Some buildings get saved once. Cincinnati Union Terminal has been saved three times, and every time it was regular people who did it. Completed in 1933, this Art Deco masterpiece covers about 500,000 square feet and once handled 216 trains a day. Its signature half-dome rotunda, 180 feet wide and 106 feet tall, ranked among the largest in the world, and it’s wrapped in Winold Reiss’s glass mosaic murals telling the story of Cincinnati and America. If the building looks familiar, it should: the Hall of Justice in the old Super Friends cartoon was modeled on it. Today it’s home to the Cincinnati Museum Center, and yesterday my son Cam and I spent the day there.
From White Elephant to Museum Center
When passenger trains faded in the 1960s and Amtrak pulled out in 1972, Union Terminal sat mostly empty, and people pitched every idea imaginable for it, including a public high school. Jerry Springer, then on the Cincinnati City Council, even recorded a song in 1973 called “Save the Terminal.” In the 1980s it became a shopping mall that flopped. Then in May 1986, Hamilton County voters approved Issue 3, a $33 million bond levy, to turn the station into a museum complex. Former mayor Springer led the “Save the Union Terminal” fundraising campaign, and the Cincinnati Museum Center opened inside in 1990. Amtrak trains came back in 1991, and they still stop there today.
The Big Rescue: Issue 8
By 2014, decades of water damage had the old station crumbling again. On November 4, 2014, Hamilton County voters overwhelmingly passed Issue 8, a quarter-cent sales tax over five years that raised roughly $170 million for repairs. Combined with historic tax credits, state money and private donors, it paid for the first full restoration in the building’s history, a $224 million, two-and-a-half-year project. Crews 3D-scanned the entire building, restored the giant clock, rebuilt the front fountain stone by stone, and reopened the Art Deco Losantiville dining room. The doors reopened to the public in November 2018.
Cam’s Favorites: Dinosaurs and the Cave
For Cam, the highlight was Dinosaur Hall. Six huge prehistoric skeletons tower over you in a bright, window-lined gallery, from long-necked sauropods to a fierce Daspletosaurus, a cousin of T. rex. Then we went underground. The Cave is a replica of a Kentucky limestone cave, with two levels and about 500 feet of winding passages, stalactites, a waterfall, and a big brown bat colony. It first opened in 1967 at the old natural history museum, moved to Union Terminal in 1990, and is still one of the most popular exhibits in the building. Cam couldn’t get enough of it, and we went through twice.
Dad’s Favorite: Neil Armstrong
My favorite was the Neil Armstrong Space Exploration Gallery. Armstrong lived for much of his life in Lebanon and Indian Hill, just up the road, and he served as chairman of the Museum of Natural History. The gallery has the inflight jacket he wore under his spacesuit on Apollo 11, his “Snoopy” communications cap on loan from the Smithsonian, an exact replica of his spacesuit, and a moon rock from Tranquility Base that Armstrong himself gave the museum. There’s also a 360-degree theater that puts you in the summer of 1969. Kids can try on a Snoopy cap and record their own “first words” on the moon. Neither of us could pass that up.
Home for the Dawgs
We headed home in time for kickoff of Georgia vs. Auburn in Athens. Back in 1980, I walked on at Georgia as a kicker. I never got into a game, but I was there for the national championship season, and Georgia–Auburn is still a Saturday I don’t miss. A morning with dinosaurs, a moon rock and an Art Deco masterpiece, then the Dawgs in the afternoon: that’s about as good as a fall Saturday in Ohio gets.
Next Time: The Big Dome and the Night Train
We’re already planning our next trip. Cam and I want to catch a movie in the Robert D. Lindner Family OMNIMAX Theater, a five-story domed screen that wraps all the way around you. More than nine million people have watched films there since it opened in 1990. Then we want to do something most visitors never think of: wait for a real passenger train to pull into this grand old station. Union Terminal is still a working Amtrak stop. The Cardinal, running between New York and Chicago, comes through three times a week in each direction, and it arrives in the wee hours, somewhere between about 1:30 and 3:30 a.m. That makes it a real father-and-son adventure. On Friday and Saturday nights the OMNIMAX adds evening showtimes at 5:30, 6:30 and 7:30 p.m., so the plan is a late movie, a little sleep, and then a middle-of-the-night trip back to the terminal to watch the train roll in. That’s what this building was built for in 1933.
Address: 1301 Western Avenue, Cincinnati, OH 45203
Website: https://www.cincymuseum.org/
