Cincinnati

Cincinnati sits in southwestern Ohio on a series of hills above a bend of the Ohio River, directly across the water from Kentucky. One of the first great boomtowns of the American interior, it grew rich in the early 1800s as a steamboat port and meatpacking center - "Porkopolis" - and was for a time the largest city in the West.

The river both defines and divides the metro, which spills across state lines into Kentucky and is stitched together by historic bridges, including a Roebling suspension span that prefigured the Brooklyn Bridge. Steep hillsides, 19th-century Italianate neighborhoods like Over-the-Rhine, and the river valley give the city a distinctive terraced geography.

• Ohio
  The Buckeye State, between the lake and the river related