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Walnut Hills, Cincinnati — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Walnut Hills rises on one of Cincinnati's oldest hilltops, a near east side neighborhood built around the streetcar crossing at Peebles' Corner.
About Walnut Hills
Where to stay in Walnut Hills
Where you base yourself shapes the visit — here's the character of each area.
Walnut Hills holds almost no hotel stock of its own, so the neighborhood earns a day rather than a night. The beds sit lower down. Cincinnati keeps its hotel trade in the basin downtown and in Over-the-Rhine, a short run below the hill that Gilbert Avenue climbs to reach Peebles' Corner. What this hilltop offers a guest is position instead of a room key.
Eden Park is a walk from the crossing, and if a morning at the Cincinnati Art Museum is what you came for, this is the side of the city to wake on.
About Walnut Hills
What are the main landmarks in Walnut Hills?
Peebles' Corner is the address Walnut Hills is known by, the crossing of McMillan Street and Gilbert Avenue that six streetcar lines fed by the close of the nineteenth century. The Orpheum Theatre opened there in 1909, the first playhouse Cincinnati built outside its centre. Houses and churches follow.
Only the tower of the Walnut Hills United Presbyterian Church still stands at Taft and Gilbert, and the Harriet Beecher Stowe House survives at 2950 Gilbert Avenue. Eden Park covers the southwestern ground, and the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Krohn Conservatory and the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park all sit inside it.
What is the history of Walnut Hills?
Walnut Hills carries the name of a farm, Walnut Hill, worked by the settler James Kemper. The Kemper Log House he raised in 1804 stood on Kemper Lane until it was moved away. Lane Seminary came next.
Founded in 1829 on ground bounded by Gilbert, Yale, Park and Chapel Streets, it made Lyman Beecher its president, and his daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe heard the Lane Debates of 1834 set immediate abolition against colonisation. Annexation to Cincinnati followed in September 1869. Italian and Jewish households filled the western side of McMillan Street, and African American families arrived in number through the 1930s.
Where is Walnut Hills?
Walnut Hills occupies a hilltop on the near east side of Cincinnati, where McMillan Street crosses Gilbert Avenue and the ground drops toward Eden Park.
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Updated September 2026