What should go into the old Covington roundhouse?

Residents of Covington’s Eastside and Westside neighborhoods came out to the old Duro Bag building and historic roundhouse Monday to share their views on what should eventually occupy the site.

Recommendations included everything from a market space to a skate park to a community center, but everyone agreed it ought to be something the community would generally benefit from.

“This is your tax dollars that we’ve spent to purchase this,” said Mayor Ron Washington, “and we’re hoping that this will be really, really nice for our community.”

The site is 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. There are multiple buildings on the site, including the historic roundhouse itself, which was originally used to repair trains, manufacturing buildings and a large metal shed in the rear of the building away from the street.

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.

The building is owned by the Northern Kentucky Port Authority, although several institutions, including the City of Covington, the Kenton County Fiscal Court and the Northern Kentucky Catalytic Fund, contributed to the acquisition of the site, which has sat unused for years.

The parties involved in the acquisition held the meeting at the site on Monday to get feedback from Eastside and Westside residents, specifically. Those two neighborhoods are closest to the site, although there were some at the meeting who didn’t hail from those two areas.

Attendees were split into groups and led through an exercise to brainstorm what would be good for the site and the community by facilitators from Kenton County Planning and Development Services. The exercise lasted a little over an hour, and groups later presented their recommendations. A tour through the facility followed.

Some common ideas came up among the groups: a community center, a community market, affordable housing, workforce and vocational training centers and various kinds of recreation. Childcare and grocery stores were other common recommendations.

“I was blessed to live here when this was an operating manufacturing plant,” said Eastside resident Lenette Beasley. “I watched people who lived down the street walk out with their lunch bags, their kids waiting for them to come out. There was a level of pride in this community that I haven’t seen since this place closed.”

David Reeves, who grew up in Covington but lives in Union now, said the space had to be something like a “keystone” for the community, something that would make people want to put down their roots in Covington.

Reeves is also the president of the Northern Kentucky Bengal Tigers, a youth football and cheer league, and has observed how families will sometimes leave the city as their children age. As such, whatever went into the buildings had to be “good for all,” Reeves said during his group’s presentation. “It’s going to attract the current Covington residents, be useful for them. It’s also going to keep residents here and let them know that they don’t have to go elsewhere.”

Given the facility is, in fact, multiple buildings, it’s possible they could be divided up for different purposes, although organizers of the event encouraged attendees to consider the constraints of the space.

“We’re not going to build the Eiffel Tower,” Washington said.

There’s a still a long way to go before any serious development of the site can begin, but Washington said “already we had an event with developers, and it was over 80 developers that came to the site to take a look, to give suggestions.”

There’s currently no other events like Monday’s on the docket in the near future, but Covington residents who wish to share their ideas about what should go into the historic site should send them to the city’s External Affairs Department at sebastian.torres@covingtonky.gov.