In the first decade of the twentieth century, OMI opened Cincinnati’s full-time technical high school, offered continuing education for the city’s public school teachers, and housed a symphony orchestra of more than forty student members. Even though two floors, including the Ladies’ Parlor, had been added to the Greenwood Building at 6th and Vine Streets, “Capacity Outgrown” became the OMI’s theme.

Mary Emery endowed the new home, known as the OMI Building, at the northeast corner of Walnut and Central Parkway. That property had been the site of Eagle Iron Works, Miles Greenwood’s foundry which crafted notable munitions for the Civil War.

To honor the memory of her husband Thomas J. Emery, Mrs. Emery funded “a building suitable for [the OMI’s] purposes for educational uses . . . and an assembly hall for school use and also for lectures, symphony, May Festival, et cetera.” On January 6, 1912, Leopold Stokowski conducted the inaugural concert and proclaimed that the auditorium’s “superb” acoustics rivaled those of Carnegie Hall. The auditorium housed the Cincinnati Symphony until the orchestra moved to Music Hall in 1936, and today the Emery Theatre is one of four such remaining concert halls including Carnegie Hall.

Fall classes moved into the OMI Building in 1911. The new site boasted the city’s largest construction beam, approximately 90 feet long and weighing 33 tons. Its roof garden grew produce prepared in the 5th floor kitchen to feed more than 1,400 students. The twentieth-century OMI was off to an auspicious start.

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