page_title: History of Covington, Kentucky
section_title: Rebirth
hierarchical_section_title: History of Covington, Kentucky / Economic growth / Rebirth
context_page_description: The history of Covington, Kentucky began in 1815, with the city's founding.
context_section_description: Beginning in the mid-to-late-1980s, Covington began its revival. New buildings were constructed, jobs were created, and the population loss began to stabilize.
  The rebirth of Covington as a commercial center occurred in the same place where the city commercial growth first occurred – along the Ohio River and in one of the city's first commercial districts, Main Street. The rebirth on the river began modestly in 1984 when developer David Herriman built the $4.4-million, 34-unit Riverside Terrace condominium complex on Riverside Drive. Two years later, Herriman constructed the 43-unit Riverside Plaza, a companion condominium project just south of Riverside Terrace, for $7.5 million.
  With the city and state investing approximately $7 million in infrastructure improvements in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including construction of the 100-foot (30 m) Carroll Chimes Bell Tower with its carillon and glockenspiel in Goebel Park, Main Street and Sixth Street was renamed "Mainstrasse," and returned to its roots as a German village with restaurants, taverns, and specialty retail shops.
  In the mid-to-late-1980s, the city, using state and local funds, began acquiring properties along the Ohio River for redevelopment. In 1988, the city and local developer Corporex entered into a master development agreement to redevelop the city's riverfront, which kicked the city's renaissance into high gear. The first phase of this redevelopment occurred in 1990 when the $110-million, 18-story Rivercenter office tower and a 230-room Embassy Suites hotel was built atop a 1,100-space parking garage constructed by the city.
  In 1994, Fidelity Investments established a 188-acre (0.8 km²) campus in Covington, constructing three office buildings on the campus, totaling approximately 780,000 square feet (72,000 m²) and employing 2,000 employees. At the same time the Fidelity campus was underway, Wessels Construction built the IRS Gateway Center on Scott Boulevard, between Third and Fourth Streets, which would employ approximately 2,000 IRS employees when completed.
  In 1997, Rivercenter II was built next to Corporex's first downtown office tower, and during the same year, across Madison Avenue from the Rivercenter complex, a new garage was funded by the Commonwealth of Kentucky and built by Corporex. A year after the garage was finished, a 300-room Marriott hotel was built atop a portion of the garage. Two years later, on the remaining portion of the parking garage, eleven floors of office space was constructed, now known as Madison Place, and on top of this office space four floors of multimillion-dollar residential condominiums called Domaine de la Rive were built.
  In 1998, across the street from the Marriott hotel, the Commonwealth of Kentucky contributed $30.5 million to build the Northern Kentucky Convention Center. In 2001, a block away from the convention center, Wessels Construction would add a 110,000-square-foot (10,000 m²) expansion of the Gateway Center on Madison Avenue and Third Street. Another block away, Towne Properties would build Roebling Row Apartments, an 86-unit luxury apartment building with architectural features compatible with nearby structures in the surrounding historic Licking Riverside neighborhood.
  Meanwhile, a housing boom was taking place in the southern part of the city. Among new subdivisions built in South Covington in the 1990s were Ridgeport (275 homes), Clover Meadow (88 homes), and Heathermoor (100 upscale homes).
caption: Covington's downtown neighborhoods have many wooded streets and historic buildings, some of which date to the nineteenth century.
exif: {}