A 1990 article from the Cincinnati Post
Emerys shared riches with city
By Barry M. Horstman, Post staff reporter
When the University of Cincinnati honored John J. Emery in 1975 for a lifetime of civic and philanthropic contributions, he was likened to the legendary English architect whose dozens of 17th- and 18th-century churches and other structures still dominate London's landscape.
''We can say of him as was said of Christopher Wren, 'If you would see his monument, look about you,' '' one speaker said of Emery.
That description accurately captures the civic ubiquity not only of Emery, but of generations of his family, whose business affairs, social activism and exceedingly generous charitable donations left an indelible imprint on nearly every facet of life in Cincinnati.
A modest candle-making company founded by Emery's grandfather in 1840 spawned a corporate empire that, by the mid-20th century, had become a global industrial-chemical giant. His forebears donated millions of dollars to build, expand - and, in some cases, save - institutions ranging from the Cincinnati Zoo and Children's Hospital to the UC College of Medicine and the Cincinnati Art Museum. His aunt, Mary Emery, became known as ''Cincinnati's Lady Bountiful'' for her charitable munificence, which included funding the development of Mariemont as a model town patterned after an English village.
John Emery himself gave the city some of its most enduring landmarks - notably, the 48-story Carew Tower, which still punctuates the skyline - and put his considerable clout behind the mid-century redevelopment of downtown Cincinnati. As one of the founders and president of the Charter Committee, he helped reform city government. And over nearly a half century, Emery - for years, referred to as ''Cincinnati's biggest taxpayer'' - continued one of his aunt's most cherished projects, lifting the Art Museum from parochial mediocrity to national prominence by serving as its longtime president, chairman and perpetual benefactor.
The local history of one of Cincinnati's most significant families began with Thomas Emery, who in the early 1830s left his job in a London bank to come to America. After drifting westward from Connecticut to Kentucky over several years, he finally settled in Cincinnati in his mid-30s, where he opened a real estate and money agent office on Fourth Street.
The Panic of 1837 scuttled that business, but Emery rebounded by manufacturing candles, building a company around something no one else wanted - the abundant fat and oil byproducts of Cincinnati's meat-packing plants. Emery, who initially sold his candles door-to-door in his buggy, saw his sales soar when he improved on the tallow candles of the day by developing dripless stearic acid candles, which burned longer and held their shape better.
He plowed most of his profits into buying land, a strategy that his three sons continued after their father was killed when he fell down a hatchway at his downtown factory in 1857. By the early 1900s, the Emery estate was estimated to be the largest west of New York.
Beginning in the late 1880s, the Emerys built the first modern apartments in Cincinnati - four- and five-room ''French flats'' in downtown that offered private bathrooms and kitchens, not simply sleeping quarters, as was then the norm. Future President William Howard Taft, in his bachelor days, lived in one of the Emerys' buildings on Fourth Street, the Lombardy.When Mary Emery's husband, one of Thomas Emery's sons, died in 1906, he left his $20 million share of the family estate to her with no strings attached. Having no direct descendants, she spent the final 21 years of her life dispensing millions to innumerable causes - and still managed to leave nearly the amount she had inherited in a $20 million trust fund to oversee her commitments when she died.
In 1916, she and Mrs. Charles P. Taft each donated $125,000 to save the Cincinnati Zoo, buying it from a transit company that could no longer afford to operate it. She funded construction of Children's Hospital, orphanages, churches and recreational facilities; helped form the Summer Opera, and built the Emery Auditorium, which housed the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra from 1912-1936. The UC College of Medicine gained a new building and an endowed chair thanks to Mrs. Emery. And in her will, she left paintings valued at $3.5 million to the Art Museum.
Her crowning achievement, though, was Mariemont - the first subdivision of its kind in Cincinnati and one hailed as a ''national exemplar.''
After buying up 423 acres in the early 1920s, she commissioned a nationally recognized town planner to create a community of about 5,000 drawn from ''a wide range of families of different economic degrees (who) would prefer not to live 'under the shadow of the factory' so long as they are not too far from their work.'' Most homes were to be modestly priced, and the community was to be a self-contained suburban enclave with parks, recreational facilities and a farm; a shopping district with stores, a theater and an inn; small police and fire stations, and a town hall, school, church, hospital and library.
Although Mariemont fell short of some goals - higher construction costs raised its lowest rents to nearly 50 percent above the citywide average - it drew effusive praise from housing reformers and urban planners. Its underground electrical and telephone wiring - an aesthetic choice that eliminated unsightly poles and wires - remains innovative even by contemporary standards.
Several years before his aunt's death, John Emery moved from his native New York to Cincinnati in 1924, anticipating a relatively brief stay to oversee the family's diverse interests. Instead, Emery - educated at Harvard and Oxford universities - remained here the rest of his life, eventually becoming the family's most visible member.
While extending the Emerys' real estate holdings, he piloted Emery Industries Inc. - the outgrowth of the old candle company - through decades of steady expansion, making it one of the nation's top producers of fatty acids and chemicals used in rubber, leather, dyes, paints and a wide range of other products. At the time of his death, the firm - which two years later was merged into the National Distillers and Chemical Corp. - had annual sales of $193 million.
An unrelenting advocate of downtown redevelopment, Emery was responsible for the $30 million Carew Tower - a smaller-scale model of New York's Rockefeller Center that has topped the city's skyline since 1930. He also built the Terrace Hilton (now the Crowne Plaza) and the stately 28-story, 800-room Netherland Plaza, which at its 1931 opening was rhapsodically described in newspapers as rivaling the ''splendors of Solomon's Temple.''
Some of Emery's ideas helped shape downtown's modern face, including his early calls for a convention center, hotels and apartments precisely where they were later built. As early as the 1950s, he warned that development of the central riverfront was long overdue.
While Emery's daring risk-taking and sense of noblesse oblige were remaking his adopted city, his sister, Audrey, kept Cincinnatians enthralled by cutting a spectacular swath through international society in the '20s and '30s.
Voted one of America's 10 most beautiful women, she twice married into Russian nobility - once to Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, the cousin of Russia's last czar, Nicholas. Later, in the weeks before Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier of Monaco, papers were filled with stories hinting that Audrey - by then Princess Ilynski, a courtesy title from her marriage to the grand duke - might beat them to the altar by marrying Rainier's father. But, from her Palm Beach home, she assured Cincinnatians that she and Prince Pierre were just old friends.
When John Emery died at 78 in 1976, closed-circuit television was brought in for the overflow attendance at his Indian Hill funeral.
A newspaper story from years before provided a fitting eulogy. ''Cincinnati would not seem normal,'' it said, ''if there was not an Emery around doing something for the town.'' The lasting gifts from John, Mary and other Emerys assure that there always will be.
Publication date: 08-09-99
