A stretch of stairway in Cincinnati’s CUF neighborhood that spent more than a century without even a name is about to get something rarer still: a working orchard planted and tended by neighbors. Spring in Our Steps, the nonprofit that has spent years clearing brush and litter from the city’s public stairways, has secured a lease as it plans to develop an edible, publicly accessible orchard at the Fig Alley Steps.
The project has involved years of planning, including securing the lease and preparing the site for planting, as reported by WCPO 9 News. The Cincinnati City Council met on June 10, 2026. The organization, whose mission focuses on improving public stairways through art, cleanup efforts and green spaces, considers the orchard a way to steward public space, per the WCPO report.
A Stairway That Waited Over a Century for a Name
The Fig Alley Steps themselves carry a longer backstory than the orchard alone suggests. The stairway sat unnamed from the 1890s until April 2023, when Cincinnati City Council officially christened it following a joint proposal from Spring in Our Steps and University of Cincinnati researchers, honoring a prominent nearby fig tree, according to the City of Cincinnati Department of Transportation and Engineering. That naming led to a $26,300 cleanup, wayfinding and mural project funded jointly by the city and the university. The stairway project was revealed on September 23, 2023.
Ella Schultian, an intern with Spring in Our Steps who studies urban planning and has worked with the organization for almost a year, told WCPO that watching the project approach physical fruition is rewarding. The group now plans to continue preparing the site, managing invasive plants and developing the orchard, with planting to begin once the site is ready, per founder Christian Huelsman. The station reports that the coming winter months offer an opportunity to finalize plans and prepare for early spring work.
One Stairway Among Hundreds Still Waiting
Cincinnati has roughly 360 public stairways, many of them overgrown, per the same WCPO account, and Fig Alley represents just one node in a network that Spring in Our Steps has spent over a decade trying to document and revive. The group’s January 2024 digital inventory mapped 383 public stairways citywide using data from the Department of Transportation and Engineering’s 2022 inspection, funded through the American Rescue Plan Act, according to Spring in Our Steps. That survey was the city’s first comprehensive stairway count in a decade…