Why cincinnati is awesome

This annual event is a local favorite and one that thousands around the city look forward to each year. Each year the event features over acts performing on three to six different stages along the banks of the Ohio River, making this the largest music festival in the city.

The Hyde Park Blast is an annual bike race that began in that attracts both professional and amateur riders alike. For one weekend the Hyde Park Square, located directly in the center of the neighborhood, is shut down and turned into a racing course. Along with the race itself, several food tents and live bands set up shop near the square, which makes this race a true community event. Cincinnati is filled with places around the city where you can go to see live music, spend a day at an amusement park, catch a live theater performance, and much more.

The park itself covers over acres and offers a huge variety of roller coasters and other rides that thrill-seekers love. Queen City Underground Tours offers a unique tour through Cincinnati that takes place mostly below the city streets. According to National Geographic, this tour is one of the top five underground tours in the entire U. Located downtown, the casino offers slot machines, poker tables, live entertainment, and a variety of restaurants.

BB Riverboats is the official riverboat cruise line of Cincinnati and has been since It offers sightseeing, dining, and private event cruises along the Ohio River. The Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, located in Mt. Adams, is one of the best places in the city to see a live theater performance.

The playhouse is known for its top-notch musicals and plays that draws thousands of visitors in each year. The Taft Museum of Art is one of the finest small art museums in the country. Originally opened in , the museum is home to an impressive collection of art that includes European and American paintings, Chinese porcelains, and ivory sculptures. The museum also has an outdoor garden, free on-site parking, and a museum shop and cafe.

Pyramid Hill is one of the few sculpture parks in the U. The park originally opened in and today hosts more than 60 massive contemporary sculptures. The park itself covers over acres and is home to concerts, special events, and kids programs held throughout the year. The Cincinnati Music Hall, which overlooks Washington Park, is a classical music performance hall that has been around since It also hosts a variety of public and private events that take place throughout the year.

The Contemporary Arts Center is a contemporary art museum in located downtown. Rather than collect and hold art, the CAC focuses instead on showcasing paintings, sculptures, photography, and other art forms that have been produced primarily by local artists.

The Aronoff Center for the Arts is a massive performing arts center located downtown. The center is known for hosting events like ballets, plays, concerts, musicals, and even stand-up comedy shows. The American Sign Museum is one of the most unique museums that you can attend in Cincy. With over 20, square feet of American signage, this museum takes at least an hour to explore, but is a one-of-a-kind experience. Located in Avondale near the UC campus, the zoo is home to over animals, over 3, plant species, and attracts more than one million visitors each year.

The most popular aquarium to visit in Cincinnati is the Newport Aquarium. Located just across the Ohio River in the northern Kentucky city of Newport, this aquarium has over 70 unique exhibits and five acrylic tunnels that connect 14 different galleries. The Krohn Conservatory , located in Eden Park , is a wonderful place to view over 3, different plant species in one single building. The conservatory itself has been around since the s and to this day it remains one of the most popular places for plant lovers to visit in the Queen City.

Fountain Square is arguably the most well-known downtown city square in Cincinnati. It serves as home to food trucks, local vendors, free public concerts, and it hosts a wide variety of events and festivals throughout the year. Xavier University was ranked 7th in the best value colleges and universities in Ohio category for Best Colleges gave the Art Academy of Cincinnati 11th place for being one of the top colleges in Ohio.

The Kroger Company was ranked 18th as a fortune company. Enjoy books? The Cincinnati Museum Center, a complex including 3 different museums, was named one of the top rated tourist attractions in Ohio. Check out Typhoon Tower! Best Things Ohio named the Mushroom House as one of the 15 best and most offbeat attractions in Ohio. The second and third spots go to the Cincinnati subway and Lucky Cat Museum.

It was also the home of the infamous gorilla, Harambe. Cincy was named one of the 25 best places to visit in Ohio. The list, compiled by VacationIdea, was done in no particular order. Perhaps the most treasured comes from Camp Washington Chili. They were Fifty West Brewing Co.

Primavista, an Italian eatery , was listed as one of the 19 Restaurants you must visit in Ohio before you die. Around Ohio. The man-made river has since been turned into Central Parkway and marks a distinctive shift in architectural style and density. The neighborhood is one of the largest preserved historical districts in the entire country, with hundreds of structures that potentially rival New Orleans and Savannah in number.

Incredibly, Over-the-Rhine was a neglected feature of the city due to high crime rates and years of paralyzing neglect until 3CDC , a private non-profit formed in , took on the task with a decidedly non-governmental vision to transform the vibe. The results are stunning. A place that residents once shunned is positively brimming with capital improvement projects, hip restaurants, public art, fancy hotels and has become the place to live or invest.

In addition to permanent exhibits, the Cincinnati Museum Center hosts plenty of traveling collections, like the current Egypt: The Time of Pharaohs , which is in the United States for the first time and whose artifacts spanning 4, years will be on display through Aug. My website design was inspired by the Art Deco era, and aside from midcentury, it happens to be my favorite style of architecture, too. I was thrilled to find so many Art Deco relics populating the downtown. As a result, Cincinnati has become a hotbed for film activity; many production crews are now using it as a backdrop to recreate 20th century New York City.

Besides being stuffed with formwork, steel and aluminum fixtures that marked an era of futuristic enthusiasm, the entire story structure is an absolute gem of engineering and the Art Deco style, and was used by the architect William Lamb of the firm Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, that built it as a basis for designing the Empire State Building.

This radiant masterpiece of an Art Deco bar and lounge has the classy feel of a speakeasy, with fancy cocktails to match. The main stage features jazz musicians every evening except Sunday, when they perform during brunch. Check out the fabulous Egyptian-inspired sculpture behind the band and take a walking tour of the public spaces to each side for a glimpse of historical grandeur.

We lucked out and ran into a very animated Palm Court employee, Aerin, who saw our interest in the building and took us behind the scenes and deep into its history. Public murals keep popping up into our lives, so how about one of the original masters of the genre, Louis Grell, being featured 18 times throughout the bottom floor hotel?

They were done in the s, no less, and are still immaculate. Ugh, so dreamy. Also, hello universe, we see you! Did you know the Greater Cincinnati region also includes Northern Kentucky?

In fact, you could throw a stone from downtown Cincy and hit Covington and Newport, both of which are just over the bridges that cross the Ohio River. For those just in Cincy for a quick business trip, you can still walk the half-mile Purple People Bridge , which was built in , over to Kentucky for a sip of bourbon, then back again. Now that you know Northern Kentucky is part of the Cincinnati metropolitan area, you should have seen this coming.

After all, you know what Kentucky is all about … bourbon! Fall screams bourbon to me, so in October, we plan to tackle the entire B-Line , which combines experiences at four distilleries and five bourbon-centric bars. As if I needed another excuse to visit Kentucky! Thanks to engineer Kate MacDonald, who started making wine for fun over a decade ago, Cincinnati has an urban winery, the Skeleton Root , that debuted in right in the heart of Over-the-Rhine, a throwback to the s when winemaking was all the rage in the region before it turned its focus to industry.

If you want even more wine, Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky have a handful of wineries around their perimeter. One of the coolest things we did in Cincinnati was go behind the scenes at a few different maker studios, the most impressive of which was the year-old Rookwood Pottery Company , a factory-scale artisan tile maker with deep roots in the area.

In , Cincinnati became one of the only cities in the country with a fully functioning streetcar by creating a 3. Technically the end of the line from the Southern states that still allowed slavery, crossing the border of the Ohio River into Cincinnati was just one crucial part of the journey of African-American fugitives to freedom.

The most contentious issue of the era that eventually spawned the Civil War, thousands of human lives were liberated by residents of the city in the years prior to the final reckoning of battle. The resulting cultural zeitgeist feels distinctly liberating and accepting, which stands out in this region.

Sixty local Cincinnati artists participated. Thirty entertainers performed on six different stages.