Ohio Valley, 10,000 years to now
Cincinnati began as a speculator's river landing called Losantiville in 1788, renamed itself after a Roman farmer-general two years later, and spent the first half of the nineteenth century as the largest city west of the Appalachians. Pork paid for the first fifty years, German brewing and river freight paid for the next fifty, and machine tools, soap and jet engines paid for the twentieth century. The hills that kept the city compact also kept its oldest neighborhoods standing, which is why Cincinnati still has more intact nineteenth-century streetscape than almost any American city its size.
Photo: Taylor Thompson / Pexels
Quick facts
Before 1788
The Ohio Valley was not empty land waiting for a survey. Adena and Hopewell peoples built burial mounds and geometric earthworks across the region between roughly 800 BCE and 500 CE — the Miamisburg and Fort Ancient works survive nearby, and Cincinnati's own mounds stood where downtown is now until they were leveled for streets in the early 1800s. By the eighteenth century this stretch of the river was Shawnee and Miami country, with Delaware and Wyandot presence, used for hunting and for the villages along the Great and Little Miami rivers. The Ohio River was the boundary the 1768 and 1774 treaties kept redrawing, and American settlement north of it was contested by force for a full decade after the first cabins went up.
1788–1802
Mathias Denman, Robert Patterson and John Filson bought the section opposite the Licking River mouth from John Cleves Symmes and landed settlers there in December 1788. Filson coined the name Losantiville — a Latin-Greek-French mash meaning 'the city opposite the mouth of the L[icking]' — and was killed by Native fighters before the year was out. What made the settlement survive was the U.S. Army: Fort Washington was built in 1789 and became the staging ground for the campaigns against the Northwest Confederacy, including St. Clair's catastrophic 1791 defeat and Anthony Wayne's victory at Fallen Timbers in 1794. Governor Arthur St. Clair renamed the town Cincinnati in 1790. The Treaty of Greenville in 1795 opened Ohio to settlement, and the soldiers' payroll turned the landing into a town.
1802–1850
Steamboats changed everything. Cincinnati was building its own by 1811, and the river put it at the center of a national trade in salt pork, whiskey, flour and furniture. Hog drovers walked their animals down the streets to packing houses that turned out barreled pork for the South and lard oil for the lamps of the East — by the 1830s the city handled more hogs than anywhere on earth and had earned the name Porkopolis, which locals used with more pride than embarrassment. The Miami and Erie Canal opened north from downtown in 1827, and the population went from about 2,500 in 1810 to 115,000 in 1850, making Cincinnati the sixth-largest city in the country. Germans and Irish arrived in enormous numbers, and the Germans settled the basin north of the canal — the canal they nicknamed the Rhine, which is why the neighborhood is Over-the-Rhine. Being a free city on a slave-state border also made Cincinnati a center of abolitionism and of violence against it: mobs destroyed Black neighborhoods in 1829 and 1841 and wrecked James Birney's abolitionist press in 1836, while Harriet Beecher Stowe, living in Walnut Hills, gathered what became Uncle Tom's Cabin.
1850–1880
German Cincinnati built the city people photograph today. By the 1870s dozens of breweries were operating in and around Over-the-Rhine, cutting lagering tunnels into the hillsides and the basin floor, and the neighborhood's Italianate tenements went up faster than almost anywhere in America — the surviving district is now one of the largest intact nineteenth-century urban areas in the country. John A. Roebling's suspension bridge to Covington opened to traffic on December 1, 1866 with the longest main span in the world, and it is the direct prototype for the Brooklyn Bridge he designed next. In 1869 the Cincinnati Red Stockings became baseball's first openly all-salaried professional team and went undefeated on a national tour, which is why Opening Day is still treated here as a civic holiday. Music Hall opened in 1878, the zoo in 1875 — the second-oldest in the United States — and Spring Grove Cemetery, laid out in 1845, became a model for the American landscape-cemetery movement.
1880–1912
The basin was full and the hilltops were not, so between 1872 and 1890 five steam-powered inclined planes hauled streetcars, wagons and people up to Mount Auburn, Price Hill, Mount Adams, Bellevue and Fairview. Hilltop resorts sat at the top of each one and the neighborhoods that formed around them are still there. The same decades brought the city's worst civil disorder: in March 1884 a manslaughter verdict in a notorious murder case set off three days of rioting that burned the Hamilton County Courthouse and left dozens dead. Out of that disorder came George B. Cox, who ran Cincinnati as a Republican machine boss from the 1880s until reformers broke his organization in the 1910s. Cincinnati also sent William Howard Taft to the White House in 1909 — the only person to serve as both president and chief justice, born in a Mount Auburn house that is now a national historic site.
1913–1945
Reformers replaced the machine with a new charter in 1924 that installed a city manager and proportional representation, and for decades Cincinnati was cited nationally as the best-governed large city in America. The same era produced its most famous failure: the Miami and Erie Canal bed was drained and dug out for a rapid-transit subway, funded by a 1916 bond issue, and construction stopped in 1927 with two miles of finished tunnel and stations that never carried a passenger. Central Parkway was built over the top. Art deco arrived at scale — the Carew Tower in 1930 and Union Terminal in 1933, whose 180-foot half-dome rotunda is still the largest of its kind in the Western Hemisphere. Then in January 1937 the Ohio River crested just under 80 feet, put a fifth of the city underwater, knocked out the water works and the power plant, and forced the flood walls, pumping stations and riverfront clearances that shaped the modern waterfront.
1946–1979
Postwar Cincinnati did what postwar American cities did, at full scale. The 1948 master plan targeted the West End, and between 1958 and the mid-1960s the Kenyon-Barr clearance demolished roughly 2,800 buildings and displaced more than 25,000 people — the overwhelming majority Black — to create the Queensgate industrial district and the right-of-way for Interstate 75. Fountain Square was rebuilt in 1971, Riverfront Stadium opened in 1970 on the old public landing, and the skywalk system tried to lift downtown off the street. What people remember from the decade is the baseball: the Big Red Machine won back-to-back World Series in 1975 and 1976 with Bench, Morgan, Rose and Perez. The decade closed badly — eleven people were crushed to death outside Riverfront Coliseum before a Who concert on December 3, 1979, which ended festival seating in American arenas.
1980–2001
Manufacturing left, the population fell from a 1950 peak of about 504,000 toward 330,000, and Over-the-Rhine — the district now marketed to tourists — became one of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States, with block after block of vacant Italianate buildings. Downtown's answer was suburban-style: a convention center, a skywalk, and stadium politics that produced a 1996 county sales tax for two new venues. The defining event of the period came in April 2001, when a Cincinnati police officer shot and killed Timothy Thomas, an unarmed nineteen-year-old, the fifteenth Black man killed by police in the city since 1995. Four days of unrest followed, along with an economic boycott by national artists and a federal review. The 2002 Collaborative Agreement that came out of it reorganized policing here and is still cited nationally as a model consent process.
2002–today
Great American Ball Park opened in 2003 and Paul Brown — now Paycor — Stadium in 2000, and the land between them became The Banks, with Smale Riverfront Park finishing the connection to the Roebling Bridge. Over-the-Rhine's turnaround, driven largely by the nonprofit developer 3CDC from 2004 onward, rebuilt Washington Park, Music Hall and hundreds of buildings — and produced the displacement argument that still runs through every neighborhood meeting in the city. The streetcar opened in September 2016 on a 3.6-mile loop between the riverfront and Findlay Market, and became fare-free in 2020. FC Cincinnati went from a 2016 expansion side to MLS to a purpose-built stadium in the West End in 2021 and an MLS Supporters' Shield in 2023. The census counted 309,317 people in 2020 — the first increase since 1950.
Lost landmarks
1920–1928, never opened
Two miles of finished tunnel and a handful of complete stations sit under Central Parkway, dug out of the drained Miami and Erie Canal bed after a 1916 bond issue. Inflation ate the budget, the politics soured, and work stopped in 1927 with the money gone. It is the largest abandoned subway system in the United States, structurally sound, occasionally opened for tours, and permanently proposed for reuse.
1872–1948
Mount Auburn, Price Hill, Mount Adams, Bellevue and Fairview each had a steam-powered inclined plane hauling passengers and streetcars up the hillside, usually with a beer garden or resort house at the top. Buses and cars made them redundant; the last, Mount Adams, shut down in 1948. The hilltop street patterns, a few retaining walls and the Bellevue Hill Park terrace are what remain.
1912–1972
The Reds' home in the West End, famous for the terrace incline in left field and for hosting the first night game in major league history on May 24, 1935. The team left for Riverfront Stadium mid-season in 1970 and the park was demolished in 1972. A plaque and a street name mark the site in Queensgate; a replica field sits in Blue Ash.
razed 1958–1960s
A dense, overwhelmingly Black neighborhood of roughly 2,800 buildings and more than 25,000 residents, cleared for the Queensgate industrial district and Interstate 75. The city photographed every building before demolition, and that archive is now the main record of a place that was erased rather than lost. Its displacement reshaped Avondale, Walnut Hills and the West End that survived.
1970–2002
The concrete multipurpose bowl that held the Big Red Machine and the Bengals, built on the old public landing. It was imploded on December 29, 2002, after the ballpark that replaced it was already going up next door. Everything at The Banks stands downstream of that clearance.
1927–1977
A 3,300-seat movie palace on Fountain Square, demolished for a convention hotel and retail complex despite a preservation fight. Its marble entrance arch was saved and reinstalled on the Duke Energy Convention Center — a facade with no building behind it, and the most literal monument to what downtown traded away.
1886–2023
The riverfront amusement park upstream of downtown, whose rides moved to Kings Island in 1972 while the grounds continued as a waterpark and event site around Sunlite Pool, the largest recirculating pool in the world. The park closed for good after the 2023 season and the land was sold for the Andrew J. Brady Music Center's larger festival successor. Riverbend, next door, still runs.
Still standing
Cincinnati kept more of its nineteenth century than almost any city its size, largely because the hills held the basin in place and the money left before the wrecking balls got to everything. What survives survives because it is still being used.
opened December 1, 1866
The longest suspension span in the world when it opened and the prototype for the Brooklyn Bridge. It still carries traffic and a sidewalk you can walk end to end in about fifteen minutes. Start on the Ohio side at Smale Park for the skyline behind you.
opened 1933
The art deco terminal's half-dome rotunda is the largest in the Western Hemisphere, and its Winold Reiss industrial mosaics are the best public art in the city. Inside are the history museum, natural history, a children's museum, an OMNIMAX and the Holocaust and Humanity Center. Amtrak still stops here three days a week.
opened 1878
A High Victorian Gothic pile at the edge of Washington Park, home to the Cincinnati Symphony — founded 1895 — the May Festival, the opera and the ballet. A $143 million restoration finished in 2017. Tours run regularly and the acoustics are the argument for going.
operating since 1855
Ohio's oldest continuously operated public market, in the middle of Over-the-Rhine, with an iron-framed house that predates almost everything around it. Butchers, a fish counter, produce, a biergarten and a Sunday street market. The Opening Day parade starts here.
cut c. 1850s–1919
Beneath the brewery district are stone-and-brick cellars where lager was kept cold before mechanical refrigeration, sealed after Prohibition and reopened by tour operators over the last fifteen years. The Brewing Heritage Trail runs above them. Book ahead; the good tours sell out.
built 1930
A 49-story art deco tower built in thirteen months at the start of the Depression, with an arcade, the Hilton Netherland Plaza hotel and an observation deck near the top. The deck's hours have varied in recent years, but the ground-floor arcade is open and worth the detour on its own.
founded 1843, Mount Lookout building 1873
The oldest professional observatory in the United States, with its 1845 Merz und Mahler refractor still in use — John Quincy Adams came to lay the cornerstone. Public viewing nights run year-round in Mount Lookout.
built 1866
Isaac M. Wise's Moorish Revival synagogue across from City Hall, a national historic landmark and the birthplace of American Reform Judaism. The interior is the single most spectacular room in Cincinnati that most residents have never been inside; visits are by arranged tour.
founded 1845
733 acres, the second-largest cemetery in the country, and a designed landscape that changed how American cemeteries were laid out. Civil War generals, brewers, and the Fleischmann mausoleum. Free, open daily, and effectively a public arboretum.
opened 2005 in Camp Washington
A full indoor street of restored neon and porcelain-enamel signs, plus a working neon shop, covering a century of American storefronts. It is the best hour in the city for seeing what Cincinnati's commercial streets actually looked like before the malls.
Watch
GeoLogic
The Cincinnati story nobody talks about
Why the city grew where it did, why it stopped, and what the river and the hills had to do with both.
YouWalk
Over-the-Rhine walking tour, 4K
An hour on foot through the largest intact nineteenth-century district in the country — the beer-era city, block by block.
Tacit Roam
Findlay Market, end to end
The 1855 market house still doing its original job, which is the shortest way to understand the German basin.
Mileage Mike Travels
The full I-275 loop around Cincinnati
Three states in one drive — the clearest picture of how postwar highway building set the metro's shape.
Notable people
Born in Mount Auburn in 1857, 27th president and later chief justice — the only person to hold both offices. His family home on Auburn Avenue is a national historic site and free to visit.
Lived in Walnut Hills from 1832 to 1850, where she met people who had escaped slavery across the Ohio River. Uncle Tom's Cabin came out of those eighteen years. Her house is a museum.
Born Doris Kappelhoff in Evanston in 1922, the biggest female box-office star in the country in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and later a full-time animal-welfare campaigner.
Born in Avondale in 1946 and spent his first years here before the family moved to New Jersey and Arizona. Cincinnati has a modest claim, but it is a real one.
The 'Cincinnati Cobra,' world heavyweight champion from 1949 to 1951 and one of the finest light-heavyweights in boxing history. He grew up in the West End and is buried in Spring Grove.
Led Crispus Attucks High to Indiana titles, then starred at the University of Cincinnati from 1957 to 1960 and reinvented what a guard could do. His lawsuit against the NBA created modern free agency.
From Anderson Ferry to the Big Red Machine, baseball's all-time hits leader and the most argued-about figure the city has produced. Reinstated posthumously in 2025, decades after his ban.
Over-the-Rhine, the riverfront, Eden Park and the hilltops the inclines opened up.
The basin, the West End, Walnut Hills, Mount Adams, Northside and the rest.
Findlay Market vendors, century-old chili parlors, breweries back in old cellars.