D
epending on the angle you look at it from, the 124-year-old Dennison Hotel is a historic gem needing to be rescued, the last sliver of bygone affordability in an ever-pricier downtown or a crumbling holdover from a less-successful era standing in the way of new development.
The owners of the building subscribe to that last view and want to tear the Dennison down. Others, however, have aligned to try and save it. Those efforts mirror larger contentions around affordability, history and progress as downtown Cincinnati continues to change.
“The Dennison Hotel, under previous ownership, had been allowed to decay, deteriorate and become unsafe over a period of years,” attorney Fran Barrett, who represents building owners Columbia REI, LLC, argued in a filing with the city’s Historic Conservation Board earlier this month. Columbia argues it’s too expensive to restore the building and that it should come down to make way for new buildings.
Advocates for preserving the building have gained some high-profile supporters, however, including Cincinnati City Councilman Chris Seelbach, who touts Cincinnati’s national reputation for historic architecture.“When we talk about getting rid of something that makes us who we are — taking down a building that defines us as a city — we start to lose what makes us different than West Chester or Blue Ash or any other suburb around the country,” Seelbach said at an April 16 press conference in front of the building. “If Cincinnati gets rid of its historic buildings, it becomes less and less Cincinnati.”
The multi-faceted battle over the building at 716 Main St. will continue a little longer after the Cincinnati Historic Conservation Board April 18 tabled a vote on an application to tear down the Dennison brought by Columbia, which is owned by influential car dealership magnates the Joseph family. The vote was rescheduled for 1 p.m. May 26.
Columbia’s attorneys say the group needs time to respond to a report issued by Cincinnati Urban Conservator Beth Johnson, who was highly skeptical of their demolition application. That report came days before the conservation board’s originally scheduled April 18 vote to confirm or deny Columbia’s demolition application.
“The applicant has not provided credible evidence that they cannot reuse the building, nor can reasonable economic return be gained from the use of all or part of the building proposed for demolition,” Johnson wrote in that report, released April 14. That report also noted that the Josephs haven’t attempted to sell the property.
Attorney Sean Suder, who is representing the Cincinnati Preservation Association and the Cincinnati Preservation Collective in the opposition to the demolition, said those groups welcome the extra time and hope it will lead to a change of heart for Columbia and a deal to save the building. But that would be a big change of heart for Columbia.
The group cites a study completed by Beck Consulting that found that renovation of the Dennison into a 60-room hotel would cost $10.5 million, turning it into a 52-unit apartment building would cost $7.9 million, conversion to 35 condos would cost $8.7 million and changing it to an office building would run about $5 million.
Those costs aren’t feasible at the modest scale the redevelopment would take, Barrett has said. The group says it would like to assemble the parcels it owns, including the Dennison, and redevelop them as the headquarters for an as-yet-unidentified Fortune 500 company.
But historic preservationists here see the family’s attempts to tear down the building, designed by noted local architect Samuel Hannaford’s firm, as another loss in a decades-long string of demolitions downtown and elsewhere.
In the late 1980s, the Joseph family demolished multiple buildings around the Dennison, and their absence is still visible as a flat spot in the city grid — parking lots wrapping around the block. Back then, the family also said it intended to build a corporate campus.
Housing advocates and historic preservationists alike have blasted the application by Columbia as a case of a developer seeking special favors from a historic conservation board full of newly appointed members, some of whom are donors to Mayor John Cranley.
City administration has appointed five people to the board’s seven spots since Cranley’s election, and four of those five donated to his 2013 mayoral campaign. One, noted developer Shree Kulkarni, donated more than $7,500 to Cranley’s campaign. Kulkarni was also responsible for the demolition of a historic building downtown on Fifth Street before his term on the board. Another, Herbert Weiss, also donated more than $1,500 to Cranley’s election campaign.
Housing advocates also point to the never-realized plans in 2011 to convert the Dennison into 63 units of permanent supportive housing and the building’s past life as 114 units of single-room occupancy housing. The Dennison was the last of more than 20 such buildings downtown.
When the Dennison’s last tenant left in 2011 — in handcuffs during an eviction, according to Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless Executive Director Josh Spring — so too went the last vestiges of a diverse downtown that was affordable to low-income people, Spring says.
The median household income in the Central Business District is more than $80,000 a year, according to 2010 Census data. That’s well above the city’s median of $33,681. The area is about 62 percent white and 32 percent black, while the city as a whole is about 50 percent white and 46 percent black.
In 2000, downtown was somewhat more diverse — about 55 percent white and 40 percent black, with a larger economic mix as well.
“Really, until just five years ago, the Dennison Hotel had people living in it,” Spring says. “A lot of times, when buildings are vacated, our memory quickly vacates with it.”
There are questions about the fate of the 2011 efforts to establish permanent supportive housing at the Dennison. That $10 million proposal, which was to be developed by the Model Group and managed by the Talbert House, drew a $3.3 million pledge from the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority as well as other funding sources.
That fell through, however, and the building was transferred to the Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation soon after, in July 2013, for $1.3 million. The next month, 3CDC sold the building to Columbia for $744,000.Opponents of the Dennison's demolition have asked questions about that sale. But those involved in the proposed supportive housing project say 3CDC bought the building with its partners in 2010 and didn't take a loss on it.
"The Dennison Hotel project did not come to fruition, but 3CDC was able to recoup all its costs in the building," Steve Leper of 3CDC, Steve Smith of Model Group and Neil Tilow of The Talbert House wrote in an April 20 op-ed in The Cincinnati Enquirer. "Not only was it not sold at a loss, as previously speculated, but the project design work and other project-related costs were covered in the sale as well."
The op-ed doesn't further elaborate on the finances behind the deal or the structure of the ownership arrangement. News reports at the time said that Model bought the building with a $700,000 loan from 3CDC, but do not indicate whether 3CDC was a part of Ironworks Apartments LLC, the corporation under which Model seems to have purchased the property. 3CDC's Form 990 shows it gave $500,000 to The Talbert House the same year the Dennison project was abandoned, though it is unclear if that money was involved in the Dennison deal or not.
The groups' op-ed touts other recent affordable housing projects between The Model Group, The Talbert House and 3CDC, specifically Talbert House's Parkway Apartments for veterans — which broke ground last year and opened this March — and the upcoming Central Parkway YMCA renovation for senior affordable housing, set to open this summer.
The op-ed doesn't clarify who put up opposition to the development, which the piece says squashed the project in 2013.
Columbia, however, has admitted that it bought the building that year at least in part to block affordable housing in the Dennison.
“Since it was believed this type of use would have a damaging effect on their investment in particular and on the neighborhood in general, the family concluded it was necessary to acquire this property,” Barrett wrote in documents filed with the conservation board earlier this month.
In 1985, Cincinnati City Council stipulated that affordable housing levels should drop no lower than 1,300 units. Today, according to housing advocates, there are less than 300. Just a few years ago, there were more — some 230 at the Metropole and another 84 at the Anna Louise Inn. Today, the Metropole is the luxury 21c Museum Hotel, and the Anna Louise Inn is slated for a similar redevelopment. ©
