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Cincinnati, Ohio
But people like us think we’ve got all the time in the world
My second day in Cincinnati started early with a trip to the Over the Rhine neighborhood, with its urbanist, walkable streets that you just don’t see downtown. We’re starting in Washington Park, where there was a temporary art installation- a complex web of multicolor string- surrounding its gazebo. Or at least I think it was a temporary art installation, apparently there is no way to know for sure. For some unknown reason, the (presumably) good people of Cincinnati are either intentionally keeping all information about this off the internet, or the internet has an inherent bias against the good people of Cincinnati and their temporary public art installations. No way to know for sure.
I parked in a nondescript downtown garage and took the free streetcar all the way up to the heart of Over the Rhine neighborhood and Findlay Market, which likes to advertise itself as one of the top ten markets in the world. Maybe it is, or maybe that 2019 Newsweek article with unranked markets referenced on the signs was not the definitive list to end all lists. And while I openly rank contemporary art museums, living artists, Zaha Hadid buildings, fish and chips, baseball stadiums and, well, a lot of things, I never thought about ranking markets, so who am I to question that 2019 Newsweek article.
From Findlay Market, I started to wander through the urbanist, walkable streets and ended up at Washington Park, where more than a gazebo surrounded by a secret string art installation awaited. I paused to enjoy the classic view of the Cincinnati Music Hall but quickly found myself on the move trying to avoid a group marching through the park. This group of pleasant enough people were approaching with signs about kindness and love, and this is where my years of living in New Jersey kicked in and told me to get the hell out of there. It’s not like I specifically have anything against kindness or love, but I don’t know who these people are and I don’t want to mistakenly end up in a cult or something. I tried to unsuspiciously walk away, but was still approached by one of them who tried to give me a daisy. I politely refused (in the spirit of kindness and love) and quickly kept on moving, continuing an easy, generally downhill walk that would take me all the way to Kentucky.
On my way downhill through downtown, I had time to stop at my second favorite Zaha Hadid building, the CAC, the Contemporary Art Center, a terrific building with good art and, just like the Cincinnati Art Museum and the streetcar Over the Rhine, free admission.
The CAC is not a big building, but it’s a very Zaha Hadid building. The thing I love most about it is the experience of its stairs, which are way more fun in person than these photos may suggest. From the crazy curved wall and shark headed girl in the lobby to the jagged walls of the top floor, the stairs- with solid black sides and a low riser height- are a joy to walk up and down, or if you’re me, up and down and up and down again and again.
If you keep walking downhill long enough, sooner or later you’ll come to the end of the city, the end of the state and the end of the north where the Roebling Bridge dramatically offers to take you across the flooding Ohio River all the way to Kentucky. The bridge predates Roebling’s far more famous bridge in Brooklyn, and it’s also hard to look at this one and not realize that the same designer was involved with both.
And for architecture fans, the only Daniel Libeskind building in Kentucky is visible in a few of these pictures. With easy to spot blue glass and a noticeably interesting form, The Ascent at Roebling's Bridge is a residential building with great views of the bridge and, as far as I can tell, really high prices for the area.
The riverfront in Cincinnati has a lot going for it, if you can ignore that god awful gash of a highway separating it from the city and everything else. At the riverfront you can see the bridge and the flooded river, there are a few sports stadiums sprinkled about, a park and stairs and fountains and one big museum, this one. This is the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, a wonderful museum that I debated not going to. My concern was time, I really only had about an hour and, having visited before, remembered that it takes some time to actually see the place and read its well thought out exhibits. In that hour I saw what I could despite my ill advised, rushed walk through, although even in such a rush, I did have some time to stop and appreciate Journeys I and II, the masterwork by Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson on the walls in the same atrium as that devastating slave cabin display right in the middle of the building.
You may have already figured out what’s coming next. I went out of my way to note that I like to rank baseball stadiums when writing about Findlay Market, I wrote about the riverfront’s sprinkling of sports stadiums (yay alliteration) and one of the pictures above is an aerial view of the Harriet Tubman Beacon of Hope sculpture with a guy dressed in red walking towards it. All of these hints foreshadow the rest of the pictures on this page, my visit to the Great American Ball Park and a Cincinnati Reds game.
I have been to a lot of baseball stadiums in my life, many (but not all) of which are represented here in the slideshow archive. Adding them up, it comes out to an impressive 20 of 30. What’s most impressive to me about this, and you may not believe me, is that I have not intentionally gone out of my way to visit as many baseball stadiums as I have. If I was somewhere and there was a baseball game that weekend, say Milwaukee or Los Angeles or Houston, then sure, I’d go see the game and check out the stadium, but it’s not like NHL arenas (where I am 26 of 32) that I intentionally planned trips to see. Still, when my eclipse driven schedule just happened to coincide with a Mets / Reds series, I was excited enough for the first time (again, something you may find hard to believe) to finally count how many baseball stadiums I have been to, and was excited to count the Great America Ball Park as 21 of 30. Only nine more to go I guess.
As for the stadium, it wasn’t as bad as reviewers suggested, but it’s definitely not in my top five- that’s Dodger Stadium, Busch Stadium, Oracle Park, Target Field and Citi Field, in that order. I had great seats only a row behind the dugout and overall it was a pretty good place to see a game, although one that was a little nicer before the afternoon sun ceded to an exceedingly chilly early spring shade, a coldness that even that flaming steamboat in the outfield could not help prevent.
There are a lot of mascots at the Great American Ball Park. The Reds have four of them, three of which are pictured below. These mascots are a family with giant baseballs for heads, and I care enough to write about them but do not care not enough about them to actually research what their relationship is to each other. Is the guy with the old timey mustache the father, or are they all aliens from the same alien race as the equally disturbing Mr. and Mrs. Met, all masquerading as mascots and biding their time to attack? Just like the mysterious string art installations and the true, scientific rankings of the world’s best markets, Cincinnati remains a city cloaked in unsolvable mysteries.
