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Water returns to Union Terminal fountain

Tana Weingartner
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WVXU
Children play in the spray of the restored Union Terminal fountain on Fountain Day 2019.

On Friday, May 26, water will once again return to the fountain in front of the Cincinnati Museum Center. In this article from our archives, reporter Tana Weingartner takes a look at a time not so long ago when the fountain was turned on for the first time after a three-year long reconstruction.

Water is once again flowing in the fountain in front of the Cincinnati Museum Center. The fountain was out of commission for three years during the Union Terminal restoration.

"Once we get the geyser flowing and the water going, we will really be back home at Union Terminal," said Museum Center CEO Elizabeth Pierce as she led the countdown to turn on the fountain.

Credit Tana Weingartner / WVXU
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WVXU
The restored fountain is now the original shade of green it was when it first opened.

The fountain was removed during the restoration to allow for new waterproofing underneath. Years of leaks and water damage severely eroded the structure below. The fountain sits directly above the Children's Museum.

"Most people remember the fountain as having this mint green pool paint on it," explains Communications Director Cody Hefner. "There were corners and areas of the fountain where we found the actual construction of the fountain and the surface was a rough terrazzo ... we actually rebuilt the fountain with that terrazzo on top so now it doesn't look exactly how it did in 2015 when it came out, it looks how it looked in 1933 when it first opened."

Credit Tana Weingartner / WVXU
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WVXU
The brass fixtures were cleaned and restored during the Union Terminal restoration.

About the fountain

The original fountain was designed by Fellheimer & Wagner, according to the Cincinnati Museum Center's unofficial building historian Nick Massa. The Cassini & Martini Terrazzo Company crafted the recognizable green terrazzo finish.

Rebuilding the 8,000-square-foot fountain meant removing 2,300 pieces of limestone and granite. Some 57 trucks hauled in 450 cubic yards of concrete. The basin holds 44,000 gallons of water, circulated at a rate of 2.4 million gallons per day.

Credit Tana Weingartner / WVXU
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WVXU
Swimming isn't allowed in the Union Terminal fountain, but that doesn't mean these youngsters couldn't have a little fun on Fountain Day 2019.

Behind-the-scenes of the reconstructed fountain

WVXU went behind the scenes in September 2018 to see how the fountain was rebuilt.

While the fountain looks the same, the plumbing beneath is completely new.

In 2015, WVXU took listeners two-and-a-half stories below the fountain to see how it worked. A giant blue make-up tank held 15,000 gallons of water and 26 pipes fed the individual spouts. The fountain's center geyser was manually controlled by a wrench-lever that required an engineer in the pump room communicating by radio with person above ground to determine the spout's height.

Credit Tana Weingartner / WVXU
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WVXU
The big blue make-up tank at left once held 15,000 gallons of water for recirculating through the fountain. The tank is now gone but the concrete pad where it stood remains.

The large, bottom basin of the new fountain now serves as the make-up tank, eliminating the need for a  storage silo in the pump room, though you can still see the round cement base upon which it stood. The fountain holds 44,000 gallons of chlorinated water. The spouts are still individually fed, but the pipework is new.

"We moved the piping up above the (new) waterproof slab" says Dave Swope, site superintendent with The Nelson Stark Company, which specializes in commercial plumbing.

Credit Tana Weingartner / WVXU
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WVXU
The old pipes and pumps (at left) have been replaced, though the general operational outline remains.

"In all honesty," Swope says, "it's a very similar situation with the exception of the tank. It's a very simple system. There's one pump that handles the seven-jet centerpiece ... it gets that pressure up there because it can shoot quite high." Two more pumps feed pressure to a header with valves for the individual spouts around the fountain's edges.

Credit Courtesy of Dave Swope
"We had to get in there and clean the nozzles out, re-aim them, and the only way to do that is with the fountain running," says Dave Swope (left). "There's no way to get it exactly right unless you're in there."

Swope estimates the center "flower" could reach 80 feet in the air if turned all the way up. Don't expect to ever see the geyser shoot that high, wind gusts would drench everyone and everything near the plaza.

In 2015, Museum Center Chief Engineer Mike Reed told WVXU the center spout was usually kept at about 12 feet high, but it could be turned down - by hand - as low as three feet or as high as 100 feet.

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WVXU
Engineers used to control the height of the center spout manually with a wrench and a valve. The new system is computerized and can be controlled with a mobile app.

The fountain is now run by a computer. Museum Center engineers, Swope explains, can program the fountain to regulate its height based on how hard the wind is blowing or other conditions. Swope says there's a wind meter on the south side of the building.

"The fountain height will move around. It'll go up ... On still days in the summer when there's no wind, it'll go higher."

While the plan is to set a schedule and let the fountain run itself, it does come with a mobile app engineers can use to manipulate the various spouts.

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Once controlled by hand, the fountain is "smart" now. Dave Swope demonstrates how the fount can be adjusted from a screen in the pump room.

Getting 'the look' right

The fountain's original brass fixtures were spruced up, but the basins are reconstructed from concrete and new green terrazzo, a composite of marble, granite and other similar materials.

"The terrazzo that you see today looks almost exactly like the original," Project Architect Nick Cates with GBBN Architects told WVXU last year. "It's a really good match." He says it may look a little different than in recent memory because layers of a substance similar to a pool finish have been added over the past 30 years. "Before the reconstruction project started, the color was off."

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WVXU
The recognizable green basin color now comes from new terrazzo (at right) created to remain watertight in the future. The previous basin (at left) was coated with layers of swimming pool-like liner material.

Lots of testing was done to determine the best waterproofing and terrazzo finishes. "We did color tests as well. ... Different colors, different pigments and different aggregate to try to get the color to match," Cates says.

The plaza now features multiple colors of concrete creating visual interest. This, too, is based on Union Terminal's original plans. The old concrete was replaced over time, not always following in the original colors, or with subpar materials that didn't preserve the hues. Cates says the new concrete is tinted all the way through to prevent that problem.

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WVXU
The rebuilt weirs now cascade more evenly.

Visitors may notice another slight difference. The fountain's cascading weirs are straighter and more level.

"If you stand at the bottom and watch the water flow over, it's much more even," Cates says. "Before, it came down in little streams and wasn't always perfectly level. But in any type of pool where you have water coming over the edge, it needs to be level so the water's the same thickness so it falls over the edge."

There is one way in which the fountain can't be completely returned to its inception. Unofficial historian Nick Massa notes "the scallops were badly damaged in the 1970s ... and some of the decorative covers over the lower sprays were removed."

Credit Courtesy of Cincinnati Museum Center
The original bottom basin spouts were removed for some reason in the 1970s. The whereabouts of just one are known.

Massa says it's unclear why the covers were taken off or who did it. The work happened as the train station was being modified into a shopping mall. The museum knows the whereabouts of just one cover, it came into the museum's own collection several years ago, Massa says, after being loaned for an exhibit.

Updated: May 19, 2022 at 4:21 PM EDT
This article was first published on May 17, 2019 and has been updated.
Senior Editor and reporter at WVXU with more than 20 years experience in public radio; formerly news and public affairs producer with WMUB. Would really like to meet your dog.