In June of 1984 I had a conference in Cincinnati, Ohio. Kate and I made a road trip and holiday out of it. We rented a car (at the time we biked everywhere or rode the city bus) and took the back roads down avoiding the interstate where we could. While you can easily do this in one day, we toured around and stayed overnight along the way. This would have been my first adventure across the border into the USA.
We drove the backroads of Highway 3 in Ontario to Windsor and Detroit where we crossed on the Ambassador bridge. Navigating the city of Detroit to find the I75 Southbound was a bit of an eye opener. Detroit was pretty bleak and abandoned back then (as it is now), not the kind of place you'd want to get lost. So of course we were lost. We did find our way and stayed at a Knights Inn along the way (I think it was near Findlay, Ohio). Our room was tricked out with garish purple bed spreads in a Graceland meets the Chicken Ranch motif. But it was clean and comfortable enough. We explored a neighborhood bar that night.
Neighborhood bars, and the drinking culture, were something I found fascinating. Coming from Ontario where drinking and alcohol are strictly controlled it was culturally fascinating to find all these small local bars where people just hung out chatting and drinking ... all day long. That first bar had a "Mickey Mouse" motif (not sanctioned by Disney Corp.) with all sorts of souvenirs that regulars had brought in. The lady behind the bar, the owner, told us that they were light heartedly disparaging the bar, that Mickey Mouse joint, but she went along with it.
The next day was spent on our way through the backroads of small town Ohio which, apart from the bars and many flags, looks an awful lot like the small town Ontario we explored along the first part of our trip. We toured an historic home (the Piatt Castle near West Liberty) and went underground to explore the nearby Ohio Caverns (stalactites, stalagmites). That was the first underground cavern we explored, we saw many others in the years to come.
The small town of Yellow Springs, just to the east of Dayton, was a pleasant hippy dippy kind of town with lots of interesting shops and restaurants to explore before finding our way into Cincinnati and surrounds. I recall having Skyline Chili at least once, it's a style unique to the area. Everytime we drive the I75 through the area we remark about dropping in again and having a bowl.
The conference was held in downtown Cincinnati at a huge convention centre and there would have been an expensive splashy conference hotel. We stayed instead across the Ohio River in Covington, Kentucky at the foot of the Blue Iron Bridge (John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge) in a much cheaper and quite comfortable two story motel, "The Gateway", with free parking and an outdoor pool with a view of the city. It was a reasonable walk across the river into the city to the conference.
The Kentucky side of the river was definitely an interesting area. Cincinnati has a reputation as being prissy, Kentucky is definitely down to earth. At the foot of the bridge were several bottle shops, along the street there were seedy bars (like the "Sly Fox" where a young girl, working for the bar, would get you to buy her a drink), corner shops advertised and sold all sorts of beers and liquor, definitely a run down kind of neighborhood. Liquor and drinking venues were much more strictly controlled in Ohio. In nearby Newport we went to a seedy bar one night to see a now legendary punk band — "The Dicks" (from Austin TX via San Francisco CA).
To the north of the city center on higher ground we visited Calhoun Street at the one end of the University of Cincinnati. Another "high ground" neighborhood we visited was Mt Adams, to the NE of the city centre. We caught a couple of shows. There was an interesting Doo-Wop band, "Smokin' the Students", playing at a place called Chapter 13. Reg made friends with a cute dog that had recently been clipped/sheared rather raggedly. The owner explained to us that the dog had long hair and would be miserable in the summer heat so he did this himself every year.
One evening Kate and I took a paddle boat tour of the Ohio River on the Mark Twain departing at the KY side of the Blue Iron Bridge. It was a pleasant warm evening and we enjoyed the views of the city and the many bridges we pass under. It's a small tour boat, not the grand paddle wheelers you might expect. There are several tours you might take with BB Riverboats. I understand you can take a very long cruise from here and down the Mississippi to New Orleans. There are very modest boats on the river — an an outing one day we crossed the river downstream from Cincinnati on the small Anderson Ferry. The Ohio is quite a big river and, while there are many bridges within the city, sometimes a small ferry is all you have.
Another interesting place we visited was the historic Art Deco Cincinnati Union Terminal. Kate loves the style and this old train station is a fine example. It's a round 1/4 dome shaped building. It's located to the west of the city centre and, at the time, didn't seem active as a train station. Instead it was full of shops. I understand there's now a museum there.
We kept seeing signs for Hudepohl Beers, especially Christian Moerlein (Cincinnati Select Beer), and did a tour of the local brewery which was to the west of the downtown in an older industrial area. There were just a few of us on the tour. The guide told us, since we weren't locals, that they'd put the same beer into two different cans — a cheaper drug store brand and one with their own name. I used to search out Christian Moerlein on subsequent trips to the US and we still have a metal beer tray with the Art Noveau lady sipping a beer.
We also did a couple of high views. There's a tall viewing platform downtown on top of a building near the convention where the city is quite tall. The other, perhaps more interesting, was the revolving restaurant in Covington near the I75 bridge. From both you have good views of the city.
Final pictures in the album are a return to the farming country of Michigan and Ontario.
We've been through Cincinnati on the I75 many times over the years — on our way south to Florida, or Texas, or Nashville, etc. We've not been back to the city for a visit but we ought to. It was an adventure when we did.
These photos where scanned and these notes were composed during the pandemic lockdown of May 2021.
