Abandoned subway costing city years later
Cincinnati stuck with maintaining 2.2-mile tunnel over more pricey options of filling it in or renovating it
For being a century old and abandoned, Cincinnati’s subway doesn’t look too bad.
Latonia resident Allen Singer searched for the right word to describe what he saw when he went down there in 1997 and a few years later in the early 2000s.
“There’s a word that feels like you’re transported to a different time,” said Singer, a local author who wrote a 2003 book, “The Cincinnati Subway: History of Rapid Transit.” “That’s what it felt like to me, with everything as it was when they stopped working on it in the 1920s.”
But abandoned subways don’t maintain themselves.
The city of Cincinnati has spent millions to maintain its 2.2-mile-long tunnel and will likely spend millions more in the coming decades, city engineers told The Enquirer.
The city broke ground on the subway in January 1920. The planned 16-mile loop was never finished.
Now that the subway has entered its second century of existence, The Enquirer took a look at the cost to the taxpayers and what could be done about it.
The answer to the first question: The tunnel has cost more than $6.7 million in major repairs over the past 30 years, according to estimates adjusted for inflation from the city’s engineering department. In addition, the city spends on average $3,500 a year in routine inspection costs.
The answer to the second question? Not much can be done with the subway.
Once you build a subway tunnel, you’re stuck with it.
Should Cincinnati have completed its subway?
By 1929, a reform-minded new leadership headed by Mayor Murray Seasongood decided the additional $9 million or $10 million to finish the subway wasn’t worth it and halted construction. That would be $158 million in today’s dollars, based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Whether halting construction was a prudent decision, in the long run, is up for debate. Instead of a working subway, the city has a hole underneath it.
The $6 million in bonds issued in 1916 to build the subway was relatively cheap as far as public transit goes for the turn of the 20th century, said Jacob Mecklenborg, author of “Cincinnati’s Incomplete
Subway: The Complete History.” That’s especially true compared to massive transit projects at that same time, such as Penn Station in New York City, which was finished in 1910 for more than $100 million.
“That’s a reason why it was done,” Mecklenborg said. “It was so cheap pound for pound. There was a ready revenue stream. It would be managed by Cincinnati Street Railroad. There was almost no risk. It’s so amazing, something they went ahead with at no risk, what it ended up being.”
The city paid off the construction debt in 1966 at a total cost of $13 million, $113 million in today’s dollars using a Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.
The average annual cost over the past three decades to the city for repairs and maintenance is small compared to the city’s $461 million operating budget. But it’s an expense that engineers say will only grow over the generations and won’t go away.
Almost all of the subway is original, except for the 50 feet repaired in 2009 and a few other small patches fixed over the ages, said Reiner Reising, a senior engineer for the city.
“It’s going to be 110, 120 years old,” Reising said. “There will be a need for more repairs. With inflation, things will be getting more expensive.”
Cracks and erosion sometimes demand big repairs to prevent Central Parkway above it from collapsing. The most recent big project was a $1.6 million
repair in 2009 to joints in the tunnel connecting each section.
While the subway is showing its age, it’s structurally sound and keeping Central Parkway above ground, Reising said.
The city’s current six-year plan for the subway doesn’t call for major repairs.
What the next century holds for Cincinnati’s subway tunnel
What do the next 100 years look like for Cincinnati’s favorite abandoned tunnel? More maintenance, Reising said. Exactly what will be needed can be hard to predict.
“It’s a tricky one,” Reising said. “Because you have areas that look like they were constructed yesterday. You can’t believe this is 100 years old. And those are large areas. But you get sections where the concrete’s fallen off. You have leakage. You have drippage. You have corrosion and exposed rebar.”
The cost to fill it in would be even more expensive, studies have shown. City engineers last looked at options for the tunnel in 2007 in a comprehensive study of the tunnel.
At that time, the engineers estimated a $19 million price tag to fill in the tunnel. That would be at least $26 million in today’s dollars.
To renovate the tunnel for use as an actual subway would have cost at least $100 million in 2007, according to the study.
Maintaining it as it is would cost about $2.6 million over five years, engineers estimated at the time.
The city went with the third option.
Underground winery? Shopping?
Sure, other ideas have come along over the years.
At one point, an underground winery was proposed. In 1974, Nick Clooney, then a local anchorman for WKRC-TV, pushed for an underground shopping district.
But these plans were all abandoned like the subway. Retrofitting a tunnel to make it safe for people to visit isn’t cheap.
Tours are not allowed down there anymore. The city stopped the Cincinnati Museum Center tours in 2015 after a state audit deemed the lack of fire escapes and exits a hazard and liability.
Plus, a water main installed in 1959 had to be shut off every time people were in the subway.
That water main is the only functional use for the subway for 100 years, other than the now-defunct tours.
It doesn’t look like members of city council have any plans to look at the subway anytime soon. Calls to incoming Mayor-elect Aftab Pureval and budget committee chairman Greg Landsman were not returned.
The $6.7 million cost over the past three decades surprised the incoming vice mayor, Jan-michele Lemon Kearney. She told The Enquirer finding a use for the subway or a way to mitigate future costs is worth investigating.
“We need to see what’s cost-effective,” Lemon Kearney said. “I didn’t realize we were spending that much. We have not talked about it.”
‘No mice or rats’ in abandoned subway
Overall, Cincinnati’s unfinished subway system is in “fair” shape, city engineers told The Enquirer.
The tunnels are inspected once a year by a team of two engineers. When they’re down there, two other city employees guard the entrance to ensure it remains open and the workers aren’t trapped, Reising said.
The tunnels are dark and humid in the summer, he said.
When Reising goes down there, what strikes him is the lack of anything living.
“There are no mice or rats, not even bats due to the lack of food inside of the tunnels,” Reising said. “We have once found a single raccoon track near the north portal, but that was a clear exception.”
Entrances to the subway remain visible from Interstate 75 along Central Parkway near Hopple Street. They’re sealed shut.
The gray, silent stations and empty tracks will remain in darkness, possibly for another century or more as life above ground in Cincinnati marches on.