You wonder about all kinds of things: who built that, why did they call it that? OKI Wanna Know is the feature where you can find the answers to your neighborhood's little mysteries. This week, we dive back into local buildings and building styles.
On the northeast corner of Liberty and Central Parkway Downtown, there's a building with a sign above the door reading "Warner Bros. Pictures."
Listener Mark Holder wants to know what it's about.
Before Warner Bros. Pictures was part of Warner Bros. Discovery, it was known as Time Warner, and AOL Time Warner. At the beginning though, there were four brothers — Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack — who started a movie studio.
That studio that gave us "Looney Tunes," "Casablanca," and in 2025, "Superman," some of which was shot in Cincinnati, including at Union Terminal.
However, nothing was filmed at the Liberty and Central Parkway building. Beth Johnson with Cincinnati Preservation says it's not, and never was a studio.
"It was a distribution center," Johnson says. "Cincinnati in the 1930s, 1940s, was a centrally located city; a fairly large commercial metropolitan area that had really easy access to a lot of other markets and a lot of other cities."
Cincinnati had a lot of theaters Downtown in those days. Some are still around in one form or another, like the Woodward, the Emery, the Regal, and the Imperial.
Others are gone, like the Empire, the Albee, the Lyric, and the Grand.
It wasn't just Warner Bros. that saw the advantage of an office in Cincinnati. Johnson says several movie studios had offices here, with many of them renting space in office buildings, like the nearby Film Center at 1632 Central Parkway.
"The one on Central and Liberty that says Warner Bros. on it, that was constructed specifically for Warner Brothers," she says. "They were one of the largest film companies at the time, so they had enough business to be able to build their own offices."
County auditor records indicate Warner Bros. left the Over-the-Rhine office in 1964.
Johnson says in 2015, the two-story yellow brick building won historic preservation tax credits from the state of Ohio. Grandin Properties rehabbed it into office space, and kept the sign out front.
"They are within the Over-the-Rhine Historic District, so they did have [city] guidelines to follow. They were very intentional about making sure that they kept what makes that building special," she says. "People drove by it for years knowing it as the Warner Bros. building and they didn't want to take that away."
Why all the stairs?
Isobel Dozier of Peebles, Ohio, noticed something while visiting Cincinnati: narrow, concrete staircases in front of older homes, just a few steps up from the sidewalk to the level of the house. She wondered what purpose they serve.
Johnson calls these "terraced houses," which are built above street level.
"It's not necessarily unique to Cincinnati," she says. "You can go to places like Pittsburgh, as well, that have very similar stairways. It's really because of our geography."
Johnson says having your house built a little higher than the street helped prevent some flooding, but that was a bonus, not the main reason.
"In order to be able to build and have streets, they often would have to excavate the streets, which would create retaining walls, then the necessity to have stairs that would go up to the houses," she says. "Because you would still want to build on the flattest portion, which was usually at the top of the hill, which even if it wasn't flat, it would require the least amount of excavation to flatten."
Johnson says having a house up above street level made construction of a basement easier, and made it easier to keep that basement dry.
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