Cincinnati

• 1. Introduction

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  Cincinnati sits at the place where the Ohio River bends north, and for a long time that bend was everything. When Mathias Denman, Colonel Robert Patterson, and Israel Ludlow stepped off a boat onto the northern bank in 1788, they were standing at the mouth of the Licking River, a crossing that would funnel goods, people, and conflict for the next two centuries. They named the settlement Losantiville, a cobbled-together word from French and Latin meaning "town opposite the mouth of the Licking." That awkward name lasted only two years before a governor renamed it after a society of Revolutionary War officers, who had named themselves after a Roman farmer-dictator who gave up power and went back to his fields. The name stuck, and so did the city's peculiar identity: a border town that called itself the Paris of America, a northern city with southern roots, a place that gave the world Cincinnati chili, the first professional baseball team, and a subway system that was never finished.

  How did a settlement on a riverbank become the economic hub of a three-state region? What did it mean to live where the free North and the slave South pressed against each other across a strip of water? And why does a city of 309,317 people, according to the 2020 census, carry the cultural weight of a place ten times its size?

• 2. The River Made It

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  In 1811, steamboats arrived on the Ohio River and the city's commercial life changed almost overnight. Cincinnati connected itself to St. Louis and New Orleans, trading pork products and hay downriver while pulling in goods from the growing interior. By 1850 the population had reached 115,000, a number that had nearly tripled from 1810 to 1830 alone, when the city grew from 9,642 to 24,831 residents.

  The Miami Canal, begun on the 21st of July 1825, did for inland trade what the river did for southern commerce. The first section opened for business in 1827, linking Cincinnati to nearby Middletown; by 1840 it reached all the way to Toledo. Then came the Little Miami Railroad, chartered in 1836 to connect Cincinnati toward the ports of Sandusky Bay on Lake Erie. Each new line of transport made Cincinnati more central.

  The Ohio River was also a boundary line in a more fraught sense. Fugitive slaves used the crossing at Cincinnati to reach the North, and the city had numerous Underground Railroad stations. Levi Coffin made the Cincinnati area the center of his anti-slavery efforts from 1847 onward. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in the city for a time, met escaped slaves firsthand, and drew on their accounts when she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852. The same river that carried pork barrels south carried people north toward freedom.

  The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 made that crossing more dangerous, requiring citizens in free states to assist in recapturing escaped slaves. Cincinnati's location on the border made it a flashpoint. The city's 1829 anti-black riots drove approximately 1,200 black residents out of the city and into Canada, and the aftermath prompted the first Negro Convention, held in Philadelphia in 1830. White mobs attacked black neighborhoods again in 1836 and 1842, with a crowd of 700 pro-slavery men destroying a press run by James M. Birney, publisher of the anti-slavery weekly The Philanthropist. The Ohio River was never just a trade route.

• 3. German Roots, Jewish Reform

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  In 1830, residents of German heritage made up roughly 5 percent of Cincinnati's population. By 1900, more than 60 percent of the city's population was of Prussian background. That shift happened in waves: early migrants from Pennsylvania and the Upper South, then a surge after the German revolutions of 1848-49 brought thousands of newcomers who brought their trades, their churches, their language, and their festivals.

  The neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine preserves their most visible legacy. Its ornate brick buildings were constructed primarily between 1865 and the 1880s, and the district ranks among the largest and most intact urban historic districts in the United States. The neighborhood's name came from the canal that once separated it from downtown, which German residents compared to the Rhine River at home.

  Among the lasting intellectual contributions of Cincinnati's German-Jewish community was the Reform Judaism movement in the United States. Rabbi Isaac M. Wise led the effort to adapt Jewish practice to the conditions of American life and the ideas of the Enlightenment. Hebrew Union College, the seminary Wise founded, continues to train Reform rabbis today under the name Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion.

  The Irish who arrived in the late 1840s alongside the Germans entered an already tense city at the bottom of its economy, competing with black workers for the lowest-paying work. James Gamble, an Irish immigrant who founded Procter and Gamble alongside William Procter, was also a devout Methodist who donated funds to build Methodist churches throughout Greater Cincinnati. The city's cultural institutions grew out of this dense, often contentious mixing of communities, and the Oktoberfest Zinzinnati and Bockfest festivals that Cincinnati holds today trace directly back to that 19th-century immigration.

• 4. Porkopolis, Queen City, Paris

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  Cincinnati accumulated nicknames like sediment. The first professional baseball team in American history, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, gave the city a claim on the national pastime, and the Cincinnati Reds inherited that distinction. The city's 1879 designation as "chief city of Ohio" in the New American Cyclopaedia reflected a dominance that lasted throughout much of the 19th century, when Cincinnati ranked among the top ten U.S. cities by population.

  "Porkopolis" came from the city's dominance in pork processing. When Cincinnati celebrated its bicentennial in 1988 and commissioned British artist Andrew Leicester to create a sculpture for Bicentennial Commons, he topped four steamboat smokestacks with winged pigs as a nod to that history. The initial public reaction was derision. The city came around. The Flying Pig Marathon now carries the nickname forward each year.

  "Queen City" has older credentials. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalized the term in his 1854 poem "Catawba Wine," though the phrase first appeared in an 1819 newspaper article. The late 19th century brought another layer: with ambitious architectural projects like Music Hall, the Cincinnatian Hotel, and the Roebling Suspension Bridge, the city earned the comparison to Paris from its own admirers.

  The flood history written into Cincinnati's geography shapes the city in ways most visitors don't notice. The Ohio reached its all-time high water mark of 79 feet, cresting on the 26th of January 1937, and that flood was among the worst in the nation's history. The flood walls the city built afterward still stand along Fort Washington Way and at Yeatman's Cove, keeping the downtown dry while the river runs beneath them.

• 5. Riots and Reckoning

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  The Courthouse riots of 1884 began with a single manslaughter verdict that much of the public viewed as a gross miscarriage of justice for what many considered a clear case of murder. Over three days, 56 people were killed and more than 300 were injured, making it one of the most destructive riots in American history. The riots ended the political reign of Republican boss Thomas C. Campbell.

  The Avondale riot of 1967 had a different origin. Years of police abuse and deteriorating living conditions in the black community of Avondale had built up pressure, and the disputed June 1967 conviction of Posteal Laskey Jr. triggered the explosion. One person died and 404 were arrested. Less than a year later, in April 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. set off a second riot in which two people were killed, at least 220 were injured, and 260 were arrested. President Lyndon B. Johnson's Commission on Civil Disorders specifically cited Cincinnati, blaming the riots on segregated poverty and on a police practice of stopping black residents "on foot or in cars without obvious basis" while applying loitering laws disproportionately.

  In April 2001, a police officer fatally shot Timothy Thomas, a young unarmed black man, during a foot pursuit related largely to outstanding traffic warrants. The resulting riots drew national attention. Afterward, the ACLU, the Cincinnati Black United Front, the city, and its police union reached a community policing agreement that was subsequently used as a model across the country.

  In 2015, unarmed motorist Samuel DuBose was fatally shot by University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing during a routine traffic stop. The legal proceedings that followed in late 2016 became a sustained focus of national news coverage and drew protests linked to the Black Lives Matter movement. On the 4th of January 2022, Aftab Pureval took office as the 70th mayor of Cincinnati, the first person of Tibetan descent to serve as mayor of a major American city.

• 6. Fortune 500 on the Ohio

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  Greater Cincinnati holds the 28th-largest economy in the United States and the fifth largest in the Midwest, with a gross domestic product for the region of $127 billion measured in 2015. Several Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in the city or its immediate suburbs: Kroger, Procter and Gamble, GE Aerospace, Western and Southern, Fifth Third Bank, Cincinnati Financial, Cintas, and American Financial Group.

  Kroger is the largest employer in the city, with more than 20,000 local employees. The four next largest employers are Cincinnati Children's Hospital, TriHealth, the University of Cincinnati, and St. Elizabeth Healthcare. The city's cost of living ran 8 percent below the national average at the most recent measure.

  The Procter and Gamble connection reaches into unexpected corners. The company, which traces back to Irish immigrant James Gamble and his partner William Procter, produced the daytime television drama The Edge of Night from 1956 to 1980, featuring the Cincinnati skyline in its opening sequence. The Filet-O-Fish, now a global fast food staple, was invented in 1962 by Lou Groen, the owner of the first McDonald's franchise in the Cincinnati area, as a way to serve Catholic customers who abstained from meat on Fridays.

  King Records, a Cincinnati label, helped launch the career of James Brown and brought him back to the city repeatedly to record. Louis Armstrong made some of his first recordings in the Cincinnati area, at Gennett Records, as did Jelly Roll Morton, Hoagy Carmichael, and Bix Beiderbecke. The Cincinnati May Festival Chorus has operated continuously since 1880, anchoring what is recognized as the oldest continuous choral festival in the Western Hemisphere.

• 7. The Unfinished Subway

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  In 1917, Cincinnati voters approved spending $6 million to build a subway, a 16-mile loop planned to ring the city through the suburbs of St. Bernard, Norwood, Oakley, and Hyde Park before returning downtown. World War I delayed the start of construction until 1920, and by then inflation had driven the cost past $13 million. The Oakley section was never built.

  Mayor Murray Seasongood, who also led the 1923 reform movement that ended machine politics and introduced the city's at-large council system, argued the subway was too expensive to finish. Construction stalled after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The tunnels remain under the city today, unused.

  The streetcar the city does have opened for service on the 9th of September 2016, running directly above the unfinished subway on Central Parkway. It covers more than 3.5 miles of track and logged annual ridership of over 846,000 in 2022. The Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, located in Hebron, Kentucky, ranks as the 5th busiest airport in the United States by cargo traffic and is the fastest-growing cargo airport in North America, serving as a global hub for Amazon Air and DHL Aviation. The city that never finished its subway still moves an enormous volume of freight through the sky above the Kentucky fields where its airport was built.