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Dayton Daily News archives THE DAYTON DAILY NEWS building has served as an imposing downtown landmark since 1910.

Original building is a downtown landmark

Turned down for a loan, paper's founder asked for a building that looked like a bank

By Benjamin Kline
Dayton Daily News

The Dayton Daily News building at 4th and Ludlow streets was designed by architect Albert A. Pretzinger and erected between 1908 and 1910. Pretzinger modeled the building after the famous Knickerbocker Trust bank in New York.

Daily News founder James M. Cox reportedly told Pretzinger to "build me a damn bank" after local bankers turned down his application for a loan.

According to Cox's own account in his autobiography, Journey Through My Years, banker Valentine Winters told him, "Newspapers have never been known to earn money. Of course we can't accommodate you."

"It was that very thing," Cox wrote, "which prompted us to erect a very attractive building, classic in its features, looking more like a bank than a newspaper plant. It was to symbolize the solid institution which the public was late to recognize."

The original building was expanded in the 1920s, again in the 1950s and again in the 1970s. The 1910 structure was extensively remodeled and renovated in 1989.

Although the Daily News built a massive new printing plant in Franklin in 1999, the downtown building remains the newspaper's headquarters, where reporting, editing, advertising, circulation and other operations are based.

Excerpted from: "Historic Investments: Newspaper to restore 'bank' built in 1908-10 by Gov. Cox," Dayton Daily News, Dec. 9, 1989.

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