Sunday, November 21, 1999
Little city makes big impression
Extensive History Museum exhibit captures Cincinnati in the '40s, at 1/64th scale
BY OWEN FINDSEN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Staff members put a section of the Carew Tower in place for the 'Cincinnati in Motion' exhibit.
(Gary Landers photos)
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They set out to build a model train display. They ended up building a city. And it could be the largest S-scale model in the world.
Cincinnati in Motion is a new, permanent exhibit in the History Museum at Union Terminal. When it opens on Friday, it will include all of downtown Cincinnati and the West End.
By this time next year, the model will grow to include Mount Adams and Mount Auburn, Over-the-Rhine, Spring Grove, Ivorydale, Covington, Newport, Price Hill — even to Lunken Airport and Coney Island.
“For a long time we've been talking about doing something with model trains,” says Gary Pilkington, director of historic exhibitions and programs for the Museum Center. “Because Union Terminal was a railroad terminal, people who come to the Museum Center always ask "Where are the trains?'
At 7 feet, 2 inches, the Carew Tower tovers over the rest of the 1940s-era model city.
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“But we knew it had to be something special. It had to be something that dealt with the history of the city.”
There are trains, to be sure, but Cincinnati in Motion also includes Carew Tower, the Island Queen, Fountain Square — all of downtown Cincinnati as it was in the 1940s.
As far as is known, it is the largest S-scale model in the world, Mr. Pilkington says. S-scale is 1/64 scale, or 3/16 inch to 1 foot.
“If you know what Hot Wheels cars are, they're S-scale,” he says. That makes the Carew Tower about 7 feet tall.
“We also think it will be the largest streetcar exhibit in the world, with over two scale miles of track,” Mr. Pilkington says.
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IF YOU GO
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• What: Cincinnati in Motion.
• Where: Cincinnati History Museum, Museum Center at Union Terminal.
• When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday. Closed Christmas Day.
• Admission: $5.50, $3.50 ages 3-12 (combo tickets to other attractions in Museum Center extra).
• Information: 287-7000.
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Not only do orange street cars run on city streets, but the Mount Adams and Price Hill inclines will be operational in about a year.
Visitors will see the exhibit as soon as they walk through the door of the History Museum. They arrive at the riverfront and see the 1940 skyline. Beyond it, the real city skyline can be seen through the window at the end of the display.
“Everybody on the staff and lots of volunteers have been working on this. We talked to teachers and to visitors to find out what they wanted us to include,” Mr. Pilkington says. “We worked with the conservation staff to find the historic information in our collection we needed to build all this accurately.”
About half of the buildings were built by staff exhibit designers. Others were built by commercial model studios.
The museum exhibits staff, who previously built such works as the Ice Age Exhibit, became expert model makers, learning how to convert model kits to their needs and how to create models from scratch. “There are a lot of buildings that are unique so they had to be made from scratch, by carving and casting individual parts,”Mr. Pilkington says.
“Building the models is a big part of this,” he says. “Everybody who sees this asks how we did it, and that's part of the idea. It won't be finished when it opens. We will still have people out on the floor working on the model, so visitors can see how it is done.”
Volunteers have painted hundreds of tiny cars and people.
“There are people painting fire escapes and there are people painting street lamps. Photographs and films from the museum archives were used to get accurate detail.
“We discovered that we would be seeing a lot of rooftops. Fortunately, there are a lot of aerial photos in the archives that show us the roofs.”
Mr. Pilkington stressed that the exhibit is a work in progress. “It will be open through the holidays, but after Jan. 3 there may be days, even weeks, when we'll have to close it for safety reasons while we're installing new parts.”
More than 800 buildings are included in the downtown section of the exhibit alone.
“There are three kinds of buildings in the display. The first-tier buildings are accurate replicas of actual buildings. Second-tier buildings are built from kits that are based on historic architectural styles.
“By cutting and pasting, the modelers could make buildings that are really close to real Cincinnati buildings.”
A third tier of fill-in buildings are “architecturally correct but not exact replicas.”
There is so much concern for detail that signs on even the smallest stores are duplicates of the signs seen in old photographs. Even some displays in store windows are duplicated.
Although it is mostly accurate, some liberties had to be taken to make it fit in the space.
“We felt that Lytle Park and the Taft Museum were important to include, so we've merged Main, Sycamore and Broadway into one street,” Mr. Pilkington says, and some blocks are compressed with fewer buildings than were actually there, and some sections of the display, such as Mount Adams, will be compressed into vertical shadow box displays.
There will be touch-screen computer terminals providing information about individual buildings. “People will be able to get as much information about architecture, politics, personalities, leisure activities. The computers will use sound, film clips. It's a neat system and very easy to use,” Mr. Pilkington says.
And there will be costumed interpreters who will talk about Cincinnati in the 1940s. “We'll have a railroad engineer, a street car motorman, a GI, a WAC and a telephone operator. We've learned from older people that in the 1940s, telephone operators knew more about the city than anyone else.”
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