City View Tavern, the 150-year-old Mount Adams dive bar famous for its skyline views and its beloved Big Ted burger, has a new owner. Randy Freking, a retired employment lawyer, takes the reins Saturday, becoming just the fifth owner in the tavern's long history at 403 Oregon St.
Freking purchased the building, the land, and the liquor license, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. He told the paper he has been coming to City View for almost 50 years and dreamed of owning the place ever since he saw it listed for sale back in 2020. Now retired from Freking Myers & Reul, the Cincinnati employment law firm he co-founded in 1990 and stepped away from at the end of 2020 after three decades representing workers, Freking is bringing a lifetime of regular-customer loyalty into the owner's chair.
The sale closes a six-year marketing effort. Commercial real estate agency OnSite Retail Group was first hired in August 2020 by seller Debra Henning to find a buyer for the building, business, and liquor license, and the asking price was lowered twice over that span from an original $740,000, the Enquirer reports. Joshua Rothstein, who managed the sale, said the final price ended up being far more than he expected to get.
A Dive Bar That Isn't Changing Its Stripes
Despite the ownership change, Freking insists City View's identity is staying exactly as regulars know it. The vibe of the tavern will not change at all, he said, according to the same Enquirer report. He plans to add more comfortable seating, install new televisions, and introduce happy hour specials, while also expanding the burger menu with vegetarian options.
Freking wants to make City View a great place to watch Reds and Bengals games again, a goal that lines up neatly with his baseball resume. He serves as treasurer of the Cincinnati Reds Community Fund, has co-authored several books about the Reds, and co-hosts the Reds podcast We Love Our Team. He has also authored Cincinnati's 150-Year Opening Day History and The Big Red Machine's Last Hurrah, and hosts an annual Opening Day Eve fundraiser that raised more than $56,000 in 2024, per the Cincinnati Bar Association.
The bar's old jukebox is staying put, and so is the unpredictable rhythm regulars have come to expect — though Freking is set to bring some structure to it. He will maintain regular hours of noon to 10 p.m. Wednesday through Thursday and noon to midnight Friday through Saturday, a break from the tavern's history of unpredictable business hours before his ownership began.
150 Years, Five Owners, One Burger
City View Tavern's story stretches back to 1875, when the building started life as a grocery store with a small taproom attached. It didn't take on its saloon identity until a bar was added in 1901. The building originally rose three stories, but lost its top two floors in an infamous Christmas Tree Fire, leaving the single-story profile Mount Adams residents know today, according to the Harvard Club of Cincinnati.
Ownership passed through several hands over the decades — from Thomas Spain in 1891 to Bernard Recklingloh in 1906 to employee George Lagemann in 1917, whose family ran the bar for decades under the name Lagemann's, per the same account. Debra Henning, who co-owns the business with Silas Evans, bought City View in 1985 and added the small kitchen that turned the Teddy Burger, now known simply as the Big Ted, into one of the tavern's central draws — a handmade, never-frozen patty on a Kaiser roll that's been called among the best burgers in Cincinnati.
City View isn't the oldest bar in town; that title belongs to Arnold's Bar and Grill downtown, which opened in 1861 and never stopped pouring drinks even during Prohibition, according to Arnold's Bar & Grill. Still, City View ranks among the oldest bars in greater Cincinnati, and its 150-year run has earned it a place in local lore that goes well beyond the burger.
The View, the Neighborhood, and That Tequila Ban
Part of what keeps people climbing the hill to City View is the view itself. The tavern sits on a 2,850-square-foot property overlooking downtown Cincinnati, Newport, Covington, and the Ohio River from its outdoor deck, according to the Harvard Club. Mount Adams itself, perched on a steep hill east of downtown, was originally called Mount Ida before being renamed in 1843 for former President John Quincy Adams, who visited Cincinnati to dedicate the Cincinnati Observatory, per The Cincinnati Map Collection.
Then there's the tequila ban, one of City View's quirkiest and most enduring traditions. Local legend holds that Charles Manson, born in Cincinnati in 1934, frequented the bar in the 1960s and once threatened to jump off the back deck after downing tequila shots — a story the tavern has never served the spirit since, even though historians note Manson spent most of that decade behind bars, according to Cincinnati Magazine. Whether the tale is entirely accurate or not, it has become a fixture of the bar's identity, much like the jukebox and the burger.
City View has long been counted among Mount Adams' top watering holes, a status Hoodline noted back in 2019 when it ranked the tavern alongside Blind Lemon and Crowley's. The neighborhood's bar scene has seen other recent turnover too — Hoodline reported in June on the reopening of Tavern on the Hill after a seven-year shutdown, and in July on the sale of Cincinnati's Jim & Jack's after four decades under the same owners. For City View regulars, Freking's arrival Saturday looks less like a changing of the guard and more like a familiar face finally taking a seat behind the bar he's been drinking at for half a century.
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