On the first Sunday of September, when the last long weekend of summer settles over the Ohio River, Cincinnati does something it has done for half a century: it gathers by the water, looks up, and lets the sky scream. The Western & Southern/WEBN Fireworks, the unofficial close of summer for the Tri-State, returns on Sept. 6, 2026, for its 50th edition — and organizers are promising that the golden anniversary will be the biggest blast in the event's history, and quite possibly the biggest blast in America.
The milestone show, branded "The Biggest Blast in America," is built around a simple but audacious idea: put the audience inside the fireworks. For the first time, a second set of barges will be added on the river, positioned on both sides of the Taylor-Southgate Bridge, while pyrotechnics launch from rooftops of riverfront buildings and from bridges. The result, organizers say, is a 360-degree, "theater in the round" experience in which spectators are surrounded by explosions no matter where they stand.
John Barrett, chairman, president and CEO of Western & Southern Financial Group, said the show is designed to be more immersive than ever. Joe Rozzi, vice president of Rozzi's Famous Fireworks, added, "We've designed this year's show like a theater in the round. The idea is to surround the audience with the experience, using the river, the skyline and multiple launch points to create a show that feels bigger, wider and more connected to both sides of the river."
Joe Rozzi, vice president of Rozzi's Famous Fireworks, the fourth-generation family company that has fired the show for decades, said the scale of the show is unprecedented. "We are going to be doubling the amount of time we are working physically on the river, the choreography is going to be double to triple," he said.
The show will also reach across the Pacific for a piece of its spectacle. For the first time in 40 years, some specialty fireworks will be imported from Japan.
The fireworks will be preceded by the Pella Windows & Doors Drone Show, which is doubling in size with a second fleet of drones visible from both Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. The whole production, which has been two years in the making, is expected to generate an estimated $25 to $30 million in economic activity for local hotels, restaurants and small businesses.
It is a staggering scale for an event that began, improbably, as a birthday party. The fireworks were the brainchild of Frank "Bo" Wood Jr., the general manager and president of WEBN-FM, who in 1977 wanted to celebrate the station's 10th anniversary by throwing a party for the whole city. "I thought it would be fun to have a birthday party for the whole city and do something they've never seen before," Wood told the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1978. "Since we're a radio station we decided to broadcast music to go with the display, multimedia fireworks. It worked beyond anyone's expectations."
That first show, held on a Tuesday night, Aug. 30, 1977, was a seat-of-the-pants affair. There was no traffic control, no parking plan, and no real sense of what would happen. Fewer than 50,000 people showed up, flooding both sides of the river. DJ Glenn Gaskins produced a mix of song cues on reels, loosely synchronized to the Rozzi pyrotechnics. When a stopped train blocked the crowd from leaving that first year, some people crawled under the cars, climbed over them, and a few even uncoupled them — so that when the train started up the next morning, it broke apart on the tracks.
The following year, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra staged an all-day event along the river, and Riverfest was born. By the third year, the celebration had become a Cincinnati tradition and the unofficial signal that summer was ending. The music, piped over WEBN 102.7 FM, was a mix of rock, pop, movie soundtracks and classical — with a well-timed "Ribbit!" — and for years the only way to hear it was to bring a boom box to the river.
In the early days, synchronization was more hope than science. "The word 'synchronized' with fireworks was a myth until sometime in the 1990s," said Jay Gilbert, a former WEBN DJ who produced soundtracks in 1983 and '84. The Rozzis would write a script describing each firework and estimating how long it would take to explode, and the music was cut into numbered tape cartridges matched to the flights. During the show, a staffer on the barge radioed to a producer at the Newport Yacht Club, who relayed the cue to the studio in Hyde Park Square. It was, Gilbert recalled, "all that haphazard" — with burning debris raining down and the constant risk that a stray spark would ignite a flight not scheduled for another ten minutes. One year, Gilbert stood on the barge with a walkie-talkie while a man behind him brushed burning ashes off his head and shoulders.
The show was first broadcast on television in 1984, and it has not always gone smoothly since. In 2011, WEBN inadvertently aired the previous year's soundtrack for the first 12 minutes. The event also had a wilder, rowdier past: before alcohol was banned, crowds were unruly, with scores of arrests and hundreds of citations each year. After a man was beaten to death with a baseball bat downtown following the 1988 show, Cincinnati, Covington and Newport moved to restrict alcohol, and by 1992-93 it was banned outright. Riverfest became a family-friendly affair, and attendance soared.
Over the years, the fireworks shows have become bigger, better and more complex.
The 50th edition also carries a charitable heartbeat. The show is tied to the Rubber Duck Regatta, which benefits the Freestore Foodbank.
Riverfest returns to Yeatman's Cove, with the event beginning in the afternoon.
For a tradition that began as a radio station's birthday gift to a city, the 50th anniversary is a remarkable arc — from fewer than 50,000 people on a Tuesday night in 1977 to a massive 360-degree spectacle with drones, Japanese fireworks and a soundtrack pulled from five decades of the show's most memorable music. On Sept. 6, Cincinnati will once again gather by the river, look up, and mark the end of summer the way it has for fifty years — with the sky screaming all around them.