United States · Ohio · Cincinnati
Mount Airy, Cincinnati — Area Guide & Where to Stay
A castle-like water tower rises over Colerain Avenue in Mount Airy, a Cincinnati neighborhood holding Mount Airy Forest, the city's largest park.
About Mount Airy
Where to stay in Mount Airy
Not every neighbourhood fits every trip — here's what each one is good for.
Mount Airy has almost no lodging of its own, so the visit runs on a car and a room booked elsewhere. Housing here runs to postwar ranches and apartment blocks, and the shops gather where West North Bend Road crosses Colerain Avenue. Rooms concentrate downtown.
Colerain Avenue carries US Route 27 north out of the Mill Creek valley, so a room in Over-the-Rhine or Downtown Cincinnati still leaves Mount Airy Forest a straight drive out. You want this neighborhood for the trails, the disc golf, or the treehouse.
About Mount Airy
What are the main landmarks in Mount Airy?
Mount Airy holds the largest park in the Cincinnati system, Mount Airy Forest, more than 1,400 acres of hillside that Cincinnati set aside in 1911 and replanted as woods. Crews of the Civilian Conservation Corps rebuilt the eroded ground through the 1930s, their rustic structures still stand, and the National Register added the whole park in 2010. The gate opens at 5083 Colerain Avenue.
Inside sit an arboretum, a disc golf course, and a wheelchair-accessible treehouse. Further up the avenue at 5421 Colerain Avenue, the Mount Airy Water Towers were finished in 1927 and built to look like a castle.
What is the history of Mount Airy?
Mount Airy was incorporated as a village in 1865 on land surrendered by Mill Creek Township and Green Township, and Cincinnati annexed it in 1911. The city started turning the worn-out farms on the hill into forest that same year. Generations of clearing and grazing had stripped the topsoil, and a Cincinnati Times-Star editorial of 1914 quoted a farmer nearby joking that his fields had slid downstream toward New Orleans.
Trees went back in. Planting ran through the 1930s under federal relief crews, and the work is generally counted among the earliest urban reforestation efforts undertaken by an American city.
Where is Mount Airy?
Mount Airy covers the ridge between College Hill east and Green Township west, with Northside downhill to the southeast and North College Hill over the line north.
More areas in Cincinnati
Updated September 2026