Cincinnati Culture

Cincinnati’s cultural institutions are old for an American city and mostly still funded.

Music

The Cincinnati Symphony dates from 1895, the May Festival choral tradition from 1873, and both perform in Music Hall, an 1878 High Victorian Gothic pile that is among the finest nineteenth-century concert venues in the country. The opera company is one of the oldest in America.

The art museum

Free since 2003, with a collection covering six thousand years, and a strong holding of Cincinnati’s own nineteenth-century art — including Rookwood pottery, an art pottery founded here in 1880 by Maria Longworth Nichols and internationally significant in its day.

Brewing

German brewers built dozens of breweries and the lagering cellars beneath Over-the-Rhine; Prohibition ended all of it, and a substantial craft brewing revival has since taken over some of the same buildings.

Chilli

A Macedonian-Greek invention of the 1920s, spiced with cinnamon and allspice and served over spaghetti. It is a genuine regional cuisine with competing dynasties and a prescribed ordering vocabulary.

Ice cream and goetta

Two local foods carry as much identity as the chilli: Graeter’s ice cream, made in small French pots a couple of gallons at a time with chocolate poured in to set in sheets, and goetta, a German-derived breakfast patty of pork, beef and pinhead oats sliced and fried, which is eaten here and essentially nowhere else.

Writing and broadcasting

Harriet Beecher Stowe lived here for eighteen years and drew on what she saw across the river for Uncle Tom’s Cabin; her house is a museum. The city also has a long broadcasting history, having been an early radio centre, and it produced the writer and humorist Erma Bombeck and a run of television talk hosts.