Ch-ch-changes! 1224 Kinnear Road

These days, as modern philosophers like to say, the only constant is change. With that thought in mind, I decided to document some of the changes currently underway at 1224 Kinnear, but also to take a "deeper dive" into how that particular piece of property had evolved over the last century. What I found was far more interesting that I had suspected!

This summer, the statewide technology organizations that comprise the Ohio Technology Consortium continue to streamline their operations and optimize their facilities. Taking advantage of space that recently became available at 1224 Kinnear Road, OhioLINK is moving  from offices in downtown Columbus and will cohabitate with its sister organizations, the Ohio Supercomputer Center, OARnet and eStudent Services.

Renovations are being made to the building at 1224 Kinnear to accomodate OhioLINK employees, to prepare for the support of additional networking services to the state and to provide the most productive work environment for everyone there. The changes include adding additional conference room space, upgrading conference room capabilities, rearranging office space and creating a new Network Operations Center.

Before the move could proceed, officials decided to document and update the network capabilities of the building. As a result, several operational issues are being addressed during the renovation so that OH-TECH can provide additional LAN security services, easier guest network access and new phone services, such as VOIP. With support from the Ohio Board of Regents, all-new CAT6 phone and data lines are being installed throughout the building and improvements are being made to provide local network services during power loss.

This certainly isn’t the first time this building, or the property, has been the subject of substantial alteration. An afternoon of research – with the assistance of a reference librarian at the State Library of Ohio, a student assistant at Ohio State’s Planning and Real Estate Office within Administration & Planning, and staff at the Science and Technology Campus Corporation – provided some insight into earlier tenants, uses and configurations of the building at 1224 Kinnear.

Of course, Native Americans occupied the lands of Ohio, including the Mingos who settled nearby on the Scioto River as they were pushed out of the eastern side of the state. Later, deed records show that the property was part of the U.S. Military Lands, small land grants given by Congress to army veterans for service in the American Revolutionary War.  Eventually, the Sells family of the Dublin area bought up about 1,000 acres of the military lands on the west bank of the Olentangy River, north of Fifth Avenue, to provide winter quarters for their family circus. Known as Sellsville, the nearby riverfront property between Fifth and Chambers provided living quarters and a dining hall for workers, a large building to house the animals, and sheds for wagons and railroad cars.

At the turn of the 20^th century, Lewis Sells subdivided the land along Sells Road (Kinnear Road today) into industrial parcels. The Ohlen-Bishop Manufacturing Company, a maker of saws and other hand tools, bought two five-acre parcels extending back off of Kinnear Road to the north. In March 1949, Ohlen-Bishop sold to The Scott-Viner Company three acres across the back of the two lots, a parcel designated 1224 Kinnear and valued then at just less than $800.

Over the next year, Scott-Viner erected a one-story, 43,000 square-foot building with a steel frame and concrete block exterior walls. The Columbus firm specialized in building automated equipment for harvesting, canning and freezing peas, soybeans, beets, peanuts and other crops.

At some point, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company laid the King Avenue Industrial railroad line along the main line near SR315 and curving westward north of Kinnear Road. The line featured a siding along the south side of the Scott-Viner building before turning back south across Kinnear Road to provide sidings for the Simmons Mattress Company.

In the spring of 1963, the Scott-Viner Company was sold to the FMC Corporation (known prior to 1961 as the Food Machinery Corporation). FMC had been building harvesters under contract from Scott-Viner for a number of years. FMC continued to build harvesting equipment at the Columbus facility, after the acquisition. Beginning in the early 1980s, FMC began spinning off several of its divisions, and the 1224 Kinnear property and building, then valued at nearly $100K, was sold to Byers Realty Inc. in 1981.

Byers initially leased the building for three years to Shelmark Industries Inc., a manufacturer of plastic foam packaging materials. After the company’s departure in 1984, Byers oversaw extensive remodeling to the interior and exterior of the factory building, applying a brick façade to all four sides, installing long rows of tinted glass to the front and rear walls, and trimming the roof with copper. Ohio State trustees exercised an option in 1988 to buy the building, a purchase that passed through the Ohio Bureau of Workers Compensation. By this point, the value of the property and building had risen to about $2.5 million.

The Ohio State University Research Park began subleting sections of the building to various tenants. Some of the first tenants were the recently established Ohio Supercomputer Center, the university’s Advanced Computing Center for Art and Design (ACCAD), and the offices for the Science & Technology Campus Corporation (SciTech), the university’s research park development group. Other non-academic tenants followed: coil-coating and highway marking-product manufacturer Whittaker Coatings Inc., the Ohio Department of Health’s Radiological Health Program, spectroscopic research and manufacturing company Mattson Instruments Inc., and Silliker Laboratories, a food testing facility. By 2001, most of the commercial businesses moved to other locations or were closed, and ACCAD moved their motion capture equipment from the university’s Mount Hall to some of the vacated space.

In 2002, OSC officials occupied the rest of the space and constructed the 7,040-square-foot Blueprint for Advanced Learning Environment, or BALE (left, video of artist's fly-through of proposed BALE facilities). Complete with its own in-house supercomputer cluster, BALE provided “an environment for testing and validating the effectiveness of new tools, technologies and systems in a workplace setting, including a theater, conference space and the OSC Interface Lab.” That same year, the OARnet and OSC business offices were consolidated and all of the OARnet offices were moved to 1224 Kinnear, a transition that involved some cubicle reconfigurations and a complete CAT5 rewiring of the northeast quadrant of the building.

From that point onward, up until last fall, the basic configuration of the space at 1224 Kinnear has remained fairly static. But, with last year’s major renovation of Sullivant Hall on Ohio State’s main campus, ACCAD made the jump over the Olentangy River and opened the way for OhioLINK to join the other OH-TECH organizations at 1224 Kinnear Road. And, technically, OhioLINK is returning to this building, because their first offices were located for a short time in the west end of the building at 1224 Kinnear Road when the organization was established in the early 1990s.

Although this new arrangement seems logical, comfortable and stable, all bets are off on how many years it will go unchanged. The small three-acre plot has, after all, been home to a wilderness, circus animals, hand tools, pea viners, railroads, supercomputer specialists, network engineers and now, for the second time around, librarians!