West Fifth Street & Fountain Square (Central Business District)

• National Historic Landmark – Listed April 19, 1994
• National Register – Listed August 5, 1982 (No. 82003578)

Significance: Built during the Great Depression, this complex is one of the finest examples of skyscraper modernism in America. The hotel and tower complex is a particularly coherent series of public areas that ascend upward from the street entrances and are evidence of the master hand Walter W. Ahlschlager of Chicago. As designed, it makes the most complete statement of the 1920s Jazz Age, an embodiment of speed, high style, and a mass-market machine age. The block-square complex cost $33,000,000, an enormous sum for the time, and was finished in 13 months by crews working seven days a week, 24 hours a day. The Netherland Plaza Hotel, now the Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza Hotel, is a superb example of European-Deco design adapted to commerce; most of the decorative work had been created in France several years prior to construction of the complex and exhibited at the 1925 Exhibition of Decorative Art in Paris.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has identified the Netherland Plaza Hotel as one of its Historic Hotels of America, and additional information about the facility can be found at www.nationaltrust.org/historic_hotels.