It might not make lists of famous local architecture, but 120-year-old Longworth Hall still has a story to tell about Cincinnati — even as a chunk of it disappears for the Brent Spence companion bridge.
Five stories up on the roof of the sprawling, 1,160-foot-long former railroad warehouse, the hum of cars on interstate 75 mixes with the sounds of trains leaving nearby Queensgate Yard.
Ohio Department of Transportation's Matt Bruning is leading a tour of the building. ODOT owns the building now. Bruning says the portion we're standing on won't be around much longer thanks to the massive Brent Spence project.
"You'd be on the new bridge — or under it," he says, pointing out where the coming companion bridge will arc over the Ohio River. "It'll be taller than this."
If you've driven over the existing Brent Spence bridge, you've seen Longworth Hall. It was built in 1904 in a striking Romanesque style by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company. It spent most of its life simply known as the Cincinnati B&O Warehouse. After its railroad life ended, it was renamed for prominent Cincinnatian Nicholas Longworth, who once owned the land it sits on.
It also lives up to its name in a more literal sense, extending about a quarter mile to the west.
The building has a near-twin built in 1905 by the B&O Railroad in Baltimore. It makes regular TV appearances as part of the Oriole's Camden Yards baseball stadium.
There's a further Cincinnati tie-in. The only player to hit a fair ball far enough to strike the wall of the former Baltimore railroad warehouse was hometown hero and former Cincinnati Red Ken Griffey, Jr. He did so in the 1993 Home Run Derby. That's where the Cincinnati connection ends, though. He was playing for the Seattle Mariners at the time.
A hub of commerce
Railroad historian Chris Mayhew is the past president of the Cincinnati Railroad Club. He says there's more to Longworth's significance than its size and famous baseball sibling. It's one of the last remaining monuments to an era when Cincinnati was a bustling logistics hub.
"It was one of the largest, longest buildings in the nation when built," he says. "It stretched more than four football fields. It had a U.S. Customs house because some things were coming in from foreign countries. So it was a real hub of commerce."
Mayhew says Cincinnati was a very important city when the B&O built its warehouse here, though Chicago had surpassed it as the Midwest's key urban center. The B&O — one of the first commercial railroads in the country — built in Cincinnati for another reason.
"Unfortunately for the railroads at the time, Cincinnati was a hot mess for logistics," he says.
The Queen City was a bottleneck for rail travel because of the region's massive hills, the Ohio River, and numerous train yards. Cincinnati was a natural place for shippers to stop and re-sort their cargo.
Decline as a logistics hub
Longworth Hall was a central spot for the B&O for about 70 years, with space to shuffle items from one box car to another or hold them for weeks until the right train came in.
Then things changed. Highways like I-75 and later modular containers that could be easily moved from trucks to trains to boats without having to repack cargo revolutionized shipping.
"Eventually in the 1970s, the railroad said, 'We don't need this building anymore' and let it go into private hands," Mayhew says. "In 1986 it's registered on the National Register of Historic Places and becomes what we know as Longworth Hall — office and retail space."
The building has hosted design and architecture firms, restaurants, nightclubs, and even the Cincinnati Children's Museum until flooding forced it to move in 1997.
This isn't the first time the highway has taken a chunk of Longworth Hall. Crews demolished a 150-foot portion of the building for the original Brent Spence Bridge in 1961. They built a 30,000-square foot addition that expanded the building north to replace a portion of the missing chunk.
That's the part crews are poised to demolish now, along with a roughly 200-foot section of the original building. ODOT's Bruning says that's not the whole story, though.
The transportation department will replace the rest of the building's many windows, repair much of its brickwork — made up of roughly four million bricks — and then put it up for sale. ODOT also will use original bricks from the section being removed to build the building's new east-facing wall.
"ODOT's not exactly in the business of restoring buildings, property management, things like that," Bruning says. "That's just not what we do. But to be able to invest in the building and hopefully turn it over in better condition than we found it, that's a cool part of the story."
Mayhew says Longworth is an important reminder of Cincinnati's role as a shipping powerhouse — and an example of how that role has changed over the decades.
"The interstate system eliminated some of the need for the building, and here we have the interstate taking parts of the building not once, but now twice," he says. "For me, that's kind of... not ironic, but symbolic."
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