The half-dome rotunda stretches 180 feet across—a space so vast that when it opened in 1933, it was the largest semi-dome in the Western Hemisphere. Art Deco at its most confident, designed to be Cincinnati’s grand gateway, a cathedral of transportation built at the exact moment when railroads were beginning their long decline.

By the time the last long-distance train departed in 1972, Union Terminal had become a magnificent anachronism. Too beautiful to demolish, too enormous for any obvious reuse. The building sat for years, its Winold Reiss mosaics gathering dust, its monumental spaces empty of the travelers they were designed to inspire.

Masumi photographed it in 1989, during the transformation. The following year, Union Terminal would reopen as the Cincinnati Museum Center—one of the most successful adaptive reuse projects in American preservation history. Her panorama captures the building in transition: the railroad era fully ended, the museum era not yet begun.

Her technique suits this architecture. The half-dome’s immensity defeats conventional photography—no single vantage point captures the space as you actually experience it, turning your head, looking up, moving through. Her collage assembles multiple perspectives into something closer to the truth: a building designed to overwhelm, documented at the moment it was learning to be something new.