Reality check: History says replacing Macy's won't be easy

Cincinnati’s biggest cheerleaders say it won’t take long to replace the Macy’s store Downtown with something even better.

Some touted Downtown’s “vibrancy” after Macy’s announced on Wednesday it would close the store, while others described the site west of Fountain Square as “a great address” that tenants would be racing to fill.

History suggests otherwise. 

Before a Lazarus department store opened there in 1997 – it became Macy’s in 2005 – the site known as Fountain Square West was the source of constant anxiety for city managers, city council members and urban planners. They spent the better part of two decades trying to figure out what to do with one of the city’s most valuable pieces of real estate.

Yet Fountain Square West bested them every time. It became the place where development dreams went to die.

The doomed plans for the site included a huge shopping mall, a skyscraper that would’ve been the city’s tallest and a $33 million conservatory called the Crystal Forest, where small animals would have frolicked around trees and waterfalls in a massive glass enclosure.

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Nothing worked. Instead, city officials lived for years with the decaying remains of an old department store and, later, an open-air parking lot.

Turning Fountain Square West into a viable development project was harder than anyone had imagined. Economic swings, unreliable partnerships and changing ideas of what a downtown should be all contributed to the dismal drama.

City officials say it will be different this time. “Downtown’s vibrancy will quickly re-tenant Macy’s retail space,” Mayor John Cranley said Wednesday.

That may be true, but Fountain Square West’s past is littered with big ideas and good intentions that never came to be:

A really big plan

The first swing and miss on Fountain Square West came back in 1982, when Cincinnati’s “Year 2000 Plan” envisioned a combination office, hotel and retail complex on the site of the old Elder-Beerman department store.

That soon morphed into a 200,000-square-foot mall with office space and parking.

By 1985, that idea was dead, too, and the city was three years closer to the Year 2000 without anything to show for its Year 2000 Plan.

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Tallest skyscraper in town

In the mid-1980s, city officials started thinking bigger. Or at least taller. They spent about five years and more than $1 million trying to build a skyscraper packed with offices and retail space on Fountain Square West.

The idea was to build a $275 million skyscraper taller than Carew Tower. They hired a hot shot Chicago architect and partnered with Canadian real estate mogul Robert Campeau.

It did not end well. Campeau plunged into bankruptcy — the largest in retailing history at the time — and the partnership defaulted on its contract with the city in 1991.

With no other developers waiting in the wings, city officials razed the site and put in 175 parking meters. They figured they might as well make a few bucks off the property until something better came along.

Shopping is where it’s at

A design firm recommended in early 1993 that the city build a Lazarus store on the site, along with a parking garage, a hotel and an office building.

The problem was finding someone willing to build and run all of those things. City Council was getting frustrated.

The city's economic development director resigned soon after the plan was unveiled, and City Manager Gerald Newfarmer followed him out the door a short time later. Unhappiness over Fountain Square West was a big reason why.

A new idea emerged in late 1993: Build the Lazarus store first and worry about all the rest later. City officials decided this might be the way to go.

A downtown rainforest

Around this time, the Cincinnati Parks Board and a few council members decided a retail store wasn’t ambitious enough for such a prime spot Downtown.

So they pitched the idea of building a $33 million conservatory on top of the store, kind of like the Krohn Conservatory in Eden Park. Visitors would presumably take in the wonders of the rainforest and then head downstairs to shop for shoes and jewelry.

The glass-enclosed tourist attraction would have included trees, plants, small animals and a man-made creek fed by a waterfall.

Everyone loved the artist renderings, but not so much the price tag. Some also questioned the wisdom of building a waterfall above a retail store.

As opposition mounted, support for the plan on City Council wilted.

Councilman Charlie Winburn, who once said he was "50.75 percent sure" he'd support the conservatory, changed his mind and helped kill the project.

Just build a store

By late 1993, with few other options, city officials decided to move forward with the Lazarus store alone. No office tower. No hotel. No shopping mall. No conservatory.

The store would be constructed so a tower could one day be built above it for offices or other uses.

The plan at that point was to get something built and rally support for a bigger project in the years to come. Lazarus opened in 1997.

Twenty years later, the building hasn’t changed and nothing new has been added to the site. Macy’s remains the only major tenant on Fountain Square West, and soon it will be gone.