John J. Emery

John Josiah Emery (28 January 1898 — 1976), developer of the Carew Tower (1931) in Cincinnati, Ohio, at the time the tallest building west of the Alleghenies, and the Netherlands Plaza Hotel, opened at the same time, was a major figure in the city's cultural life for more than four decades.

He was a patrician of Cincinnati, the grandson of Thomas Emery, who settled in Cincinnati in 1832, and whose lard oil and candle business John J. Emery developed into the Emery Chemical Company, now Emery Industries. Thomas Emery had assembled sizeable real estate holdings in the center of Cincinnati, which were enlarged by his son and grandson, who consolidated the family's holdings into several blocks on downtown Cincinnati. The real estate company, Thomas Emery's Sons, Inc, built the first apartment houses in Cincinnati as well as numerous other buildings downtown and in the immediately adjacent hills. After World War II, Thomas Emery's Sons built the Terrace Plaza Hotel, placing the hotel lobby on the eighth floor, reached by elevators that by-passed the commercial floors. For the hotel he commissioned three works of art that passed to the Concinnati Art Museum when he sold the Terrace Plaza: a mural by Joan Miro and a cartoon mural by Saul Steinberg and a giant mobile by Alexander Calder.

Born in New York, the son of John J. and Lela Emery, he was raised on the East Coast, and prepared at Groton for Harvard, where his education was interrupted by the First World War, after which he received his BA degree, cum laude, in 1920. He spent one year at Harvard Law School and then went to Trinity College, Oxford, where received a diploma in Economics in 1922.

He returned to Cincinnati on a visit in 1924 and stayed to manage the faltering family business. In 1926 he married Irene Langhorne Gibson, daughter of the celebrated illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, who had been married to George B. Post III, grandson of the architect George B. Post. They had children, all born in Cincinnati: Ethan Emery of San Miguel, Mexico, Irene Emery Goodale of Atlanta, Lela (Mrs. John Steele) and Melissa (Mrs. Addison Lanier of Cincinnati). After her death in 1973 he married Mrs. Adele H. Olyphant, on December 3, 1975.

He was a founder of the Cincinnati Country Day School, and the leading trustee and a benefactor of the Cincinnati Art Museum. He served as vice-president of the Boy Scouts in the Cincinnati area, and was an original member of the Cincinnati Public Recreation Commission.

In 1930, he began constructing his 1200-acre estate, Peterloon in Indian Hill, a rural outer suburb that shelters the rich of Cincinnati, Ohio, built around the Camargo Club and the Camargo Hunt; since his death Peterloon was been divided into housing lots, leaving the neo-Georgian brick house on 72 acres as an event destination. The house was designed by Delano and Aldrich of New York, who built a five-bedroom stucco cottage to hold the family while the house was being built.

References

• University of Cincinnati): John Josiah Emery
• The Peterloon Foundation