Queen City

Cincinnati, Queen City of the West, focus of seven trunk railroads, sent 1,000 of its leading citizens to the capacious roof garden of its Hotel Gibson last week to dine with George Dent Crabbs and to laud him with all their might for persuading the railroads to build a $40,000,000 freight terminal and a $35,000,000 union station. Other Cincinnatians had striven towards the same ends since 1899. Mr. Crabbs, president of the Cincinnati Railroad Terminal Development Co., after only four years of wise, eloquent persuasion, succeeded.

Cincinnati, situated on the north bank of the huge Ohio River and opposite the mouth of the small Licking River that runs north through Kentucky,* was for decades the commercial gateway from the North to the South. Traders, some Jews, from Cincinnati were the first businessmen to settle in many a southern hamlet, village and town. So thriving was Cincinnati that when private developers would not build a railroad to Chattanooga, Tenn., the city itself provided funds and built the Cincinnati Southern Railway, 336 miles long, the only first class railroad owned by a U. S. municipality. Cincinnati was the Queen City of the West.

On that eminence--and it is still high-- Cincinnati has drooped, malnourished industrially. She has become draggled and dirty.* The bright ornaments that are her hospitals and colleges have only accentuated her drabness. The new union station is to be another ornament. The mere plans for it have already made her proud again, and boastful. With the new railroad tracks for freight and passenger terminals she plans to stitch together an up-to-date industrial dress, to become again in fact the Queen City of the West. Other U. S. cities have their soubriquets --descriptive, fanciful, hopeful. Some of them are:

Baltimore Monumental City Boston The Hub Charleston, S. C Palmetto City Denver City of the Plains Galveston Oleander City Los Angeles City of the Angels Memphis Bluff City New Orleans Crescent City Portland, Ore Rose City

*The city's original name was fantastically Losantiville--L for Licking; os, the Latin word for "mouth"; anti, the Greek word for "against"; and ville, the French word for "city."

*;And, since last week, frayed. A severe wind which zigzagged for 200 miles across Ohio and Kentucky tore off Cincinnati roofs, toppled houses. It also damaged Hamilton, Ohio, and Louisville, Ky.