where he created a sequence of carefully designed, gradually unfolding views that maximized dramatic distant vistas over the Mill Creek Valley.91In 1854, Strauch was hired by Spring Grove Cemetery to serve as landscape gardener, receiving $700 a year. His first task called for the improvement of the low ground on each side of the railroad on the eastern edge of the cemetery. 92In April of the next year, Strauch was promoted to superintendent of Spring Grove Cemetery. 93During Strauchs employment with the cemetery he transformed the grounds from, as he described, a marble yard where monuments are for sale into a model for rural or lawn-type cemeteries and landscape architecture nationwide. 94Well-known French opera singer Emma Calve said of Cincinnati only a place with a heart and soul could make for their dead a more magnificent park that any which exists for the living.95Spring Grove Cemetery and sixteen other contributing resources located within the cemetery are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The cemetery became a National Historic Landmark in 2007, an honor bestowed on properties that played a major role in the development of the nation. Spring Grove Cemetery is noted as being nationally significant as an original model for the landscape lawn concept, and having a major influence in landscape architecture. It has been cited as the first example of the Rural Cemetery movement west of the eastern seaboard states.96Washington ParkBy the mid 1800s, Cincinnatis lower basin was densely populated. Needing greenspace, the city acquired six acres that had served as a cemetery between 1855 and 1863. Washington Park, in Cincinnatis Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, was established. The park served as a center for entertainment, hosted a number of political rallies and festivals including May Fest, which is still celebrated today. The parks average weekly attendance during the summer of 1893 was 12,000, just five years after the Joseph Earnshaw Engineering Company surveyed the location. Following a major renovation in 2012, Washington Park is again a premiere cultural and entertainment hub in Cincinnati.36