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Built in 1874, on the site reserved for an opera house, the Old Cincinnati Library was a thing of a rare wonder. With five levels of huge cast iron book shelving, a fabulous hallway, spiral staircases that went several stories high, checker board marble floor finishing and an atrium lit by a skylight ceiling, the place was breathtaking. Unfortunately that spectacular maze of books is now lost forever.
The Public Library consisted of three buildings. The front building was originally an opera house which was opened to the public on December 9, 1870. The middle building and main hall opened to great fanfare on February 25, 1874, with a speech by George Hunt Pendleton, who had been the Democratic candidate for vice president in 1864.
Patrons entered on Vine Street beneath busts of William Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin and John Milton. A foyer led to the cathedral like main hall, four stories tall, topped with a massive skylight roof. The floor was checkerboard marble tile. Five levels of bookshelves pressed against the walls. Rays of sunlight cut through the windows to provide ample illumination. “The main hall is a splendid work”, The Enquirer reported at the opening. “The hollow square within the columns is lighted by an arched clear roof of prismatic glass set in iron, the light of which is broken and softened by a paneled ceiling of richly-colored glass. One is impressed not only with the magnitude and beauty of the interior, but with its adaptation to the purpose it is to serve”
The total estimated cost of the lot and building was $383,594.53, about $7.7 million today. The Public Library contained 60,000 volumes, with an estimated capacity of 300,000. So why this building demolished? Talks for a new library building had already begun 30 years earlier when the book collection had started to outgrow the building. Books were stacked beyond reach. Ventilation was poor and the air stuffy. The paint was peeling.
In January 1955, a new contemporary library opened at 800 Vine Street Cincinnati, Ohio. The old building was sold to Leyman Corp for about $100,000 today, and by June that year, the magnificent library was demolished. The site is now a parking garage. The three heads that once guarded the main entrance of the library were the only original features of the building that were saved and placed in the new library’s garden.
Completed in 1874, originally intended to be an opera house before the project went bankrupt, the modestly-sized building did not do justice to to the magnitude and beauty of the interior designed by architect J.W. McLaughlin.
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