re: "America should have been art deco"

quote:

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Cincinnati's seven railroads signed the agreement to build a single union terminal in 1927. American passenger rail had peaked in 1920. They built it anyway, for 216 trains a day, and it opened in March 1933, the worst month of the Depression.

What makes this worth 17 minutes is not that it failed. It is that every number said demolish, for forty years, and the city kept refusing. The terminal got about four good years. By 1962 it was handling 24 trains a day instead of 216. The last passenger train left in October 1972, and in 1974 the train concourse came down because the railroad that owned the tracks wanted clearance for taller freight. Citizens raised $400,000 to cut the Winold Reiss mosaic murals out of the walls before the wreckers reached them. One was too large to move and was destroyed with the hall.

Then the strange part. The city bought the building in 1975 with no use for it.

It spent the early eighties as a shopping mall called the Land of Oz, which failed. Museums moved in after that. And in 2014, six voters in ten in Hamilton County raised their own sales tax to spend $228 million restoring a train station that one Amtrak train serves, three nights a week, at three in the morning.

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