Terrace Plaza Hotel was modernism icon

We hardly notice a landmark in our midst. At Sixth Street, between Vine and Race streets, stands the Terrace Plaza Hotel, in its day one of the most heralded hotels in the world.

Today, folks see only Batsakes Hat Shop and high brick walls. The hotel can’t be seen from the street because the lobby is on the eighth floor. The Gourmet Room, at one time a five-star French restaurant, looks like a flying saucer on the roof. The last hotel guests checked out in 2008.

Out of sight, out of mind, the Terrace Plaza is a ghost.

But that could change within the next couple of years. Last year, the building at 15 W. Sixth St. got a new owner. Representatives of the ownership group pledged to market the property for sale to a developer that would be interested bringing new life to it.

To appreciate the significance of the Terrace Plaza Hotel, you almost need to be transported back in time to see how radically different and modern it was compared with hotels of the day.

Developer John J. Emery had built Carew Tower, one of the first mixed-used buildings, in 1930, but the Terrace Plaza Hotel was something different – a vision of the future.

Emery hired Chicago-based architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. SOM is now an international firm whose portfolio of 10,000 buildings includes some of the tallest in the world, Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower) and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

Much of the Terrace Plaza design was done by renowned architects Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois, who went on to design the Lever House in New York City.

The Terrace Plaza’s grand opening on July 19, 1948, drew a crowd eager to see what the hubbub was about. Harper’s Magazine wrote, “If you want to discover what your grandchildren will think of as elegance of this postwar era, you will have to go to Cincinnati.”

The Terrace Plaza may look like a stack of boxes, but it was one of the first hotels in the mid-century modern style. The straight utilitarian design was shocking at the time, and a harbinger of modernism.

The lobby was high off the street. Every room had air-conditioning. Beds slid out of the wall at the push of a button. The first seven floors were retail space for Bond and J.C. Penney; a brick façade instead of windows was innovative for department stores.

The much-vaunted Gourmet Room sat atop the hotel, 20 floors from street level. The circular restaurant, almost entirely exposed by windows, had a spectacular view of the city that truly set it apart.

Modern art was used throughout the hotel: a stunning abstract mural by Joan Miró, a mural of Cincinnati landmarks by cartoonist Saul Steinberg, and an Alexander Calder mobile.

For all its innovation and influence, the Terrace Plaza had a short heyday. Emery sold it to Hilton Hotels Corp. in 1956. The art went to the Cincinnati Art Museum. Little by little, the department stores closed, the space was converted into offices and windows were bricked over.

The hotel changed hands and names, but never recovered its prestige. Long before the doors closed, what made the Terrace Plaza Hotel so remarkable had become outdated.

Shawn Patrick Tubb, in “Cincinnati’s Terrace Plaza Hotel: An Icon of American Modernism,” wrote: “Perhaps it should come as no surprise that a building designed to be strikingly modern in 1948 would seem old-fashioned and even unattractive to some in 2013.”