A 1.4-mile stretch of highway could change the fortunes for one of the region’s oldest neighborhoods and for thousands of commuters in Northern Kentucky.

“The sky’s the limit,” Northern Kentucky Realtor Ken Perry said. “Anybody who builds less than four stories high has the wrong development plan. When will you ever get a chance like that? Sixteen acres undeveloped in the middle of town with a skyline view?”

An excited, but uncertain, optimism lingers among residents of this area, which lies west of York Street to the Licking River and north of the hill to the Ohio River.

It's all due to the extension of the four-lane AA Highway/Ky. 9 into Newport.

By the end of 2018, a four-lane highway will run along the western edge of Newport by the Licking River from Wilder to the Taylor-Southgate Bridge.

Bulldozers will start clearing the land in the next few weeks for the final portion between Ninth and Fifth streets. People have talked about a highway on Newport’s western edge since the 1960s. The legislature allocated $38 million in 2014 to do it, and now it’s starting to take shape.

What makes western Newport and the highway special?

The highway in Newport will run through what has been a gaping, vacant industrial landscape in the middle of the Greater Cincinnati metro area.

Former steel mill, Ovationare glaring vacancies

The hope is traffic will jumpstart interest in two of the most glaring vacancies in the Cincinnati region, Ovation and the former Newport Steel mill.

Dean Gosney looked out from a second-floor window of the former headquarters of Newport Steel. Across the street, a "for sale" sign is posted where the steel mill operated for more than a century.

“What’s going to be around here five years from now, you’ll probably have hotels through here,” Gosney said. “Maybe an Applebee’s over there. Lord only knows. Some of the hotel owners have talked to me and are looking at this area.”

It takes some imagination. Gosney's second-floor view is gravel, overgrown weeds and a metal building that has fallen into disuse. But the downtown Cincinnati skyline with the tiara of the Great American Tower looms large on the horizon.

Gosney and his brother, Shane, bought the steel mill's administration building in 2016 alongside a completed portion of Ky. 9 at the corner of Ninth Street. They spent more than a year tearing down drop ceilings and drywall to reveal the historic structure underneath.

It’s now headquarters for their engineering firm, Hal-Pe Associates.

The building is the last remnant from when the Newport steel mill provided Newport's economic engine. One hundred years ago, the two-story red brick building housed the offices of two of the region’s richest and most powerful business executives, brothers Joseph and Albert Andrews.

The Newport Steel plant moved to Wilder about 20 years ago and is now owned by Houston-based TMK-IPSKO. The company has left the 17-acre site of the rolling mill vacant ever since.

The surrounding area includes a junkyard and recycling plant. Imposing Gothic warehouses line the street.

'I feel like we're on to something'

But in five years, people think it will look entirely different.

Perhaps no greater example exists of its potential than the old trolley garage along the first completed section of Ky. 9 in Newport. The massive 100-year-old building with cathedral ceilings and thick brick walls housed the Green Line trolleys until 1972.

It now houses thousands of bourbon barrels. Ken Lewis and his New Riff Distilling in Newport are investing $11 million into the property to turn it into a rickhouse for his bourbon company. It'll be done by next summer.

Rickhouses used for storing bourbon barrels are major tourist destinations on Kentucky’s Bourbon Trail. Lewis expects the rickhouse will draw more than the 30,000 people each year that visit the New Riff Distillery on the other side of town.

The trolley garage and an adjacent building under construction will house 20,000 barrels within seven years.

While standing in front of his new rickhouse, Lewis looked down the new road next door to what used to be Newport’s steel mill. Beyond that is the Ovation site, on a vacant former public housing site where Corporex had planned a $1 billion residential and commercial development. The new highway goes through the site with two roundabouts.

Some have proposed building FC Cincinnati’s stadium there. Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley has said the Ovation site will be in the region's bid for the new Amazon headquarters location.

We won't know what it'll be until the highway's finished, said Corporex chairman Bill Butler.

"To me, it's a no-brainer," Lewis said. "I feel like we're in on something very early owning property here. I think five years from now, it's going to look very different around here."

A boon for commuters

No one knows how much traffic it'll carry. But its significance extends far beyond Newport, said Seth Cutter, economic development officer for Campbell County.

Commuters on Interstate 275 in Northern Kentucky may see this as an alternative to Interstate 471 or Interstate 75 to get into downtown Cincinnati. People in Cincinnati may also use it as a shortcut to many Northern Kentucky locales, including Northern Kentucky University, Cutter said.

"None of us really know how many cars and how much traffic it'll generate from places like Taylor Mill, Independence, Alexandria, Cold Spring to get up this way," Cutter said. "What kind of businesses, what kind of projects might be instigated, we don't know."

Built in the 1980s and early 1990s, Ky. 9 winds through rural Kentucky 116 miles from Newport’s southern border with Wilder to Grayson.

It will now end at a roundabout in front of the Taylor-Southgate Bridge.

A rough century for western Newport

The new highway will draw people to a neighborhood in Newport seen for more than a century as the blue-collar and poor side of town.

It was on the frontlines of the nation's labor struggle in the early 20th century.

In 1921, National Guard tanks rolled down the streets to quell a labor strike from the steel plant.

Residents for years have said they felt leaders have ignored the west side in favor of Newport's east side.

"This is the most divided small city I've seen in my life, between the haves and have-nots," resident Monica Remmy told The Enquirer in 2016. "There's just a lot of antagonization that goes back and forth from both directions."

In 2014, about 40 percent of those living west of York Street in Newport lived below the poverty line, according to the U.S. Census. That's more than triple the poverty rate on Newport's east side.

The longstanding poverty in west Newport made national headlines when U.S. News World and Report in 1994 labeled the neighborhood as one of the worst areas in the country for the underclass, with the third highest concentration of households headed by single, white mothers.

Homeowners dream of better times ahead

But the highway has Newport’s west end residents dreaming of better times.

Some expect a building boom similar to what happened in Newport’s East Row 20 years earlier. Old homes sold for a few thousand dollars became $500,000 historic manors today.

The turnaround in the East Row at the time seemed miraculous.

Buildings crumbled to the point that, in the 1960s, the area planning commission considered leveling 70 percent of the buildings in downtown Newport due to their dilapidated structure, an Aug. 6, 1967, article from The Enquirer stated.

A few daring investors have already bought into the idea western Newport will be the next hot real estate market.

Gary Collins moved out of Newport’s west end five years ago because he didn’t want to raise his son in the neighborhood.

But now Collins, who owns Galaxie Skate Shop on Monmouth, bought a property this year at 10th and Ann streets.

He said it’s more than just the highway that will turn the neighborhood around. The rents and property values rising in Cincinnati will drive people to the cheap housing in western Newport.

“I just know there’s no way to sustain the downtown housing boom,” Collins said. “It’s too much. All those people moving to OTR and around there, eventually, they’re going to buy their own property and not keep paying those crazy rents.”

Not so fast

But a housing boom hasn't started yet in western Newport.

As of Oct. 1, 17 homes have sold on Newport's west side, according to statistics from the Campbell County Property Valuation Administrator. Last year, 21 homes sold.

Median property values hover around $60,000 to $70,000 compared to the $200,000 median home value east of York Street, according to the United States Census in a 2015 estimate.

"I would say within the next 18 months, we'll see the trends and what's going to happen," said Campbell County PVA Dan Braun. "Is it going to improve the area? Will it drive up the price because of a better thoroughfare?"

Goodbye public housing

The highway has already altered housing.

Gone are the public housing projects that once dominated this neighborhood.

To make way for the new highway, the city and federal government over the past two years demolished the 171 public housing units in the Peter G. Noll public housing complex. The residents were dispersed throughout the region.

A decade earlier, 192 units were torn down for Ovation.

Those who work with the poor in Newport's west end don't see the poor getting pushed out yet.

Neighborhood Foundations, formerly known as the Newport Housing Authority, has built new homes and rehabbed old ones into affordable housing that low-income people can buy.

Low-income people have an option, said Tammy Weidinger, president of the Brighton Center, a nonprofit charitable organization based in western Newport.

"That's the key to working toward a better Newport where there's a place for everybody," Weidinger said.

Debate rages: Preserve or tear down?

Most people on the west side don’t deny change is coming. But they differ on the type of change.

Homeowners want to see the old housing preserved with the creation of a national historic district.

Micky McElwain and a group of residents have photographed 1,400 homes on Newport's west end this past year. The research will go into an application made by city to the National Park Service. They want a historic district to extend from York west to the new Ky. 9 and from 12th to Eighth streets.

The neighborhood has some of the oldest buildings in the city, going back to the first half of the 19th century. The corner storefronts from long gone businesses remain.

"One of the things we don't want to see is developers coming in and tearing down buildings and putting up apartments, the things you see in New York," McElwain said.

A national historic district doesn’t restrict what homeowners can do to their properties, but does make them eligible for historic tax credits if they follow guidelines.

If residents want tough historic restrictions, they can create a local historic district later, McElwain said.

Not everyone agrees. Realtors, such as Perry, think a historic district limits the city.

Newport’s west side housing stock is nothing like the east side's, Perry said.

"We're not turning around West Newport by calling it historic," Perry said.

'Now I have hope'

For many longtime residents, they see a bright future for their home.

Newport’s west side isn’t the same one Michelle Corbette grew up in two decades ago. For one, there seem to be fewer drug dealers, she said.

The 28-year-old has lived in Newport’s west side for most of her life, except when she attended NKU.

She moved back recently into a building her parents own. It’s an old carryout with apartments, a very common design in the neighborhood.

“When I grew up here, it was shady,” Corbette said. “It was crack alley.”

Police believe recent drug sweeps reduced criminal activity. No one has murdered anyone in Newport in the past three years, an unusual stretch in the 17 years he’s been with the police department, Newport Police Chief Tom Collins said.

“The drug thing has always been an issue here,” he said. “It was law enforcement’s targeted efforts that I attribute to the reduction.”

The streets are more inviting than when she was a child, Corbette said.

She walks the streets of her neighborhood almost daily with her beagle, Bernie Sanders.

“Now I have hope,” Corbette said. “I’ve watched it get better. A few years ago, I thought I was a dreamer.”