More Great Cincinnati Families at Home looks at people behind our architectural heritage

"More Great Cincinnati Families at Home", part two in an exhibit on the families behind some of our city's greatest architectural treasures, is now open at the Betts House, 416 Clark Street in the West End

The exhibit features the residences of the Emery, Longworth-Anderson, Maxwell-Schmidlapp-Graydon, and Werk-Oskamp families.

Co-curator for the exhibit is Walter E. Langsam, architectural historian, teacher at the University of Cincinnati, and author of Great Houses of the Queen City, from which he drew much of the exhibit's information.

"Because there I also used different generations of families to provide some continuity," he says.  "I used different ethnic backgrounds and different neighborhoods and different styles.  But, at the same time, the more I could have different houses with different generations of the same family, the more meaningful it seemed."

While some of the residences were designed by such well-known architects as Burnham & Root, Grosvenor Atterbury, Delano & Aldrich, Samuel Hannaford, and Elzner & Anderson, some of the architects have remained obscure.

"There are some other local architects who are really very important and have not been recognized," Langsam says.  "Most of the names are not known at all, and yet most of them have more than local significance."

But Langsam says that the houses tell more about the families themselves than about their architects.

"A lot of it's about their own self-images," he says.  "The Werks saw themselves as German, so their German castle's over there.  But yet the third one on the right there [of the Longworth-Anderson family], this was two of the German-American families, but it's one of the earliest American Colonial Revival houses in the city.  Obviously they were making a somewhat different statement."

A companion lecture series, hosted by Langsam, begins May 2 at the Cincinnati Fire Museum.

"These are the people who were the clients for most of the important buildings of the city for 200 years," he says.

The Betts House exhibit will be on view through September 30.

Writer: Kevin LeMaster
Sources: Walter E. Langsam, co-curator, "Great Cincinnati Families at Home"; Juile Carpenter, executive director, Betts House