After 99 years, Cincinnati to restore street names erased by anti-German hysteria

Cincinnati wasn't always proud of its German heritage.

While oompah music will reverberate throughout Cincinnati this weekend for Oktoberfest, the echo of the anti-German hysteria a century earlier has remained.

It's in the names of 10 streets, which the city renamed during World War I.

Now after nearly a century, German names will once again adorn these roads.

More: Let's right a wrong by restoring German street names

City leaders, a representative of Germany, and the descendants of German immigrants will gather Thursday in Over-the-Rhine on Yukon Street – soon to once again be Hanover Street – to celebrate what they see as righting an old act of bigotry.

Don Heinrich Tolzmann , of Green Township, has worked to get these street signs changed for 20 years.

"I'll be really happy that finally the wrongs of World War I will be addressed and made right," said Tolzmann, president of the German-American Citizens League.

Three streets will go back to their original German names: Woodrow (Berlin) Street in Price Hill and Stonewall (Hamburg) and Yukon (Hanover) Streets, both in Over-the-Rhine.

They're small streets. Only one, Yukon, has a residence – a rental unit whose owner, the Model Group has supported the name change, according to city officials.

Seven streets will retain their current names, but the original German names of seven streets will hang below the street signs as honorary designations.

They are: Republic (Bremen) Street in OTR; Edgecliff (Brunswick) Point and Merrimac (Hapsburg) Street, both in Walnut Hills; Panama (Vienna) Street in California; Orion (Wilhelm) Street and Beredith (Schumann) Place, both in Pleasant Ridge and Connecticut (Frankfort) Avenue in College Hill.

That way residents won't have to change their address labels.

1918 headline: 'Versenkt!'

The Cincinnati City Council didn't have qualms about address labels on April 9, 1918. That's when it voted in a unanimous decision to change all streets named for German cities or historical figures to American names. They saw these names as German propaganda, Tolzmann said.

A headline in The Enquirer that day cheered: “Versenkt! Hun Names Torpedoed” (Versenkt means 'sunk.')

Even saying the word 'German' was taboo, with papers opting for Hun or Teutonic.

So in lower Price Hill, Berlin Street became Woodrow Street, after President Woodrow Wilson. The rest were chosen at random by City Councilman John Bauer from a book, according to an April 9, 1918 article in The Enquirer.

City Council must vote on the name changes, which it will do next Wednesday. City Councilman Chris Seelbach, who led the effort, doesn't anticipate any opposition.

The 100th anniversary this year of the United States involvement in World War I seemed an appropriate time to do it, he said.

Seelbach hopes the street names remind people today the damage caused by fear and scapegoating entire groups of people.

"It shows history does repeat itself," Seelbach said. "Too often we see entire ethnicities or races blamed for the actions of a small few. Whether it was German descendants in 1918 or Syrian refugees in 2016, we can't keep fearing and blaming entire cultures within our society."

The street signs will be unveiled at the ceremony on Thursday but won't go up until the city council approves them next Wednesday.

The ceremony Thursday won't end the fight for some descendants of German immigrants. Doug Newberry, of Kennedy Heights, said he's disappointed some of the names are honorary. He wants to find some streets in the city where the residents would agree to rename with some of the censored German names.

It was Newberry's Enquirer editorial on April 15, 2017 that Seelbach credited for renewing the push for renaming the streets.

"Based on their names and heritage, people were being discriminated against, and city council approved this," Newberry said. "It was a wrong thing to do 100 years ago. 100 years is long enough."

Reporter Jeff Suess contributed to this report.