This is a wall by the Interstate running through downtown Cincinnati:

Other angles:

You would think it’s some kind of retaining wall, or the remnant of a bridge or drainage canal or something like that. Retaining wall makes sense when you look at it from the rear—there’s a parking lot below the level of the highway, and the wall bridges that gap. The highway is beyond the wall to the right:

If only that were the case.

This is what stood in what is now that parking lot/underpass area. This historic photo is from the same perspective as the third modern image, going down from the top.

And that stone wall is the bit outlined in red:

Remnants of openings (windows?) are visible from the parking lot side:

Credit to this Cincinnati blog for the archival photos.

This train station, called Central Union Station, was built in 1883. Yes, of course there were reasons why this was torn down, as there are for every casualty in American cities during the 20th century. In this case, one of the problems was too many trains. From the local blog:

This was not the only train station in town. There was also the Pennsylvania Station, the Sixth and Baymiller Station, the Court Street Station, and the Fourth Street Station. This caused quite a tangled mess of tracks in the riverfront area, which was subjected to the periodic flooding of the Ohio River. So in 1929, it was decided that a new depot should be built in the West End and in 1933, Union Terminal was opened.

The structure was demolished in 1933. It was a little later until the land was used for so worthless a purpose as the dead space under an elevated highway. 1933 may predate urban renewal, but in this case it closely preceded it.

If you consider every distinct case like this, it can be easy to think that there must have been good reasons for this all. In some cases, there were. But taken together, it’s clear that something happened to our cities in this period—1930 to 1960, roughly. Something that constituted a clear break with what they were before and how they were understood.

Edmund Burke wrote, of the French Revolution, “Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in an hundred years.” That has been distilled into the conservative aphorism that “it is easier to tear down than to build.” This is usually taken as a metaphor for rapid political change. But it can also be, and should be, taken literally.

That stone wall is like a fossil in the “wrong” strata; like finding a species that wasn’t thought to exist in that place. Or—my preferred analogy—it’s like the remains of the Statue of Liberty that Charlton Heston’s character finds in Planet of the Apes. And it about makes me want to say what he said, too.

Related Reading:

A D.C. Building Mystery

Old School, New Deal

Dial 9 For Nun

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