The legacy of the Emery family as prolific developers, industrialists, and civic leaders in the Cincinnati area was well established by the time businessman John J. Emery Jr assumed a leading role in his family’s professional affairs in the early 1920s. Bringing new life to the Emerys’ assorted enterprises and investments, he took particular interest in his family’s downtown real estate holdings and the prospect of revitalizing the city center. In this spirit, John spearheaded the construction of Carew Tower and the Netherland Plaza Hotel from 1927-31. The mixed-use Art Deco development proved a massive success for both the city and the Emerys, even with the Depression taking hold before construction was completed.

With John anticipating his next major step in Cincinnati development, genesis for the Terrace Plaza Hotel began with a 1943 contract affording 200,000 square feet of floor space to the J.C. Penney company within any new downtown development to be built by the Thomas Emery’s Sons company. With the certainty of planning to accommodate a department store on their next project, the company began acquiring parcels to amass an appropriately sized lot, and signed an additional retail lease with Bond Clothing. A design competition was held in 1945, both to select an architecture firm and investigate possible solutions for the air rights above the stores. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill were selected as winners of the competition, with John Emery favoring the firm’s modern design identity and innovative hotel solution for the air rights question. Although smaller than the Carew Tower and the Netherland Plaza Hotel, the project was poised to draw the public into the Cincinnati city center with its exciting modernity and lush amenities, as its predecessor had done in its own time.

In 1959 the Bond Department store wanted more space to display merchandise so the windows on Vine Street were removed and filled in with matching brick masonry on the exterior of the building.

Hilton Hotels Corporation purchased the building in 1956 and in 1965 the interior design was renovated with little appreciation for the Modern aesthetics.  The Miró, Calder, and Steinberg pieces were donated to the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1965, while the Davis lighting piece went missing. 

The Gourmet Room was renovated in a French Baroque style and the adjoining lounge was enlarged and opened to new views by creating a new window wall.  The Gourmet Room still remains intact on the exterior and the interior still has very significant defining features from the continuous glazing and the steel columns.

Plans from architect Robert Springer in 1968-69 show that after J.C. Penney closed in 1968 and Bond closed in 1977, these spaces were subdivided and turned into smaller shops with aluminum display windows and polished granite pilasters.

Around 1970 the original vestibule and glass entrance doors were removed to create an open-air valet parking area within the building.  The systems in the building have been updated however the original duel heating system remains and could be functional with some upgrades like new boilers, tanks and fuel pumps.

While alterations have been made, the integrity of the Terrace Plaza is still exists.   It still retains character defining spaces and materials.  The exterior still has its brick skin, cubic massing, the original fenestration pattern, the circular restaurant in the penthouse, and its terraces.  The interior of the building with the exception of the ground floor still retains its original circulation. The lobby and Skyline Lounge and Restaurant still exist on the eighth floor along with the original marble walls, terrazzo floors, stainless steel wrapped columns, and plaster ceilings with recessed lighting.  The floor plans and guest rooms are still the same except for lighting and the built in furniture.

The ground level supports subdivided retail operations while a print shop and fitness center occupy the basement (Sullebarger 6). The remainder of the building sits vacant.

In addition to the extensive history of discordant modifications, the building has incurred significant decay in its vacant state since Crowne Plaza ownership ended in 2004. 

Anthony Birkla, the developer in current possesion of the property, has taken measures to stabilize the building structurally and abate interior hazards, but as of August 2023 continues to push renovation plans which significantly undermine the building’s original design (Christian).   

The Terrace Plaza Hotel is an International-Style mixed use skyscraper with a 7-story commercial base, originally occupied by two department stores, and office space on a block long site with a stepped back 12-story hotel and terrace on top.  An additional setback at the top makes way for a 51-foot tall penthouse with a dining room.  It is a steel structure with brick curtain walls.  A band of storefronts exist at street level, and the windowless base façade is clad in terra cotta colored brick veneer.  The hotel lobby is on the eighth floor and has a continuous window wall.  The hotel above is arranged by ten foot high floors and a regular grid pattern of wide windows, ten bays in the front, two bays on each side, and eight bays on the rear with the space behind the elevator bank left blank.  The original project included 324 guest rooms, 14 apartments, 4 restaurants, 2 department stores, 3 retail spaces, offices, and back of house areas.  The Gourmet Room is located in the 51-foot tall penthouse and is noticeable on the east end of the building by the projected curved, continuous glazing.  The Gourmet Room has a small outdoor viewing platform and a stairway below to a terrace that has built-in concrete planters.

The Gourmet Room was not originally part of the original proposal or program, but de Blois was asked to come up with the architectural and interior plans for a small dining room on top of the building.  She proposed between six to eight designs and Emery liked the curved one the best.  A narrow space lead from the elevators compressed visitors, but upon entering the circular Gourmet Room after going up a short flight of stairs, they could experience views from the circular restaurant.  Slanted glass walls directed views as well as improved acoustic qualities of the space. To not obstruct views, small post columns along the perimeter support the roof while the room sits on a pedestal about six feet above the twentieth floor terrace.  The Joan Miró mural originally existed on the curved back wall however it was removed in 1965 before being replaced by the existing wood paneling.

The Terrace Plaza was a hotel of many “firsts”. It was the first to have a lobby on the eighth floor, the first to have fully automatic elevators, the first hotel to have user-controlled air-conditioning in every room, and the first use of a dual heating system that could run on gas and oil or coal.  The hotel also had moveable partitions to create suites upon request, motorized beds that could be turned into sofas, and built-in controls for radio, telephones, and televisions.  The building also included the first use of fluorescent lights for reading in hotel rooms, makeup lights in bathrooms, and filtered exterior floodlights which would enhance textures and colors.  Illuminated white glass ceilings were also used extensively in the building.

The key structural challenge in designing the Terrace Plaza Hotel was to reconcile the need for widely spaced columns in the open plan department stores with narrower intervals to fit within the tight regular plan of the hotel tower. The eventual solution stretched a single wide bay across the spine of the hotel block encompassing the corridor and bathrooms, with a perimeter row of smaller bays to either side which enveloped the living space. Only two column rows from this upper arrangement, the north perimeter row and south interior row, continue down into the lower block. The remaining columns rest on heavy double beam girders beneath the eighth floor, allowing for a wide interior bay below (Architectural Forum, Dec. 1948). 

An abundance of cutting edge technological systems contributed to the hotel’s renowned modern image. Monitoring and control of the electrical, heating, cooling, and fire suppression systems were routed to a central command station in the hotel engineer’s office, from which employees could also relay audio messages across the building’s PA system and radio units. (Architectural Forum, Dec. 1948). Fire detection on the retail floors was achieved through photo-electric smoke sensors in the ventilation ducts, while the hotel floors networked together smoke and heat sensors in the thermostats of each room. The boiler system was designed to switch between gas and coal so as to ensure continuous service regardless of delivery schedules, shortages, or emergency situations. With an innovative AC system, custom developed by Carrier at a cost exceeding one million dollars, chilled water from a central plant was pumped to cabinet units in the hotel rooms where it could variably cool ventilated air as controlled by the guests (Sullebarger 26). A central IBM electric time system coordinated all hotel clocks from controls at the registration desk, which was also connected to the hotel's four restaurants through a system of pneumatic tubes to communicate billing and orders (Sullebarger 7). While many of these developments operated behind the scenes, their contributions did not go unnoticed. They contributed, along with guest oriented novelties like the aforementioned mechanical beds and partitions, to a hotel experience which offered many Americans a formative major glimpse of modern life to come in the post-war years. 

The Terrace Plaza Hotel is located on the south side of West Sixth Street, bordered by Race Street to its east and Vine Street to the west. Situated firmly in the center of downtown Cincinnati, the hotel is one block west of a key public space at Fountain Square and one block north of its predecessor, the larger and still active Netherland Plaza Hotel. A 23 story commercial high-rise from 1984 neighbors the hotel to its south, separated by the narrow Thorpe alley which connects Race to Vine, cutting through the Plaza’s service tower to do so. The south side, west of the service tower, is a vacant lot. Directly across West Sixth Street is the Second Empire style Cincinnatian Hotel, an earlier Emery family development dating from 1881. The older hotel sits on the east end of the block, with a 1912 office tower and lowrise streamline commercial building to the west. Across Race Street is an eight story mixed use office development from 2013. Across Vine is a major downtown parking garage which spans the full length of its block to the east. 

The Terrace Plaza Hotel’s mixed use program was an innovative formulation in skyscraper design, employing an extensive array of technical solutions to resolve its diverse ranks of function and program into a unified operational whole. The dual lobby configuration allowed the ground floor department stores to dominate the street level real estate essential to their operation without significant intrusion from the hotel’s public amenities. With the separation of user experiences accounted for, the service tower appendix additionally ensured that technical operations of neither the hotel nor the department store would interfere with or intrude each other’s spaces. The framing solution, described in the construction section, allowed for separation of the different spatial qualities defining the upper and lower sections within one integrated structure. 

The extensive assortment of cutting edge electrical and mechanical technologies utilized in the hotel, also listed in the construction section, produced a user experience of automation, comfort, and control which was thoroughly and deliberately modern in character. The scope of these technologies extended to the background operations of the hotel and stores as well, centralizing the control of sprawling technical systems, streamlining the flow of personnel and goods, and providing systematic redundancies to ensure operational control in the case of uncertainties. 

Mixed use high-rise developments have created some of the most innovative and memorable urban entities in American architecture. With skyscraper construction so largely predicated on flexible commercial speculation, the great coordinated ventures in deliberate and diverse high-rise programming have served as invaluable experiments and insightful records of the unique conditions from which they arose. Just as Adler and Sullivan’s Auditorium Building speaks to cultural life in the 1880s, and Thomas Emery & Sons’ earlier Carew Tower and Netherland Plaza Hotel to business life in the 1920s, the Terrace Plaza Hotel is firmly rooted in the unprecedented wave of consumerism and burgeoning commercial modernity characteristic of the United States following the end of the Second World War. 

With planning for Terrace Plaza underway before victory in Europe, its development occupies an anomalous period in which the imminent consumer trends of the optimistic post-war years were readily anticipated, but the rise of the suburb and movement of commerce out of the cities was yet to solidify. As the first American high-rise hotel built since the Depression, the Terrace Plaza deliberately rejected the entrenched traditions of 19th and early 20th century hotel building, seeking instead to pioneer a model of hotel for the new epoch. This bold departure from tradition attracted exactly the brand of attention which the developers and architects had hoped for, with the hotel featured extensively in popular publications like Time, Life, and Fortune, as well as industry publications including Architectural Forum, Engineering News-Record, and Hotel monthly (Sullebarger 38-39). The hotel’s exuberant initial success, however, was short lived, as the decline of urban Cincinnati throughout the 1950s and 60s soon made independent operation infeasible for Thomas Emery’s Sons, who sold the property to the larger Hilton company only ten years after its celebrated opening (Sullebarger 9). 

When the Terrace Plaza Hotel was designed, American architectural practice was overwhelmingly dominated by men and chauvinist attitudes. SOM designer Natalie de Blois was a major pioneering figure for women in architecture; undertaking design coordination of the Terrace Plaza project at just 24 years old, the hotel draws immense significance from its status as one of the first skyscrapers to be designed by a woman (Sullebarger 39-40). Her work on the project is an unprecedented triumph for the time, but her experience with the Terrace Plaza foreshadowed years of mistreatment to come, including the exclusion of credit for her work in major publications, distancing from contact with the client, and exclusion from men’s clubs where key SOM meetings were often held (Sullebarger 40). 

Designed between the large-scale cessation of skyscraper construction at the beginning of the Great Depression and the post-war building boom of the 1950s, the Terrace Plaza Hotel is an enigmatic and invaluable expression of tabula rasa American modernity. With exceedingly few contemporaneous templates to gauge commercial trends in skyscraper construction, the project was an untethered expression of modern aspirations, enabled and guided by a client as devoted to the image and functionality of modern design as the architects themselves. Neither the nascent spectacles of high-rise International Style design before the war, in Howe and Lescaze’s PSFS building or Raymond Hood’s McGraw Hill Building, nor the early glass curtainwall prototypes, in Bellushi’s Equitable Building and the UN Secretariat, seem to have substantially impacted the unique flourishing of independent expression achieved through Skidmore, Owings, and Merril’s internal process of methodical research and pragmatic design. 

The brick curtain wall is a peculiarity of the Terrace Plaza’s design, occupying a transitory position between the masonry clad buildings to its past and the glass sheathed skyscrapers which would define SOM’s image in the years to follow. The use of brick aligns with the firm’s other work from the period, including Fort Hamilton Veterans Hospital and Manhattan House, but nowhere else was it used to express such pure prismatic geometries, nor articulated with such extensive use of the distinctive stack bond. 

The massing of the hotel is additionally unique, conforming to neither the pre-war ziggurat mode of setbacks, nor the plaza and slab model which would dominate American skyscrapers in the 1950s and 60s. Instead, the building expresses its retail, hotel, and mechanical functions through differentiated volumes, stacked with a subtle asymmetry that enlivens the composition with directional dynamism. 

The integration of fine art into the hotel’s design was a matter of particular passion for developer John Emery Jr., who sat as president of the Cincinnati Institute of Fine Arts and the Cincinnati Art Museum at the time of construction (Sullebarger 17). The commission and integration of works by Alexander Calder, Joan Míro, Saul Steinberg, and Jim Davis captured the attention and favor of critics as well (Sullebarger 18). An April 1948 article from Architectural Forum which focuses solely on the topic of art at the hotel, described the works as “designed to beguile and stimulate, not puzzle and tax,” noting that they contribute to an atmosphere of “lighthearted and sophisticated gayety”(Architectural Forum, April. 1948). Collaboration with leading contemporary artists would become a staple of SOM practice in their future work, but the scope and diversity of the fine art at Terrace Plaza warrants a place of exceptional note among them.

The history of the American skyscraper is replete with heroic design personalities and dazzling technological advances, whose hold on the public imagination endures in popular memory. Behind these stories of the individual and the instance, however, are pervading conditions of radical change in the relationship between market forces and the built environment. Few firms more than Skidmore, Owings, and Merril, and few projects more than the Terrace Plaza Hotel, better demonstrate the foundational role of market dynamics in shaping the history of skyscraper design in the United States. 

Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings’ seminal collaboration, designing commercial pavilions for the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition, firmly embedded their hallmark concerns for modern design and market sensitivity within the identity of their practice to come (Adams 23-34). Taking an oath which outlined the terms of their partnership shortly following the fair, the architects vowed to, “build only in the vernacular of [their] own age,” and asserted that economy and good design were not only fit to be reconciled, but were essentially one and the same (Adams 24). In this spirit, the brand of modernism which defined SOM carried the legacy of spontaneous pragmatism from which the early American skyscrapers had first emerged.

Established as an office, SOM integrated a groundbreaking process of extensive research into their design approach, seeking intimate technical familiarity with prospective problems and producing a plurality of responsive solutions (Adams 36). The design competition which produced the Terrace Plaza Hotel could hardly have been more appropriate a challenge for the ethic and method of SOM’s practice. Centered on the speculative question of maximizing revenue in the airspace above an urban department store, the firm’s research apparatus excelled in the mixed use hotel solution it furnished for the problem (Sullebarger 18). The developers, Thomas Emery & Sons, were particularly receptive to the SOM submission, lauding the originality of the solution coming from a firm which had never before designed a hotel (Adams 34). 

The Terrace Plaza commission was the first to bring national press attention to Skidmore, Owings, and Merril, but the unique aesthetics and program of the hotel would remain as singular an anomaly in their celebrated and vastly influential career to come as it would in the context of broader American architecture.

Making headlines for its position on the NTHP’s 2020 “11 Most Endangered Historic Places” list, the preservation battle for the Terrace Plaza Hotel’s future is uncertain, but its immense value to history is difficult to dispute. Although it is exceedingly unique among American skyscrapers and hotels in the transitory phase of modernity it represents, the Terrace Plaza is exceptionally representative of the innovative, practical, and optimistic spirit which characterized the best of US architecture in the golden age of modernism which immediately succeeded it. Aspiring to the height of progressive design in its own day, the effective synthesis of the Terrace Plaza’s experimental program and compelling aesthetics still evokes wonder and possibility, even in its present state of decay. 

“Barroom art in the Modern Manner.” Architectural Forum, April. 1948, pp. 148,150.  

Blum, Betty. de Blois, Natalie. Oral History of Natalie de Blois. The Art Institute of Chicago, 2004.

Christian, Paula. “Mold, Pigeons, Potential: An Exclusive Look inside the Iconic Terrace Plaza Hotel.” WCPO 9 Cincinnati, WCPO 9 Cincinnati, 31 Aug. 2023, www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/i-team/mold-pigeons-potential-an-exclusive-look-inside-the-iconic-terrace-plaza-hotel. 

“Cincinnati’s Terrace Plaza.” Architectural Forum, Dec. 1948, pp. 81–96.

Dams, Nicholas. Gordon Bunshaft and SOM: Building Corporate Modernism. Yale University Press, 2019. 

“Penthouse Hotel.” Architectural Forum, Dec. 1946, pp. 101–108.

Sullebarger, Beth, and Shawn Patrick Tubb. “National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Terrace Plaza Hotel.” United States Department of the Interior National Park Service, 21 Aug. 2017. 

Elizabeth Hutton Turner and Oliver Wick, ed., Calder|Miró, (New York: Philip Wilson Publishers, 204), 79.

National Park Service, Terrace Plaza Hotel, 8/21/2017, SG100001493

“New Hotel Spruces Up Cincinnati,” Business Week, 3 July 1948, 23.