Amid downtown Cincinnati stands Carew Tower, a 49-story edifice that has defined the city’s skyline for nearly a century.
Located on the southwest corner of Fountain Square, Carew is seated in the heart of the city. From celebrating the end of World War II to the Reds winning the World Series, Fountain Square is the place to be. But it wasn’t always the welcoming civic center it is today.
In the late 19th century, the corner of 5th & Vine Streets was a cluster of saloons and grimy buildings. Department store owner Joseph T. Carew loathed the view.
“He used to call it the ‘nasty corner,’” Jeff Suess, history columnist at the Cincinnati Enquirer and author of “Lost Cincinnati” said. According to Suess, J.T. Carew pledged, “‘Someday, I’m going to build something nice there.’”
He kept his word. By 1891, construction on the Carew Building was complete. Yes, Carew Building, not Tower. This nine-story Romanesque structure served as the first major step in cleaning up the downtown, and laid the groundwork for an illustrious tower to come nearly 40 years later.
The new vision came from industrialist and real estate developer John Josiah Emery Jr. The Emery family was a Cincinnati institution, having built their fortune in the “Porkopolis” days by turning pork-packing byproducts into soap and candles, before eventually pivoting to real estate.
By 1929, the Emery family owned the entire block, including the original Carew Building and the Emery Hotel.
The continuous plot of land made space for J.J. Emery’s vision of a city within a city, a complex of multipurpose buildings to serve the development of downtown Cincinnati. Hoping to take advantage of the financial boom of the roaring ‘20s, Emery imagined an art deco masterpiece celebrating the city’s prosperity. But there was a problem — no bank would fund it.
Undeterred, in September of 1929, Emery cashed out $33 million of his own investments. And, luckily for Emery, he did so right before the stock market crashed just one month later.
Not one to spare any expense, Emery hired not one but two architectural firms to design the building: Delano & Aldrich and W.W. Ahlschlager & Associates.
To build the complex, Emery contracted the Starrett Brothers, a plucky young construction firm that was simultaneously working on another ambitious project — now known as the Empire State Building.
Building the tower quickly became a citywide effort, providing much-needed jobs as the Great Depression began.
“Everybody who worked in construction in Cincinnati probably did something on this building,” Suess said. “It was a really major project.”
The Starretts were known for their speed. At the height of construction, builders were working at a record-breaking pace, with entire floors of steel being finished in under a day. Groundbreaking occurred in September 1929 and the building was completed in October 1930.
Emery’s final design featured the St. Netherland Plaza hotel, a shopping arcade and an observation deck. Adorned with metallic leaf, marble inlays and Rookwood pottery tiles, the building was a toast to the Roaring Twenties and represented hope for the city’s prosperous future.
The St. Netherland Plaza Hotel’s design seems straight out of “The Great Gatsby,” featuring sprawling fresco murals, rare Brazilian rosewood paneling and intricate handcrafted metalwork. One of the most famous rooms was the Hall of Mirrors, modeled after the legendary gallery of the same name at the Palace of Versailles.
The hotel’s ornate design aptly matched the high-profile clientele, including icons like Elvis Presley, Doris Day and Winston Churchill. Some stories report that Churchill loved his suite’s bathroom so much that he commissioned the bathroom at his personal estate to be remodeled after it.
The hotel also housed the glamorous Orchids at Palm Court restaurant. Adorned with lush upholstery and massive chandeliers, the restaurant was a time capsule of 1930s opulence, making it the perfect filming location for the Oscar-nominated film “Carol” (2015), where it stood in for a famous Chicago hotel.
The St. Netherland Plaza Hotel operates today as the Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza, playing host to hundreds of guests, professional conferences and even local proms.
In addition to the hotel, the first two floors of the tower held the Carew Arcade, a double-height shopping mall that bustled with hairdressers, shoe shiners and endless stores. In the wintertime, the arcade was also a refuge from the cold, providing an interior pass-through connecting Race and Vine St. There, visitors might also have stumbled across Santa Claus, who sat for photos each holiday season.
Forty‑nine stories up, at the very top of the tower, is the observation deck. Until 2011, Carew Tower was the tallest building in Cincinnati, and even after that title was claimed by the Great American Tower, most Cincinnatians would say it is the best view in the city.
For the price of just a few dollars in admission, you could see the entire topography of the Queen City unfold in front of you, providing a perfect map for a city tour.
For Anne Steinert, assistant professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, the observation deck was always the perfect first stop for any visitor. It was a “magical place,” Steinert recalled.
“It was silent because you were up far enough from the traffic that you couldn’t hear it,” she said.
The observation tower has been closed to the public since 2021.
With the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of remote work, tenants moved out of the Carew Tower office building, thrusting it into obsolescence. The building fell into disrepair; water damage crept into the ceilings and wallpaper began to peel, and in 2023, the city had to close sidewalks because loose bricks fell from the aging facade.
In 2022, the building was purchased by Victrix LLC for $18 million, with plans to convert the complex into high-end apartments. The New York-based real estate investment firm is known for adaptive reuse projects, having done a similar residential conversion at the Macy’s headquarters in Cincinnati.
In 2024, Ohio granted the Carew Tower project funding as part of the Ohio Historic Preservation Tax Credit program. In exchange for the $175 million renovation of the building, Victrix will receive a tax credit of $10 million and a 30-year tax exemption.
The Netherland Hotel will remain under the ownership of Hilton, and the residential conversion is slated to include the arcade and office tower. Carew Tower housing is anticipated to be priced at a premium similar to other nearby luxury apartments even amid increasingly saturated housing markets.
Old shops and theaters in Cincinnati’s downtown have been demolished over the years, and to Suess, saving Carew Tower from that fate is worth the price of privatization.
“The sentiment now is to try to preserve as much of that as we can,” he said.
The Victrix LLC website writes of the building: “It is a cornerstone of the community — it wouldn’t be Cincinnati without Carew.”
But others are less optimistic, concerned that developers will cut Carew off from the city entirely—a pattern already seen in Cincinnati’s historic preservation projects.
In 2024, the 19th-century Mercantile Library and the adjacent Formica building were converted into a luxury residential complex now known as Merc & Mica under the same historical tax credit enjoyed by Victrix. Before the conversion, the building featured a popular mid-block pass-through, just like the one found at the Carew arcade.
“You used to be able to kind of duck out of the wind and weather, to kind of sneak across from Fourth Street to Fifth Street … without having to walk all the way around the block in the rain or the cold,” Steinert said.
After the renovation, that pass-through was closed. For the public, a functional piece of the city simply vanished.
“I know that space is in there, but now I’m not allowed to use it anymore,” Steinert said.
Steinert describes amenities like the pass-through arcade and observation deck as civic gifts from the Emery brothers to the people of Cincinnati.
“The fear is that these special, magical spaces will be eliminated and privatized,” Steinert said.
As one of the first ever mixed-use skyscrapers, Carew Tower was a prototype for future buildings like Rockefeller Center in New York City. It was dubbed a National Historic Landmark in 1982. And for many Cincinnatians, Carew Tower will always hold fond memories.
“Your ears would pop going up in the elevator, and then your feet would kind of fall out from under you going down,” Steinert said. “It had this … spirit of adventure magic to it.”
But as gates close and locks change, a question remains: if a landmark no longer serves the public, does it still belong to the city?
