Covington
"Covington built its own suspension bridge before Brooklyn built its famous one, and the engineer used what he learned here to do it again."
A German-founded river city across the water from Cincinnati, its skyline anchored by a Gothic cathedral and its riverfront by a suspension bridge that predates its more famous cousin in New York. Lia and I walked MainStrasse at dusk with a carillon clock chiming overhead and felt like we'd wandered into Bavaria by accident.
Covington sits directly across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, close enough that the two cities blur together on a map, but crossing the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge on foot makes clear this is its own place — a nineteenth-century German immigrant town that kept its rowhouses, its beer gardens’ bones, and its particular Catholic devotion long after the breweries themselves closed. Roebling built this bridge in 1866, fourteen years before using the lessons learned here to design the Brooklyn Bridge, and it still carries cars across today, its stone towers lit gold after dark.
MainStrasse Village
MainStrasse’s cobbled blocks were built by German immigrants in the mid-1800s and restored with real intent in the 1970s, right down to the Goose Girl fountain and the Carroll Chimes bell tower, whose mechanical figures act out the Pied Piper legend on the hour. We ate schnitzel at a corner restaurant that’s been serving the neighborhood since before either of us was born, then wandered past bars spilling music onto the sidewalk, the kind of low, easy evening that made Lia keep saying she felt like she was somewhere in the Rhineland rather than northern Kentucky.
The Cathedral Basilica and the riverfront
A few blocks east, the Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption rises out of a residential street with a scale that seems out of proportion to its neighborhood — modeled partly on Notre-Dame and Saint-Denis, with one of the largest stained glass windows in the world set into its facade. We sat in a back pew for a while, the light coming through in fractured color, before walking down to Covington’s riverfront to watch the Cincinnati skyline light up across the water, the suspension bridge’s cables catching the last of the sunset.
Getting There
Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG) is actually located in Kentucky, about fifteen minutes south of Covington via I-275 and I-71/75, making it by far the most convenient airport. A car makes getting around easiest, though Covington’s riverfront and MainStrasse are both very walkable once you’re downtown, and a pedestrian path across the Roebling Bridge connects directly to Cincinnati.
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