How Was Cincinnati Built

Cincinnati built densely because the hills left it no choice, and much of what it built in the nineteenth century is still standing.

Italianate Over-the-Rhine

Between about 1850 and 1890 the German quarter filled with three- and four-storey brick tenements and shophouses in the Italianate style — tall narrow windows with decorative hoods, bracketed cornices, and shopfronts below. Several hundred blocks survive, which is among the largest intact collections of nineteenth-century urban architecture in the United States. It survived because the neighbourhood was too poor to redevelop, and has been progressively restored since the 2000s.

Brewery cellars

Lager needed cold storage before refrigeration, so brewers dug vaulted cellars ten metres or more below the streets. Miles of them survive under Over-the-Rhine, sealed at Prohibition and now partly reopened for tours.

The Roebling bridge

John Roebling’s suspension bridge across the Ohio opened in 1866 with the longest span in the world at the time. He used it to prove the methods he would apply to the Brooklyn Bridge, which his son completed.

Union Terminal

A 1933 Art Deco terminal with a half-dome of 55 metres, built when rail traffic was already declining, and preserved by conversion to museums.

Music Hall

Built in 1878 on the site of a pauper burial ground, a High Victorian Gothic hall in red brick with a rose window, funded by public subscription and still in use for symphony, opera and ballet. Its restoration in 2017 was one of the larger heritage projects in the American Midwest.

Inclines

Five funicular railways once carried streetcars and wagons up the hillsides; none survive, but the routes are visible.