Alfred Oscar Elzner


Alfred Oscar Elzner was a prominent American architect in Cincinnati, Ohio. Along with George M. Anderson, he formed a partnership known as the firm of Elzner & Anderson.

Biography of Elzner

Elzner studied art with Thomas Satterwhite Noble, C.T. Webber, and Frank Duveneck, and attended the Ohio Mechanics Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He worked for James W. McLaughlin in Cincinnati during the early 1880s and was superintendent for H.H. Richardson's Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce Building.
Elzner established his own practice in 1887; he was joined by George M. Anderson in 1896. His firm, Elzner & Anderson, designed the Ingalls Building in Northwest Cincinnati at the intersection of Fourth Street and Vine Street, diagonally opposite Richardson's Chamber of Commerce Building. The Ingalls Building, named for railroad baron Melville E. Ingalls, is said to have been "the first reinforced concrete high-rise office building in the world." Elzner's clientele included members of the prominent Taft, Emery, Procter, and Bullock families, as well as "Cincinnati’s German-American elite."

Projects