After several blocks more, Linn lifted up over the massive gash of Interstate 75. Buchanan turned west again on Eighth Street and they plunged into the warehouse district and under the railroad tracks. The main police channels remained on routine business.
Now Will was growing curious. Despite what many east-siders thought, there were some lovely neighborhoods west of I-75, the Sauerkraut Curtain-although old-timers applied that term to Vine Street-but Buchanan was not driving into one. When the sunlight found them again on the other side of the railroad underpass, they were in Lower Price Hill. He could keep going and follow Glenway’s rightward arch around the tree-covered bluff ahead of them and keep going uphill. But he was slowing down.
They weren’t on a hill. The real Price Hill was directly ahead, and it, too, had once been connected with an incline railway, but Will couldn’t say exactly where. Lower Price Hill was in the basin above a broad swoop of the Ohio River, and although the city had designated it a historic district that couldn’t make up for the blight and crime. He had been on a shooting call here a week ago Wednesday, on Neave Street. Many of the rowhouses held the classic Italianate features found in Over-the-Rhine, but few people were trying to gentrify the properties. Vacant lots and junk cars proliferated. It was slowly falling apart.
If Kenneth Buchanan “spoke Cincinnati,” he would know that he was among the briars, the local term for poor Appalachian whites. This had long been a closed, clannish part of town. Once the briars had migrated down the river, then on the railroads, finding decent jobs in the factories around the rail yards of Mill Creek. It was their way out of the coalmines. Now most of those manufacturing jobs were gone. The factories were being gutted, their scrap sold to China. Some of the junkyards were in this neighborhood. Poverty was high. The place was also growing more African-American, and that made for racially charged confrontations. Like most of the older, poorer parts of the city, it was losing population.
And here was Kenneth Buchanan, white-shoe downtown lawyer.
He turned down two-lane State Avenue, going twenty-five. Will waited for the red light and sat, watching him slow. Then a truck passed, obscuring the view, and when it was gone so was Buchanan’s Mercedes.
Will turned left and cruised slowly down the street. Some large old multi-story brick apartments were on the left, and a few forlorn rowhouses stood on the right.