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Philip Spiess
So I promised you all another Cincinnati historical vignette:
Just before the last and recent WHHS Reunion, Dick Murdock and I were in communication over his impending visit to Chicago, and I offered my suggestions as to what important historical architecture he should see there, particularly the famous "skyscrapers" that predated those of New York. I then remembered that Cincinnati had an important one of its own (before Carew Tower), and here it is:
It is the Ingalls Building, northeast corner of Fourth and Vine Streets, built 1902-1903. Later called the Transit Building, and by 1978 (when I wrote up this information for the Society for Industrial Archeology's national meeting in Cincinnati) known as the ACI Building (American Control Industries), the building is universally recognized as the world's first reinforced concrete "skyscraper," and as such has been designated as a National Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers. The financial backing for its construction came from Melville E. Ingalls of Cincinnati, who desired "to erect an everlasting monument to Cincinnati; her progress and enterprise"; but it took Ingalls two years to convince the city to issue a building permit for the structure, because of the novelty of its construction. Ingalls was a nationally prominent railroad man, who in 1880 formed the Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis & Chicago Railroad (later the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad), known popularly as the "Big Four" line; in 1888 Ingalls also became president of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad (C & O, or "Chessie"), and he was also connected with several other rail lines and civic enterprises.
The Ingalls Building, occupied in 1904, was designed by Alfred Oscar Elzner, partner in Elzner & Anderson, architects; he had studied and worked under the famous architect Henry Hobson Richardson (whose Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce building burned down all too soon; its carved stone remains were built into a memorial to Richardson in the 1970s, located in the south reaches of Burnet Woods park in Clifton, adjacent to the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Art, and Architecture). The Ingalls Building was constructed by the Ferro-Concrete Construction Co. of Cincinnati; the general contractor was the William H. Ellis Co.; and the structural engineer was Henry N. Hooper, head of the engineering staff of the Ferro-Concrete Co. The iron reinforcing system designed by Hooper was based on the patents of Ernest L. Ransome of San Francisco, an American pioneer in reinforced concrete construction, whose system of reinforcing was the first to employ metal bars. Concrete was chosen as the structural material for the building chiefly because of economy; the structural cost was $400,000, which was somewhat less than steel construction would have been for the equivalent load-bearing capacity. The Ransome system of reinforcing by means of cold twisted square bars was used throughout; according to Elzner, "this gives excellent results, due to the greatly increased tensile strength of the bars after twisting, and the mechanical grip of the twisted bar on the concrete."
The Ingalls Building has stood essentially the way it was built, showing no major signs of deterioration; the interior was modernized in 1959 when the name was changed to the Transit Building. The basic techniques of reinforced-concrete construction used in erecting the Ingalls Building have remained standard practice ever since it was built; it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.
But wait! There's more! Another noteworthy Cincinnati reinforced concrete structure is the Melan Arch Bridge, the bridge which crosses over the main drive at the northeastern entrance to Eden Park (if you're coming into the park from Walnut Hills), adjacent to the landmark Eden Park Water Tower (maybe I'll write about it at another time). The Melan Arch Bridge is the oldest reinforced concrete bridge in Ohio, and the second oldest reinforced concrete bridge in the United States. It was designed by Fritz von Emperger, a German engineer, after the reinforcing system designed by the Austrian Josef Melan. This system was considered at the end of the 19th century to be the most advanced method, in theory and practice, of building reinforced concrete bridges. Although the system was popular for awhile, it was eventually replaced by the Ransome method of using reinforcing bars distributed only in tension zones (see above), as this was equally effective but also cheaper than the Melan system.
The Eden Park bridge, constructed at the close of 1894, is reinforced with twelve parallel steel I-beams of 9-inch depth, and was constructed by the Melan Arch Construction Co. of New York. Although originally heavily ornamented with the arch ring accentuated by moldings, an ornamented keystone, panelled spandrel walls and soffit panelling, as well as wing walls and an elaborate balustrade, deterioration of the concrete over the years has brought about simple patching and a metal railing replacing the concrete one. The bridge cost $7,139. The stone eagles flanking the bridge on the drive below are from the old Chamber of Commerce building designed by Henry Hobson Richardson (see above); they are not part of the original bridge design.
For those of you interested in the history of concrete architecture (if any), you must definitely visit Doylestown, Pennsylvania, the home of Dr. Henry Chapman Mercer, who, around the turn of the last century (1890s-1910), built his home, Fonthill Castle, as well as his museum of American arts and crafts, the Mercer Museum of the Bucks County Historical Society (a really eccentric museum, where war canoes and Conestoga wagons hang over your head from the ceiling, and in one of the towers you emerge wrong way up through a working gallows!), and his Moravian Tile Works (still producing tiles) -- all out of early self-produced concrete.
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