Two historic Cincinnati properties in Evanston are going up for auction — the former Hoffman School and St. Mark Church.
The Hoffman School building sits near the border between East Walnut Hills and Evanston. Developer Kingsley + Co., founded by former Cincinnati Bengal Chinedum Ndukwe, won zoning changes from the city to demolish the building to make way for a 240-unit apartment complex in 2024. Those plans sparked controversy, though the building doesn't have historic designation.
Famed Cincinnati architects Hannaford and Sons built the Jacobethan Revival style Cincinnati public school facility in 1922.
Ndukwe has said renovating the building into housing simply doesn't work financially and that it's in very poor shape.
A potential deal to sell the property to the Desales Community Urban Development Corporation emerged and was then quickly shelved this summer. Now, Kingsley will put the property up for auction from Nov. 16 to Nov. 18, with a starting bid of $750,000. Should it not sell, the building could still be demolished.
The company plans to move forward with a $36 million apartment development — called The Mingo — on the former ball fields behind the school.
On the other side of Evanston, the roughly 48,000-square-foot St. Mark Church campus, also owned by an Ndukwe-owned holding company, will also go on the auction block.
St. Mark Church was completed in 1916 for a growing neighborhood of mostly Polish and German Catholic families.
I-71 tore through the neighborhood right next to St. Mark in the early 1970s, chipping away at the church's congregation and leveling numerous homes directly to its north. By 2010, the parish had gotten so small the Cincinnati Archdiocese merged it with three others now located in Bond Hill and decommissioned the building.
Ndukwe purchased the building in 2022 and the following year was awarded $2 million in state Historic Preservation Tax Credits to redevelop it. Those credits were never utilized, however.
The church complex will be on auction from Oct. 26 to Oct. 28, with a starting bid of $150,000 and an undisclosed reserve.
An email to Ndukwe hadn't been returned at time of publication. The developer told the Cincinnati Business Courier the buildings no longer fit into Kingsley's development strategy, which is focused on new construction of affordable and market rate apartment buildings.
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