For a midsized city in what some folks derisively call “flyover country,” Cincinnati has seen more than its fair share of major news stories over the past quarter-century. This isn’t an exhaustive list — each Cincinnatian has their own ideas about what is and isn’t huge news — but these are some of the major events CityBeat has reported on (or watched unfold while making snarky comments about) since our first issue*.
*In no particular order
Cincinnati Police shooting of Timothy Thomas and resulting civil unrest
April 7, 2001 forever changed Cincinnati. The shooting death of unarmed black citizen Timothy Thomas in Over-the-Rhine by Cincinnati Police officer Stephen Roach and subsequent unrest here presaged incidents in Baltimore; Ferguson, Missouri; Chicago and elsewhere by more than a decade. Since 2001, reforms like the Collaborative Agreement have been put in place and those outside the city have lauded changes undertaken here. But activists — and to some extent, data — suggest there is more work to do. Long after the protests ended, after the curfews were lifted and after buildings were rebuilt — in some cases replaced with shiny, new storefronts — the fateful shooting in a dark alley just off Republic Street has continued to have a ripple effect.
Chiquita/The Cincinnati Enquirer lawsuit
It was about as big as local news stories get — the 1998, 18-page investigative piece in The Cincinnati Enquirer revealing that then-local fruit giant Chiquita Brands International, its subsidiaries and security forces were engaged in a number of environmentally and ethically questionable business practices in Central America. But as quickly as the story hit the papers, The Enquirer was retracting the piece, firing investigative reporter Michael Gallagher and eventually paying Chiquita more than $10 million in damages for the article. The issue wasn’t necessarily veracity, but methods — the company charged that Gallagher and co-writer Cameron McWhirter illegally gained access to Chiquita executives’ voicemails. Questions about Chiquita’s business practices in Central America received some validation in 2007, when the federal government fined the company $25 million for paying and supplying arms to right-wing militia groups accused of human rights violations.
The repeal of one of the nation’s most restrictive anti-LGBTQ ordinances
For this one, we need to go all the way back to a year before CityBeat was born. In 1993, after a campaign from conservative groups, Cincinnati voters approved a charter amendment known as Article XII, which effectively kept the city from passing laws protecting LGBTQ Cincinnatians from discrimination. For 11 years, the city kept that amendment — one of the most restrictive in the country — helping it earn a reputation as a place hostile to the LGBTQ community. Signs that the city was changing, however, came in 2004, when voters finally repealed Article XII after a two-year campaign by those appalled by the law.
Obergefell v. Hodges
Cincinnati wasn’t done changing its ways after the repeal of Article XII. As it happens, the man who lent his name to the history-making 2015 U.S. Supreme Court case was a resident of Over-the-Rhine. James Obergefell was one of the plaintiffs challenging Ohio’s ban on same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, the case in which the Supreme Court decisively ruled that states can’t bar same-sex couples from being wed.
Great American Ball Park/Paul Brown Stadium deal
Ah, yes. Remember when voters in 1996 approved a half-cent sales tax to fund the construction of not one, but two new stadia on the city’s riverfront? Depending on your view of publicly financed sports facilities, building Paul Brown Stadium and Great American Ball Park may or may not have been a good idea in the first place. But then the costs ballooned, with the price of building the two structures running up to $800 million instead of the projected $550 million. And the long-term details of the plan have been especially generous to the Cincinnati Bengals. Those factors have caused some observers to dub it one of the worst stadium deals ever. Whether that’s true or not, it’s a decision that county taxpayers continue to pay for.
MetroMoves
Perhaps chastened by their 1996 stadia decision, or maybe because they were just bigger fans of our losing sports teams than public transit, Hamilton County voters in 2002 turned down another half-cent sales tax increase that would have partially funded a plan by the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority to greatly expand the region’s bus system and add rail transit. The game-changing proposal came with a head-spinning price tag — $4.2 billion overall — though county taxpayers would have only paid for a quarter of that. Sixty-eight percent of voters said no thanks to MetroMoves, leaving the region’s transit system to greatly atrophy and indirectly setting up a new tax levy ask from SORTA you’ll see on the ballot next year.
Riverfront Stadium Implosion
Thirty-two really isn’t that old. But if you’re a ballpark on Cincinnati’s riverfront, it’s apparently ancient. And when a new set of ballparks needs to go up, an old one must come down. That’s how we lost Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium in 2002, at half the age its predecessor, Crosley Field. The implosion was an epic farewell to the 52,000-seat behemoth, with rounds of explosives going off inside the structure before it disappeared into a cloud of its own dust on a cold morning in late December. Farewell, short-lived friend.
Construction of Great American Tower, the “tallest” building in Cincinnati
For 81 years, Cincinnati’s Carew Tower lorded over downtown as the city’s tallest building. But in 2011, a new queen claimed the height record by virtue of her crown. Great American Tower at Queen City Square stands 91 feet taller than Carew, put over the top with the added boost of a decorative element architect Gyo Obata said was inspired by the late Princess Diana’s tiara. Western & Southern Financial Group had been considering building a tower for at least two decades and ended up with a $322 million, 800,000-square-foot office building that dominates the city’s skyline. But if you’re going to call it the tallest building in the city, be prepared to argue with some dedicated Carew fans.
Sam DuBose shooting
In a tragic 2015 echo of the series of police shootings that led to the 2001 civil unrest in Over-the-Rhine, the eyes of the nation once again turned to the Queen City when University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing shot and killed an unarmed black motorist named Sam DuBose in Mount Auburn. The resulting protests mirrored those around other contemporaneous police shootings at a time when the issue drew national scrutiny. Two separate juries could not agree on a conviction for Tensing. The case was dropped when prosecutors declined to pursue murder charges a third time.
Tracie Hunter saga
The tangled, tragic and contentious story of former Hamilton County Juvenile Court Judge Tracie Hunter saw a coda this year when Hunter was dragged from a county courtroom to spend a portion of a six-month sentence in jail. But the saga has its roots as far back as 2010, when Hunter, a Democrat, sued for a recount in a razor-thin election for her juvenile court seat. She prevailed but was then indicted on eight felony counts in 2014. A jury convicted her on one of those counts later that year for allegedly providing confidential documents to her brother, a court employee charged with hitting a juvenile inmate. Hunter spent the next four years appealing that conviction. Her appeals ran out this year, and she eventually spent roughly four months in jail.
BLINK
Cincinnati basically had a lowkey neon-drenched rave in its living room and invited a million people over to party in 2017. It was so fun, the city did it again this year and even more folks showed up. The marquee event engaged artists from all over the country to paint murals and make installation art, drawing huge crowds and rave reviews from national publications. BLINK grew from another hugely popular light art display — Washington Park’s Lumenocity — that also put Cincinnati on the map for the city’s embrace of innovative cultural events.
CityBeat sues the city, Citizens for Community Values
Sometimes, the news outlet becomes the story. That’s what happened to CityBeat in 2008, when conservative group Citizens for Community Values, then-Cincinnati City Council member Charlie Winburn and some law enforcement agencies singled the publication out for adult-themed ads it ran in the paper. The upshot was that CityBeat stood accused of aiding and abetting prostitution, and a letter from 39 conservative officials and law enforcement personnel sounded a threatening note: Stop the ads or else. But CityBeat fired back, asserting its First Amendment right to publish what it pleased in a lawsuit against the city, CCV and others. Those groups settled out of court a year later.
The cursed streetcar
All local political arguments eventually take a 3.6 mile loop around downtown and circle back to Cincinnati’s streetcar. And, given that this is Cincinnati, it’s no surprise that the ongoing debate is well over a decade in the making. After local advocacy, Cincinnati City Council voted to launch the streetcar project in 2008, and by 2011, the city had seen not one but two ballot initiatives trying to block it. Voters, however, batted down those referendums. But that didn’t end the fight — nor did a 2013 pause on construction of the rail loop or the 2016 completion of the project. Sagging ridership has hobbled the streetcar to a degree, but rest assured, conversation about the rail system is sure to light up local Twitter well into the future.
The Banks
Another long-running Cincinnati topic that people occasionally like to argue about: the massive development project on the city’s riverfront simply called The Banks. The effort to build out the space between Paul Brown Stadium and Great American Ball Park — including restaurants, apartments, Smale Riverfront Park, a huge General Electric office building and more — has grown by leaps and bounds since officials first solicited public input in 1996, drew up initial plans the next year and finally broke ground in 2008. But the effort hasn’t come without sometimes-intense battling between Cincinnati and Hamilton County officials, including a recent dust-up over the placement of a music venue there.
Changes in Over-the-Rhine, other neighborhoods around Cincinnati
The cover of the very first issue of CityBeat — a pair of scuffed up Converse facing a pair of polished wingtips symbolizing the squaring off of activists and business interests in Over-the-Rhine — was prophetic all the way back in 1994. Who knew that 25 years, a bout of civil unrest, hundreds of millions of dollars in development, renovated historic buildings and a significant number of displaced low-income residents later, we’d still be debating the sweeping changes in Cincinnati’s urban core?
Cincinnati’s population begins growing again
At some point last decade, Cincinnati’s population — long on the decline from a high of 500,000 people in the 1950s — slid below 300,000. But thanks to a number of factors — a reawakening in interest in urban living, efforts to attract suburban residents to the city’s core, even high gas prices, perhaps — people began trickling back into the Queen City this decade. By 2017, we were at an estimated 301,301 residents — a rebound of more than 4,000 people from the 2010 Census — and we’re still growing. But the city isn’t growing at the same rate for everyone. Cincinnati’s black population had dropped to almost 50-year lows by 2016 even as the city’s overall population slightly grew.
Marge Schott banned from MLB over comments about Hitler and Nazis
Of course, for every shining sports moment or hometown hero, the Queen City has an embarrassment as well. One of the Queen City’s most notable examples came in 1996, when Cincinnati Reds owner and philanthropist Marge Schott was banned for two years from overseeing day-to-day operations of the team by Major League Baseball for comments she made asserting that Adolf Hitler was “good in the beginning, but went too far.” It was the second time Schott had received such discipline — the first coming from the league in 1993 for racist comments she made. Schott sold her share of the team in 1999 shortly after coming off her ban.
The new downtown Kroger
It took 50 years, but downtown Cincinnati got a full-service grocery store again in 2019. Kroger on the Rhine — a 52,000-square-foot, two-story store with a 139-unit apartment tower and parking garage atop it — was 15 years in the making, Kroger officials say. About $15 million in city, state and federal funds helped make the $90 million project a reality. As it opened, OTR bid farewell to a smaller Kroger location a few blocks away. It was demolished for parking.
Rise of FC Cincinnati and stadium construction in the West End
Few could have predicted that when FC Cincinnati launched in 2015, we’d be watching a Major League Soccer stadium rise in the West End just a few years later fueled by the team’s massive popularity. Perhaps more expected was the pitched battle over the impact that $250 million, 26,000-seat stadium would have on the neighborhood, especially after CityBeat uncovered that a handful of residents and businesses would need to move from nearby buildings.
Ken Griffey Jr.’s baseball stardom
Let’s be honest — Cincinnati has sorely needed hometown sports heroes over the last 25 years. And you couldn’t ask for a higher-profile star than Ken Griffey Jr. in the 2000s. Griffey came complete with a Queen City origin story — his dad, Ken Griffey Sr. played for the Reds in two World Series appearances; Junior attended Moeller High School and then played for the Reds himself. Yes, yes, he did leave for the Seattle Mariners first, where he amassed much of his fame and played his best baseball. But his 2000 return and eight-year stint with the Reds was a triumphant one for Cincinnati as Griffey climbed up the lifetime homerun rankings. Junior made the Reds’ Hall of Fame in 2014 and the MLB Hall of Fame two years later.
Union Terminal/Music Hall renovations
Two of Cincinnati’s most iconic buildings got much-needed attention in the last few years. The 85-year-old Union Terminal building, originally constructed as a train station and used for a brief time as a shopping mall before it became the home of the Cincinnati Museum Center, had never been renovated before county voters approved a sales tax levy in 2014 and private donors stepped up to fund a nearly three-year, $224 million renovation effort needed to keep the radio-shaped half-dome structurally sound. Over-the-Rhine’s Music Hall didn’t make the cut for that tax levy ask, but in 2016 private donors and public funding stepped in to fill the void for the stately 1878 performance venue’s $143 million renovation.
Fountain Square Shooting/Cameo Night Club shooting
Cincinnati saw two of its biggest contemporary tragedies in back-to-back years with the Cameo Night Club shootings in 2017 and the shootings at Fifth Third’s downtown headquarters on Fountain Square a year later. The late-night fusillade of bullets at Cameo killed two and wounded 15, while the morning shooting at Fifth Third’s headquarters claimed three lives and injured two other people. The motives that drove the shooters in both tragedies remain unclear, but the incidents drew national attention and kicked up calls for everything from stricter gun laws to better access to mental health care.
The shooting of Kabaka Oba
It was a bizarre, brutal moment in Cincinnati history: an outspoken, sometimes coarse public access TV personality was gunned down outside City Hall during a Cincinnati City Council meeting in 2006. Kabaka Oba, who often peppered his show, radio call-ins and in-person appearances before council with controversial invective, had a years-long running feud with restaurateur Howard Beatty when Beatty fired a .357 into Oba’s car outside City Hall. He later died from his wounds. Beatty originally faced murder charges, but a judge ruled that Oba provoked him with threats before the killing and gave him 13 years for manslaughter instead.
The downtown casino
It took a few years after Ohio voters opted in 2009 to legalize gambling in the Buckeye State, but in 2013, Cincinnati got one of the state’s four full-scale casinos, a massive gaming facility straddling downtown and Pendleton. In the time since, it’s gone through a few names — Horseshoe, JACK and, coming soon, Hard Rock — and overall hasn’t quite lived up to the promised tax revenue it was supposed to provide for Ohio’s public schools, county funds and other public coffers. But supporters say the casinos in Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland and Toledo are better than not having anything at all when Ohio is surrounded by states that also have legalized gambling.
National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
It took years of planning and fundraising, but the landmark museum commemorating resistance to slavery first planned by Cincinnatians in 1994 finally became a reality in 2004. The $110 million, 160,000-square-foot structure at The Banks commemorates the Queen City’s role as an important waypoint on the Underground Railroad and its location in the first free state that many escaping slaves stepped foot in on their flight from the South. The center’s purpose isn’t just to mark history, however — it serves as a focal point for ongoing efforts to end slavery and win human freedom across the globe.
This article appears in Nov 27 – Dec 10, 2019.