Ward Bakery Building Will Become U-Haul Self-Storage Units

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – The new owner of the Ward Bakery Building, U-Haul Moving & Storage of Youngstown, will transform the structure into storage units.

The 101-year-old building at 1024 Mahoning Ave., just a few blocks west of downtown, was sold in the spring but the buyer was not revealed until Wednesday.

In a press release, U-Haul said it will renovate the massive three-story building and divide it into roughly 800 climate-controlled self-storage units that will be available to rent. The building’s exterior will be preserved to maintain as much of the original character as possible. 

The building, which is expected to reopen in spring 2025, will also get “high-end” security features, according to a press release.

The purchase of the building was finalized July 22. Neither the sales price nor the cost of renovations was revealed by the company.

The Ward Bakery Building – so named because it was originally a bakery – is directly across the street from U-Haul’s Youngstown location, which offers rental storage units as well as truck rentals and other moving equipment. The new location will be operated by the parent store across the street and will employ up to six people.

The Ward Bakery Building will be the second U-Haul adaptive reuse project in Youngstown. The first one, the U-Haul building across the street, was a former Isaly’s dairy plant.

“We are honored to preserve a second piece of Youngstown’s past while giving it a new purpose,” Alissa Nider, U-Haul Co. of Akron president, said in the press release. “Our customers needed more self-storage options, so we are thrilled to provide another adaptive reuse property that can accommodate the growth we are seeing in northeast Ohio.”

The Ward Bakery Building had served as the home of dozens of artists, artisans and other creative types since the 1970s. It had been subdivided into a maze of studios and workshops.

The previous owners, James and Tamara Deeley, told their tenants in an April 8 letter that they sold the building because they could no longer keep up with the maintenance. The tenants were given until June 10 to vacate the building under the terms of the sale.

A city fire inspector found dozens of code violations in the building during a 2023 inspection. The cost of bringing the 30,000-square-foot structure up to code was reportedly at least $200,000.

While the new owner was not revealed until Wednesday, it was widely known to be U-Haul.

The order to vacate the building left the roughly 20 tenants shocked and unsure of where they would move to.

Many have since moved into a new location or put their equipment into storage until they could find one.

Meanwhile, a group of artists known as Loop Youngstown has been looking for a suitable location that it could purchase and renovate into studios and an art gallery. Karen Schubert, director of Loop, has said the group is attempting to secure financing for a particular location that it hopes to buy.

Copyright 2024 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.