Walt Lockley

The Sister of the Chrysler Building

Union Terminal, Cincinnati

She is heartbreaking. She could tear your heart out. Architecture has a
special place for the white elephant, for the extravagant gesture, for the
magnificent lost cause, for the unbuilt, the unbuildable, the unmaintainable, for
ruins and necrotic artifacts, and Cincinnati's Union Terminal is a lot of those
things. It's beautiful and hopeless and has nothing to teach us. Unless you're
in a class of people who specialize in mooning over lost causes
like the Confederacy, or train travel, it's best that you don't go to the Union
Terminal. It'll only make you sad. And the chances of you just passing
through are astronomically tiny, and you'd have to make a special trip to have
your heart broken in a non-value-add way.

That said.

Construction on the Union Terminal began two months before the
Crash of 1929 and cost $41 million in those old, old, meaningful dollars. That counts as bad timing.
It was NOT the last major train station built in the US - the Los Angeles Union
Station was astonishingly late in 1939 - but it was an ambitious project for a
city this size and train travel peaked, you know, in 1946, and that was a long
time ago. If there was ever a civic buzz that could fill the vast area under the
record-breaking half-dome, it had been in 1946. It was an Amtrak barn for awhile.

According to their site, the last train departed in 1972, the city bought
it and put an ad in the Wall Street Journal to lease it out for $1, it was a mall
then a failed mall called "Land of OZ!" or something in the early 80's, and now
it's home to a couple of successful museums, both of them spreading out and
down into its spacious caverns - it's a huge place - Science to the left, History
to the right, if you're facing the big wall. And there's an IMAX now.
So the building is going to be okay. It knows where its next meal is
coming from.

If the timing of the project was unlucky from a financial standpoint, it
brought the building's development into the red-hot high jazz Empire State
Building, all that outlandish stuff that happened just before the bubble burst. In
fact, you could think of Union Terminal as the Ohio sister of the Chrysler
Building. It offers the same set of sort-of decadent pleasures.

Nutty lettering, that kind of thing.

The architects of record were Alfred Fellheimer and Stewart Wagner,
who had designed the surprisingly lush and complicated and Chicago-Tribune-
Building-looking Buffalo Central Terminal before this one. Space planners.
But Cret and Wank were also on the case. Cret and Wank were the beauticians.
That's Paul Cret (a figure comparable to Bertram Goodhue, part of his long arc from
France to Texas, from the Ecole des Beaux Art to designing most of the UT
campus at Austin, 19 buildings including the famous tower) and Roland Wank
(who had been a Hungarian graduate who came to America and kept
his fiery Utopian leanings alive in deepest darkest Tennessee, molding TVA dams
until they looked like sculpture, he's the one responsible for that socialist
undercurrent in the look of the TVA. The Norris dam, that's his work).

So anyway. Yeah. Just keep saying to yourself, Ecole des Beaux Art
and the Bauhaus produced these two guys named Cret and Wank.

And it's an engineering marvel. Kinda. It's the world's tallest half-
dome, I think (do I have that right?) and it's the last monumental dome (or half-
dome) put up before, I don't know, I don't know. It's big, I know that. It's ten
stories.

Of course it's a masterpiece and lovingly restored. It is achingly
gorgeous and evocative. It wants to be touched. If it were only portable, it
could move to New York and have dozens of proposals. There are friezes of
Commerce and Transportation on the facade, interior mosaics of many great
figures in Cincinnati history. There are significant outbuildings, including an
Art Deco power station of some kind, and all out in the front yard (site of a
planned airfield) are these long, playful, horizontal fountains. The ceiling of the half-
dome is amazing to look at. Part of the layout of the façade contains three concentric
traffic lanes, three big tunnels shaped like macaroni, originally meant as
separate traffic lanes for cars, taxis, and buses. Those tunnels are fun to think
about. The whole large, expansive, polished, detailed, complicated place is
photogenic and welcoming. The ladies room is supposed to be nice, there's
tons of art deco detailing like this:

A women's lounge area preserved from the Terminal's train days also
shows the breadth of the building's detailed design. The noted muralist
Pierre Bourdelle was commissioned to create panels for the semi-
circular entrance to the women's lounge. Using his favorite motif of
jungle animals, Bourdelle created carved and lacquered linoleum
panels that serve as background to the deep brown leather benches in
the lounge. Elsewhere, the building boasts unusual and irreplaceable
art such as that found in the Cincinnati Dining Room. Named for the
stylized map of the city wallpapered to the ceiling, also created by
Bourdelle, the wood and marble room is now used for meetings and
social functions.

So this building is great to look at. (Jungle animals is my favorite
motif too. I was sorry to see them change themes at the Reserve in Henderson,
I loved those giant fiery altars.)

Excessively urbane for its setting, and with a feeling of having
wandered away from the rest of its herd, the Union Terminal is a bit brave and
solitary. That jazz-age future that never happened, it certainly didn't happen in
Cincinnati. And she doesn't have anything to teach you, that's the thing. She's
a willing and sensible old girl but it's not everybody who needs architectural
advice on handling lots of train passengers. Or how to best show off your
ebony paneling. "Listen, if I ever need a concourse....!"

She sort of looks at the floor the whole time, as if saying to
herself, "none of this really matters, really," because she doesn't believe that
you're really interested in what she has to say, and she does seem a bit….. beside the point..

Photos: Historic American Buildings Survey.