Explore Cincinnati

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 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 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 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.