Overmyer Building
The Overmyer Building, also known as the Commerce Paper Building, is located just south of downtown Toledo, Ohio in the Warehouse District. The original four-story structure was built in 1912 for The Overmyer Company, a grocery wholesaler and designed by the local architecture firm Mills, Rhine, Bellman and Nordhoff. A vertical addition of four more stories was constructed in 1917, constituting the eight-story building as it currently exists. The reinforced concrete structure is one of the earliest surviving flat-slab buildings in downtown Toledo and boasts large “mushroom” column capitals that support the concrete floors. The front façade of the brick-clad building includes decorative terra cotta accents such as a dentiled cornice, coping and window sills. Additional features of the historic industrial warehouse style building include an open floor plan, large freight elevators, expansive factory-style steel windows for natural light, and a covered loading dock along the railroad tracks.
The rehabilitation converted the building to 75 market-rate residential apartments spanning all floors, with a commercial office and fitness center located in a portion of the first floor. New building systems were installed throughout, including a new traction elevator that extends to a rooftop deck for the residents. A central corridor on each level connects to a newly-constructed egress stair tower on the south façade. As architect and historic consultant, Kraemer Design Group coordinated approval for the demolition of the adjacent one-story warehouse building that allowed for the construction of the new egress stair tower, trash removal, and resident parking. The exterior underwent full masonry restoration and the deteriorated factory-style windows were replaced with thermally-broken historic replica aluminum windows. The project utilized both federal and State of Ohio historic tax credits, which entailed close coordination with the State Historic Preservation Office to ensure compliance with the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation.
