Fairgrounds to tkae 15 years to develop
New name to honor location; work to begin within 4 years.
A new name and vision for the future neighborhood planned at the former Montgomery County Fairgrounds will focus on the 38-acre development’s location on Main Street.
The fairgrounds will become “onMain: Dayton’s Imagination District.” University of Dayton president Eric Spina and Premier Health CEO Mary Boosalis announced the name change Tuesday even though construction work may not begin on the
site for at least a few years.
“There were literally hundreds of potential ideas. The words ‘onMain’ actually came from a
community focus group,” said Jamie Greene, principle of planning NEXT, a Columbus firm creating the redevelopment plans. “If you think of some of the more iconic place-based names like Soho in New York, it was important to many people that the name be authentic to the location and really have some geographic component to it.”
The new name is supposed to express the community’s aspira-
tions for the district, Premier and UD said in Tuesday’s announcement. The district will embody “a vision for the site as a place where Dayton’s history of innovation takes off into the future,” the release states.
UD and Premier jointly bought the fairgrounds last year. UD and Premier each paid $5.25 million of the $15 million purchase price.
The organizations have started to seek funding for the property and will continue to do so for the next year or two. The university and health system are looking for partners who would be willing to pay for or help build roads and utility infrastructure such as water and sewer lines.
The fairgrounds purchase gave UD control of three of the four corners at the intersection of Main and Stewart streets. Earlier this year UD also announced that the Dayton Development Coalition and the Dayton Foundation would relocate to a new Main Street building on the school’s campus as well.
“One of the attractions (of ) ‘onMain’ is it really allows you to work on Main, live on Main, learn on Main, play on Main, be on Main,” Spina said. “That kind of construct, ultimately was really very attractive to us in addition to really identifying this as an iconic and very important street.”
A lot of infrastructure work will need to take place at the fairgrounds before much building can begin, Greene said. Though demolition is scheduled to start this year, Greene said it will likely take more than 10 to 15 years for the site to be fully redeveloped.
Construction on the new neighborhood’s first building at the corner of Stewart and Main streets could begin within the next three or four years, Greene said. The first building will not necessarily be “a UD building or Premier building,” but it will likely include “several partners,” UD’s Spina said.
Solar panels and “green roofs” will be a major part of new facilities in the neighborhood.
“This building we foresee as more innovative than just a standard office building,” Boosalis said.
The new neighborhood is not meant to compete with other developments in the city, Spina said, but rather it will be designed to complement them and the surrounding area.
Planning NEXT unveiled the early vision for the fairgrounds in January. It calls for the first phase of development to have about 245 units of housing, 225,000 square feet of office, 60,000 square feet of retail and four acres of urban agriculture.
“Anyone who knows anything about the history of Dayton knows that we’re particularly collaborative...I think this project is one more demonstration (of that),” Boosalis said.”When we collaborate we do it really well and that’s what we want this project to be about.”