Cincinnati: Sixth Street Market

Posted December 9, 2024Dec 9

Featured buildings:

Jabez Elliot Flower Market, 6th St. between Plum and Elm, Hannaford &Sons, 1890 (razed in 1950)

Meat Market House, 6th St. between Central (Western Row) and Plum, Hannaford & Sons, 1896 (razed in 1960)

There are very few photographs of the Meat Market, and even fewer of the Flower Market, available online. This recreation is based on those scant resources. Initially, I used only these images and the extant dimensions of the street grid to figure out the proportions and dimensions of the market houses. This has surely resulted in errors, but I believe I’ve matched the feel of those documents, at least.

I’ve not found any images of the inside of the Meat Market’s end-pieces, which had two floors and a basement according to a Cincinnati Almanac entry marking its construction. I also have no idea what the ceiling of the center pavilion looks like. At the moment, those interior areas are just dark hallways and gypsum planes.

I have enough reference to make a modest attempt at recreating the interior of the Flower Market, but I’ve left that out for now. It’s ostensibly a transparent building, and I’m doing it a disservice by wrapping it in opaque windows.

All surrounding buildings are approximately correct in width and height, according to the 1935 Sanborn map. The facades of the buildings themselves, except in 1 or two cases, are all invented.

The setting, accordingly, is 1935, though that is not at all reflected in the condition of the Meat Market as I’ve recreated it. By this time, the ornamentation on the roof had been altered pretty significantly and the spire atop the middle pavilion had been removed entirely. As for the interior, a single photograph from the 1950s shows a much changed interior than the one I constructed, which is based on a much earlier photo.

I built this entirely in the Source 2 game engine. The engine’s native 3d tools are powerful and super-quick, but it comes up far short in handling high detail compared to a standalone 3d software, which I opted to not incorporate into the workflow for this iteration. As such, some of the more detailed geometry (reliefs and sculptures, for example) has been simplified or altogether ignored.

My next move is to try to locate the Hannafords’ drawings for these buildings and do a more precise and detailed second iteration in Blender/Unreal 5.

No bygone Cincinnati building haunts me more than the Meat Market. I think it’s one of the most culturally and symbolically significant demolitions in the history of the city, and not many people today know it, or the rest of the market, were ever there.