Since construction began in 2022, the Union Schoolhouse, built in 1872, has been outfitted to accommodate 91.3 WYSO’s new broadcasting headquarters, as well as professional offices for local resident and comedian Dave Chappelle’s companies. The radio station aims to begin their move into the space this month. To the right, towering over the 10,000-square-foot addition to the schoolhouse is WYSO’s new 150-foot transmission tower. The building is pictured from the Union Street side. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
Union Schoolhouse nears completion
- Published: October 6, 2025
The dust hasn’t quite settled on the construction site, but local NPR affiliate 91.3 WYSO is gearing up to move in the coming weeks into its new headquarters in the historic Union Schoolhouse at 314 Dayton St.
“It’s nearly done,” WYSO General Manager Luke Dennis told the News earlier this week.
According to Dennis, the 67-year-old radio station’s plan is to begin moving furniture, radio equipment and broadcasting accoutrements into their new facility between October and December, with the goal of completely moving out of their current space — the Antioch College-owned Kettering building on East South College Street — by early to mid-January.
“With the general contractors wrapping up their work, this feels like the home stretch,” Dennis said.
Built in 1872, the Union Schoolhouse has been under construction and redevelopment since January 2022.
The schoolhouse and an adjacent lot were purchased in 2020 for a total of $550,000 by Iron Table Holdings, the real estate company owned by local resident and comedian Dave Chappelle.
At a 2021 Planning Commission meeting, Iron Table’s architect Max Crome, of Crome Architecture, unveiled plans to rehab and expand the 19th-century building into a shared space for Chappelle and WYSO; those plans were unanimously approved by the commissioners at the time.
In its past iteration, Union Schoolhouse was the first integrated school in Yellow Springs, then later, the Village’s municipal offices, and most recently, a shared space for small businesses and art studios. The building then sat vacant and fell into disrepair until it was purchased by Chappelle.
The Union Schoolhouse, with new studio and office space for WYSO and professional offices for Iron Table Holdings. (Rendering by Max Crome Architecture)
In the three years since construction began, Iron Table built a new two-story, 10,000-square-foot space that adjoins the schoolhouse on its western facade, as well as regraded the lot for parking and completely redid the existing building’s interior, foundation, roof and windows. The building is also now has an accessible entrance.
Behind the building, on the Union Street side, now stands a 150-foot-tall radio tower — specifically, a “studio transmitter link” that will send WYSO’s FM signal from the schoolhouse to its main transmission tower in Bellbrook.
While the thin new tower dwarfs the schoolhouse and neighboring homes, Dennis said there’s no reason to fret: It’s completely safe and secure, he said.
“The [tower’s] foundations are made of concrete and go super deep into the ground. There’s underpinning that even attaches to the new foundation of the original building,” Dennis said. “It’s a very stable structure.”
But as a caveat: “If, God forbid, there’s ever a cataclysmic weather event, this tower has been designed to fall straight down, and in pieces. It certainly will never tip onto neighbors’ homes.”
Looking back inside, Dennis explained that WYSO will occupy 8,000 square feet of the bottom two stories in the original structure and the first floor of the addition, while Chappelle’s corporate headquarters for Iron Table Holdings and his other company, Pilot Boy Productions, will reside in the top floors of the schoolhouse and adjoining structure.
While Chappelle’s spaces will be closed off to the public, Dennis said “the entire WYSO space is for the community — we’re making classrooms, conference rooms and performance areas.”
A rendering of the proposed renovation and addition to the historic Union Schoolhouse at 314 Dayton St. for the new home of local public radio station WYSO was presented at Planning Commission in July 2021. The commission approved the conditional use permit for the property, which was submitted by locally based comedian Dave Chappelle’s company, Iron Table Holdings, LLC. (Rendering by Max Crome architecture)
All of WYSO’s public radio broadcasting operations will be housed in the new structure. As Dennis said, the initial plan was to keep them in the original schoolhouse, but owing to the structure’s aged specs, creating soundproofed rooms there was untenable.
“It would have been impossible to mitigate sound,” Dennis said. “A studio is like a box within a box — it has a floating floor, a floating ceiling, and is completely isolated from the sounds of the outside world. Setting up something like that in the original building would have been very expensive and difficult to do.”
He added: “This whole project has been one big lesson in creative problem solving.”
As the future tenant of Chappelle, Dennis said that, owing to nondisclosure agreements, he is unable to disclose how much WYSO’s new lease will be, but did say that Chappelle offered the radio station a rental agreement that was “below market cost,” but still more expensive than the $4,000-a-month rent WYSO pays Antioch for the first floor of the college-owned Kettering building.
WYSO has occupied the Kettering building since 2012, when it relocated there from the college’s Sontag-Fels building.
Since then, WYSO gained independence from Antioch in 2019, when the station became an independent nonprofit, governed by its own board of trustees, by purchasing the college’s Federal Communications Commission license for $3.5 million — a sum, as previously reported in the News, Antioch considered a “partial reimbursement” for its decades of investment in the station.
WYSO first sounded out from Antioch College in 1958, and began as a student and faculty station with a 10-watt transmitter atop the student union.
The Charles F. Kettering Building, at 150 E. South College St., built in 1950, was home to classrooms, administration and faculty offices, as well as scientific research laboratories. Now, it houses 91.3 WYSO. Currently under contract, Windsor plans to turn this building into 55-and-older residential apartments. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
Also in the years since WYSO occupied the Kettering building, and in conjunction with the station’s “longstanding plans to move,” as Dennis said, Antioch has been in conversations with Columbus-based real estate developer Windsor Companies to sell the Kettering property — among other college-owned buildings — and turn them into senior-focused rentals and market-rate apartments.
“Windsor has been great in working with our timelines of moving, which have changed several times,” Dennis said. “We’ve had to change the end of our lease — which is now March 31 [2026] — several times, and each time, Windsor has said, ‘No problem.’”
Dennis said there are still a few more months to go before community members can come into their new home.
“Sometime around Valentine’s Day,” Dennis said, WYSO will open its doors on Dayton Street with a good amount of fanfare — there will be a big unveiling ceremony and days of live music performances, events and more.
Having earlier this summer suffered the loss of federal funding, like many other public radio and television stations across the country, WYSO is undeterred from the imminent move into a new broadcasting space, which ought to signify to the station’s members and regional listeners “a show of strength,” Dennis said.
“We’re not cowering. We’re not capitulating. We’re moving into a beautiful new facility, and that shows that even without federal support, that the local community is invested in independent journalism and music,” Dennis said.
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