With its modernistic glass and steel architecture, Tower on the Maumee in downtown Toledo may not fit the description of what one would think is a historic landmark, architect and historic preservationist Elisabeth Knibbe said in a speech to the Toledo Rotary Club at the Park Inn Ballroom in downtown Toledo.
But Ms. Knibbe said the 28-story skyscraper, formerly the Fiberglas Tower, grew out of the 1950s urban masterplan design authored by architect I.M. Pei featuring groups of low-rise housing contrasted with taller towers.
The legacy of the 1960s Urban Renewal, the federal program that helped cities demolish and replace large areas of blight with modernist housing and office blocks, also played a role in the tower’s construction, said Ms. Knibbe, who was the lead architect on the project to covert the Tower on the Maumee into luxury condos and commercial office space.
In 1961, Mr. Pei created downtown Cleveland’s urban renewal project Erieview District, which featured the 40-story Erieview Tower, designed by Harrison & Abramovitz, the same architectural firm responsible for the Tower on the Maumee.
“Toledo looks over to see what’s happening in Cleveland and sees we have the same problems. We got this industrial riverfront. We got the downtown, which by the 1950s and 1960s, was not doing well,” Ms. Knibbe said. “They said this is the opportunity. Let’s do something new.”
The architect said Harrison & Abramovitz drew up a plan mimicking Cleveland’s urban renewal plan. The firm suggested the Fiberglas Tower as the centerpiece of Toledo’s downtown urban renewal project known as Riverview.
“This is really Toledo trying to remake itself for the future. It worked for a time,” said Ms. Knibbe, principal with Quinn Evans Architects in Detroit.
Eyde Co. purchased the old Fiberglas Tower in 1998, two years after Owens Corning moved its headquarters to an old railroad yard just south of downtown called the Middlegrounds.
The Lansing-based company won approval in 2012 to get the building and adjacent garage listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a designation needed to obtain state and federal historic preservation tax credits.
Eyde Co. began construction in October to convert the top 10 floors into 106 apartments. Directions Credit Union announced last month it will locate into the 15th, 16th, and 17th floors of the 400-foot skyscraper by early 2018, bringing 90 new jobs to the downtown.
Eyde Chief Financial Officer Mark Clouse, who also talked to the Rotarians, said the building has gone through changes during the nearly 20 years of ownership by the Eyde family.
“We are proud to be part of the resurgence of downtown,” he said. “It has taken an entire community to make this happen. The city of Toledo, Lucas County, and state of Ohio have been very helpful and decided to make this happen.”
Contact Mark Reiter at: markreiter@theblade.com or 419-724-6199.
First Published March 14, 2017, 4:00 a.m.
