Cincinnati Gardens: Honoring a legacy while embracing the future

December 02, 2024

When the Cincinnati Gardens opened to great fanfare in 1948, it was hailed as Cincinnati's ticket to major league sports franchises, high-profile boxing matches, and major entertainment acts. Its opening night hockey game drew what was, at the time, the largest indoor event attendance in the city's history - over 11,000 spectators.

Cincinnati Enquirer - November 1947

The grand entertainment venue succeeded in attracting historic boxing matches, major entertainment acts like the Beatles, and professional sports franchises like the Cincinnati Royals. But, by 2016 the Gardens was a shell of its former self, hosting just a handful of events a year. The building had slowly fallen into a state of disrepair, and between the extensive repairs needed and larger, more modern arenas attracting area events, the Gardens essentially became obsolete.

This is when The Port stepped in. The Gardens had been up for sale, and no buyers had come forward willing to invest in bringing the arena up to modern code and standards. However, the Gardens' location made the land it occupied and the parking lots across the street valuable assets for manufacturing and industry.

Background: The Port's Manufacturing Strategy

The Port’s industrial strategy is to grow Hamilton County by transforming historic industrial properties within key transportation corridors to attract new investment and family-supporting manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing once built the core of Hamilton County’s middle class, but since its peak in 1969, our region has lost nearly 100,000 manufacturing jobs. The Port’s specializes in assembling land and leading complex remediation and demolition efforts to prepare vacant and underutilized sites for new development

Learn More About The Port's Strategy

Want to learn more about The Port's Manufacturing Strategy and how we are working to prepare sites for job creation?

An Innovative Funding Strategy

To fund this bold strategy, The Port recognized it would require an innovative approach to raise both public and private capital to invest in this work. In 2016, The Port created a Patient Capital Note Program – a new-to-market debt financing tool to raise private capital to support the public's vision of social benefit. The investors in this impact investment program have agreed to trade high financial return for social impact.

The Port leveraged this investment to acquire the 19-acre site and, with funding from the City of Cincinnati district tax increment financing and a state redevelopment grant, invested more than $3 million into the work needed to prepare the site for new jobs. In total, the acquisition, remediation, demolition, and site work totaled approximately $4,200,000.

This success was only achieved with the support from local economic development agencies, the community, and the City of Cincinnati. After securing the site, The Port worked with REDI Cincinnati and JobsOhio to secure funding through JobsOhio's Site Redevelopment program to assist with abatement and remediation efforts, which the City of Cincinnati matched.

Gardens' Legacy Can Be Found Throughout Cincinnati

From day one, The Port prioritized honoring the legacy and history of the Gardens, even as we said goodbye to the physical building. The Port worked closely with O'Rourke Wrecking throughout the demolition process to preserve a number of items that remained after the public auction held by the former owners.

Public Seat Sale

With the news of the Gardens' closure, many Cincinnatians wanted a way to keep a physical memento of the venue. The Port partnered with Building Value, a non-profit Easterseals job training program, to remove the seats and hold a public seat sale, charging just enough to cover the costs of seat removal. Over 1,000 seats were sold to individuals throughout the region.

Iconic Marquee

The Port and O'Rourke also carefully removed the large "Cincinnati Gardens" porcelain letters from the marquee and donated them to the American Sign Museum in Camp Washington. The museum worked with Klusty Sign Associates to reorganize and add some additional letters. The sign is now installed on the museum's Monmouth Avenue facade, announcing the museum's "Cincinnati Sign Garden."

Bas Relief Sculptures

Showcasing the types of sporting events that the Gardens held - hockey, boxing, and basketball - six bas-relief-style sculptures flanked the entrance to the arena. O'Rourke painstakingly removed these sculptures, safely supported and moved them (no small feat considering their 1,200 lb. weight), and stored them for future display. Three of the bas-relief sculptures are displayed for future generations to appreciate alongside the marquee letters at the Sign Museum. In addition to the three now housed at the museum, Buddy LaRosa's boxing academy received a boxer sculpture, and Xavier University, whose basketball team once played at the Gardens, received a basketball sculpture.

Spotlight: Preserving a Family Legacy

The Port worked with the sculptor's family in a generational effort to preserve these pieces. Hank Mott was a student when he won a design competition for the bas relief sculptures flanking the entrance to the Cincinnati Gardens. The Port worked with his grandson, John Peckskamp, to ensure they were saved.

Ensuring a Clean, Safe Demolition

Keeping the site safe and secure throughout the demolition process was of paramount importance. Beyond just ensuring the safe remediation of hazardous materials and demolition of the physical structure, keeping neighbors and stakeholders informed throughout the process was also critical.

Demolition efforts utilized a controlled cutting/wrecking process to safely demolish the arena building. The arena was designed to be able to accommodate the equivalent of a ten-story structure when it was built. This demolition process allowed the high structure to be safely dropped as a unit, with remaining demolition then able to occur on the ground level.

Preparing the site for a new use involved a lot of moving parts behind the scenes. By the numbers:

Approximately 85 tons of asbestos was removed before demolition could begin.
1,987 tons of metal was recycled
10,048 tons of concrete was crushed for reuse
10,000 gallon underground storage tank was removed

Positioning For The Future

As demolition progressed, planning was already underway for how to best position the site for new investment and jobs. A collective 19 acres, the property was split in two by Seymour Avenue, and the parcel on the West side of the road featured some complex geometries, making building only feasible on parts of the site. As a result, the site was broken up into three parcels to market for sale.

Throughout, The Port worked closely with partners at Colliers and REDI Cincinnati to identify ideal end uses and begin replying to site inquiries.

If You Build It, They Will Come

In early 2019, the first parcel sold was at the Southwest corner of Seymour Avenue and Langdon Farm Road. Terrex and Messer, seeing the potential of the property, purchased the site to build a 73,000 SF speculative industrial building. To accommodate a wide range of industrial uses, the building was designed and constructed to allow for customization by the end user.

In 2020, Team Inc., an aerospace manufacturing company, signed a lease to bring 75 employees to the site with future growth plans to add additional jobs.

The second parcel, to the south of the Team, Inc. facility, was soon sold to Duke Energy, which was looking for a location to build critical infrastructure.

Patience...

Even with the two former parking lot parcels sold, the site of the former arena continued to sit vacant. As a public agency, The Port is able to be patient, holding onto properties until the ideal end-user can be identified.

Enter Cynthia Booth and Emerge Manufacturing. Booth was searching for the right location to build a new PPE manufacturing facility as she launched her company, Emerge Manufacturing. The Port's President and CEO, Laura Brunner, suggested the former Gardens site could be a perfect match for Booth's vision.

"When I walked the land, I knew that it was meant for me to be here because there's a lot of things that I could see ourselves doing in this particular site," Booth explained to the Business Courier. "One, the creation of a product that helps to protect and save lives. Two, the ability to hire people from the community, Roselawn and Bond Hill. And three, to provide a large training center where we will allow the community to come in and learn about health disparities."

In September of 2024, a ribbon cutting ceremony was held to officially commemorate the completion of Emerge Manufacturing's 50,000 SF manufacturing facility. With plans to grow to 100 employees, Emerge is a perfect match for The Port's manufacturing jobs strategy.

The Cincinnati Gardens was a beacon of opportunity when it opened, promising to put Cincinnati on the map, and for years it paid dividends, attracting some of the biggest names and sporting events to the region. Today, this site brings a new kind of opportunity in the form of new jobs in Roselawn and Bond Hill.