Over the course of the spring and summer of 1866, a Cincinnati photographer named John Wildman Winder climbed to some of the highest elevations around the Queen City and created three breathtaking panoramas, preserving a record of our city as it existed in a long-lost age.
Since we don’t know the exact order in which Winder captured his images, labelling them in order is entirely arbitrary. Let us begin with the images collected from atop the Suspension Bridge itself. The four albumen prints that constitute this panorama are preserved at the Library of Congress.
To create this spectacular series, Winder positioned his camera on the summit of the south tower of the bridge. From that vantage point, he made four images encompassing the entire riverfront from the Gas Works at the foot of Rose Street in the West End to the Water Works at the base of Mount Adams. Far in the distance to the east, we can see the hillsides of Mount Lookout and Columbia-Tusculum, with Bellevue, Kentucky peeking in from the other shore. To the west, we see Ludlow, Kentucky, with Price Hill in the background.
Looking due north, to the west of the bridge, we see the foot of Vine Street and to the east of the bridge we get a good view up Walnut Street. There we identify the College Building, home to the Mercantile Library. On the Vine Street side, what appears to be another church steeple is, in fact, the city’s fire tower. Installed on the roof of the old Ohio Mechanics Institute on the corner of Sixth and Vine, Cincinnati’s relatively new professional fire department kept watch from this tower and assigned steam fire engines to respond by lighting color-coded lamps on the pole above the tower, while ringing the fire bell. To the west of Vine Street, we see some familiar spires that are still around today—St. Peter In Chains Cathedral and the Isaac M. Wise Temple. Their present-day neighbor, today’s City Hall, had not yet been constructed. Each of the four albumen prints is approximately 10 inches tall and 15 inches wide. Stitched together, the whole panorama is about five feet in width…