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Originally Posted by Centropolis
i think cincinnati has the highest quality vernacular in the midwest. i’m not sure why, exactly, but i suppose its a combination of quality building materials/brick and early, pre-hyper industrial wealth.
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In terms of the unique density (not the rowhouses and semi-rowhouses, but the tenement-style housing which survived in Over-The-Rhine) I've heard it's a combination of the early boom of the city and topography.
Essentially, Cincinnati was the first great interior boomtown, located as it was along the Ohio River. But the steep hills surrounding the basin that comprised the core of the city was built out by the 1850s. Horsecars couldn't be used to access the steep hilltop areas surrounding the basin, because horses couldn't traverse the steep hillside roads in icy weather. It wasn't until the 1870s and 1880s that the hilltops began being developed through the development of inclines and cable cars, and of course in the 1890s electric streetcars came along. Still, for several key decades the "bowl" of Cinci was under tremendous geographic constraints, meaning they built upward in a way that really was only being done in Manhattan and parts of Boston concurrently.