The $24 million project won't be done until fall of 2005. But by then, it will provide about 800 parking spaces, a two-floor medical office space to be filled by a doctors' group, and an 87,000-square-foot office building atop the west end of the garage that's available for lease.

A slow office market has made big deals for new space scarce. But when the market recovers, City Manager Tom Steidel wants to be ready.

"We think if there's growth out there, we'll have a product that's at the top of the list," said Steidel, a veteran of development in Covington, where the RiverCenter office complex was built at least partly without tenants.

"Let's face it, the market in Cincinnati has migrated to where everyone wants to put a building on Third Street with a view of the river. And you can see what's happened in Covington."

Lawrenceburg didn't have to borrow money to finance the deal, but did it out of normal cash flow over three years, Steidel said.

That's only one of several renovation projects going on in downtown Lawrenceburg, including a new City Hall that should be ready late this year. "The downtown is what was pretty much deserted over the years, and that's what the focus is," Steidel said.

Changing course

Unable to close a deal that it had hoped would drive it to profitability, Games Inc. has taken a different path.

It's started www.games.org to unveil some of its new multiplayer games, and it's providing up to $1 million in "virtual quarters" to play the games. Games, the company run by downtown businessman Roger Ach, eventually hopes to charge weekly or monthly fees to play.

It originally had hoped to offer a stable of icon names, including Monopoly and Risk, under the Internet site www.games.com.

But the $1.125 million purchase of those digital licenses from Atari Inc. is embroiled in dueling notices of default, so the deal is in limbo.

Games - the company - hopes games.org can fill the gap.

"It gives us an opportunity to beta-test some of the features we had in our Web site," chief financial officer Myles Cairns said. "We're still planning to launch games.com."

In less than a week since the company started offering the free multiplayer games on games.org, 6,500 subscribers have played more than 86,000 games, Cairns said. Of course, that's small potatoes compared to the biggest industry sites, where more than half a million people a day join in the fun.

The Atari deal was key to Games Inc.'s hopes to bring in enough revenue to reach profitability, but Cairns hasn't given up yet.

"We just believe we will prevail," he said.

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E-mail cpeale@enquirer.com