Ohio Landmarks Worth the Detour: 10 Stops From Cleveland to Cincinnati
Ohio has a reputation as the state you drive through on the way to somewhere else. We’ve now crossed it enough times to tell you that reputation is doing you a favor: it keeps the crowds thin at some genuinely great stops. Everything on this list is a place we’ve stood in front of, walked through, or climbed on ourselves, camera in hand. No filler, no guesses.
The list runs north to south, Cleveland to Cincinnati, because that’s how you’d actually drive it.
Cleveland and the Lake Erie Shore
Cleveland Script Sign at Edgewater Park
Destination Cleveland started planting big white script signs around the city in 2016 as a tourism play, and it worked. There are a half dozen now, but the Cleveland Script Sign at Edgewater Park is the one you want: the letters sit above the lake with Lake Erie and the entire downtown skyline lined up behind them. Go at sunset and expect to wait your turn, because everybody in Cleveland has the same idea.
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
A glass pyramid by I.M. Pei on the downtown lakefront, stuffed with decades of music history. Yes, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is the big obvious tourist stop, and yes, it’s worth it anyway. Give it half a day, not an hour, and catch the skyline from the plaza while you’re out there. The script sign at Edgewater is a short hop west and makes the natural same-afternoon pairing.
Squire’s Castle
A castle that was never a castle. Feargus Squire, a Standard Oil man, built Squire’s Castle in the 1890s as the gatekeeper’s lodge for a grand country estate that never got built. The lodge was eventually stripped to a stone shell, and now it sits in the Cleveland Metroparks’ North Chagrin Reservation where you can walk every room of it for free. If it’s apple season, Patterson Fruit Farm is a short drive south in Chesterland.
Smolen-Gulf Covered Bridge
The longest covered bridge in the United States is not in Vermont or New Hampshire. It’s in Ashtabula County, Ohio. The Smolen-Gulf Covered Bridge is 613 feet of timber truss hanging 93 feet over the Ashtabula River, opened in 2008 and built to carry full highway loads. You can drive through it or walk the covered sidewalks along each side. The county doubles down on the gimmick by also holding the shortest covered bridge in the country, all of 18 feet, a few miles away in Geneva.
Columbus
Franklinton Slingshot
A 20-foot, 6,000-pound slingshot drawn back by a giant stone hand bursting out of the bricks, permanently aimed at downtown Columbus. Artist Andrew Lundberg built the Franklinton Slingshot in 2022 for the corner of Sullivant and Lucas in Franklinton, the arts district across the river, and the 1797 on the frame is the year the neighborhood was settled. Climb the grassy levee behind it for the best angle. Free, always open, done in ten minutes, and worth every one of them.
Arnold Schwarzenegger Statue
Columbus is where a 23-year-old Arnold won the 1970 Mr. World title, and the city never let go of him. The Arnold Sports Festival has brought the man himself back every spring since 1989, and an 8-foot, 600-pound bronze Arnold Schwarzenegger Statue in competition trunks, frozen mid twisted double-biceps, greets everybody else outside the Greater Columbus Convention Center. The statue went up in 2012 at the old Veterans Memorial, the very hall where he won, then moved to the convention center in 2014. Strike the pose. You know you’re going to.
Cincinnati
Cincinnati Union Terminal
The finest Art Deco building in the Midwest, full stop. Cincinnati Union Terminal opened in 1933, and its half-dome rotunda with glass mosaic murals looked so much like a superhero headquarters that it’s said to have inspired the Hall of Justice. Today it holds the Cincinnati Museum Center and the Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center, so one stop covers the building, the museums, and one of the most affecting exhibits in the state.
National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center stands on the banks of the Ohio River, and the location is the point: for people escaping slavery, this river was the line between owned and free. The centerpiece is a real slave pen, moved timber by timber from a Kentucky farm and rebuilt inside the museum. It is not a light stop, and it is not supposed to be. Plan a couple of hours and let it be heavy.
Elsinore Arch
In 1883 the Cincinnati Water Works needed a valve house at the edge of Eden Park, and instead of a utility shed they built a medieval gate tower styled after Elsinore Castle, the Hamlet one. The Elsinore Arch still sits right on Gilbert Avenue looking gloriously out of place. Park, shoot it, then take the stone steps behind it up the hill toward the Cincinnati Art Museum.
Ault Park
Cincinnati’s pretty park on the hill. The 1930 Italian Renaissance pavilion at the heart of Ault Park crowns a grand staircase with a cascading fountain running down it, formal gardens all around, and a terrace view that runs for miles over the Little Miami valley. It’s a favorite for weddings and sunset chasers for the same reason it’s a favorite of ours. Free, easy, and reliably gorgeous.
Keep Going
That’s ten, and it’s nowhere near the whole list. The American Sign Museum keeps a warehouse of vintage neon glowing in Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden earns its reputation, and northeast Ohio alone could fill a second post. We knocked out the northern half of this list on our Columbus to Erie road trip if you want the full route. If Ohio has always been your drive-through state, pick three of these and fix that.
