Beauty in the City

The beholder’s eye for beauty is only as good as his willingness to look for it.

Cincinnati, Ohio has an aura surrounding it. Smog, that is. The air pollution is visible, and when the wind stirs the sewage just right, it’s smellable. And even in stagnant wind, olfactory nerves are punished by Cincinnati’s inherent urine-tinged scent.

Once-stately homes near Cincinnati University bear the wounds of 40 years of student occupants: missing shingles, dirty siding, and splintered porches.

A 1994 Ford Taurus drives by. It’s three and a half feet off the ground. Its back bumper is not the color of the rest of the car. It has $600 worth of 36-inch rims on its wheels.

Some streets aren’t to be trodden. Most streets aren’t to be trodden after dark.

On a corner just off campus sits a church of brown brick with high Roman arches and some gothic tracery. At one time its visitors found divine revelation. Now they find swanky jeans because Urban Outfitters purchased the building.

But just a mile down the road from there and on a side street to the right lays one of probably many hidden sanctuaries. It’s just a patch of a few neighbors who may or may not know each other, but who have all commonly found solace from smog, dirt, crime, and sacrilege.

Nelson is from New Zealand. In New Zealand, he says, people like to keep their yards tidy. To describe Nelson’s yard as tidy is a lie—Nelson’s yard is immaculate. The back yard is only about 100 feet deep by 50, but it rivals Eden. Pointy spires of a type of shrub grow at regular intervals around his brown picket fence. Before them rest upward-facing accent lights. The lawn—the perfect ideal of grass—is bordered by the perfect ideal of mulch. Flowers and flowering shrubbery dot the remaining space in apparently random, yet probably scrupulous pattern. Nelson comes home from work, eats dinner until seven, and then goes to his yard to prune his plants, pull weeds, and hose off everything until well after dark.

About the time Nelson was beginning his escape from the vulgarities of everyday life in his garden, across the street, another was ending hers. Behind the curtained sliding glass door, third from the left on the second floor of an apartment building, a violinist has just set down her bow. (Though I never saw the violinist and have no real reason to suspect this, the way this person played struck me as the elegant artistry of a female.) Around seven in the morning, chirping bird sounds mingled out of key with the warm-up drills of the musician. In the afternoon, Bach-like and then Beethoven-like pieces made their way down the road with a vibrato-filled, artistic air, despite being unaccompanied.

Across the street from her and two houses down from Nelson, an out-of-tune upright piano labored on a front porch. A group of probably musically illiterate, but nonetheless soulful and inspired good ol’ boys drink beer and pay homage to Ray Charles. They take turns banging out chords and singing their blues to the setting sun.

Behind that house is an empty lot in the middle of the block, too far removed from the street for anyone to build something there. A fragile yellow butterfly in this place seems to be carried randomly by the breeze rather than by its own faculties as it moves from tree to bush to grass. It probably got swept away en route to Nelson’s.

The butterfly isn’t the dazzling result of the human spirit. It isn’t the beautiful manifestation of a passion for gardening or music. Nor is it hampered in its grandeur by any urban decay. It simply exists—perhaps only for the enjoyment of those who want to see it.