Union Terminal: The Station That Outlasted Its Purpose

Cincinnati Union Terminal opened on March nineteenth, nineteen thirty-three, at the height of the Great Depression, serving seven railroads that converged on the city. The building that housed it was an Art Deco half-dome, one of the largest examples of Art Deco architecture in the world, with a five-hundred-and-fifty-foot wide facade and a rotunda that rose to a hundred and six feet. The building was built at a moment when American cities were still investing in the idea that rail travel was the future.

It was finished just as that idea was starting to be wrong.

Passenger rail declined through the nineteen forties, fifties, and sixties as highways and airlines took over. Union Terminal, which had been designed to handle as many as seventeen thousand passengers a day, fell to a fraction of that use. By the nineteen seventies it was nearly empty. The railroad companies that owned it wanted to demolish it, and came close to doing so. A preservation campaign, led partly by Cincinnatians who simply did not want to see the building gone, saved it.

The terminal was converted into a shopping mall in the nineteen eighties, which did not work. It was then converted into the Cincinnati Museum Center, which opened in nineteen ninety and now houses the Cincinnati History Museum, the Museum of Natural History and Science, and the Children's Museum. It was listed as a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy-seven, before the mall period, a designation that helped make demolition legally and politically complicated.

The mosaics in the rotunda, depicting Cincinnati workers and industries, were made by German artist Winold Reiss in nineteen thirty-three. The mosaics depict workers of multiple races laboring together, which was aspirational rather than accurate for nineteen thirty-three Cincinnati. They are still there.