Over-the-Rhine: Forty-Eighters and Lager Beer
Ohio
The Miami and Erie Canal ran along the northern edge of Cincinnati's settled area in the eighteen thirties and forties, a straight ditch of brown water that became the practical boundary between the city proper and the open land to the north. German immigrants, arriving in waves, settled on the far side of the canal. They called the waterway the Rhine. They called their neighborhood Over-the-Rhine. The name has stuck for nearly two centuries.
By eighteen fifty, Germans made up roughly sixty-three percent of the neighborhood's population. They had brought with them not just language and food but a political tradition. Many of the Germans who arrived after the failed revolutions of eighteen forty-eight, the Forty-Eighters, had been actively involved in democratic and republican uprisings against the old European order. They organized Turner societies, which combined physical training with radical politics, built community halls, published newspapers in German, and opposed slavery with particular force.
When Cardinal Gaetano Bedini, the Pope's emissary, visited Cincinnati in December eighteen fifty-three, a mob of German immigrants five hundred strong marched on the bishop's residence to protest him. Bedini was associated with the repression of the eighteen forty-eight revolutions in Europe, and the Forty-Eighters had not forgotten.
They also brewed beer. The lagering cellars cut into the limestone hills north of the canal gave German brewers the cold storage they needed to make lager, which requires low-temperature fermentation. By eighteen eighty, Cincinnati was being called the Beer Capital of the World, with Over-the-Rhine as its center. Christian Moerlein, Hudepohl, Burger: the names on the old brewery buildings still visible in the neighborhood all belong to German immigrant families.
Prohibition emptied the breweries in nineteen twenty. The neighborhood declined. Over-the-Rhine has been in some form of revival and crisis ever since, a place where the German bones show through whatever is built on top.
