Soapboxmedia – American Sign Museum from Chas! Pangburn on Vimeo.

The museum is currently in Phase 3 of its 4-phase move into a new, expanded, permanent home in Camp Washington.  They’re still raising money, which you can help out with by purchasing a paver or painting a panel!

See here for past coverage of the Sign Museum.

First up is a long piece CityBeat did on the Vent Haven Ventriloquism Museum here in town, the only major public museum devoted to ventriloquism.

While it risks cliché to say this, the [Vent Haven] museum can legitimately be tagged a unique experience because of that. It regularly gets international attention. The New York Times last month did a major feature praising it (as well as another hard-to-see Greater Cincinnati museum, the American Sign Museum). National Public Radio has also featured it, and a Web site called Internationaltraveler.com listed it as one of the world’s 10 weirdest museums.

From Vent Haven Ventriloquism Museum

With a video!

Founded in 1975, the non-profit railway museum, located in the four-acre Latonia Yard, has a permanent collection of 37 pieces of historic equipment from the seven railroads entering Cincinnati.

So says Building Cincinnati, in a post about May’s Covington After Hours, about the Railway Museum of Greater Cincinnati.

I’ve probably driven down Decoursey Ave. in Latonia about a thousand times, so I’m fairly familiar.  I know about Johnny’s Toys and the now-vacant Value City store.  But I never knew there was a whole museum dedicated to trains hidden back there!

After a bit more digging, I turned up an old Cincinnati Post story (on the Wayback Machine) on the museum.

Some people never stop playing with trains.

Take 84-year-old Bill Ewing of Anderson Township, whose ”toy” is a real, bright yellow B&O Railroad caboose, for which he paid $2,500 15 years ago.

He keeps it in the rail yard of the Railway Museum of Greater Cincinnati, in Covington’s Latonia neighborhood, where he and other volunteers work on the museum’s 80-piece collection every Wednesday and Saturday.

… In the rail yard, each car has a unique story, and Ewing is eager to tell them.

A tiny green engine with a No. 1 on its face used to push coal into a power house, he said.

He helped paint a dark green passenger car, which he said was at least 75 years old. ”It’s priceless,” he said.

A red passenger car, which had two master bedrooms and a shower, was one of four end cars for the Broadway Limited in New York, volunteer Bill Williams said.

There’s also a long article up on Roadside America.

A stone’s throw from Hamilton, some 25 miles from downtown Cincinnati, lies a public park with monumental sculpture and an underground house.Pyramid Hill sprawls over 265 acres of rolling hills, man-made lakes, thick woodlands and butterfly-filled meadows. Overlooking the Great Miami River, it is a contemporary art museum outdoors – a place where visitors can hike or drive through natural galleries filled with the splendor of art.

More at Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park, the Enquirer, and Cincinnati USA.

CET conducted this interview with Harry Wilks, the park and museum’s founder and director in 2007.