AP R IL 2026 • M A R IEMONT, OHI O • VOLUME L • NO. 7
Mariemont Inn Celebrates One Hundred Years BY MATT AYER A century ago, Mariemont’s village square began to take shape around the building that would become its most prominent architectural feature and enduring anchor: the Mariemont Inn. In the Spring of 1926, the structure was completed sufficiently for the Mariemont Company to move its rental and leasing offices into the main lobby. Soon afterward, a savings bank opened in the building to serve Mariemont’s earliest residents. Although the building did not officially open as a hotel until April 13, 1929, it was already serving as a center of business and community life from its earliest days. Today, as we celebrate 100 years of the Mariemont Inn building, we recognize not only a beloved hotel, but a cornerstone of Mary Emery’s and John Nolen’s extraordinary vision for Mariemont. No ordinary suburb, Mariemont holds national significance as the most intact example of John Nolen’s planning in the American Garden City movement and as Mary Emery’s response to the worsening urban living conditions of the early twentieth century. Through her extraordinary philanthropy, she imagined an affordable, beautiful, and thoughtfully designed community for working families, a “national exemplar” of town planning. Mariemont was no ordinary town laid out upon a grid, but a planned community shaped by a preeminent town planner of the early twentieth century.
John Nolen organized the Village around a central civic core, with broad streets radiating outward like spokes from a wheel, while gently curving residential roads framed neighborhoods, parks, and public spaces in harmony. Inspired by the formal geometry of Baroque village planning and contemporary English garden cities at Letchworth and Welwyn, Nolen brought together architecture, landscape, and civic design in a unified whole. That same blending of beauty, function, and community life could also be seen in other notable Nolen plans, including Venice, Florida; Kingsport, Tennessee; and Myers Park, North Carolina. In Mariemont, that carefully ordered plan converged with a major
Mariemont Inn originally served as the rental/ leasing office for the Mariemont Company. Note that the porte cochere (sheltered entrance for passengers) at the corner was added later.
force beyond the Village itself: the east-west thoroughfare that became U.S. 50 in 1926. Where regional travel met the Village’s boulevards, the town center required a building of consequence, one that could serve as both landmark and symbol. The Mariemont Inn answered that need. Continued on page 6
In This Issue Dogwood Park Ribbon Cutting.............7 50 Years in the ‘Mont, Part 2..................8 Community Receives Federal Project Funds............................................20 Spring Recycling, Arbor Day, & Annual Plant Sale....................................22 MariElders Open House Week............23 The complementing Tudor revival, slate-roofed service garage on West Street.
Pool & Pickleball Registration............26