Fort Piqua Plaza

Fort Piqua Plaza. Sign of the Past. Piqua and Troy have long had a friendly rivalry. This has included wrangling over railroad routes, bragging rights over size and maintaining one of the oldest high school football rivalries in the State of Ohio. The ultimate manifestation of the rivalry involved the location of the Miami County Courthouse. Troy cemented its claim with the dedication of one of the fines courthouses in Ohio in 1888 designed by Joseph Warren Yost of Columbus. Piqua responded with the erection of the largest hotel in the Upper Miami Valley north of Dayton. The building promoters, William P. Orr and Samuel K. Statler, just happened to hire architect Yost to design their new project., Construction began on the Plaza Hotel in 1890. Yost designed the hotel in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, highlighted by a massive Cleveland stone facade covering five floors. The exterior was covered with carvings of faces, animals and plants all created by William Whyte and John Clifford. The two were forced to work on their carvings after the stones had been erected. Using handmade scaffolding, they were able to complete hundreds of designs without any delays in the construction timetable. The building immediately became a symbol of civic pride and community growth. The Plaza was more than just a building, more than just a hotel. Piqua's largest newspaper, the Miami Helmet, referred to the structure as "A Poem in Stone". When the grand opening was held in October of 1891, the hotel contained one hundred rooms, a bathing area, a billiard parlor, a barber shop and the city's first elevator., The Plaza quickly became the center for many of the community's firsts. When it was built, there was not enough land available for the number of outhouses required. The city council authorized the digging of the city's first sewer line. It ran down Wayne Street and then east to dump into the Great Miami River. The Plaza Hotel literally gave Piqua its first indoor plumbing. In 1891, the hotel operated its own electric generating plant to power over nine hundred lights, more than the rest of the city put together, The city also put down brick paving blocks on the street in front of the Plaza, resulting in one of Piqua's earliest paved streets., The Plaza Hotel, later known as the Favorite Hotel and then the Fort Piqua Hotel, was the center for many of the city's defining events. The first electric street railway in Piqua in 1890 tied the hotel to the rest of the city. When bus routes took over in the early 1930's, the hotel building served as a terminal and ticket counter. The community's love-hate relationship with alcohol was often centered at the hotel. In the late 1890's, the Piqua Anti-Saloon League met in the public spaces of the hotel. But when national prohibition ended in 1933, Der Ratskeller, Piqua's first post-prohibition bar, opened in the basement of the hotel. In 1945, the Piqua chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. organized a sit-in at the bus stop lunch counter at the southeast corner of the hotel. This civil rights action was the beginning of the end of segregation in local restaurants., The hotel has been the site of political speeches by Republican presidential candidates Teddy Roosevelt, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Warren G. Harding, Democratic candidate James M. Cox and Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs. Notable visitors to the hotel have included Henry Houdini (1917), John Phillip Sousa (1912) and the Cincinnati Red Legs baseball team (1908). Over one hundred different businesses and social service institutions have called the hotel structure home, everything from antiques to groceries and from union offices to churches. The building has seen its share of tragedies, including the 1913 Flood and the murder of Police Officer Jan Mulder (1970) in the main lobby., The restoration and renovation of the deteriorating building began as a community project as early as 1994. It took the combined efforts of the City of Piqua, the Hotel-Library Legacy Alliance (private funding), various foundations, the State of Ohio, federal and state. historic tax credit experts and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency to fund the twenty-two million dollar project. The structure was formally rededicated on October 19, 2008 as the Fort Piqua Plaza. The building now houses the Piqua Public Library, two ground floor commercial establishments and a community meeting center on the beautifully restored historic fourth floor., Fort Piqua Plaza Timeline , 1891 Hotel Plaza Opened , 1901 Piqua savings opened in hotel , 1914 Hotel massively remodeled by Stanhope Boat , 1924 Fourth floor restaurant closed , 1928 Fifteen hotel rooms added to fourth floor , 1934 Dodge taxi and Bus Company opened , 1947 Piqua Central Labor Union office opened , 1950 Union terminal serviced 50 buses a day , 1963 Window air conditioner were purchased , 1971 Piqua News Stand opened , 1984 Hotel closed and replaced with apartments , 2008 Building formally rededicated