Hello. My name is Joe Robb and I live on the south bank of Cincinnati.

I don’t know what you know about Cincinnati.

When I used to live in Boston, I met people from the East Coast or the West Coast who thought my hometown–the mighty metropolis on the coast of the Ohio–coasted through a flat sea of corn, and that it was a town, small and rural, full of twang. They were surprised by my accent, and to learn that my city was big, and ugly sometimes, but beautiful at other times, so seeped in odd history that when you step on the pavement of Cincinnati, stories leak up through the cracks in the asphalt and the smells of malted barley and pigflesh flood your nose.

Was that too much?

Cincinnati is the Queen City, The ‘Nati, The City of Seven Hills, The Beer Capitol of the World, and Porkopolis. Cincinnati is the birthplace of Roy Rogers, Bootsy Collins, Doris Day, Stephen Spielberg, Sarah Jessica Parker, and King Records, but not Jerry Springer, although he served on our city council from 1971 until 1974 when he resigned, admitting he had hired a prostitute with a personal check . . . that bounced. The people of Cincinnati appreciated his honesty and reelected him the next year, and by 1977 he was our mayor.

Us in Cincinnati are a forgiving people.

Cincinnati is home to one of the largest historical districts in the United States, which features the largest collection of Italianate architecture in the United States. This area is called Over-the-Rhine, for the Germans that settled the area and the canal that had run through it, a canal that had been replaced by an unfinished subway that is now covered by a parkway. This is the part of town that my grandpa grew up in, and this is the part of town he took me every weekend to go shopping at Findlay Market, the largest, oldest open-air market in Ohio, where I got my first job as a meat and cheese man as a teenager. This is the part of town that was ranked earlier this year as the most violent neighborhood in the US

(Bullshit, by the bye).

Why so much about Cincinnati? Because my contributions to this blog will be about living and writing in Cincinnati, particularly about writing with a group in Over-the-Rhine called Inktank, a non-profit organization dedicated to furthering literacy and initiating writing projects in Cincinnati–the city that, while the 23rd largest city in the US, is now considered the 9th most literate American city, right after Boston. I just learned that tidbit today.

I hope you enjoy my submissions to this blog and I look forward to blogging with you in 2010.

As a treat, here’s an abridged look at OTR: