The population of Cincinnati was , in , making it the third-most populous city in Ohio and 64th-most populous in the U. The city is the economic and cultural hub of the Cincinnati metropolitan area , Ohio's most populous metro area and the nation's 30th-largest , with over 2. Throughout much of the 19th century, Cincinnati was among the top 10 U. The city developed as a river town for cargo shipping by steamboats , located at the crossroads of the Northern and Southern United States, with fewer immigrants and less influence from Europe than East Coast cities in the same period.
However, it received a significant number of German-speaking immigrants , who founded many of the city's cultural institutions. It later developed an industrialized economy in manufacturing. Many structures in the urban core have remained intact for years; in the late s, Cincinnati was commonly referred to as the " Paris of America" due mainly to ambitious architectural projects such as the Music Hall , Cincinnatian Hotel , and the Roebling Bridge. Greater Cincinnati has the 28th-largest economy in the U.
The city's largest institution of higher education, the University of Cincinnati , was founded in and is now ranked among the largest in the nation by enrollment. Two years after the founding of the settlement then known as "Losantiville", Arthur St. Clair , the governor of the Northwest Territory , changed its name to "Cincinnati", possibly at the suggestion of the surveyor Israel Ludlow , [ 15 ] in honor of the Society of the Cincinnati. Clair was at the time president of the Society, made up of Continental Army officers of the Revolutionary War.
Cincinnati began in when Mathias Denman, Colonel Robert Patterson , and Israel Ludlow landed at a spot at the northern bank of the Ohio opposite the mouth of the Licking River and decided to settle there. The original surveyor, John Filson , named it "Losantiville", a combination of syllables drawn from French and Latin words, intended to mean "town opposite the mouth of the Licking".
Clair changed the name of the settlement to honor the Society of the Cincinnati. In , the introduction of steamboats on the Ohio River opened up the city's trade to more rapid shipping, and the city established commercial ties with St.
