Explore Cincinnati

The Tyler Davidson Fountain, also called The Genius of Water, stands on Fountain Square in downtown Cincinnati. Dedicated in 1871, the bronze fountain was designed by August von Kreling and cast in Munich; a female figure with outstretched arms rises above scenes showing the uses of water. The square around it hosts concerts and events.

The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center is a museum on the Ohio riverfront in downtown Cincinnati, opened in 2004 in a building by BOORA Architects. Its exhibitions trace American slavery, the people who escaped across the river and the Underground Railroad network that helped them; the central exhibit is a two-storey log slave pen built in Kentucky in 1830.

The Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame and Museum tells the story of the city's baseball club, whose roots go back to the Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869. Founded in 1958 and housed since 2004 in a building beside Great American Ball Park on the Ohio River, it shows photographs, memorabilia and multimedia displays and honours the club's inductees.

Plum Street Temple is a Reform synagogue in downtown Cincinnati, dedicated in 1866 for the congregation of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, a founder of Reform Judaism in America. James Keys Wilson designed it in a Moorish Revival style inspired by the Alhambra, with two minarets and a rose window; the interior is seen at services and on tours booked in advance.

The Taft Museum of Art occupies a house built around 1820 on Pike Street, later home to Charles Phelps Taft and Anna Sinton Taft, who gave it and their collection to the people of Cincinnati; it opened as a museum in 1932. Its rooms show paintings by Rembrandt, Hals, Gainsborough and Turner, Chinese porcelain, Limoges enamels and Robert S. Duncanson's murals.

The John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge crosses the Ohio River between Cincinnati and Covington, Kentucky. Designed by John A. Roebling and opened in 1867, its 322-metre main span was the longest in the world at the time, and its stone towers and cables foreshadow his later Brooklyn Bridge. Walkways run along both sides.

The Cincinnati Art Museum opened in 1886 in a Romanesque Revival building by James W. McLaughlin in Eden Park. Its collection of more than 73,000 works spans about 6,000 years, from antiquities and Asian art to European and American painting, and the Cincinnati Wing, added in 2003, shows art made in or for the city since 1788.

William Howard Taft National Historic Site is the Greek Revival house in Mount Auburn, built in the 1840s, where William Howard Taft, the 27th president and later chief justice of the United States, was born in 1857 and grew up. The National Park Service shows furnished family rooms and exhibits, with a visitor centre in the Taft Education Center next door.

Cincinnati Museum Center occupies Union Terminal, an Art Deco railway station by Fellheimer & Wagner with Paul Philippe Cret, opened in 1933. Around its half-domed rotunda with Winold Reiss mosaic murals are the Cincinnati History Museum, the Museum of Natural History & Science, a children's museum and an Omnimax theatre; Amtrak trains still stop here.

Krohn Conservatory is a glass greenhouse in Eden Park, completed in 1933 to an Art Deco design by Rapp & Meacham and named in 1937 after park commissioner Irwin M. Krohn. Its houses hold more than 3,500 plant species, among them palms, ferns, desert plants, orchids and a bonsai collection, and a show room hosts seasonal displays such as the butterfly show.

The Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden in the Avondale neighbourhood opened in 1875 and is the second-oldest zoo in the United States. It keeps around 1,800 animals of more than 400 species among some 3,000 kinds of plants, and several of its historic buildings, among them the domed Elephant House, are a National Historic Landmark.

The American Sign Museum, founded by Tod Swormstedt and opened in 2005, collects commercial signs from the late 19th century to the 1970s, from gold-leaf lettering on glass to neon and plastic. Since 2012 it has filled a former factory in Camp Washington, where many signs line a mock street of shopfronts and Neonworks of Cincinnati shows how neon signs are made.