Dr. Know is Jay Gilbert, weekday afternoon deejay on 92.5 FM The Fox. Submit your questions about the city’s peculiarities at drknow@cincinnati magazine.com
DR. KNOW
Q+ A
configure with the institution’s move to the Cincinnati Museum Center in 1990. While many elements were successfully installed in the new location, some had to sadly be left behind. The magnificent Planetarium especially was a major loss; Pink Floyd laser shows just haven’t been the same since. But even with the extinction of reallife wooly mammoths—thank you for not calling them elephants; it’s a sore point— the Natural History Museum committed to giving their mammoths a new home. The family of four now happily roams outside the entrance of the Cincinnati Museum Center’s sister location at West Fifth and Gest Streets in Queensgate. It’s all for the best, really, because back in the old neighborhood, the new Cincinnati Ballet Margaret and Michael Valentine Center for Dance has just opened on Gilbert Avenue. If the mammoths were still hanging around, it would make everyone think of that scene in Fantasia.
I live in Denver now, but as a Cincinnati kid I often visited the Natural History Museum by the Elsinore Tower on Gilbert Avenue. Outside were enormous sculptures of wooly mammoths. I loved them more than the exhibits inside. Why didn’t they move with the Museum to Union Terminal? Please tell me they survive somewhere. — MAMMOTH MEMORY
DEAR MEMORY:
The Doctor is pleased to tell you that they survive somewhere. Despite decades of, um, mammoth popularity standing guard outside the old Natural History Museum, your cherished pachyderms were unable to
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At the corner of Reading Road and Liberty Street is the beautiful clock tower that welcomes people to Pendleton/Over-the-Rhine. But the clock (two clocks, really) stopped working about two years ago. It’s been 10:06 in my beloved neighborhood for too long. Are there plans to fix it? — IT’S ABOUT TIME DEAR ABOUT:
Because the Doctor is a history nerd, he shall begin by bringing up a much older clock tower. On September 24, 1848, Cincinnati’s riverfront was the subject of the world’s first panoramic city photograph. Not until 2015, though, during a painstaking digital restoration of the daguerreotype plates, did we discern a downtown clock tower showing that the time was exactly 1:55. Everyone was impressed, but come on, was the clock even working that day? We all know how finicky those contraptions are. The clock(s) at Reading and Liberty continue(s) this finicky tradition. Time ILLUSTR ATIO N S BY L A R S LEE TA RU
