The Carew Tower

By Ian DesJardins

The Carew tower and Netherland Plaza Hotel plans were announced in August of 1929.  They were completed in January of 1931.  The financing for the building came from the Emery family.  The Emery family made its fortune from processing by-products of the stockyards of Cincinnati.  John Emery hired Walter W. Alschlager and Colonel William Starrett for the construction of the buildings.  Starrett is well known as the builder of the Lincoln Memorial, and the Empire State Building.  Alschlager is known as the designer of the Peabody Hotel in Tennessee, and the Hotel Intercontinental in Chicago.

The Carew tower and the Netherland Plaza Hotel were designed to be a “city within a city”.  This concept was new to Cincinnati in 1929.  This meant that the building was going to be a combination of shops, department stores, offices and a hotel.  During the creation of this historic building, Emery decided to make some bold moves with the final side of the building construction.  These bold moves ended up working in his favor later.   He approached the bank to write a loan for the “city within a city” project.  The bank didn’t share the vision for the project and declined the loan.  They did not believe that a combination of all that in one multipurpose facility could work.

Emery ignored the advisors form his financial adviser, and sold all of his stocks and securities.  Just when the financing for the building was finished, the stock market crashed.  If Emery had left his stocks tangled up in the stock market, when it crashed, the project would have been done for and he would have lost everything.  But the project could continue as planned, because he had made a good decision.  In fact, during the great depression, the construction project was one of Cincinnati’s biggest employers.  When the construction was ending, the project was named “The St. Nicholas Plaza”.  Just before the grand opening of the building, The Cincinnati Realty Company filed an injunction against the name of the hotel.  

They claimed that they had purchased the rights to the name “St. Nicholas” when the old St. Nicholas Hotel had closed just a few years before.  The new hotel name was changed to “St. Netherlands Plaza”.  The Netherland Plaza suffered a period in the 1960’s where the hotel was covered in a modernization effort.  But later in 1981, the full original beauty was restored as the modern cover- up was torn away.  In 1985, the Hotel earned a National Historic Register, and also received a status as a National Landmark.  In 1989, the hotel became a member of the Historic Hotels of America.  Today, the hotel still stands a as historic monument of the beauty of its 1930’s architecture.  People can visited it today and reflect on what an amazing piece of historic architecture this building really is.