page_title: Winold Reiss industrial murals
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Winold Reiss industrial murals / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Cincinnati Union Terminal as depicted in Railway Age.
context_page_description: The Winold Reiss industrial murals are a set of 16 tile mosaic murals displaying manufacturing in Cincinnati, Ohio. The works were created by Winold Reiss for Cincinnati Union Terminal from 1931 to 1932, and made up 11,908 of the 18,150 square feet of art in the terminal. The murals were first installed in the train concourse of the terminal, which was demolished in 1974. Prior to the demolition, almost all were moved to the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, nine of which were placed in air terminals which were themselves demolished in 2015. The nine works were then relocated to the exterior of the Duke Energy Convention Center, where they stand today. Two murals depicting the Rookwood Pottery Company never left the terminal; they were moved to the Cincinnati Historical Society's special exhibits gallery in 1991.
context_section_description: Reiss was paid $21,000 for the murals. There were four stages to their creation - an initial photograph, a simple illustration on 30 x 22 inch paper with Conté crayons (sometimes combining multiple photographs), followed by the maquette - 1/3 size, and the final mosaic pieces.
  In 1931, he began taking photographs in factories, and then made the studies from them. He sent the studies to the Ravenna Mosaic Company of New York and St. Louis, which created the tiles for the murals. The 1/3 scale works were photographically enlarged to the full size, and the shop-drawings were traced in reverse, cut up into smaller pieces for craftsmen to add tiles - the most complicated areas to the most skillful artisans. Reiss lived in New York at the time and regularly visited to supervise the progress. They were then packed up and shipped to Cincinnati.
  Around 1932, Ravenna craftsmen and local laborers began to lay the works out on the terminal floor, assemble the works, and install them. All sixteen were placed in the train concourse of the terminal, with the north wall displaying piano making, radio broadcasting, roofing manufacture, tanning, airplane manufacture, ink making, and laundry machine manufacture. The south wall displayed meat packing, drug and chemical processing, printing and publishing, foundry-products operations, sheet-steel making, soap making, and machine tool manufacture. The two Rookwood Pottery murals were installed in corners of the concourse, above the offices of the Station Master and the Passenger Agent. That year, shortly after some were installed, the terminal's board of directors wanted the murals removed. The board wanted to remove the murals and not install further murals in order to save money, though the chief engineer, Henry Waite, urged them to save them. He argued that the remaining installation would only cost $6,000, and that removing them and installing anything else would cost more. The effort saved the murals, and the board cut costs elsewhere.
  The concourse was demolished in 1974. Due to the impending demolition, the fourteen murals in the concourse were moved in 1973 at a cost of $400,000 to the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. A grassroots campaign named "Save the Terminal" raised the funds to save the works, though it could not raise sufficient funds to save the map mural at the west wall of the concourse. The murals were difficult to move due to their extreme size and weight: they were attached to the concourse's interior wall, they were large in size, they utilized concrete in areas not covered by tiles, and steel frames were permanently placed around each mural. These factors made each work weigh approximately 8 short tons (7.3 t). Engineers spent three months working on the best method to remove the murals from the concourse walls. The panels were removed and encased in steel frames and lowered to steel cradles. Workers applied a protective coating to prevent tiles from moving or chipping, padded them in styrofoam, and crated them in wood. They were transported upright on a flatbed truck to avoid damage, and telephone wires and signs on the route to the airport had to be temporarily removed. The first murals arrived in August 1973, five hours after departing the terminal.
  Two of the industrial murals were shown in the airport in the 1988 film Rain Man. In 1994, Delta spent $1 million moving five of the murals from one older airport terminal to a newer one.
  In 2015, with the airport's Terminals 1 and 2 slated for demolition, nine of the murals were relocated. They were moved to the exterior of the Duke Energy Convention Center, where a ceremony was held at the completion of the move in 2016. The airport board paid $1.45 million to remove and transport the works, and the City of Cincinnati paid $750,000 to restore, encase, and mount them. Five Reiss murals remain in the main terminal at the airport.
  The two Rookwood murals were not moved from their places until between 1989 and 1991, when they were relocated to the Cincinnati Historical Society's special exhibits gallery 
caption: The murals in their original location, Union Terminal's train concourse
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