Councilman Jim Tarbell is both a serious and a light-hearted man, a politician for whom dissembling and hyperbole seem completely out of character.

In the first of what has become two interviews with Jim (pressing business disallowed him from meeting our deadline for the second half), I found him totally committed to a renewed and rejuvenated downtown/city. If you go up to the top of the Carew Tower, you see a pie-shaped city, which absolutely includes downtown, Over-the-Rhine, and the West End, he said, offering visual architectural proof of what earlier corporate leaders clearly saw as constituting the city.

In modern times, he sees the 60's as the turning point away from the three downtown areas, because of the failure of mixing culture with mixed-use income neighborhoods, which might have encouraged people to stay or move back. He longs for the times when a community leader like Irma Lazarus would speak up and speak out; he sees an overall lack of leadership as a critical problem, also believing that, for example, George Shaefer of Fifth Third Bank has far more clout here than directly elected Mayor Charlie Luken does. And with the Republican Party divided, as Tarbell sees it, other people who are committed to downtown/O-T-R in particular, don't have the clout to see it through.

There's already so much in place, he added, it was so well done in the first place -- but it (O-T-R) will come back again. Tarbell believes that we must pull city and county together, meaning the creation of some form of metropolitan government, as Indianapolis and Columbus have. Does he think this will happen here? No. The cost of all the city's rehab needs is the same as the sales tax we voted in for the stadiums, implying that the money for downtown O-T-R/West End is there, but without any funding mechanism. He believes we need light rail badly. And the last mayor-driven effort here was Mayor Eugene Ruehlmann's new/newly rejuvenated Fountain Square. That was in 1960.

The Nell Surber reign as City Development Director coincided perfectly with an indifferent corporate leadership. What the city got was lots of new corporate towers and nothing else, although Neil and Arn Bortz at Towne Properties had been ready to recycle downtown buildings into upscale loft living. They were repeatedly blocked, leaving one-sided development. Now the housing exists, both in O-T-R and downtown - the newest big player being Tom Williams (Western Southern) and, still, Towne. In the Surber era, the guys with the money weren't interested in downtown housing, which became a national priority by the 80's, starting with a Baltimore firm (presumably The Rouse Corp.). Virtually none of the corporate people lives in the city.

The original Over-the-Rhine consisted of 50-60,000 units of housing stock; now it?s around 25-30,000. There's a huge amount of architecture, convenience, with easy access to Findlay Market, the renovated downtown library. Within a few blocks there's Broadway, SCPA, Music Hall, he added, and close to the Lloyd Library, St. Peters, and the Fire Museum. How do we get off base with so little time? Tarbell worries that if one corporate headquarters were to leave the city, we could be moving into crisis management. We began to discuss the art institutions downtown (remember: downtown to Tarbell means the city itself plus Over-the-Rhine and the West End), or skirting the edges of downtown, including the surprise success of the Pendleton Building (almost all artist studios). I sometimes wonder if corporate leaders are really aware of the genuine knowledge of business techniques which are now very well understood by many arts leaders; the droit de seigneur mentoring of arts institutions no longer need be so constant.

Tarbell's eyes lit up as he began to speak of the possibility of linking one CEO and one savvy arts leader up to ten pairs for a start. Each can speak the others language, but, just maybe, the beginnings of a larger understanding of what could be might emerge. Corporate leaders are not lugs and arts leaders no longer frolic amongst the tulips. I was thinking of George Shaefer and Melody Sawyer Richardson working as a team. The first half of this interview stopped with this tantalizing idea.

A special thanks to Artwhirled for another great interview.

Stay tuned to iRhine.com for Part Two of this interview...