Driving Around Downtown Cincinnati, Ohio in 4k Video

Filmed on Monday, October 21 2024, I drive around Cincinnati, OH to see what's going on.

Two years after the founding of the settlement then known as "Losantiville", Arthur St. Clair, the governor of the Northwest Territory, changed its name to "Cincinnati", possibly at the suggestion of the surveyor Israel Ludlow, in honor of the Society of the Cincinnati.

St. Clair was at the time president of the Society, made up of Continental Army officers of the Revolutionary War who named their club for Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a dictator in the early Roman Republic who saved Rome from a crisis, and then retired to farming because he did not want to remain in power.

Cincinnati's location, on the border between the free state of Ohio and the slave state of Kentucky, made it a prominent location for slaves to escape the slave-owning south. Many prominent abolitionists also called Cincinnati their home during this period, and made it a popular stop on the Underground Railroad. In 2004, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center was completed along Freedom Way in Downtown, honoring the city's involvement in the Underground Railroad.

In 1859, Cincinnati laid out six streetcar lines; the cars were pulled by horses and the lines made it easier for people to get around the city. By 1872, Cincinnatians could travel on the streetcars within the city and transfer to rail cars for travel to the hill communities. In 1889, the Cincinnati streetcar system began converting its horse-drawn cars to electric streetcars.

Cincinnati weathered the Great Depression better than most American cities of its size, largely due to a resurgence in river trade, which was less expensive than transporting goods by rail. 

The flood of 1937 was one of the worst in the nation's history and destroyed many areas along the Ohio valley. Afterward the city built protective flood walls.

Metropolitan Cincinnati has the twenty-eighth largest economy in the United States.

Several Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in Cincinnati, such as Procter & Gamble, The Kroger Company, and Fifth Third Bank. General Electric has headquartered their Global Operations Center in Cincinnati. The Kroger Company employs 21,646 people locally, making it the largest employer in the city, and the University of Cincinnati is the second largest at 16,000.

Cincinnati chili, a spiced sauce served over noodles, usually topped with cheese and often with diced onions and/or beans, is the area's "best-known regional food." It was first developed by Macedonian immigrant restaurateurs in the 1920s. Cincinnati has been called the "Chili Capital of America" and "of the World" because it has more chili restaurants per capita than any other city in the United States or in the world.

One of the United States's oldest and most celebrated bars, Arnold's Bar and Grill in downtown Cincinnati has won awards from Esquire magazine's "Best Bars in America", Thrillist's "Most Iconic Bar in Ohio", and The Daily Meal's "150 Best bars in America".

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