The City of Covington, Kenton County, the Northern Kentucky Catalytic Fund and the Northern Kentucky Port Authority are partnering to buy up the old Duro Bag building in Covington for the purposes of future redevelopment. The deal, which is slated to occur sometime in the next quarter. The building carries a purchase price of about $4.5 million.
“This warehouse is 200,000 square feet,” said Covington Mayor Ron Washington. “At one time, it had hundreds and hundreds of jobs here.”
City and regional leaders announced the move Tuesday morning at the site of the facility located at the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Madison Avenue, a roughly eight-acre site that once housed both Duro Bags and a Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad roundhouse.
Duro Bag Manufacturing, which still operates today, was actually first established in 1953 in Ludlow, where founder David Shor set up both administrative offices and a manufacturing plant. The main plant caught fire in 1964, a blaze that engulfed nearby houses and incurred about $2.1 million in damage, according to a historical analysis by the Kenton County Public Library. The administrative offices remained in Ludlow, but the company later set up a new plant in Covington. The Covington facility is long defunct, but Duro Bags still has facilities in other parts of Northern Kentucky.
Chesapeake & Ohio was a major railroad that had track networks throughout the Midwest, Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia. The roundhouse itself makes heavy use of American-style arches and is one of the last railroad roundhouses still standing in an American city.
Each of the partners involved in the acquisition will contribute a portion of the funds to make the purchase. Covington will contribute $1.5 million from its TIF budget, Kenton County will contribute $2 million from its site development fund and the Port Authority will contribute $1.175 million, according to city documents. This exceeds the $4.5 million price tag on the building, likely to account for contingencies and administrative costs. The Catalytic Fund, which specializes in rehabbing old buildings, will front a loan to fund stabilization of the building for future use. The building is currently zoned for industrial use, and Washington said that marketing to future occupants for the site would be a “nationwide effort.”
“I often talk about the progress we’ve made, the momentum, the investment and the energy that has taken over,” Washington said. “The challenge has always been how to carry that momentum over 12th Street and MLK [Boulevard] and into the core of our city. This moment gives us that opportunity. It allows us to extend progress south.”
Charles Shor, David Shor’s son who formerly served as Duro Bags’ CEO before selling the company to Hilex Poly Company in 2014, talked about the importance of the site both for himself and the region.
“This building is deeply sentimental to me – it represents what we built at Duro and, more importantly, the efforts of thousands of Duro employees, so many of whom call Northern Kentucky home,” Shor said. “I’m excited to see this legacy endure and take on new life.”
Shor said that any money his foundation receives from the purchase will be sent to charitable initiatives, particularly technical schools in Covington and throughout the region.
Overall, the institutions involved believed the acquisition would serve as means of contributing to the economic growth and prosperity of the region. Jeanne Schroer, CEO of the Catalytic Fund, said the hope was to “ensure [the building’s] redevelopment has as much positive impact on our Northern Kentucky Community as it did… under the Shor family.”
When it came to historic preservation of the structure, Covington City Manager Sharmili Reddy told the Covington Board of Commissioners Tuesday evening that “that is the goal.”
Reddy said the city’s historic preservation officer has already identified parts of the building that could be preserved. The city and its partners, Reddy said, would also seek to place the structure on the National Historic Register, which would aid in securing more federal help.
“The roundhouse that everybody talks about dates back to the 1890s,” Reddy said, “so there are portions of it that the goal will be to preserve it.”
UPDATE: LINK nky has obtained more details about the amount each party in the transaction will contribute. Relevant lines have been edited. –LINK nky editorial, Jan. 20, 2026.