Tuesday, February 14, 2017

The Denison Hotel

After a long battle between parking lot developers & preservationists, the Dennison Hotel, at 716 Main Street, Cincinnati Ohio has begun to be demolished.
The owners have stated they intend to build a new building on the site that will host an unnamed Fortune 500 company. This is what they said about another building around the corner they demolished that now sits as a surface parking lot. That was 30 years ago.
Levelling the Dennison Hotel will bring us a bit closer to making an entire city block of prime real estate a parking lot.
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During the depression, building owners in CBDs frequently found themselves with vacant buildings because their tenants had all gone out of business. The building owners would demolish the buildings and, with the rise of automobile ownership, the owners utilized their vacant lots as surface parking lots. This generated enough money to cover their real estate taxes. Pretty much nobody alive today remembers that CBDs used to be solid buildings and that there were no big gaps of parking lots.
It's a poor investment & essentially blights the CBD.
Will the city have wait another 30 years for the owners of this block, legally represented by the chair of the Hamilton County Democratic party, to keep their word or just assume they are lying and the strategy is to somehow support automobile sales in an area chock full of public transit.
Valentine's Day, February 14, 2017.
What will be the status of this block 2/14/2047?

More on the history of the building at Abandoned

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