The River Is the Front Porch Again: Cincinnati's Banks and Riverfront Parks

Cincinnati was born on the Ohio River, spent a century turning its back on it, and has spent the last twenty-five years reversing course. The riverfront today — The Banks development, Smale Riverfront Park, and the two stadiums that bookend them — is the city's front porch and its postcard.

Smale Riverfront Park is the centerpiece: a ribbon of gardens, fountains, swings and river overlooks strung between the ballpark and the football stadium, built on land that once held surface lots. Its porches and picnic lawns fill on summer evenings; its riverwalk connects east to the older Sawyer Point and Theodore M. Berry International Friendship Park.

The Banks — the mixed-use district of apartments, offices, restaurants and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center — filled the gap between the stadiums with actual neighborhood, an urban experiment that keeps adding blocks. The Freedom Center itself, opened in 2004 on the river that once separated slavery from freedom, is one of the most significant museums in America on its subject.

The working river still runs beneath the leisure one: barges move coal, grain and aggregates past the park benches, the Roebling Suspension Bridge — prototype for Brooklyn's — carries traffic to Covington as it has since 1866, and the river's level dictates the calendar of floods, festivals and riverboat excursions.

November quiets the riverfront without closing it: the gardens go structural, the fountains rest, the stadiums' lights take over the evenings, and the walking is fine.

Cincinnati spent two hundred years learning to face the water again. The view from a Smale Park swing at dusk — bridges lit, Kentucky hills behind — is the graduation photograph.