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The Hamilton JournalNews is committed to coverage of the local community — from schools and our local history to business and news. Each Sunday, reporter Richard Jones tells the story of the people, history, places and events that make Hamilton unique. Have an idea for Richard? Email him at Richard.Jones@coxinc.com.
There’s a lot of dust and a continuous flurry of construction activity interspersed with the flow of students, but developers are looking forward to a December deadline that will finish Phase II of the renovation of the Historic JournalNews Building into an arts and education center.
Where a printing press once roared in the production of a daily newspaper, the Miami Valley Ballet Theatre now teaches 120 students in two state-of-the-art studios. On the second floor, where compositors once designed the pages of the newspaper, music students from the Butler Tech Arts Academy are learning how to perform in a rock band while their colleagues work on more mundane academic material waiting their turn at the guitars and drums.
When Phase II is completed, the remaining Butler Tech students will relocate from their current home at the Fitton Center for Creative Arts as the first floor and the rest of the second floor will become classrooms, student commons areas and administrative offices. The third floor will be home to the the Hamilton City School District’s Adult Basic Literacy Education (ABLE) program.
“Having arts-oriented tenants really helped us be able to utilize what was already here,” said architect Mike Dingledein, who recently formed a new firm to focus on revitalization efforts such as this. “To have turned this into office space or residential space, we probably would have lost the ability to keep some of the distinctive features.”
Among those are sections of walnut herringbone flooring that had been covered by carpeting and some wooden bookshelves that had been in the original publisher’s office on the second floor.
The most ambitious structural challenge was the pending installation of a steel beam in the warehouse area so that a pillar can be taken out to clear way for a 120-seat black box theater, which will have its own entrance on Third Street.
The building is currently under review by state inspectors to determine if the project qualifies for Ohio Historic Tax Preservation Credits, a program that began in 2007 to help maintain the cultural heritage of Ohio’s downtown areas while boosting revitalization efforts.
The credit would significantly reduce the cost of the renovation, although Parsons said that his firm is committed even without them. If it meets the standards, the tax credits could allow for 25 percent reduction from the state and another 20 percent from the federal government.
“It would result in bringing the cost down from $2 million to $1.3 million to fill in the gaps between what the banks will approve and what the developers put into it,” Dingledein said.
“You have to preserve and enhance the historic features of the building and show that you can be an economic benefit to the community,” Parsons said.
“The requirements are very detailed,” Jursik said, “so it’s important to have experience in this so that everyone knows what those requirements are.”
“We have tons of photographic evidence of what the building was,” Dingledein said, in addition to the drawings created by SHP Leading Design and its progenitors when the previous renovations and additions were done. “There’s a story to tell and we can justify our direction by all the evidence we have.”
The original part of the building dates back to 1886. In 1914, it went through its first renovation and had additions for a printing press in 1955 and more warehouse space in 1969. Cox Media Group closed the building in August 2011, in a consolidation effort to move operations to its Liberty Twp. facility.
Historic Developers have also purchased the Robinson-Schwenn Building, also known as the Opera House, that abuts the rear of the JournalNews Building. It faces High Street and is home to Miami Hamilton Downtown and Koffenya Coffee House. Dingledein said they’re hoping that the floors will line up closely enough that they can tear out some walls and tie the building together.
Joe Parsons, one of the five partners in Historic Developers, the Canton, Ohio-based company that is behind the renovation, and the investment firm behind the renovation of the Historic Mercantile Lofts on High Street, said that this is their biggest and most exciting project to date.
“We like to take historic buildings and re-purpose them,” Parsons said. “We’ve been doing this for five years, but we’ve never seen an old building we didn’t like.
“Of the projects we’ve done, this one has been the most fun because it’s been the most different,” said partner Dave Jursik. “Normally, the buildings we get are falling down.”
This one, however, has good bones, as the saying goes.
“The structure is unbelievable, but everything else had to be gutted,” Dingledein said. “The systems were old enough that we had to start over, beginning with new wiring.”
There had been a passing thought of saving some of the duct work, he said, but once they started getting into it, they found so much old ink that had been sucked into the system that it was beyond being cleaned up.
Getting all the tenants in line was a simple convergence. Dingledein had been helping both Butler Tech and the Miami Valley Dance Theatre find new homes as they had out-grown the space they had.
“We came out and looked at the building when there were still empty desks,” said Erin Schilling, principal of the Butler Tech School of the Arts, formerly known as the Options Academy for the Arts. Last year, her 130 students were spread out between the Fitton Center for Creative Arts and a rented building at the corner of Second and Court streets.
“For us, because we’re not a typical school, we needed a building that wasn’t structured like a school,” Schilling said. “It has a lot of open space, something we really need, and we almost got to build our ideal school instead of shoving ourselves into existing spaces.
“Having our own performance space is a real bonus,” she said. “We can do more impromptu performances instead of scheduling a year in advance.”
Michelle Davis, executive director of the Miami Valley Ballet Theatre tells a similar story of Dingledein, whose daughters are students in the company, coming to their rescue.
“The company been working out of the Tanze Studio for Performing Arts (in Fairfield) for 10 years,” she said. “Since I came on board four years ago, we grew from 40 kids to 120. We loved it at Tanze, but there wasn’t any room for us to grow.”
The MVBT has been working out of the building for a couple of months, and although there was some trepidation from parents about dropping their children off in downtown Hamilton, the proximity of a coffee shop and restaurants has alleviated all of that, and they quickly became comfortable with running errands while their kids are in dance class.
In fact, Barnes said that although she lost one family simply because of the additional distance from their Cincinnati home, she has picked up students because people can see them working through the large windows facing Court Street.
“We love being in the downtown area,” Barnes said, “and it’s exciting to be a part of the revitalization effort.”
If the building meets the requirements, it will be the third building in Hamilton to have received the tax credits. The Mercantile Lofts and the ArtSpace project next door to it have already received the credits.
The project has come together so quickly, Dingledein said, that it leaped ahead of the ArtSpace project, which would provide living and work space for 42 artists as the first anchor in Hamilton’s Arts District, but ArtSpace isn’t far behind.
“It will be under construction by June,” he said. “It’s in the chute now. It’s going to happen, and with these two projects, the Fitton Center for Creative Arts and the Greater Hamilton Civic Theatre headquarters (in the nearby Palace Theatre), we are well on the way to having a very active arts scene here.”
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