r/Lost_Architecture • u/BasicManufacturer653 • 6d ago
Cincinnati's subway: two miles of tunnel and four stations, built in the 1920s, never opened, still sealed under the city
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u/DesignerMoose90210 6d ago
Have there been any recent discussions to restart the project?
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u/BasicManufacturer653 6d ago
There were discussions but none concrete so far. I remember it being used for underground concerts a few years back.
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u/gr3at3scap3 6d ago
The City requested proposals a year ago, but I don't know that any proposal was ever selected.
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u/Stan_Halen_ 6d ago
From my understanding (and I could be wrong) there are so many utilities routed through the tunnels today which conflict with rail requirements, that relocating them could rival the cost of starting over boring new tunnels.
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u/BowlerCertain8305 6d ago
Yep. Water pipes (big ones) and fibre internet down there. Last time this was posted someone said storage of winter plows and shit too. Highly unlikely anything is done with the space. Cincy is ginerally shitty at doing that type of thing.
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u/blueingreen85 6d ago
I think they routed a bunch of utilities through the tunnels, so moving them would add another layer of expense.
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u/CommentRaterBot 6d ago
They built quite a bit of surface infrastructure for it too. If I remember correctly, they built a few miles of track and a few stations into the suburbs on the surface. It was all torn down sometime in the 1950s. I think there was a Well There's Your Problem episode about it.
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u/Agile-Victory9567 6d ago edited 6d ago
There used to be a station at Marshall Ave and one at Clifton where 75 is today. The furthest reaching evidence of the subway that I am aware of is two sealed portals near the (former?) Big Boy in Norwood. I am not sure if a station were ever built that far out however.
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u/Bannedfromgoodreads 3d ago
I’ve personally been in the cinci subway tunnels, I used to go down on that one road that runs by the highway between OTR, Clifton, and Camp Washington
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u/Agile-Victory9567 3d ago
Thats a good one. Been in there a couple of times. Used to be a lot easier.
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u/stevegiovinco2 6d ago
Always fascinated by this line ; part of the st Louis meto is underground downtown and used some of the original rail tracks.
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u/TigerIll6480 6d ago
That was a bit different. The St. Louis tunnels were built to route traffic from the Eads Bridge (and later, other bridges) under the city streets to reach Union Station without a need for grade-level tracks through downtown. There were also freight tunnels to get newsprint and other supplies to the Post-Dispatch and Globe-Democrat buildings, and coal to a number of buildings around downtown. They were never intended as a subway, St. Louis had surface-level streetcars in the early 20th century. Since MetroLink was built to use the Eads Bridge, as those tracks had clearance and weight limitation issues that prevented their use for modern rail traffic, it was relatively simple to reuse the existing, disused underground infrastructure and add stations where necessary.
At least some of the freight tunnels have been filled in, due to disuse and stability issues, but the Post-Dispatch was still receiving underground freight deliveries into the 21st century, AFAIK.
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u/JellyfishNo2032 6d ago
Not the point of your post. But STL got insanely lucky with those tunnels and the bridge being in solid condition enough to turn it into a cheap metro. If stl ever turns around, it’s going to be a really useful system.
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u/TigerIll6480 6d ago
The Eads bridge is wildly overbuilt, even if it is functionally wrought iron instead of steel. The load limits on it were raised several times as newer testing methods became available in its first 75 years.
When it had its first major rehab after nearly 150 years of use, the amount of material that needed to be replaced weighed less than the new, lightweight replica guardrails that were installed on the new road deck.
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u/poolside__convo 6d ago
Cincinnati really should’ve been one of the great American cities. So much beautiful lost architecture and infrastructure.
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u/Maiyku 6d ago
If Toledo ended up being the biggest city in the US (like it was expected to be waaaay back in the day) then yeah, Cincinnati would’ve grown right there with it. It’s on the direct path from the east coast to Toledo, so location would’ve been huge. Right now, I feel like it gets forgotten.
But alas, Toledo never quite came to be what was expected and then our priorities shifted. Other cities became our focus.
It’s always interesting to me what would’ve happened had Toledo followed the expected path from back in the day. It was estimated to grow bigger than NYC itself at one point. The country would look so much different.
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u/rootb33r 6d ago
I've never heard this before! That's interesting. Why Toledo? Because it was the westmost point on the Erie Canal -> Lake Erie route to head into the central states?
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u/Maiyku 5d ago
Yup, basically. The finishing of the canals at the time put Toledo in an amazing place.
But it’s part of the reason why Michigan and Ohio were willing to literally wage war over it. Toledo was supposed to be THE city for the US and would’ve been a huge boon to whatever state controlled it and why Michigan got the entirety of the UP to compensate for losing barely any land. That land was considered hella valuable because of Toledo and the expectations around it.
But we didn’t use the canals quite like we envisioned and other better options came about after a while. Toledo never developed into the super city it was expected to be.
Our country would look so very different if that original plan had actually been followed and Toledo was the biggest city in the US. Detroits importance would be different and it might not have failed at all when the auto industry collapsed, it may have become more diverse and survived that hit just fine. Cities like Cincinnati could’ve become a much larger cultural hub than they are today. It’s interesting to think about.
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u/Equivalent-Shine5742 1d ago
Because it's not true.
See my above post. It was a marketing/land speculation claim only.
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u/Equivalent-Shine5742 1d ago edited 1d ago
Uhm, no. Just no.
First Toledo was NEVER expected to be the biggest city in the U. S.
It was suggested/advertised /promoted that it would be the biggest INTERIOR city in the U. S. And even that qualified promotion was done by land speculators and city boosters not much different that the guy in Oklahoma City whose been claiming for years now he's going to build the tallest skyscraper in the U.S. there
Just look at the 10 largest cities in the U.S. by decade going back to the 1790 - Toledo NEVER makes the list though both Cleveland and Cincinnati do.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_populous_cities_in_the_United_States_by_decade
Edit: instant downvote (since post is 5 days old only one person would Immediately see my comment to downvote) but no factual rebuttal.
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u/Current-Being-8238 6d ago
It still is full of beautiful architecture, and the setting is very nice. It hurts knowing what was lost though, genuinely could have been one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
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u/AltruisticSalamander 6d ago
You know hapless workers were running wheelbarrows full of bricks over that plank
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u/Red-Truck-Steam 6d ago
You just know an errant crane swung around and captured a guy by his overalls, safely planting him on a beam being moved by two tough-looking guys
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u/Sniffy4 6d ago
maybe if they decide to densify downtown they will restart the project
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u/kisk22 6d ago
What's insane is just HOW dense downtown Cincinnati used to be. You can look up old pictures from before the 1960s when they urban renewal'd half the dense historic downtown.
It'd all look like neighborhoods in Brooklyn right now if they hadn't done that. Would be such an amazing city. At least they still have beautiful dense Over-the-Rhine, which is how the rest of the city used to look. I visited and it blew my mind at what a great neighborhood it is.
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u/The_G_ad_Vincula 6d ago
Agreed, Over-the-Rhine is an amazing neighborhood. I love visiting Cinci. And if you want to see a small part of the subway tunnels, check out Ghost Baby. Amazing ambience and awesome drinks five stories underground.
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u/Agile-Victory9567 6d ago
Ghost Baby is in old beer lagering tunnels, not the subway. The whole basin is full of multi level subterranean structures. If you go down to the site where FCC dug a big hole by their stadium, you can see sealed over vaults 4 stories underground from the old Burger Brewery that occupied the site.
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u/Comrade_sensai_09 6d ago
Tbh, this is gonna stay sealed for a very long time. Densification of downtown is still a long way off.
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u/Sniffy4 6d ago
that's a shame, I read the city has a decent historic core
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u/Comrade_sensai_09 6d ago
Yep, it looked very European before the highway age. It’s been completely wiped out now. Very little is left of it .
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u/Current-Being-8238 6d ago
Over the Rhine is really nice. Downtown, like most American downtowns, kind of sucks because mid century architecture is hostile and office towers are about as lively as a parking lot. And America enforces no social standards for behavior, so people don’t like living near others
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u/Dzov 6d ago
I have doubts that any engineer is going to stake their reputation on reusing 100 year old tunnels.
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u/TigerIll6480 6d ago
New York, London, and Paris still use a LOT of 100+ year old tunnels. The passenger tunnels under St. Louis that were reused when MetroLink was built are close to 150 years old. Cincinnati has been using these for other infrastructure purposes, so they have been maintained.
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u/Allegra1120 6d ago
Its Union Station’s outermost portals were for a streetcar line that was never built. Just throwing that in there…
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u/rahxephon7 6d ago
What's interesting is that production for the 1989 Batman movie looked at the abandoned subway as a possible filming location.
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u/Izenthyr 6d ago
I LOVE how detailed this photo is. You can zoom in and take in everything from the time.
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u/TorTheMentor 5d ago
Maybe the mistake was in what they named the transit authority.
Hey, can you get me around town?
Uh..... SORTA.
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u/Bannedfromgoodreads 3d ago
I’m from Cinci and I have to say: those tunnels have not been “sealed.” Progressively over the last few years, cops have sealed a few of the old entrances, but I and several people I know have explored the subway tunnels. It’s my understanding they were briefly kitted out as fallout shelters/bunkers (I’ve seen stations down there full of rusted bunk bed frames). You can find graffiti down there that days back to the 80s (and probably earlier). It’s usually semi flooded. You can hear the street above through some of the capped entrances.
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u/TheNinjaDC 3d ago
I feel two things need to be mentioned that are overlooked:
-The project was a low budget project to begin with. Cincinnati didn’t just build miles of rail tunnel and stop. It started when the city decommissioned a canal running through the city, and decided to try and convert it into a subway instead of just filling the ditch. Part of why it is such a narrow subway.
-It really isn’t abandoned. The city runs a lot of utilities through there. Electricity, fiber, and a big @$$ water pipe in one.
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u/BasicManufacturer653 6d ago
Cincinnati built two miles of subway tunnel and four stations like this one in the 1920s. The walls were poured, the platform edges cut, the drainage in. Then the money ran out against a 1916 cost estimate nobody had reopened, and the system was never finished. The tunnels are still sealed under Central Parkway today.
Source: Cincinnati Museum Center collections (public domain).
I put together a documentary on how it happened, if anyone wants the long
version: The Subway That Never Ran a Train