From the picture of the “model apartment”, it appears to be the apartment we lived in. The door to the left of the fireplace (it was frustrating it did not work)lead to the master bedroom with a typical small bathroom of the time. Most bedroom and bathrooms were tiny compared to the huge living areas.
The living room must have been minimally 25 X 30 feet, with huge windows (as seen) and sills all along the entire apartment. The second room shown is the huge dining room, also with windows all around. No need for blinds, curtains, etc. in that The Belvedere stood huge over the area. Privacy assured.
The open doorway shown lead to a small kitchen with a magnificient separate pantry, glass doors and all. Past the kitchen was the maids quarters. It had a narrow hallway that lead to the right to a nice size second maids(?) bedroom we used as a study and to the left, a separate bathroom same size as the master. We used the maids area long hallway to keep our bycycles in. At the end of that hallway was a second/back entry door to the apartmentfrom the main hall, probably meant to assure “the family” was not disturbed by the coming and goings of “the help”.
My dear friend lived in the split version of our apartment on another floor. It was easy to break up the apartments, especially our since you entered many apartment into a large foyer, a room in itself, so, when the apartments were split up the foyer entry became a common hall to each apartment.
The apartment on the right, with the huge living room with fireplace, has added a “kitchenette” in the left area of the living room, the original master bedroom and bathroom.
The apartment on the left turned the huge dining room into a living room, had the origninal kitchen and maids quarters. That would be the main bedroom and bathroom. Either choice, you could not lose.
I do not know if they still have the “Concierge Open Mail Boxes”. I would think not, but they were a “touch of Class” at the time.

I still have our original lease for our apartment from 1969. We paid $175.00 a month.
What more need be said?

When we returned to the New York area and could afford it, we bought a house built in 1900 that emulated The Belvedere. It required a lot of renovation, which was a labor of love and memeories.

Thank you for this memory tour.

The Belvedere attracts some very interesting people, and you actually get to know them. We always enjoy coming over for a chat and a glass of something. And most of the units are very uniquely decorated. We even have a pipe organ in the building.

With Avondale right across the street, the Belvedere is centrally located yet affordable. Condo fee looks expensive, but only because most of the units are so huge, per square foot it’s right in line with other condos. And where else do you get a 24-hour door person to receive your mail, take care of your car and help you get your groceries inside?

Then there is the clever construction: The builders wanted to attract affluent empty-nesters from the surrounding mansions. So they sent the architect on a tour of New York apartment buildings first, to get ideas and pick the finest, and that shows. The Belvedere is, if one of the major newspaper articles is correct, the first “poured-in-place concrete” apartment building in the U.S., and designed to be fireproof. A few years back, we had invited someone from the fire department to a homeowners’ meeting to give us a talk about fire safety, and he told us we could stay in our units if we couldn’t see smoke in the hallway. And it seems to be true: there was a major fire on the 11th floor in 1996, with damage estimated at $100,000, but it remained contained to one apartment.
The building has no north side, only a north corner. Its two wings are completely separated from each other, connected only at ground level and through the roof garden. The latter is great for parties, and you can see the whole city from there, including the downtown fireworks. Each side has two elevators and two staircases.
Power supply is safer than elsewhere in the city because we are hooked up directly to the substation down the street. We only lose power when that substation goes off the grid. The big 2008 power outage passed us by.
The floor plans are not cookie cutter, they have some fun angles. We actually have the old wood floors, and had our doors stripped of a rainbow of paint layers – including orange, must have been the 70s. Beneath the paint the doors are simply gorgeous, made of a specific kind of walnut wood (circassian). We heard that the trees all died from a disease shortly after the Belvedere was built, and all the wood that exists in the U.S. today is from those trees that were felled back then and put in storage. I don’t know whether that’s completely true, but try to shop for it online and you find that it’s used only in some antique furniture and for rifles. You can easily spend more than $1000 for one rifle stock made of it. The first person to paint that wood must have been insane!

Over the last five years we have replaced the old boilers and completely repaired our heating system, and we have selected new windows to replace the originals with something that insulates a lot better and looks just the same from the outside. Owners can put those new windows in at their leisure, and I estimate about a quarter of them have done so by now. We have had the new windows for a good year now, and they make a huge difference! We live on the north corner, and last winter we turned on the heat maybe four or five times. Similar story in the summer, our cooling bills were much lower. Outside noise is also much reduced.
We had considered central air, but with us living about halfway up the building, that would have been very expensive, plus we would have had to have some of our ceilings lowered, a thought we didn’t like. So we just put in new window units.

Over the years I have collected many documents related to the building’s history, so I could go on, but I think I’ll stop here. Just this as a closing statement: the Belvedere is a true treasure of Cincinnati, and I will live here as long as I possibly can!

Christine