Cincinnati in 50 Maps

There are as many versions of Greater Cincinnati as there are residents of the region. That's roughly two million different perceptions of the city.

In Cincinnati in 50 Maps, editor Nick Swartsell and cartographer Andy Woodruff present over fifty ways of looking at the Queen City, from its early roadways and Indigenous earthworks to its shifting neighborhood borders. A visualization of relative population density can tell one story, and one showing where jobs are clustered tells another. New maps with up-to-date data sit beside historical maps that show things like exactly how communities were razed to make room for highways. Broken up into five sections--Mapping the Past, the Shape of Cincinnati, Communities and Culture, Getting Around, and Health and Environment--these visual representations show both the commonalities and the contradictions of an ever-changing American city.

These maps present reported statistics in new ways, and they represent the things that make Cincinnati the unique place that residents know and love: Find every place you can get Cincinnati chili, the location of every public stairway, and where the infamous Cincy traffic is worst.

Anyone who calls or ever called Cincinnati home will find something familiar, something surprising, and something revealing in this glossy, full-color volume.

Nick Swartsell is a reporter for 91.7 WVXU, Cincinnati's NPR member station. He previously edited Belt Publishing's Cincinnati Neighborhood Guidebook. He lives in Camp Washington among the hum of factories and the scent of chili. He likes riding bikes through places that aren't meant for bikes--some of them mapped in this book and others he's keeping to himself.

Andy Woodruff is an independent cartographer working on everything from paper hiking maps to interactive data visualizations. Though living near Boston now, he grew up an hour north of Cincinnati, visiting to watch the Reds from the nosebleed seats of Riverfront Stadium whenever possible, and it was maps of Cincinnati that helped get him into cartography in the first place.