“This is a really big deal,” said Dayton City Manager Shelley Dickstein. “Without Turner’s and Brown’s support, this wouldn’t have happened, clearly.”
Credit: Tom Gilliam
Credit: Tom Gilliam
A $90 million overhaul of the southern portion of the Dayton Arcade complex is very far along, and officials say the additional funding will help build out and fill up some of the remaining space.
“We certainly have a long way to go, and we certainly have a lot to do, but we certainly have made a lot of progress, keeping in mind that we just celebrated our one-year anniversary,” said Vince Lewis, president of the Hub at the Arcade Powered by PNC Bank and associate vice president of entrepreneurial initiatives at the University of Dayton.
The Senate on Thursday approved a government spending package that now heads to President Joe Biden’s desk for his signature.
The bill includes thousands of earmarks, requesting billions of dollars, including more than $35 million for projects in the Dayton region.
Credit: JIM NOELKER
Credit: JIM NOELKER
Earmarks — also called community project funding or Congressionally directed spending — were halted more than a decade ago by former House speaker John Boehner and other lawmakers.
Millions of dollars included in the new spending package will help complete the south arcade, which already has overperformed at this still-early stage, said City Manager Dickstein.
“This is a huge win for downtown and for continuing to position downtown as the region’s living room, where we have opportunities to learn, live, work, play, create — all of that is happening in the arcade,” she said.
The south arcade is home to the Hub at the Arcade Powered by PNC Bank, which offers classrooms, offices and co-working and other types of spaces.
Credit: Jim Noelker
Credit: Jim Noelker
The anchor tenants are the University of Dayton and the Entrepreneurs Center, which recently celebrated the one-year anniversary of the opening their joint innovation hub.
Until last year, the arcade had sat vacant and unused for three decades.
The arcade’s southern buildings have been turned into new housing, offices and arts and commercial spaces, and developers in the near future plan to rehab the northern buildings.
But the third floor of iconic rotunda still has about 13,500 square feet of “white-boxed” space, said Lewis, president of the hub, and the plan is to create additional private offices and a 100-seat classroom and lecture space using the new federal funds.
Credit: Jim Noelker
Credit: Jim Noelker
The hub’s 72 private offices are completely leased, he said, and the hub partners would like to increase private office capacity by about 50%.
The new federal funds will help solve a “great problem” facing the hub, which is that it’s running out of space and needs more, said Scott Koorndyk, president of the Entrepreneurs’ Center and executive vice president of the hub.
The federal support will allow UD and the Entrepreneurs’ Center to expand their vision for the hub, Koorndyk said, and the community should be very encouraged by the arcade’s progress and early successes.
This “lets us do more of what we’re doing really well,” he said. “We need capacity because the space is popular and the space is drawing small businesses, it’s drawing students, it’s drawing the community in.”
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Credit:
The omnibus bill has $3 million for the innovation center and $1.4 million for a new commercial kitchen incubator, which will be located in first floor and basement of sections of the arcade, along South Ludlow Street.
The 6888 kitchen incubator (pronounced six-triple-eight) will offer education and training to food and beverage businesses, as well as access to state-of-the-art commercial kitchen equipment to help them scale up operations, said Charlynda Scales, who will serve as the incubator’s director and the leader of the education program.
“We’re just glad we have people like Sen. Sherrod Brown who understand the mission and support it wholeheartedly,” she said.
6888 will have 10,000 square feet of space, which will include a shared-use kitchen that program participants, including small businesses, can book.
An educational program called Sharpen the Axe is expected to attract bakers, chefs, caterers and other entrepreneurs who make consumer-packaged goods that are sold at retail stores, Scales said.
Credit: Tom Gilliam
Credit: Tom Gilliam
6888 also will have its own retail store where consumers will be able to purchase items that kitchen tenants produce. The Sharpen the Axe program has set a goal of having about 50 graduates per year.
The kitchen incubator will drive more traffic to the heart of downtown, Scales said, and it will help the local economy and small businesses that were hit hard by the COVID crisis and lacked resources even before the pandemic began.
“The goal is to have (tenants) scale and become brick-and-mortar restaurants or retail goods that you see in the grocery store,” she said. “We want to see them grow and be able to stand on their own in the local area.”
Credit: JIM NOELKER
Credit: JIM NOELKER
Supporters say every bit of funding for the arcade helps, and this federal support is a sizable and much-appreciated contribution.
The arcade rehab, which some people have called the most transformative project in the nation, is one of the most complicated deals in the city’s history, involving more than two dozen funding sources, city officials said.
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