Commitment, cooperation get $30M in growth for downtown

Two critical properties of down- town Youngstown’s historic and grand past that for years have been wasting away on life support recently received shots in the arm via $30 million in new investment for the central city’s increasingly successful rebirth.

Thanks once again to faith in the downtown’s potential and to the value of public-private partnerships, the long-vacant 98-year-old Wells Building on West Federal Street and the mostly vacant 107-year-old Stambaugh Building on Central Square will be spared their date with death and destruction.

What’s more, the $5 million project to renovate and restore the Wells Building into professional offices and apartments and the $25 million project to rehabilitate the 12-story Stambaugh Building into a DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel no doubt will drive additional investment and energy to the downtown.

THE WELLS BUILDING

Renovation work already has begun to transform the Wells Building into the corporate headquarters of Strollo Architects and a 12-unit apartment complex on its upper three floors. Delays in securing private financing for the project had threatened nearly $2 million in state and federal tax credits. That snag, in turn, threatened the project itself. Strollo, however, last month announced success in securing private financing from Huntington Bank to make the project a go.

As a result, the 1917 terra cotta structure will be preserved to its early 20th-century grandeur and revived to meet vital 21st-century needs. Historically, Wells is rich. Built in 1917, the structure is an exemplary model of the architectural use of white terra cotta (glazed, fired clay). Over the years, the building prospered as retail businesses, most memorably as a W.T. Grant variety store.

The specific aims of the project also fulfill two ongoing priorities of downtown’s comeback that transcend architecture and history. The commitment by Strollo to invest large sums of its own capital to create a showplace for its reputable architectural firm represents a vote of confidence in the multi-use plan for downtown that will be needed for it to fully thrive. Strollo’s actions should help to spur other professionals — architects, attorneys, physicians — back to the core of the city.

DOUBLETREE HOTEL

The same public and private commitments and investments that have made the Wells project a go also loom large with the DoubleTree Hotel project in the stately Stambaugh Building. This June, for example, the Ohio Development Services Agency awarded $5 million in Historic Preservation Tax Credits to support the commitment of the private NYO Property Group that owns the building and Marshall Hotels and Resorts, the hotel’s management team.

Like Wells, the building also oozes in rich history. It was headquarters for decades to Youngstown’s longtime corporate dynamo, the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. steelmaking colossus. Once construction begins in the spring and is completed in 2016, the resurrected structure will regain it former footing as a colossal flagship of Central Square.

It also will fill a critical void downtown and citywide. Downtown Youngstown has been without a hotel since the closing of the Voyager Motor Inn on Market Street in 1974. It’s been 16 years since the city’s last full-service hotel, The Wick-Pollock Inn in the university corridor, closed its doors for good.

Taken together, the Wells Building renovation and the Stambaugh Building transformation stand as critical pieces of downtown Youngstown’s redevelopment puzzle. Thanks to the responsible and cooperative actions of all parties involved in its planning, a symphony of hammers pounding, chainsaws buzzing and engines roaring soon will upstage the dreaded crash and boom of wrecking balls.