CINCINNATI — Five football fields of vacant space at The Banks will finally be developed after more than a decade of waiting by business owners who want more visitors to the riverfront when the Cincinnati Reds and Bengals aren’t playing home games.
On Monday, the City of Cincinnati and Hamilton County advertised for proposals to develop Lot 24. This lot, with its open views of Smale Park and the Ohio River, is considered the best of the remaining five vacant lots.
It is currently a two-level parking garage without a roof, containing 710 parking spaces usually filled with Bengals fans on game days. The lot is adjacent to the Andrew J. Brady Music Center and close to Paycor Stadium.
“That is going to be the best view in the city bar none because you can’t put anything else in front of it with the park being there,” said Jim Moehring, owner of Holy Grail Tavern & Grille, who favors building condominiums there. “Anything that brings density here, for us, is huge.”
In December, The Banks Public Partnership sought qualifications and proposals from urban planners and designers for the vacant lots and the possible construction of pedestrian decks and tree-lined green space over Fort Washington Way. The sunken highway creates a wide chasm that divides the city’s Central Business District from The Banks.
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The city and county received 14 bids from urban design consultants including Gensler, the firm that evaluated Paycor Stadium and created a capital assessment report in 2022 calling for nearly $500 million in basic repairs.
“I just want to be sensitive to this idea that whatever we do on those remaining lots is good for the current tenants including the stadiums, the music venue, and everybody else,” said Hamilton County Commission President Denise Driehaus. “This density I’m talking about, I don’t know what it will look like. We’ve got a couple of ideas. Is it commercial, is it retail, is it office?”
County and city officials are now working together on The Banks redevelopment, Driehaus said, instead of sticking with the agreement brokered by the late Commissioner Todd Portune and then-Mayor John Cranley in November 2019, which split control and gave each entity oversight of half of the space.
“To me, no offense to them, but to me, I want to do it together with the city because we need to have those lots interact with one another and interact with what’s already there,” Driehaus said.
The city-sized block known as Lot 24 that stretches from Freedom Way nearly to Mehring Way was set to be developed years ago.
A group of developers led by local Jeffrey R. Anderson Real Estate Inc. submitted a proposal in 2018 to build a massive mixed-use development on the site with street-level retail, restaurants, entertainment, two-story townhomes, small luxury apartments, a pedestrian promenade and office space.
But the development never happened.
“Let me just say that COVID delayed a lot of this, not only because of the lockdown … but also we weren’t doing a lot of revenue-generating during COVID especially when it comes to travel and tourism,” Driehaus said.
The Holy Grail was the first restaurant to open at The Banks on a sunny, warm St. Patrick’s Day in 2011.
“The garage doors were up and it took off like a rocket ship,” Moehring said.
But the pandemic changed everything. After-work happy hours and Friday business lunches have still not returned, since many now work remotely. Nowadays Moehring relies on events, such as the Polar Plunge and the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, to bring in customers.
“When you’re in this industry you can’t ignore the fact that COVID happened, and it really changed a lot of people’s plans. And it drastically changed what downtown looks like, what The Banks looks like,” Moehring said.
When asked why development at The Banks has been delayed for so many years, a county spokesperson responded: “The delay is a result of the COVID disruption to the economy, private development, and interest rates … material costs have gone up, supply chain delays, and changes in the housing and office markets have all contributed to the volatility in advancing development and construction projects.”
The city and county had high hopes for The Banks when it planned to redevelop the blighted riverfront in 1996. It is anchored on either side by Great American Ball Park and Paycor Stadium, with many restaurants, bars, apartments, the Black Music Walk of Fame, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and the AC Hotel.
But nearly 30 years later, there are still large areas of vacant space.
Planned residential units: 1,470 to 3,070. To date: 592 units.
Planned retail and entertainment: 250,000 to 400,000 square feet. To date: 141,907 square feet.
Planned office space: 600,000 to 1.5 million square feet. To date: 338,000 square feet.
Planned hotel rooms: 200 to 400. To date: 171 rooms.
“The Banks is a disappointment. It's not what it was intended. It's not,” FC Cincinnati co-CEO Jeff Berding at a Cincinnati Rotary Club roundtable lunch on Jan. 9. “The Banks Working Group, which is the group that we created when I was on council with the city and the county, hasn't really done its job that well. It's run out of energy.”
Moehring disagreed.
"We consider ourselves the front door to the city. It’s a thriving area. And anything that’s going to add to it is huge for us," Moehring said.
The Banks' future is also tied to the fate of nearly 50-year-old The Heritage Bank Center downtown.
Business owners at The Banks are pleading for city officials to put a new arena at the same location instead of relocating it south of TQL Stadium in the West End or near the Duke Energy Convention Center.
“We need to improve The Banks, regardless of where the arena goes. This community needs to decide what is the future of The Banks,” Berding said at the roundtable lunch. “Let's get moving on a better plan, a more vibrant destination, with housing and other things.”
While the county will cover the cost of the urban planning and design services consultant, it is unclear who will be the decision-makers. A county spokesperson said the selection committee participants are being finalized.
“The retailers that are there now, they were loud and clear with ‘we need to have things down here that generate year-round activity. Because the stadiums don’t,’” Driehaus said. “The music venue was partly an answer to that.”
The other four vacant lots are smaller and closer to the perimeter of Paycor Stadium.
“There was some talk of having some retail there. It has to be pretty low-density because it’s so close to the stadium,” Driehaus said. “But that said, there’s some opportunities there.”
But Moehring has his vision for the vacant lots.
“I would love to see them full. I would love to have seen GE not go away. I would love to have seen everything stay full down here,” Moehring said, referring to the closure of General Electric’s office at The Banks, seven years after opening.
“I would like to see them be very prudent and make sure that whatever is going there is stable and sustainable and is going to be with us,” said Moehring. “Whatever goes down there needs to have the stability to stay.”
