CINCINNATI

A $4.7 million renovation of downtown's Lytle Park is moving forward. The recent dust-up over trees was not its first controversy.

“It will be the biggest tree in the park by far." Brinkman, a resident of the neighborhood Park Place condos and then-head of the Lytle Park Advisory Council, quickly filed for a temporary restraining order to save the fourth one. They’ll plant plenty of trees, too – seven shade trees on Fourth Street, where the London Planes once stood, and more than four dozen elsewhere in the park. They hired a specialized Texas contractor to move the London Plane in mid-November. The company also paid to relocate the surviving London Plane. By comparison, Cincinnati Parks spent $48 million on Washington Park and $100 million on Smale Riverfront Park, both completed in 2012. Rebuffed, it filed a lawsuit and ultimately agreed to pay Cincinnati Union Bethel $4 million for the property. When finished in the fall, the park will take its place as the centerpiece of a downtown Cincinnati neighborhood distinguished by both rich history and well-heeled neighbors. In 1970, the city planted seven London Plane trees along Fourth Street. When the city moved to condemn the Lytle house to make way for the park, some of Cincinnati’s “most well-to-do citizens … The Tafts donated the site and named it for Charles Phelps Taft’s daughter. In 1809 he built what came to be known as the Lytle estate amid peach trees at Fourth and Pike.