January 11, 1970, Page 411Buy Reprints
CINCINNATI—Whoever thought of touring Cincinnati? Can the city fathers be serious when they invite tourists to this midwest ern metropolis?
They are serious—and with good reason. The city has a rich cultural tra dition that, in its younger days, earned such sobriquets as “Athens of the West” and “Little Paris.” And many people who visit Cincinnati for educational, sci entific, artistic and commercial reasons usually learn that much of the old flavor is still alive.
The city acquired its present title, “Queen City of the West,” from writers and tourists of the early 19th century, when it was the capital and emporium of the Northwest Territories and the na tion's largest inland port.
Charles Dickens, who made a high ly critical tour of America in 1842, de scribed Cincinnati as “a beautiful city, cheerful, thriving, animated. . . . I was quite charmed with the town.” Horace Greeley, in his New York Tribune in 1850, was lavish in his praise and ex pectations that this would become one of the most important cities in the na tion.
Early Greatness
Cincinnati, which had its birth as a pioneer settlement in 1788, within a year of the first Continental Congress, was described by one historian as “the first strictly American city which grew up on the continent. . . . the first great Western city.”
The city has some fascinating ghosts from American history. George Rogers Clark, as a 19‐year‐old surveyor, blazed pioneering trails through what is now its major business district, and Mad Anthony Wayne fought the Indians in the area and opened the territory to white settlement. William Henry Har rison served as his aide‐de‐camp during those campaigns.
Cincinnati was settled In 1788 op posite the mouth of the Licking River and named Losantiville (L, for Licking River; os, Greek for mouth; anti, Latin for opposite, and ville, French for town). When Gen. Arthur St. Clair, the first Governor of the Northwest Territory, visited the settlement in 1790, he is reported to have remarked, as he stepped off the flatboat, “What an awful name, damn it. Call it Cincinnati!”
There are other, less colorful, ac counts of the event.
Military Origin
The town was named for the Society of the Cincinnati, a group of veteran Revolutionary War officers. Like St. Clair, they were proud of being citizen soldiers, willing to fight when needed and eager to return to civilian pursuits when the country was secure. The name originally came from Lucius Quintius Cincinnatus, a Roman military hero who saved Rome from tryanny in the 5th century B.C., and, refusing to be come dictator, returned to his farm after danger had passed.
Cincinnati and the area around it have contributed five Presidents to the country: William Henry Harrison, No. 9; Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, No. 18; Ruther ford B. Hayes, No. 19; Benjamin Harrison, No. 23, and William Howard Taft No. 27.
Gen. Lew Wallace, author of “Ber Hur,” was assigned to defend the city from a Civil War attack that never came. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived here and gathered material for “Uncle Tom's Cabin” when Cincinnati was a key sta tion on the Underground Railroad.
John James Audubon, the artist‐na turalist; Stephen Foster, the song writer and William Holmes McGuffey, author of the first children's readers, all lived here.
As for “firsts” and “oldests” in the nation, Cincinnati can compete with any Eastern city. Among its many credits, it is the home of the first United States Weather Bureau (1869), the first municipal university (1870), the first licensed educational television station and the first Jewish seminary (Hebrew Union College, whose museum is open to the public).
Musical Heights
Its symphony orchestra, which had Fritz Reiner and Leopold Stokowski as conductors, was the first to be sponsored on an around‐the‐world tour by the State Department. Music Hall, home of the orchestra, is one of the world's five concert halls rated most acoustically perfect.
Cincinnati's cultural tradition, partic ularly in music, was inherited from the influx of German immigrants in the 1840's and 1850's. The city was once bilingual, and the area where the Ger mans settled is still called the Over‐the Rhine section.
The city's physical beauty derives from the geography of the area, and its hills form a kind of amphitheater overlooking the Ohio River. Much of this beauty has been preserved in parks and in older residential sections of pleas ing architecture, giant shade trees and curving roads.
Century of Change
Cincinnati is so hilly that it once had five cable cars. One of these climb ed Mount Adams, not far from Eden Park.
This area is still one of the most in teresting sections of town, with its many steeples silhouetted beside the river, angled streets, artists' colony, his toric churches and restored 19th‐cen tury houses. This area is more reminis cent of San Francisco or some European town than of a Midwestern metropolis.
Cincinnati is, of course, not an 18th or 19th‐century city now. It has enjoyed its progress and has suffered some of the side effects of that progress, but it still retains many of those facets that charmed its more famous tourists.
Within walking distance of the cen trally situated Fountain Square Plaza, with its 1871 Tyler Davidson fountain (and its 15 bronze figures sculpted in Munich), are the following:
St. Peter in Chains Cathedral (1844), City Hall (1893) and Isaac M. Wise Temple (1865), with architectural styles that go from Old World to classic Greek to Near Eastern exoticism. Among the impressive modern buildings are the Public Library and Convention Hall. A major sports arena is now under con struction.
There is the Taft Museum, a beautiful 30‐room Federal mansion (1819–20) in which William Howard Taft received notice of his nomination for the Presi dency in 1908. It is open to the public and contains great art treasures, in cluding Rembrandts and Goyas. The home of Harriet Beecher Stowe, farther out in the suburbs, is now a state memorial and museum.
The Wesley Chapel Methodist Church (1831) is the oldest church in continu ous use in the city. William Henry Har rison's funeral was held there in 1841. Unfortunately, this historic building is now scheduled for destruction.
City Hall (1893), with its clock tower and turrets, looks as if it might have come from Munich. On the stair landings are beautiful stained‐glass windows de picting scenes from the early history of Cincinnati.
Parks of Charm
Cincinnati's greatest charm lies in her parks, with their blending of nature, culture and history. One of the city's finest is 184‐acre Eden Park, which was once a vineyard owned by Nicholas Longworth. In 1854, his famous Cataw ba wine was immortalized, along with one of the city's nicknames, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
“And this song of the Vine, This greeting of mine, The winds and the birds shall deliver to the Queen of the West In her garlands dressed By the banks of the Beautiful River.”
When the vineyard, called the “Gar den of Eden,” suffered a destructive blight, Joseph Longworth, Nicholas's son, donated the land to the city to be used as a park.
At one entrance is the Elsinore Tower gateway. This is a stone structure patterned after a gateway at the “Hamlet” castle in Elsinore, Denmark. Nearby are the Museum of Natural History and Planetarium.
Farther up the hills above the city is a replica of the famous “Lupa Ro mana,” the statue of Rome's legendary founders, Romulus and Remus, suckling at the she‐wolf; the replica was given to Cincinnati by Rome in 1931.
Points of Interest
Near the statue, along with an over look of the Ohio River, are the Krohn Conservatory, a large public green house, an art museum and art academy, a bandstand, a modern repertory thea ter and President's Grove.
President's Grove was created in 1882, when the American Forestry Con gress planted 21 trees, one for each of the Presidents to that time. Since then, trees have been added to the grove during each President's term.
George Washington's tree is now a mighty white oak; John F. Kennedy's a tall Ohio buckeye sapling, and Lyndon B. Johnson's a small shingle oak. The grove is comprised of oaks, maples, beeches and other sturdy trees that thrive in the southern Ohio climate.
The University of Cincinnati is situ ated in Burnet Woods, which, at 109 acres, is one of the city's largest parks.
Ordovician Age
Mount Airy Forest, the first municipal forest in the United States‐1,364 acres make it the largest green tract in the city—and Sharon Woods have streams containing fossil rocks from the inland sea of the Ordovician age of 458,000,000 years ago. These rocks are quite com mon in the city.
The local zoo is the second oldest one in the country, having been founded two months after Philadelphia's in 1875. It contains the oldest building in the city, a pioneer log cabin built in 1804 by a local minister named James Kemper.
Two other delightful city parks are Alms and Mount Storm, both near beau tiful residential sections. The top of the hill of Alms Park was once cleared by Indians and used as a lookout over the Ohio and Little Miami River valleys. It has since been reforested. Below Alms Park is Memorial Pioneer Cemetery, the resting place of pioneers and sol diers of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.
Temple in a Park
In Mount Storm Park is a garden pavilion called “The Temple of Love,” which was designed by the supervisor of the Imperial Gardens in Vienna. Mount Echo Park offers one of the best long views of the city and of the lazy meanders of the Ohio River; there, the Delta Queen, a relic from the Ohio's past, often lies at anchor.
The Chamber of Commerce at Fourth and Vine Streets can supply visitors with an automobile tour of 88 historic and scenic sites that was instituted for the 180th anniversary celebration of the city last year, as well as with a walking tour of historic places.