Thirty-seven seconds. That's all it's going to take.

A stadium will fall today. With it, hopes will rise once more for a rebirth of Cincinnati's riverfront.

Cinergy Field, old Riverfront Stadium, will be imploded with a series of booms and a final swoosh!

Make way for the Great American Ball Park. And, down the road, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the Central Riverfront Park with its 8-acre lawn sweeping to the river as Cincinnati's front yard and, maybe someday, a neighborhood called The Banks.

On this storied land, where history repeats itself, change is as constant and as sure as the ebb and flow of the Ohio.

But, above all, this stretch of Cincinnati's riverfront is a place of promise, of possibilities.

The notion that hope springs from the riverfront is inextricably linked to the city's heritage.

This heritage sports a checkered past. Cincinnatians have had a long-lasting love-hate relationship with the riverfront.

When we're in love, we flock to it and fill its shoreline.

When we're not, we avoid it like a plague - which thrived along the riverfront during 19th-century cholera epidemics.

And yet, love it or hate it, we keep coming back to the riverfront.

"That's because the river is our defining feature," said Kevin Grace, archivist and historian at the University of Cincinnati and co-author of Cincinnati Revealed, a Photographic Heritage of the Queen City.

"We're a river town. We'll always be a river town," said Eugene Ruehlmann, the man considered the father of the riverfront's rebirth. And not just because he was Cincinnati's mayor when Riverfront Stadium opened in 1970.

As Mayor Ruehlmann, he led a group of government, business and civic leaders dedicated to reviving the city's oldest plot of land and reconnecting Cincinnati to its long-abandoned riverfront.

He saw what others had seen before him and what others for nearly a century had been too blind to see. He saw what we now see as a great center for recreation and economic stimulus. He saw a riverfront of possibilities and promise.

City's birthday

It is altogether fitting and proper that today's implosion ushers in a new era of riverfront development on the last Sunday in December.

Two hundred and fourteen years ago, on the last Sunday in December, this river city was born.

On Dec. 28, 1788, settlers and explorers with such future landmark last names as Ludlow and Symmes coaxed their flatboats toward a muddy riverbank. They landed where modern-day Cincinnati's Sycamore Street emerges from the murky waters of the Ohio.

These adventurers stood on the edge of a level, wooded river basin. What they saw - trees for fuel, housing and food, flat land for farming and clearing - and what they didn't see - signs of Native Americans' homes - looked promising.

A settlement was quickly laid out and called Losantiville. Two years later, it was re-named Cincinnati.

The settlement quickly turned into a village, then a city in 1819, and then a boomtown known as the Queen City of the West, for its culture, and Porkopolis, for its cash crop. In the mid-19th century, 80 percent of all pork packed in the United States came from the city's bustling riverfront.

Cincinnati's boom was fueled by its location and its ability to bring goods into and out of the area. The advent of steamboats (by 1826, one in four boats on the Ohio River was made in Cincinnati) and advances in curing pork with rock salt helped make the city a boomtown.

In 1800, Cincinnati's population stood at 750. After more than doubling every decade, the city's population was 115,435 in 1850. By comparison, Chicago's population that year was 29,963, San Francisco's 34,776, New Orleans' 116,375 and Boston's 136,881.

The riverfront catered to steamboats. Early photographs from 1848 show signs on buildings lining Front Street, near the proposed site of the new Mehring Way, touting steam engine repair, steamboat painting, metal works and lumber yards.

Archaeologist Chris Bergman has excavated portions of the site to prepare a report on what's beneath the surface of the planned Central Riverfront Park.

His digs uncovered brick and stone foundations and "signs of prosperity" - fine china and bottles that once held imported spirits.

The possibilities on Cincinnati's riverfront attracted a melting pot of people. The area, noted the Bulletin of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, teemed with "southern planters, river men, gold-seekers bound for California, negro roustabouts." They formed "a colorful and ever-changing panorama of humanity" on a riverfront that at its peak was visited annually by 8,000 steamboats.

Into this mix came two adventure seekers, composer Stephen Foster and a budding yarn spinner who would become Mark Twain.

The composer worked as a bookkeeper for a Front Street steamboat agent. From 1846 to 1850, he lived on Fourth Street where the Guilford Institute stands today.

Mark Twain, in the form of 20-year-old Samuel Clemens, arrived for a six-month stay in the fall of 1856. His lodgings and the printing plant where he worked were close to the foot of Walnut Street, near the ramp of the present-day John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge.

Stephen Foster picked up the dialects on the riverfront and the German influence on the city's musical life. His most famous Cincinnati-era song is "Oh! Susanna."

Even at the age of 20, Samuel Clemens proved to be a keen observer of Cincinnati's way of life. During his brief stay here, he wrote a sketch about the city's bungling bureaucracy hogtying citizens with red tape and paperwork.

The year was 1857. Not 2002.

Period of decline

The Civil War era altered the course of the riverfront. The conflict signaled the start of a century-long decline in which the area's nickname went from the Basin to the Bottoms.

The war closed Cincinnati's Southern markets. Its aftermath stunted the South's buying power and spurred the nation's westward development.

At the same time, steamboat traffic began to yield to traffic on the rails and roads. Trains and wagons could go west - all the way to the Pacific. Steamboats couldn't.

The Suspension Bridge, dedicated in 1867, was a mixed blessing. It vastly improved connections between the Ohio's shores. But its suspended roadway provided an escape route for residents and businesses fleeing the riverfront.

After the war, pork producing followed the railroads and gradually shifted to Chicago. That city, not Cincinnati, would eventually be immortalized by poet Carl Sandburg as the "hog butcher for the world."

Then there were the floods. They struck the riverfront with a vengeance, the worst being the flood of 1937, which turned Third Street into a canal.

"All of this contributed to an abandonment of the area," said Mr. Bergman, the archaeologist. "The focal point of the city for nearly a century turned into a warehouse district with slum housing."

Into this fading neighborhood was born the King of the Cowboys.

Amid warehouses and three- and four-story brick tenements lived shoe-factory worker Andrew Slye and his wife, Mattie. Their son, Leonard, was born on Nov. 5, 1911, on Second Street.

The street is gone. Covered by the U.S. Bank Arena. Leonard went on to become Roy Rogers.

Hope for revival

During its decline, the riverfront appeared unchanged. From a distance.

Photos taken in the 1930s show many of the same brick buildings lining the waterfront that are detailed in John Caspar Wild's "Public Landing" painting from 1835.

But the quality of life, on both the economic and social fronts, continued its downward spiral.

By the dawn of the 1960s, the Bottoms had a well-earned reputation as an unsavory place of warehouses, abandoned buildings, seedy bars and broken windows.

Capt. C.O. "Whitey" Jones recently sat in the pilot house of the Belle of Cincinnati and recalled what he saw when he cruised by Cincinnati's front yard in the early '60s.

"It was a dump. People tossed everything down there," said the riverboatman with half a century's experience on the Ohio. "We thought it was never going to change."

Down by the Riverside, a documentary Channel 12 aired in 1962, depicted in words and pictures a riverfront of "tin cans, empty bottles, rags and paper, boarded windows, weeds, rags and rot."

The place reeked of decay. Forty years after photographing the documentary, Ed Marks still remembers "the foul musty odor coming from the old buildings."

Still, there was hope for the riverfront. City Hall wanted to turn it into Cincinnati's playground.

Kevin Grace noted that as early as 1925, "there was talk of putting a new ballpark on the riverfront."

Rebirth at last

Talk grew louder with the release of the 1948 Metropolitan Master Plan. Detailed drawings called for a riverfront Reds stadium as well as a heliport, convention center and park.

The volume increased in 1962. A $16.6 million bond issue was placed before the voters - $10 million for a new convention center, $6.6 million to clean up the riverfront.

Officials stumped for the bond issue on the TV documentary.

Mayor Walton Bachrach promised: "This whole improvement is going to make our front yard something for every Cincinnatian to be proud of."

It sounds eerily similar to those rosy promises made during the stadium-tax campaign of 1996.

Voters passed the bond issue of 1962. Clean-up of the riverfront began in earnest. So did efforts to put the Reds in a stadium by the river.

"We were trying to revive downtown Cincinnati," said Mr. Ruehlmann, Mayor Bachrach's successor in 1967.

"We wanted people to come downtown to shop, eat dinner and see a game. So, it made sense to put the stadium on the riverfront."

The former mayor sat in his law office on the 21st floor of the Atrium Two Building on Fourth Street.

Historic prints and photos of Cincinnati's riverfront line the walls. By the door stand two baseball bats, souvenirs from the Reds' first game at Riverfront Stadium, an 8-2 loss to the Atlanta Braves on the night of June 30, 1970.

"There's no better place to talk about the riverfront than up here," the former mayor said.

The view from one window looks straight into the notch of the Great American Ball Park. An adjacent window keeps watch over Riverfront Stadium's remains.

From this vantage point, the former mayor has kept track of every step of the riverfront's rebirth.

He knows work on the riverfront is far from complete.

"I try to envision what things will look like down here 20 years from now," he said.

"The only thing I'm convinced of is that it will be different from what it is now."

Except for what the riverfront has to offer.

Greater Cincinnati can spread to Warren and Butler counties to the north, Boone, Kenton and Campbell counties to the south and Clermont and Dearborn to the east and west. Downtown Cincinnati can make itself over 1,000 times.

One constant will remain. One spot keeps bringing people back to the place where something new comes along every day.

That is a place of promise, the riverfront.

Call Cliff Radel at 768-8379; or e-mail cradel@enquirer.com.