My wife and I took the 11:30 a.m. Queen City Underground Tour (regular) on a Sunday. We arrived at the tour office about 20 minutes early and checked in using their iPad-based system. Luckily, the tour office is located between the Eagle and Holtman's Donut Shop so we went next door for a quick coffee and donut before the tour started.
Our tour guide, Melanie, did a great job of keeping everyone together and engaged through her storytelling. We started out learning about the history of Over-the-Rhine. German immigrants flocked to the neighborhood in the 1800s to work in the brewing industry. In those days, people had to cross the filthy Miami and Erie Canal (nicknamed the Rhine of Ohio) to get from the north side to the south side of the neighborhood, where 30+ breweries, hundreds of bars and seedy theaters (burlesque, Wild West shows, etc.) were located. Those who took the bridges south over the canal were said to have crossed 'over the Rhine' into Cincinnati's little Germany. The neighborhood was much more populous than it is today, with up to 10 people inhabiting a two-room dwelling. In the late 1800s, Cincinnati Germans (men, women and children) drank 2.5 times the national average amount of beer consumed. They drank beer instead of water as it helped to kill the bacteria that resulted from dirty living conditions.
I learned that Annie Oakley was 'discovered' in the Cincinnati area when she challenged her future husband, Frank Butler, to a shooting match and beat him.
I learned about Boss Cox (a corrupt former Cincinnati mayor) as we viewed the beer hall where he held court and bought votes by providing free drinks to voters, who sometimes voted multiple times for extra drinks.
Next, we visited the St. Francis Seraph Catholic church and learned of its role in providing a place of worship for German immigrants. While there, we toured the underground crypt where 41 people are buried (mostly Irish people from the pre-German congregation). The sanctuary is beautiful, and is filled with carved wood, stained glass, pipe organ, paintings, baptismal font and more. Melanie pointed out a feature that no one on the tour seemed to notice--there were swastikas patterns in the floor tiles! Apparently, the Austrian friars who served there considered it an ancient symbol of good luck; however, this was well before the Nazi party adopted the swastika symbol and soiled its historic reputation. Melanie also noted that the Franciscan friars serving in the church today still wear the traditional brown hooded robes and rope belts, and can be seen out and about in the neighborhood. The friars also teach at the nearby neighborhood Catholic school.
Next, we walked to a building that houses artists' studios, and which was once the site of the Kauffman brewery. We traveled down two different sets of stairs, the second of which was quite narrow and uneven, into the brick-lined subterranean caverns where lager was stored in barrels to take advantage of the cool underground temperatures. Melanie told us the caverns had been sealed up once the brewery began using modern refrigeration techniques, and had remained that way for many decades.
The person who purchased the building in the 1980s didn't realize the caverns existed, but when he obtained a copy of the original German brewery's blueprints he saw them on paper. He took a jackhammer to the floor and eventually discovered 30,000 square feet of subterranean cavern space in his building, including a cistern.
It is a somewhat eerie yet exciting feeling to be in the caverns. If someone could come up with the millions of dollars that it would take to clean out the giant ash pile, comply with modern building codes and spruce up the caverns, Cincinnati could have a restaurant/dance club/performance arts venue like no other city has. Such potential!
The tour ended at the Moerlein Brewing Company (located on the site of the former Husman Potato Chip factory), where we learned a bit about the brewing renaissance in Cincinnati. My wife and I didn't partake, but some of the folks on the tour headed into the taproom for beer and food. All in all, this was a fun learning experience about Over-the-Rhine and some of the lesser known parts of our hometown's history. read more