One of the sites in Lost Dayton, Ohio, the Dayton Motor Car Company Historic District, has been in the news a couple of times recently, for very different reasons.
The good news is that a property in the area, 15 McDonough St (right), was recently awarded $1.8 million in state historic tax credits. This will allow the building to be returned to productive use, as it’s currently vacant save for some of the ground floor being used for storage. In some reports this structure has been called the “Dayton Motor Car Building,” although it was far from the only one they used (as seen below). And the company got its start making something much different from automobiles: farm implements. Originally the Stoddard Manufacturing Company, the firm built a sprawling complex of buildings centered near Third and Bainbridge and later transitioned to bicycles and then automobiles, producing many models of the iconic Stoddard-Dayton. 15 McDonough was constructed around 1908 and was used as a machine shop, tool room, and assembly room for cars. It also had office spaces on the 2nd floor.
Although it’s certainly a big win to see the renovation of this underutilized building, an original goal for the rehab was to “attract high technology, creative design, and knowledge-based companies” and get them to move to the district. Instead, Gosiger Industries has reportedly signed on to lease all of the building space, and they are already headquartered a couple of buildings over at 108 McDonough St. The new space will undoubtedly be a boon to the longtime Dayton company and give them more room to grow, and they do plan to sublease some of the space in the beginning. But it still feels like a possible missed opportunity to bring in new and emerging tech companies that would be interested in this type of bright, open office space. It’s a continuing challenge when new downtown-area developments result in a reshuffling of businesses already in the target area instead of new ones moving to Dayton’s core (for example, PNC leaving Courthouse Square to become the anchor tenant of Water Street). Fortunately this building isn’t the last that Weyland Ventures intends to develop in the district, so hopefully there will be additional commercial space coming available soon. (Update: as of July 2019, Gosiger intends to occupy just 2 floors of 15 McDonough, with the rest of the floors to be leased out to other companies.)
Unfortunately, the area was back in the news again a couple of weeks later when reports broke of a major fire raging near downtown Dayton, which later turned out to be arson. The building that burned was 101 Bainbridge St., a warehouse whose oldest parts dated back to 1880-1900. It was described in the area’s historic district nomination form: “It has a stone water table, and a segmental arched industrial doorway to the east. Five windows, now shuttered, and a ground level doorway are placed irregularly under a slightly sloping roof with overhang. The turn of the century portion is frame which is iron clad with a pressed brick pattern. It has a pair of sheltered entrances with poured concrete steps on the Bainbridge side, but a loading dock stretches along the Bacon St facade where the canal and street level railroad tracks and depot were once located.” After the fire, an emergency demolition took out nearly all of the structure, and the rest will surely soon follow. This wasn’t the first time fire invaded the Motor Car Company district, as way back in 1873, the earliest Stoddard wood frame buildings burned to the ground. Their replacements were built with brick.
In more recent years, the attached five-story portion of 101 Bainbridge (pictured below) caught fire in May 2015 but at that point Weyland Ventures (then known as City Properties Group) said that it “is a solid structure and doing real damage would be difficult” so at that point it was still in their development plans. We’ll have to wait and see if this latest fire has changed those plans.
Despite the loss, the area, which has also been dubbed Oregon East, is on the upswing overall, with the biggest adaptive reuse project being the old Weustoff and Getz building that is now the Wheelhouse apartments and the popular Troll Pub Under the Bridge Restaurant. Hopefully 15 McDonough will get underway soon and the developers will start to look at their next project.
Learn more about Stoddard and the Dayton Motor Car Company (including some additional pictures) in my book Lost Dayton, Ohio.
101 Bainbridge St. After
Before
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