On Friday, May 26, water will once again return to the fountain in front of the Cincinnati Museum Center. In this article from our archives, reporter Tana Weingartner takes a look at a time not so long ago when the fountain was turned on for the first time after a three-year long reconstruction.
Water is once again flowing in the fountain in front of the Cincinnati Museum Center. The fountain was out of commission for three years during the Union Terminal restoration.
"Once we get the geyser flowing and the water going, we will really be back home at Union Terminal," said Museum Center CEO Elizabeth Pierce as she led the countdown to turn on the fountain.
The fountain was removed during the restoration to allow for new waterproofing underneath. Years of leaks and water damage severely eroded the structure below. The fountain sits directly above the Children's Museum.
"Most people remember the fountain as having this mint green pool paint on it," explains Communications Director Cody Hefner. "There were corners and areas of the fountain where we found the actual construction of the fountain and the surface was a rough terrazzo ... we actually rebuilt the fountain with that terrazzo on top so now it doesn't look exactly how it did in 2015 when it came out, it looks how it looked in 1933 when it first opened."
About the fountain
The original fountain was designed by Fellheimer & Wagner, according to the Cincinnati Museum Center's unofficial building historian Nick Massa. The Cassini & Martini Terrazzo Company crafted the recognizable green terrazzo finish.
Rebuilding the 8,000-square-foot fountain meant removing 2,300 pieces of limestone and granite. Some 57 trucks hauled in 450 cubic yards of concrete. The basin holds 44,000 gallons of water, circulated at a rate of 2.4 million gallons per day.
Behind-the-scenes of the reconstructed fountain
WVXU went behind the scenes in September 2018 to see how the fountain was rebuilt.
While the fountain looks the same, the plumbing beneath is completely new.
. A giant blue make-up tank held 15,000 gallons of water and 26 pipes fed the individual spouts. The fountain's center geyser was manually controlled by a wrench-lever that required an engineer in the pump room communicating by radio with person above ground to determine the spout's height.
The large, bottom basin of the new fountain now serves as the make-up tank, eliminating the need for a storage silo in the pump room, though you can still see the round cement base upon which it stood. The fountain holds 44,000 gallons of chlorinated water. The spouts are still individually fed, but the pipework is new.
"We moved the piping up above the (new) waterproof slab" says Dave Swope, site superintendent with The Nelson Stark Company, which specializes in commercial plumbing.
"In all honesty," Swope says, "it's a very similar situation with the exception of the tank. It's a very simple system. There's one pump that handles the seven-jet centerpiece ... it gets that pressure up there because it can shoot quite high." Two more pumps feed pressure to a header with valves for the individual spouts around the fountain's edges.
Swope estimates the center "flower" could reach 80 feet in the air if turned all the way up. Don't expect to ever see the geyser shoot that high, wind gusts would drench everyone and everything near the plaza.
In 2015, Museum Center Chief Engineer Mike Reed told WVXU the center spout was usually kept at about 12 feet high, but it could be turned down - by hand - as low as three feet or as high as 100 feet.
The fountain is now run by a computer. Museum Center engineers, Swope explains, can program the fountain to regulate its height based on how hard the wind is blowing or other conditions. Swope says there's a wind meter on the south side of the building.
"The fountain height will move around. It'll go up ... On still days in the summer when there's no wind, it'll go higher."
While the plan is to set a schedule and let the fountain run itself, it does come with a mobile app engineers can use to manipulate the various spouts.
Getting 'the look' right
The fountain's original brass fixtures were spruced up, but the basins are reconstructed from concrete and new green terrazzo, a composite of marble, granite and other similar materials.
"The terrazzo that you see today looks almost exactly like the original," Project Architect Nick Cates with GBBN Architects told WVXU last year. "It's a really good match." He says it may look a little different than in recent memory because layers of a substance similar to a pool finish have been added over the past 30 years. "Before the reconstruction project started, the color was off."
Lots of testing was done to determine the best waterproofing and terrazzo finishes. "We did color tests as well. ... Different colors, different pigments and different aggregate to try to get the color to match," Cates says.
The plaza now features multiple colors of concrete creating visual interest. This, too, is based on Union Terminal's original plans. The old concrete was replaced over time, not always following in the original colors, or with subpar materials that didn't preserve the hues. Cates says the new concrete is tinted all the way through to prevent that problem.
Visitors may notice another slight difference. The fountain's cascading weirs are straighter and more level.
"If you stand at the bottom and watch the water flow over, it's much more even," Cates says. "Before, it came down in little streams and wasn't always perfectly level. But in any type of pool where you have water coming over the edge, it needs to be level so the water's the same thickness so it falls over the edge."
There is one way in which the fountain can't be completely returned to its inception. Unofficial historian Nick Massa notes "the scallops were badly damaged in the 1970s ... and some of the decorative covers over the lower sprays were removed."
Massa says it's unclear why the covers were taken off or who did it. The work happened as the train station was being modified into a shopping mall. The museum knows the whereabouts of just one cover, it came into the museum's own collection several years ago, Massa says, after being loaned for an exhibit.
