Carew Tower

Tip your head back on the sidewalk. The tower climbs straight up into the sky. Brown and tan stone rises in steady, narrowing steps. Cars pass behind you on the busy street. The top seems far away, a slim crown against the moving clouds. This is Carew Tower, standing tall in the heart of downtown Cincinnati.

The tower was finished in 1930. It rises forty-nine floors, to a height of five hundred seventy-four feet. For more than eighty years it stood as the tallest building in the whole city. Only in 2011 did another tower finally rise higher than its crown. For generations, this was the shape people pictured when they pictured the downtown skyline.

The style is called Art Deco. It came into fashion during the 1920s and the 1930s. You can read it clearly in the building's clean vertical lines. The stone steps inward as it rises, growing narrower near the very top. The whole design pulls your eye steadily upward, floor after floor after floor, toward the open sky above.

The architect was Walter Ahlschlager. The project was driven forward by a local businessman named John J. Emery. Together they planned far more than a single office tower. They built a small city under one roof, with shops, offices, restaurants, and a hotel all joined together. This whole idea was new and ambitious for its time, and people came to see it.

Step inside the lobby. The mood changes at once. Warm marble lines the walls all around you. Metal trim catches the light in soft gold and bronze. The high ceilings carry painted color and careful, repeating pattern. People walk through quickly on their way to work, but the space gently asks you to slow down and look up.

The hotel beside the tower is the Netherland Plaza. Its interior is a celebrated example of French Art Deco design. Inside you find rare marble, sea-green metal, and long mirrored halls. The designers worked in images of fountains and sea creatures. The whole grand space can feel like an ocean liner somehow turned to stone and glass and light.

Take the elevator up toward the top. The ride is long and steady, the floor lights climbing. Your ears may feel the sharp change in height. At the upper floors, the building opens out onto an observation deck. Here the whole city spreads out far below you, small and clear and quiet in every single direction.

From the deck, look out across the water. The Ohio River curves below the city, wide and slow and brown. Bridges cross it in long straight lines of steel. On the far green bank lies the state of Kentucky. From this height the two states sit side by side, joined together by water and by iron and stone.

Turn slowly and trace the streets with your eyes. The grid of downtown runs outward toward the hills. Cincinnati sits in a shallow bowl of low green hills, and from up here you can see all their soft edges. On a clear day, the long view reaches for many miles in nearly every direction around you.

Think about the workers who built this in the late 1920s. They raised the heavy steel by hand and by crane, floor by floor. They finished the tower just as hard economic times arrived across the country. The building stood firm through those lean years, and through all the long decades since, as a steady mark on the skyline.

Back down at street level, walk once slowly around the base. Notice how the lower floors meet the sidewalk and the doors. Shops still line the covered arcade inside the building. The tower was always meant to hold daily working life, not only silent offices high above. People have passed through these doors for nearly a hundred years.

Stand a while in the arcade and watch the flow. Footsteps echo softly on the polished floor. The ceilings here are lower, warmer, and closer overhead. Light falls in from the tall windows along the street. This was the busy ground level of that small vertical city, where the building meets the ordinary daily life of the town.

Step out again onto the open pavement. Look up one more time. The tower holds its place against the moving clouds, calm and tall and sure. It has watched the city change from this same spot since 1930. You walk on now, but the crown stays there above the streets, waiting for the next person to look up.