History

The construction of Cincinnati Union Terminal in the early 1930s was a remarkable act of civic ambition at the nadir of the Great Depression. Seven competing railroads serving Cincinnati — the Baltimore and Ohio, the Chesapeake and Ohio, the Louisville and Nashville, the Norfolk and Western, the New York Central, the Pennsylvania, and the Southern — agreed to consolidate their separate terminal facilities into a single shared station on a site in Mill Creek Valley west of downtown. The project required the relocation of the Mill Creek itself, the construction of extensive new rail infrastructure, and the design of a terminal building large enough to handle the traffic of all seven lines simultaneously.

Alfred T. Fellheimer of Fellheimer & Wagner had designed Grand Central Terminal’s improvements in New York and brought to Cincinnati a sophisticated understanding of the functional requirements of large rail terminals. Paul Philippe Cret, the Philadelphia Beaux-Arts architect who had also worked on federal buildings in Washington, contributed a design sensibility that balanced the functional demands of the program with an Art Deco visual language of exceptional clarity. The building’s plan is organized around the great rotunda, which serves as the main concourse — a 145-foot-diameter room from which all passenger facilities radiate — with the half-dome facade announcing this circular organisation to the city.

The terminal was one of the last great American railroad stations built before the long decline of passenger rail. Its active service life as a railroad terminal ended in 1972, when the last scheduled passenger trains departed. The building sat partially vacant for years before a referendum approved its conversion to a museum complex; the restoration and reopening in 1990 was one of the landmark American adaptive reuse projects of the era. A major renovation completed in 2018, following a $228 million campaign, restored the terminal’s principal spaces to their original splendour.