Walking Cincinnati. Danny Korman

200 artists and is headquarters for Final Friday and Second Look Saturday art walks. Turn left on 13th Street. On the right is St. Mary Baptist Church, housed inside one of the city’s former bathhouses. Spring Street (on the right) dead-ends at Liberty Street and features town houses, gardens, and carriage houses that serve houses on Broadway. Turn right on Broadway. On the east side is an impressive row of houses that defy urban life with their front lawns, large trees, and gardens. The Renaissance Revival limestone-fronted house at 1324 Broadway was built in 1852 and home to Christian Boss, owner of Gambrinus Stock Co. Brewery at 12th and Sycamore Streets. Follow the cast-iron railings to 1342 Broadway, a rare Federal house from 1834 and one of the city’s oldest. Seven houses on Broadway’s west side north of 14th Street are mostly Italianate.

Turn right on Race Street, and go two blocks south to W. Elder Street. On your right is Findlay Market, the oldest continuously operated public market in Ohio. Findlay is the last remaining public market of the nine that once served Cincinnati. It’s Cincinnati’s closest thing to a European shopping experience, especially on a Saturday when the market is teeming with people buying, hugging, laughing, looking around, chatting, and just being. Nineteenth-century architecture surrounds the market, with Renaissance Revival, Greek Revival, Queen Anne, and Italianate all in full view.

      After exploring the market, continue south on Race Street. Over-the-Rhine Recreation Center, hidden behind 1708 Race St., is a mix of refurbished historic buildings and infill from 1971. [Detour: Head east two blocks on Green Street to Vine Street for Tucker’s Restaurant (1637 Vine St.), the neighborhood’s oldest diner (since 1946) serving comfort food classics for breakfast and lunch.]

Continue south on Race Street, and cross Liberty Street. Race Street is a street of churches. On the left is the Gothic facade of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church (1871). Just down the street on the right is St. Paul’s Church (1850). Empty and neglected for decades, it now houses Taft’s Ale House, with tongue-in-cheek references to William Howard Taft, the 27th president of the United States and Cincinnati resident. There are more up ahead, as you will see. On the right is the Race Street Garden. While it looks like a private yard, it is indeed a community garden that holds its own in a rapidly changing neighborhood. In 1989 Pleasant Street gardeners created the little oasis with infrastructure support from the Civic Garden Center Community in Avondale.

      A cluster of culinary businesses has emerged in these blocks: Poke Hut (1509 Race St.), Anchor OTR (1401 Race St.), Zula Restaurant & Wine Bar (1400 Race St.), Salazar (1401 Republic St.), and more in a neighborhood with a regular stream of new business openings. Anchor OTR benefits from a restored wooden veranda, an important part of the area’s architectural heritage, facing Washington Park.

      Washington Park, on the right between 14th and 12th Streets, is older than most buildings that surround it. Cincinnati’s second-oldest park was the site of four separate cemeteries for several churches before the city acquired the land between 1855 and 1863. The 6-acre park is a popular destination year-round and features concerts in the bandstand, a water park, mature trees, and a playground.

Enter the park at 14th and Race Streets, follow the right walkway past the open-air stage and great lawn, and head toward Elm Street. Several magnificent buildings dominate this stretch of Over-the-Rhine. Here you see Music Hall and Memorial Hall (both designed by Samuel Hannaford & Sons) up close. Music Hall provides a massive High Victorian Gothic western wall for the park. Inside, it hosts the opera, symphony, pops orchestra, and May Festival (the oldest choral festival in the United States). To the left of it is the Beaux Arts–style Memorial Hall, a concert venue inside a building erected in 1908 as a memorial to pioneers and soldiers. As you head south along Elm Street, six houses create a stunning late 19th-century streetscape: 1209 Elm Street is the most unrestrained with its French Renaissance facade. Vestry at the Transept is located inside St. John’s Church. Once the home of Cincinnati’s oldest German Protestant congregation, the Gothic church was finished in 1868. Across the street and in stark contrast to the last two blocks, see the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, modeled after the Royal National Theatre in London and Shakespeare’s Globe.

      South of Cincy Shakes, as the theater calls itself, is the towering Central Parkway YMCA (1918). The Italian Renaissance building with two-story arched windows is home to offices for the YMCA of Greater Cincinnati, along with 65 affordable apartments for seniors. Walk along 12th Street toward Race Street and take in the block-long rear facade of the School for Creative and Performing Arts (SCPA). Key to the revitalization of Washington Park, this was the first K–12 arts school in the United States. Founded in 1973 as one of the first magnet schools in the city, it relocated here from the old Woodward High School building on Sycamore Street. SCPA is a model of excellence in school integration.

Return to Race Street for two more historic churches. First English Lutheran Church (behind the Washington Park streetcar station at 12th and Race Streets) presents a handsome red sandstone Romanesque-style facade from 1894. Go one block north on Race Street, where just north of 13th Street, Over-the-Rhine Community Church (inside Nast Trinity Methodist Church) features a rock-faced masonry facade with terra-cotta detailing and an “1880” inscription above the right door dating the building, another project of Samuel Hannaford & Sons.

      Remain standing at 13th Street for a closeup view of two ArtWorks murals. Each is part of more than 50 elaborate murals painted on the sides of buildings in Over-the-Rhine and downtown. You’ll notice them almost everywhere you go. (For even closer inspection, ArtWorks student apprentices provide guided walking tours.) The Vision of Samuel Hannaford shows a portrait of Samuel Hannaford resting on blueprints, symbolizing his architectural legacy in Cincinnati. The Golden Muse features a larger-than-life figurine from an 18th-century mantel clock in the Taft Museum of Art’s collection.

Return to 12th Street and turn left. Tender Mercies is a longtime Over-the-Rhine institution and a model for retaining diversity and inclusiveness through housing service in a rapidly changing neighborhood. Continue east toward Vine Street, the spine of Over-the-Rhine. In the late 1800s, Vine Street once contained 136 saloons, taverns, and beer gardens. Today, the street is a thriving commercial district with a mix of restaurants, bars, and retail stores. There are far too many to list here. (For a listing of Over-the-Rhine businesses, visit otrchamber.com.) A few doors south is Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati. For a long time, it was one of the only businesses, and the only theater, in the neighborhood.

Continue walking east along 12th Street, crossing Vine. Walk one block to Jackson Street. On the left is the