Image courtesy Belt Publishing
A new book, Cincinnati in 50 Maps, documents the city in 50 different ways through detailed maps and narrative storytelling. From pinpointing the precise location of every chili parlor to identifying indigenous earthworks to mapping out housing patterns and more, flipping through these pages may prove you don’t know the Queen City as well as you think.
Cincinnati in 50 Maps is divided into five sections: Mapping the Past, the Shape of Cincinnati, Communities and Culture, Getting Around, and Health and Environment. Altogether, they lay out the full range of ways the city can be interpreted. Some maps show Cincinnati as it exists today, such as present-day renting and homeownership patterns, neighborhood boundaries, and streetcar usage. Others highlight where to find the nearest source of goetta or current and former breweries in the region.
The book is one of Belt Publishing’s newest releases, and is an addition to its ongoing “50 Maps” series, which has also featured cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo.
Image courtesy Belt Publishing
To create this volume, Belt turned to WVXU reporter Nick Swartsell and independent cartographer Andy Woodruff. Swartsell has worked with Belt in the past on The Cincinnati Neighborhood Guidebook, contributing reporting informed by his years covering housing, social issues, the justice system, and transportation in Cincinnati. Woodruff was recruited separately by Belt Publisher Anne Trubek, already familiar with Cincinnati maps having grown up around Dayton.
After Swartsell and Woodruff were approached for the project in August 2024, the earliest planning stages were spent brainstorming map subjects. “We had to cut some [maps] just for space,” Swartsell says. The pair had come up with more than 100 possibilities before narrowing the list to the maps that they felt told the strongest stories.
Then the real work began. Some maps were constructed from historic materials like digitized roadways and early transit diagrams that Woodruff reconstructed into modern visualizations. For maps of older infrastructure, Woodruff used a process called georeferencing, which digitally warps historic maps so they align with modern data, before layering on present-day features like roads and boundaries. The “highway tolls” map, for example, required Woodruff to georeference 1920s street atlases and then overlay modern roadway shapes that came from the city.
Image courtesy Belt Publishing
Other maps required data modeling, such as demographic distributions and environmental health. “Getting some of those [maps] to show a clear story just from numbers alone is difficult,” Woodruff explains.
To make the mapping process more efficient, Woodruff created a digital base map of the Cincinnati region that included streets, topography, and structural elements that any ordinary map would include. This acted as his digital framework—a master file with geographic and spatial reference points that allowed him to build consistent overlays for all the maps rather than creating a new one over and over again. “It’s kind of assembling a bunch of layers, trying to figure out what extent of the map looks good, what tells the story, how to label it,” Woodruff explains.
New information and data played a central role too. Swartsell and Woodruff were able to use city census data, information collected by beer historians, and their own research to create more data-heavy maps. They also relied on less conventional sources. “We used Strava as one of the sources of data for the bike map,” Swartsell explains. This was particularly useful for visualizing movement patterns and popular cycling routes, which the app tracks among runners and cyclists.
Image courtesy Belt Publishing
Together, these maps create a rhythm to the book that moves from playful to historical and analytical. “We were really trying to ask ourselves, what’s stuff that you might not find in another map of Cincinnati? What are some things people find fun and interesting?” Swartsell says. “[These maps] give us a more cohesive picture, in some way, of what’s going on in our city.”
Among the maps highlighted in the collection is one documenting Cincinnati’s bike infrastructure in 2024. It includes planned multiuse paths, planned bike lanes, protected bike lanes, bike-share stations, and unofficial routes that riders commonly use. This map is one that Swartsell is particularly fond of, and the 2024 version offers a clear visual representation of both the city’s current layout and its expanding options for non-car transportation.
“I think some of the stuff that’s interesting is the hidden stories, the things you don’t just see every day, but that define the city and what it is and who its people are,” Woodruff says.
Placed together, the maps build a layered portrait of the Queen City. Swartsell and Woodruff hope readers can better interpret how different forces shape their region. “[These maps] can tell them thing about their city that they didn’t know. It can tell them more about who their neighbors are,” Woodruff says. “I think some of it, hopefully just makes people feel pride in this city.”
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