The Dayton Centre City Building

A Landmark Comes Back

There’s a 21-story tower in the heart of downtown Dayton, one of the city’s oldest skyscrapers, one of its tallest, and for the better part of two decades, one of its emptiest. Not for much longer.

Completed in 1904 as the United Brethren Publishing Building, it was the tallest reinforced concrete structure in the country at the time. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1993, it has most recently been known as the Centre City Building. Going forward it will be known as The Mainline, a $110 million redevelopment bringing 217 residential units and 11,000 square feet of ground-floor retail back into a 254,000-square-foot landmark. The unit mix spans market-rate apartments, workforce housing, and affordable senior units. A partnership with the Greater Dayton Regional Transit Authority will restore the nearby Air City Garage and reactivate nearly 400 parking spaces alongside the project.

Model Group and Cross Street Partners are leading the development; Browning Day is leading the architecture and design.

The Work Behind the Work

Adaptive reuse at this scale is patient work. The questions are not the questions that come with a clean site. They are questions about historic floor plates and how they will accommodate residential life. Questions about what to restore, what can be retained, and what must be replaced in a long-neglected structure. Questions about how to align a layered capital stack — historic tax credits, transformational mixed-use development credits, public funding from the City of Dayton, private investment, civic partnership — without compromising any of its parts.

The Mainline is moving forward because those questions have been on the table from the start, and because the partnership behind the project has the experience and the patience to work through them. The Montgomery County Land Bank has stewarded the building’s transition. The City of Dayton has committed public funding and political support. Model Group and Cross Street, the team that brought the Dayton Arcade back, are bringing the same approach and commitment to this project.

What Comes Next

Buildings of this scale and history don’t come back often, and when they do, it tends to mean something. They reset what a downtown can hope for. Activity returns to the blocks around them. Residents find a reason to come downtown and stay. A city is reminded of what it built and what it can build again.

The Mainline is anticipated to be completed by the end of 2027.