Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal

Union Terminal opened in 1933, near the very end of the golden age of American passenger rail, built to consolidate the trains of many competing railroads into one grand station. Its architects gave it a bold Art Deco design crowned by an enormous half-dome, and in its early decades it handled the crush of wartime troop movements and everyday travelers passing through the river city.

The decline of passenger rail nearly killed it. As train travel faded, the terminal fell largely idle and was threatened with demolition, and for a time part of it was even converted into a shopping mall. The building was rescued and, in the 1990s, reborn as the Museum Center, a use grand enough to match the architecture, though trains on a long-distance route still stop here.

Stepping inside, visitors are met by the rotunda, a vast curved half-dome that is among the largest such interiors in the Western Hemisphere, its curve amplifying sound so that whispers carry across the hall. It is a genuine Art Deco landmark, its scale meant to impress travelers arriving in a booming industrial city.

Ringing the rotunda are enormous mosaic murals made of countless small glass tiles, depicting the history of Cincinnati and the nation and the workers and industries that powered the region. Additional mosaics from the terminal's old concourse were salvaged when that section was demolished and relocated elsewhere in the city, a rescue that saved some of the finest public art of its era.

Today the terminal holds several institutions in one complex. A natural history museum walks visitors through the geology and prehistory of the region, including a reconstructed limestone cave and exhibits on the Ice Age glaciers that shaped Ohio, and a large-format theater screens documentary films on a towering screen.

A history museum tells Cincinnati's own story, from its river-port beginnings to its industrial boom, often with immersive recreated streetscapes, and a dedicated children's museum gives younger visitors a hands-on world of their own. Rotating traveling exhibitions round out a complex that can fill the better part of a day.

The terminal sits just west of downtown Cincinnati, a hilly city that grew up on the north bank of the Ohio River as a booming nineteenth-century port and manufacturing center once nicknamed the Queen City. Its steep hillsides, historic neighborhoods, and inclined-plane heritage give it a character unlike any other Ohio city.

This ground is part of the ancestral homeland of the Shawnee, Miami, and Lenape (Delaware) peoples, who lived across the Ohio Valley before being forced westward in the early nineteenth century, and whose descendant nations continue today, largely in Oklahoma. From the terminal it is a short trip to the riverfront, the historic Over-the-Rhine district, and the city's museums and markets.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.