CINCINNATI — It's been called the City of Seven Hills.

And Porkopolis.

And the Queen of the West.

It could also be called: The City With Lots of Friendly People. The City With Cool Architecture. The City With Its Very Own Chili. The City With Lots of Culture and History.

But when it was settled in 1788, Cincinnati was called Losantiville. A few years later it got its permanent name, and by the mid-1800s, Cincinnati was what some called "the pork-packing capital of the world," thanks in part to a large population of German immigrants who were the beef in the city's slaughterhouses. (And, today's population of 300,000-plus still reflects the German influence.)

About the same time, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow bestowed the title "Queen of the West" on the city in his poem "Catawba Wine."

But you're not going to visit Cincinnati in the 1850s.

You're going to visit today — or, in my case, late last April. What I found was a city — or make that a region, since the metro area sprawls across the river into the Kentucky riverside towns of Newport and Covington and beyond — that offers a lot of reasons to visit. And some of those friendly folk I ran into were only too happy to tell why:

I met my first friendly folk, Mary Pat Mullaney, as I started what looked to be an aimless trek through the Cincinnati Art Museum, on one of those seven hills in the popular Mount Adams section of the city. Mary Pat, a 45-year resident, changed all that after striking up a conversation and discovering why I was in town.

Immediately she led me to the Cincinnati Wing — not surprisingly full of arts and crafts from the area — and we were standing in front of one of her favorites, a large painting where two girls wearing colorful plaid dresses smiled down at us.

"This is magnificent — look at this," Mary Pat said as she dragged me into another room where lovely tiles of grapes and other fruits framed a fireplace. The tiles were made by Rookwood Pottery, which drew (emptied) its first kiln on Thanksgiving Day in 1880 and sadly called it quits in 1967, after moving to Mississippi in 1960. Avid collectors crave Rookwood and pay big bucks for it. (Nowadays one of the buildings at the old Rookwood site is Porkopolis restaurant, and each of the three kilns inside it, measuring maybe 20 feet across, holds a large round table for semi-private dining. One day you're churning out world-class pottery and the next someone's eating meat loaf inside you.)

GREAT NEIGHBORHOODS

As the sun headed toward the horizon, people bustled into the nearby nationally known Playhouse in the Park, and Sarah Sweeney walked her little dog Oliver in Eden Park, a rolling, greenbelt in the Mount Adams area.

"It's a great community for the arts, close to downtown and close to all of the parks and conservatory and art museum," she said when I asked her about this area, where she's lived for four years. "It's just a great part of town. ...

"It's usually pretty quiet, but in the bar district, it gets kind of wild on Saturday night."

And there's that nice park to walk Oliver in.

Marsie Rowan agreed with Sarah. I found her standing on her front porch while I wandered, enjoying the shotgun houses and other interesting architecture in Mount Adams. She's lived in Cincinnati 15 years — 14 on five different streets in Mount Adams, "and each street has a different personality. This is a dog street," she said, and a dog next door barked in agreement.

"It's almost like two or three different neighborhoods," she said of the area that draws tourists and locals to its bars, restaurants and architecture, and for a panoramic view of the city, the river and the Kentucky shore. "It's pretty laid back, tolerant and probably the only neighborhood I've been in in years where you really get to know your neighbors."

But Marsie finds lots of other attractions in the city. "I like to go to Clifton, in the University of Cincinnati area. It's a little more bohemian and has some cool shops and restaurants. In Newport (across the river) there's lots of stuff going on too. There are just lots of great neighborhoods to live in.

"I love Cincinnati. I love the culture here, I love coming to Findlay Market. I taught in the public schools here, so I know the people."

OPEN-AIR MARKET

Judy O'Rourke, a 37-year resident of the Cincinnati area, took a break from her shopping at the bustling Findlay Market to explain why she was the right person to talk to about Cincinnati's attractions.

Since 1855, Findlay Market, billed as the second-oldest open-air market in the country, has been the place where locals and not-so-locals have come to buy and sell produce, meats, sausages, exotic cheeses and olives, the Cincinnati-unique goetta (a mix of pinhead oatmeal, pork or beef and seasonings that's formed into loaves and baked, then cut into slices and fried), and other food and nonfood items.

It's also the place to socialize, and popular with activists, judging by the genial, graying woman selling the Socialist Worker and the trio of guys buttonholing passers-by to talk about the Green Party.

O'Rourke was shopping in the produce stand that Michael Johnson has run here since the mid-'90s. Among his offerings on this Saturday were "Cheap and Ugly Red Peppers," going for 75 cents apiece or two for a buck.

"During the week this is the grocery store for the locals," said Johnson, talking while waiting on a continuous stream of customers. He's open year-round, but only on Saturdays. "On weekends you get folks from a little farther away who want to spend a few hours. It's a social time for them."

But not all is rosy at the market. "We've got all this wonderful architecture," he said of the surrounding houses and shops dating from the 1800s, "but it's been neglected. ...

"We've got a problem with the neighborhood here. It's tough to get people down."

The neighborhood, the Over-the-Rhine section that sprawls just north of downtown, was once home to many of those German immigrants. Today it's a rather dicey area that has become the recipient of a very major police presence that's evident at the market. Parking's available by the market, or get there by cab.

GRAND ARCHITECTURE

Carolyn Zink and a friend who were chatting outside the Ernst Mansion hailed me while I was across the street, taking a photo of the house that dates from 1890. A plaque outside that I would read later described it as "A brick version of Richard Shaw's Queen Anne with High Victorian Gothic Neo-Grec elements." For non-architecture fiends, suffice it to say it's a really neat old house.

I'd just walked across the Licking River from Newport to meander the Licking Riverside Historic District of Covington, which is chockablock with these grande dames. Though, with the exception of occasional tours, a look from outside is all you usually get of these terrific places that were built by the local movers-and-shakers of the late 19th century, Zink offered to show me the inside of the mansion that once was home to U.S. Sen. Richard Pretlow Ernst. "If I see someone who's interested (in the building), I'll go out and talk to them," she said.

The mansion is now used as the offices of a CPA firm, but the grandeur has been restored after this jewel fell on hard times, including about a 40-year stint as a hotel where the amazing interior was carved up into tiny rooms.

Carolyn is office manager for the CPA firm, but she's like a proud mother showing off the mansion and pointing out some very cool features. In the entryway, a chain of plaster decorates the ceiling. In the same area is a massive curved wooden door that was original to the house. "When the door was originally made, they had to soak it in water for six weeks to get it to bend to that shape," the proud mother noted.

HISTORY EVERYWHERE

So why are there so many friendly folk here?

Larry Brown has an answer for that — and just about anything else you might want to ask about Cincinnati. He and his wife, Dolores, came to the city more than 15 years ago. For Dolores it was a return to the city where she was born, and where two generations before her lived, "back to slavery," Larry says.

Now in his 70s, Larry has a resume that began as a newsboy in Washington and included military service, dairy, soft drink and pastry-route salesman, and a long stint as a wholesale liquor salesman. When he and Dolores retired and came to Cincinnati to care for her ailing mother, Larry hunted around for a job but didn't find anything.

So, he got a book on Cincinnati, devoured it and committed it to memory. Today he owns L.B. Van Travel, a small business offering city tours and casino and airport shuttles that's well-enough respected that the concierge at The Cincinnatian, a downtown landmark hotel, didn't think twice about who to call when I told her I wanted a private tour of the city.

"Hey, man, I made work," he said of how the business began.

Take a ride in his van and the facts pour out: "Churchill stayed at the Hilton Netherland ... there's the only statue in the world of Lincoln without a beard ... that black church goes back to 1831 ... there's the Cincinnati Fire Museum. We were the first to have a fireman's pole — and a weather bureau ... lots of company headquarters here — Chiquita Banana, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Kroger's ... there's where Jerry Springer's station was ... we had 25 breweries here at one time ... that was Harriet Beecher Stowe's home ... this was a big department store to the left; now it's going to be condominiums ... when they put the bells up in this church it broke out all of the windows in the neighborhood. It was tuned too high ... Over-the-Rhine is where the poor people live. I call them the regular people ..."

Over-the-Rhine ... yeah, crime problems there aren't something any tourism folks would want to promote. Or the April 2001 downtown rioting that spread over several days after police shot and killed a 19-year-old black man — the 15th black man killed by police here since 1995.

But Cincinnati still has a lot to offer. The downtown area by the river, which is pretty quiet, is home to some terrific historic hotels, and plenty of good restaurants. Stay there, as I did, and you can walk to the Reds and Bengals stadiums and Reds Hall of Fame, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the Contemporary Arts Center, Aronoff Center for the Arts, Macy's and Saks, or walk across one of the bridges or take the $1 Southbank Shuttle for the Newport and Covington attractions.

And, of course, there are those friendly people.

Larry Brown's explanation of why there are so many here? "It's because it's part of the South," he said. "My wife says she was born in the Midwest. The Midwest is Chicago. This is the South. I tell my wife that and she gets mad at me."

But she doesn't stay mad long. After all, she's one of those friendly people too.

IF YOU GO ...

GETTING AROUND: I stayed downtown and relied on shoe leather, the occasional cab and the Southbank Shuttle ($1). For more flexibility, bring or rent a car.

WHERE TO STAY: I sampled two downtown classics, The Cincinnatian and the Art Deco masterpiece Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza.