Cincinnati Union Terminal — railway station
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Cincinnati Union Terminal

  • 2 min read
  • 39.110° N 84.538° W

Interesting facts

  • The rotunda doubles as a whispering gallery: channels around the great front arch let two people standing about 30 metres apart hold a quiet conversation.
  • The rotunda walls are lined with Verona marble around 150 million years old, and roughly two dozen fossils can be spotted in its surface.
  • Fossil sea lilies, bryozoans, brachiopods and snails are visible in the Indiana limestone that faces the building's front.
  • The clock on the facade is 18 feet across, weighs about five tons and was built by the Seth Thomas Clock Company, with red and amber glass panes.
  • The great arch of the facade was inspired by Helsinki Central Station, which the architect Alfred Fellheimer visited in 1927.
  • The first designs for the terminal were Gothic, with vaults and long rows of benches; Art Deco won partly because it was cheaper to build.
  • A flood on the Ohio River forced the terminal into emergency use on 19 March 1933, twelve days before its official opening, after four older stations had to close.
  • At the opening, a railway director remarked that the station came after the need for it had passed, and by 1939 newspapers were calling it a white elephant.
  • A 70-foot mosaic world map weighing 22.4 tons was destroyed with the train concourse in 1974, since saving it would have cost an estimated $100,000.
  • From 1980 to 1985 the building housed a shopping mall called the Land of Oz, with a department store set right in the middle of the rotunda.

Why it is worth it

The half-dome of Cincinnati Union Terminal rises over the end of a long, sloping plaza like a giant radio set or a rising sun, and it is precisely that silhouette that made the building famous far beyond Ohio. Inside, the rotunda spans 180 feet and climbs 106 feet, and when the station opened it was the largest half-dome in the Western Hemisphere, a record it held over the world until the Sydney Opera House was completed in 1973. Its walls carry vast mosaics by the German-born artist Winold Reiss: two murals more than a hundred feet long trace the history of the United States and of Cincinnati, while further panels depict the city's workers in its factories and workshops. Taken together, Reiss's mosaics formed the largest collection of secular mosaics in the country at the time.

The terminal was built between 1928 and 1933 to bring the city's scattered railway companies under one roof. The New York firm of Fellheimer & Wagner designed it, and the French-born architect Paul Philippe Cret, brought in as a consultant, steered the decoration firmly towards Art Deco. It opened in March 1933, at the depth of the Depression, at a cost of $41.5 million. Passenger traffic fell steadily after the Second World War, from 51 trains a day in 1953 to 24 in 1962, and in October 1972 Amtrak abandoned the building. It was saved by conversion: since November 1990 it has housed the Cincinnati Museum Center, with museums of history and natural science and a children's museum, and Amtrak trains returned in 1991. A restoration costing $228 million was completed in 2018. The terminal became a National Historic Landmark in 1977, and its outline inspired the Hall of Justice of the Super Friends cartoons of the 1970s.

Cincinnati grew up on the north bank of the Ohio River in the early nineteenth century and became one of the great inland cities of America, a river port and a centre of meatpacking, brewing and manufacturing. Union Terminal stands in the West End, northwest of downtown, at the edge of the Mill Creek valley where the railways ran.

Getting there

Union Terminal is about 3 km northwest of downtown Cincinnati. It is still a working station: Amtrak's Cardinal, running between New York and Chicago, stops here. The nearest airfield is Cincinnati Municipal Lunken Field (LUK), about 10 km away; the region's main airport, Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International (CVG), lies across the Ohio River in Kentucky, roughly 13 km away in a straight line.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Most Beautiful Railway Stations 22The Most Beautiful Buildings in the United States 34The Most Beautiful Buildings 286

From the encyclopaedia

Cincinnati Union Terminal is an intercity train station and museum center in the Queensgate neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. Commonly abbreviated as CUT, or by its Amtrak station code, CIN, the terminal is served by Amtrak's Cardinal line, passing through Cincinnati three times weekly. The building's largest tenant is the Cincinnati Museum Center, comprising the Cincinnati History Museum, the Museum of Natural History & Science, Duke Energy Children's Museum, the Cincinnati History Library and Archives, and an Omnimax theater.

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