At the end of July I bought discounted admission tickets through Groupon to the Queen City Underground tour. Tickets are regularly $20 each if you buy them online, but the Groupon gave us buy one get one free admission. After the tour you can also buy tickets for any future tours for $10. So I would not pay full price as half price tickets should be easy to come by. My parents bought tickets as well and we all decided to check it out this past Sunday.

Me and Trey on the streets of OTR.

This is a walking tour along historic Vine Street in the Over the Rhine neighborhood. The tour lasts between 90 minutes and 2 hours and is probably about 1 mile walking. Along the way our 2 tour guides provided a lot of historical information on the neighborhood and various buildings along the walk. We also go the chance to go into a few different buildings, the highlight of which had to be the old lagering cellars of the Kauffman Brewery, which shut down at the time of prohibition. These old cellars sat 70 feet underground, undiscovered for years.

Me and my dad investigating the cellars.

Also on the tour was an old beer garden, Weilert’s Beer Hall. The first floor of this building was most recently a gothic club, and is uninteresting. The neat part of this building is the beer hall that is up above street level. A set of old stairs leads up to this space which has been relatively untouched for decades. We were also able to see inside some old housing units. With a good imagination I could see and feel what life could have been like in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s in this neighborhood.

Over the Rhine

I would easily recommend the tour for anyone looking for a little education and adventure on a Saturday of Sunday afternoon. One thing to note is that the Saturday tours go into the crypt below St. Francis, which I have already seen separately. I think this is much cooler than the old housing units that we were showed instead, so you may want to catch a Saturday tour if possible. We all enjoyed the tour enough to buy additional tickets to the Newport Gangster Tour, which I hope to use soon.

My mom has many more photos of the tour on her flickr page.