Evolving Historical Tourism Narratives in Cincinnati, Ohio's Over-the-Rhine Neighborhood
By Lydia Smith
Funded by the Central Region Humanities Center, supported by the Ohio University Department of Geography
I've longed to reconcile disparate narratives between the suburb I grew up in and the city that it defines itself in relation to. Through launching my urban history project about storied downtown neighborhood Over-the-Rhine, it was my hope to transform the way I thought about "hometown" and 21st century gentrification processes. What was being sold, versus what was being told. This project evolved from a previous project about sustainable housing initatives. Through this case study, I believe I have broken through the nostalgia barrier.
A Cincinnati postcard from 1944 // J. Louis Motz News Company, Union News Company, Curt Teich
Methods
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Field research and observation of OTR from August 2024 to February 2025
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Personal interviews with historians, organization members and residents
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Content analysis of tourism brochures and city advertising
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Local newspapers – The Enquirer, Cincinnati Magazine
A Brief History of Over-the-Rhine
An industrial powerhouse whose convenient location alongside the Ohio River enabled steamboat shipping, 19th century Cincinnati was deemed “the Queen of the West” as well as “Porkopolis” for its many pork-processing factories. The OTR neighborhood, confined by Central Parkway to the south and west, is one of the city’s key historic districts. The area got its name for its large German population, which was once the largest diaspora German community in the country. The Miami-Erie Canal separated the German enclave from the rest of the downtown, thus earning the analogy to the European “Rhine” river. As manufacturing peaked, more tenements popped up, and by the late 1800s, the area had more than 75,000 residents, rendering it more densely populated than some parts of Manhattan at the time.
Cartoons depicting typical OTR "characters from an Over-the-Rhine scrapbook, sketched by Henry Farny in D.J. Kenny's Illustrated Cincinnati.
Contact
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