East Walnut Hills

I worked at Purcell Marian for four years which is in East Walnut Hills, so I have spent a lot of time there.  EWH is small and contains gorgeous mansions on beautiful tree lined streets.  There is also a much less affluent section of EWH so it is a neighborhood with extremes when it comes to wealth.  The EWH business district has been making a small come back recently as they try to take advantage of the beautiful architecture in the neighborhood.  East Walnut Hills started as its own incorporated city in 1866 with the name Woodburn, like the main street of the business district.  I have not been able to find when it was annexed into Cincinnati and why and when the name changed from Woodburn to East Walnut Hills.  It is kind of a shame because Woodburn would give it a bit more distinction.


A picture of a "welcome to.." sign is below.  You can see they symbols they are using are squirrels eating walnuts with walnut tree leaves on there as well.  You will see smaller versions of this sign at different entrances to the neighborhood, but they all have the squirrel, nut, and leaves on them.


So I went looking for a flag to steal a squirrel off of for my flag.  I came across a fantastic flag from Ufa Russia.


That's perfect, and I doubt anyone from Ufa will care.  So my first attempt was to make it more like the sign and add a walnut and some walnut tree leaves.

FLAG 1

Next, to try and to something other than just paste images on an existing flag (but still heavily plagiarize), I tried a few more things.  One idea I had was to develop pan-Walnut Hills colors.  I could not find a East Walnut Hills community council page to get ideas.  But plain ol' Walnut Hills did.  On their community council page they had this logo.

So I am going to use these blue/green/orange colors as the pan-Walnut Hills colors.  Now that I look at it, they are actually not too different from the blue, orange, and green of the pan-Uptown colors I've used.

Here are two tricolors to compare the colors.  Uptown on top.  Walnut Hills on bottom.

Walnut Hills is not considered part of uptown by the way.  But it might make sense that they could use similar colors because Walnut Hills does border the Uptown neighborhoods of Mt. Auburn, Corryvile, and Avondale.  Just as a side note, I think the Walnut Hills colors are more pleasing.

Anyway, here is a second attempt.  Using the Canadian flag's ratios as a template because that is a good way to have a tricolor with an image in the middle.

FLAG 2

Then changing up some colors.

FLAG 3

Then I went back to the first flag and simply recolored it with the pan-Walnut Hills colors.  I made the squirrel the tannish/orangish color because that seemed plausible.  But it doesn't look as good as the brown squirrel.

FLAG 4

It is customary, by the way, that when a flag has an animal on it, the head of the animal is always on the hoist (flag pole) side.  The rumored reason for this is so that if the flag is hanging limp in the wind, the only thing you see isn't the animals rump!

Finally I wanted to try something without the squirrel, although I really like that idea for a symbol.  I went back to the original name of the neighborhood of Woodburn.  I thought of wood burning and then of the Burning Bush.  I found this cool burning bush graphic on the internet and used it to create the Woodburn flag.

FLAG 5

I love this flag.  I love the graphic and the colors work better in this set up, than they do on most of the other flags I feel.  It made we go back and try one more squirrel set up.

FLAG 6

That might be the best of the squirrel flags using the pan-Walnut Hills colors, but it still doesn't look as cool as the bush I think.

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