seems like a copout. I think that makes FLAG 9 my favorite out of the Uptown color flags, it paralles the Cincy flag with the C and buckeye leaves, but not too much like many of the ones below.

The last thing I tried was to give Corryville a bit of distance from Mt. Auburn in terms of color, yet keeping the relationship. My mind turned towards Denmark, Norway, and Iceland. As you can see from the flags below, Norway and Iceland had a simple way to assert their independence from Denmark in their new flag yet give an obvious nod to their old relationship with the Danes.

Denmark's flag:

Denmark's is the oldest and therefore original Scandinavian cross flag. According to legend, the flag with a Christian cross on it fell from the sky in 1219 as the Christian Danes battled the pagan Estonians, defeating them with help of the flag. Despite it being hard to believe on a religious level, there is no historical reference to a flag until the 1300s. Anyway, the Danish flag is below.

Originally, the cross had arms of equal length, but over time, the outer arm lengthened giving us the Scandinavian Cross that spread across Scandinavian cultures and beyond.

Norway's flag:

Denmark, despite being tiny geographically, was the powerhouse of Scandinavia and controlled many of the other countries, including Norway. In 1821, control of Norway was passed from Norway to Sweden. Some Norwegians started pushing full independence at this point. The Norwegians used the basic Danish flag design and added a blue cross with a white fimbriation (border in flag speak). They did this to reference the colors of the French flag which was seen a symbol for the struggle for liberty. This flag was suppressed, however until 1899 and independence from Sweden was granted in 1905.

Iceland's flag:

Iceland was also controlled by Denmark. This flag came about in 1913, but again suppressed by the Danes until 1918, and then only allowed to fly on boats. In 1944 Iceland gained full independence and made this their national flag.

But I digress...BIG TIME!....Again. So I thought about making Corryville emphasize the orange over the slate blue. Keeping the colors of Mt. Auburn, but making the orange more of their color.

FLAG 13