Cincinnati Union Terminal/Museum Center
Freeman Evenue at west end of Ezzard Charles Drive (at I-75);
Fellheimer & Wagner; 1931-33

Cincinnati’s railroad stations were scattered around the periphery of the Basin until brought together in the early 1930s at Union Terminal, the hub of a vast rearrangement of tracks and even of the valley landscape. The Cincinnati Union Terminal was an effective, if belated, effort to unite the seven railroad lines and five separate terminals that had obstructed the transfer of people and goods from one to another. Business and community leader George D. Crabbs and Chief Engineer Henry M. Waite spearheaded the successful movement to improve rail access to the city.

The architects and engineers of Union Terminal were Alfred Fellheimer (1875-1959) & Steward Wagner (1886-1958) of New York, who organized the extremely complex yet efficient circulation patterns of the terminal, which originally allowed for access by train, bus, taxi, and private automobile without overlapping. The projected design was in a somewhat modernized Beaux-Arts Classical mode. Both the important Beaux-Arts-trained Philadelphia proto-Modernist Paul Cret (1876-1945) and a young engineer, Roland Wank (1898-1970), who had recently returned from a tour of European Modern architecture, have been given credit for the change to the dramatic arched half-dome that so magnificently unified the executed facade, symbolized the modernity of the city’s gateway, and provided a landscape-scale image of aspiration, even as the Depression lurked. The Terminal reached its peak as a transportation hub in the 1940s, then declined until it underwent an ill-fated adaptation as a shopping-center in the1980s, after the original concourse had been removed.

In 1990 the Terminal was rescued as the Cincinnati Museum Center, incorporating the Cincinnati Historical Society Library and Museum (founded 1831), Cincinnati Museum of Natural History and Science (1870), an Omnimax theater, and more recently a Children’s Museum. Brilliant mosaic-murals by Winold Reiss (1886-1953) in the spectacular Rotunda trace the history of transportationin the area (other Reiss murals portraying Cincinnati industries, from the former concourse, are now displayed in the Greater Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport). Rooms in Union Terminal clad with Rookwood Pottery and other local crafts maintain the stream-lined Moderne quality of the overall concept. Moreover, the artificially elevated site, linked to the city by formal landscaping and cascades, provides one of the great views of the skyline and Basin. NHL, NCEL. Open daily.