The old Beckett Mill building sits on 4 acres between Heaton and Dayton streets in Hamilton, now a charred and aging husk of brick and iron. It shuttered in January 2012.
Three months later, the Champion Paper Mill, a colossus 10 times larger than Beckett Mill across the Great Miami River, also closed, casting an especially dark shadow upon a city that earned its keep for 150 years by making things. The closures capped two decades of bad news for Hamilton, beginning with a spate of company sales, bankruptcies and departures in the late 1990s that revealed the city’s post-industrial parachute to be full of holes.
“In a very compressed timeframe, some of the largest and most iconic employers in Hamilton left,” Hamilton City Manager Joshua Smith said. “That’s 5,000 to 8,000 jobs… what do you do?”
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Thirteen years later, Hamilton is the dream scenario of every midsized Rust Belt town. Its dismal 20th-century fortunes have given way to widespread redevelopment, renewed population growth and every telltale of modern prosperity – coffee shops, breweries, coworking spots, public spaces, dog parks, murals, live music, residential infill, green energy, advanced manufacturing and the rescue of its gigantic former industrial sites from oblivion.
The city has around $1 billion in developments waiting in the wings, according to Smith, whom many credit for Hamilton’s comeback. Now he’s ready to make a big move he expects will take it to a whole new level.
City’s long and winding road
Smith recapped a whirlwind 72 hours in the city during a November interview. Friday night’s Music on Main was “so packed you couldn’t even get in some buildings,” he said. On Saturday, he attended the ribbon cutting at Third Eye Brewing’s new location in an old Pepsi bottling facility on South Erie Boulevard. And Saturday night, a tree lighting ceremony downtown.
“There had to be at least 3,000 people at that event,” he said. “When I came here, we were lucky to have four people at a restaurant.”
Smith assumed his role in September 2010. His early days were eye-opening. The city was barely treading water at the time, and resignation hung in the air, the impalpable malaise of not much happening and little to look forward to.
Residents told him they felt like they had to leave the city for a night out, to somewhere like Fairfield or West Chester Township that was cleaner and safer because Hamilton “looked so bad.” He recalled seeing a bumper sticker in his first week that read, “Hamilton! The city that offers you nothing.” He had never seen anything like it.
But it wasn’t always that way.
Hamilton’s 19th-century manufacturing boom traces back to a series of canals and reservoirs, completed in 1845, that drew water from the Great Miami by an upriver dam. Niles Tool Works located in Hamilton the same year the canal system began producing hydraulic power. Beckett Paper followed in 1848, Mosler Safe & Lock Co. in 1891, Herring-Hall-Marvin Safe Co. in 1896 and Champion Coated Paper Co. in 1893.
“We were an industrial juggernaut,” Smith said.
But Hamilton missed out on the bonanza of highways and suburbanization that followed World War II. The city’s population declined for four consecutive decades to end the 20th century as residents flocked to nearby townships and businesses shuttered. By Smith’s tenure, he said, “downtown was boarded up.”
One of the first actions his office took to stop the bleeding was removal of the colored newspaper vending boxes that littered downtown.
“They were empty, and nothing was going in them,” Smith said. “They were just all over the place, and it made the city look so haphazard and cluttered.”
Hamilton, beautified by degrees for the effort, plodded on. Occasionally, a bright spot surfaced. True West Coffee, opened on Main Street by Chris Cannon and his wife, Vanessa, in 2011, was one of them.
“Most businesses around us were shutting down or closing,” Cannon said. “We just believed that change was coming.”
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Change did come, but not all at once – and not easily. Banks emerging from the Great Recession of 2008-12 were wary of lending to developments in Hamilton, which they saw as riskier than infill projects in surrounding townships. Nor did Smith have many gap-financing tools at his disposal.
The issue came to a head in December 2010, just three months into Smith’s tenure. An out-of-town developer with plans to renovate the Mercantile buildings in the heart of downtown Hamilton into 29 apartments and commercial spaces was about to pull out, being unable to secure a $4 million bank loan. Smith asked the Hamilton Community Foundation to float the loan given the developer’s promise to pay it back afterward using historic tax credits.
“We gave a pretty impassioned reason why, if Hamilton was ever going to succeed, we needed some positive momentum. We needed something,” Smith said.
In the end, the board narrowly approved the loan, and the project went forward, today resulting in one of the most vibrant areas of the city.
Ultimately Smith traced the end of Hamilton’s downward spiral to 2015, midway through the riverfront redevelopment that would produce Marcum Park. The Marcum Apartments, with 102 units, opened in 2019 beside the park as the first infill residential development in Hamilton in decades.
Jim Goodman, co-founder and CEO of Municipal Brew Works, watched Marcum Park and the apartments take shape from his downtown brewery, which he opened in 2016. The line to get a beer on the brewery’s first day was so long it forced the street outside to shut down.
“Hamiltonians know what it’s like to watch your city turn into a ghost town. From the 1990s to 2015, we saw most businesses leave,” Goodman said. “Our community understands it’s ‘buy local or bye local.’”
New businesses kept coming: Tano Bistro in June 2019, Pinball Garage in June 2020, Casual Pint and Billy Yanks in August 2021 and many other restaurants and retailers. More than 100 small businesses have opened in Hamilton in the last decade alone. A vast majority, according to Goodman, are locally owned and operated.
“They’re vested and very active in this community,” he said.
The $2 million renovation of the Davis Building at 302 Main St. began in 2018, bringing 12 apartments, an ice cream parlor, a florist, a stationery store and a farmers collective cafe and market across from True West.
“Other people started to see what we saw, and small businesses started coming in and doing the same thing, being that unique space that other cities don’t have,” Chris Cannon said.
Rossville Flats, a 76-unit infill project, opened next to the Davis Building at 316 Main St. in July 2023.
“Even just five years ago, you would never have thought you could build a mixed-use development right there on Main Street,” Smith said.
Four waking giants
Hamilton’s comeback wouldn’t be what it is without Spooky Nook, which opened in the Champion Mill in May 2022. The massive sports complex features a fitness area; climbing/adventure center; hardwood, turf and sport courts for volleyball, field hockey, basketball; and more.
Local retailers and restaurants including Municipal Brew Works have located inside the facility, and King Corona restaurant will open in fall 2024 at the North B Street entrance. A boutique hotel is in the works.
Forty weekends every year the location brings between 2,000 and 35,000 people through its doors, according to Smith. Goodman has already seen increased foot traffic downtown during big tournament weekends.
“It’s lightning in a bottle,” Smith said. “And this is just the tip of the iceberg. There will be a lot more investment coming in the next 12 months.”
Across the river, Columbus-based Crawford Hoying is redeveloping the 17-acre Niles Tool Works plant following a land swap with the city that will allow Cohen Recycling, its current occupant, to relocate a half-mile north. The $150 million development will include apartments, townhomes, a hotel and lifestyle amenities.
“There’s a lot of interest in trying to preserve as much as we can and transition it to alternative uses,” said Matt Starr, executive vice president of commercial real estate and leasing at Crawford Hoying.
Demolition is expected to begin in the first quarter of 2024. A site plan is not yet finalized. The city is working with Crawford Hoying to apply for Ohio’s Transformational Mixed Use Development program and Brownfields Remediation program.
At Beckett Mill, Cleveland-based developer Bobby George is working with the city on a proposal and will apply for historic tax credits in spring 2024. The $85 million project could bring 234 apartments and possibly future townhomes.
A fourth large adaptive reuse project is also in the early stages, Smith said. Cincinnati-based Bloomfield/Schon could invest $25 million redeveloping the historic Shuler & Benninghofen Woolen Mill on U.S. Route 127 in the Lindenwald neighborhood a mile south of downtown Hamilton. The project could yield 100 apartments and retail spaces.
Elsewhere in Hamilton, a long-awaited Agave & Rye (“the missing piece in our Main Street puzzle,” according to Smith) will open in the former Ritzi Auto Body site in summer 2024. Months later, Cohatch will open a shared workspace and restaurant in downtown Hamilton’s historic Second National Bank Building.
Corrie Schaffeld | CBC
Three more new hotels will come to Hamilton in the next few years. Lighthouse Hospitality Group and Vision Realty Group are planning the $16 million redevelopment of the historic Anthony Wayne Building into Well House Hotel under the Tapestry Collection, a boutique brand by Hilton. It will feature 54 rooms with an Irish pub on the ground floor.
Across High Street, Spectrum Investment Group and Acumen Development are teaming up on the $48 million conversion of the Mueller Building into a 159-room hotel with a ground-floor speakeasy.
Four blocks east, a 160-room dual brand Hampton Inn & Suites and Home2 Suites by Hilton hotel will rise six stories on a plot of land at the northeast corner of High Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard that has sat vacant for 60 years. The hotel will feature a rooftop patio, and the development will include a restaurant pad.
“We’re hoping that when Well House Hotel opens in August 2024, we see construction commencing on (the other two hotel projects),” Smith said.
Spooky Nook owner Sam Beiler said the new hotels are a good “short-to-medium term fix” for the complex’s increasing visitor counts and that more hotel projects could take shape in Butler County in the coming years.
Turbocharging growth
Hamilton Mayor Pat Moeller described Smith in the 2023 State of the City address as the architect of Hamilton’s success. Starr said much the same.
“They just have this can-do attitude that’s very important with us,” he said. “Joshua (Smith) deserves a lot of the credit, because he has instilled that in his staff.”
Cannon singled out Smith for changing the view of the city.
“Everyone thought after the paper mills left that we had to find other manufacturers to fill those buildings, and, well, that wasn’t going to happen,” Cannon said. “He was a catalyst about, let’s look at who else we are. We’re a beautiful city.”
Now Smith is preparing to leave his role to head a not-yet formed Hamilton port authority and development finance agency. The goal of the new entity would be to increase development by offering an array of financial tools that are either currently unavailable or are pushed to the back end of projects, causing delays.
Smith and city officials hatched the idea pre-pandemic, with concepts borrowed from the Northern Kentucky Catalytic Fund, the Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority and Cincinnati Center City Development Corp. (3CDC), to supercharge Hamilton’s development through certain statutory powers and improved access to U.S. Treasury Department revolving loan grants and New Market Tax Credits. With stable funding sources, the new entity could offer a bond fund to deploy capital as loans to developers who need it.
In November, Smith met with the board of the Butler County Port Authority to suggest a joint bond fund that could be used in Hamilton and Butler County. The port authority currently does not operate a bond fund.
“Our view has been that was stepping into the area of private banking institutions,” Butler County interim Director of Development David Fehr said. “(Smith) felt, being in an urban area, he faces different challenges from the rest of the county. He felt like that was a tool they wanted to utilize.”
David Kalonick
Smith said private banks favor the bonding tools because it keeps their investments lower on projects they view as riskier.
The creation of a port authority is also an implicit acknowledgement, he said, that work-from-home will permanently impact the city’s general fund revenue.
“The city has been doing well in recent years, but we’re not taking it for granted,” Smith said. “We need to aggressively recruit housing, hospitality and other amenities to provide a ‘central social district’ that will insulate us if the work-from-home trend continues.”
Hamilton City Council could vote to create the port authority in the coming months. Smith is eager to start.
“Hamilton has a long way to go,” he said. “We dug ourselves into a pretty deep hole over the last 40 years. We’ve made some really good progress, but there’s no doubt we have decades of work in front of us.”
