Jeffery

Press, that new coffee house, has receieved a good review in City Paper Pressing the Boundaries >snip< >snip< I was there twice already. Once for their "soft opening" on Friday, the second by accident, on my way to a show at the DubPub (they were semi-open, but made me a cup anyway). They do make some good coffee, just based on these two visits. I am a regular at various Lousiville coffee shops since I am down there so often, and also at a few in Cincy, and it was as good (or better) as some of the best @ Lou and Cincy coffee places.

^ that and Asian restaurants. There still are a ton of these in the area, just little mom and pop things. Mostly Chinese, but also a few Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, and Indian. This is actually a good town for that kind of food, the cheaper street food versions. Pizza? My fave local is still Rons. Rons had expanded after I moved here...and I 'expanded' with them...I was a regular customer of their Centerville delivery operation. Saddly, now they are back just one store in downtown Miamisburg. Still one of my favorites, becuase they have a fairly thin crust, like 'neighborhood pizza" in Chicago (not that deep dish that is popularly known as "Chicago style"). A lot of locals have crusts that are too doughy for my taste. Rons is just right.

I was into Yeahsayer a bit last year, but cooled on them. For some reason they have an "80s" sound..or its lurking in there somewhere. Right now I'm listening to a Fred Holstein memorial concert in the car and compilation of his songs at work. Fred Holstein was a mainstay of the Chicago folk scene from way back...the "old folk" scene from back in the early 1960s and before. Actually before my time and not the music I particularly am into (being more of a celtic/english folk/appalachian trad fan), but I sort of appreciate the sensibility here. Most new music leaves me cold, so I browse the archives. I've got an album on order by Wendy Waldman, part of that LA singer-songwriter folk-rock thing from the 1970s. Unknown today, and actually barely known even in the 1970s.

Northside is in a good place now. I think it (Hamilton Avenue) still seems "old school + bohemian" vs "gentrified". After walking it a bit ..the side streets and cross streets..the place is actually in fair to good shape...actually rather nice the closer you get to Parker Woods. I'm sort of wondering whats going into that Art Damage Lodge space. I read that some entertainment or music venue is opening there?

What Gramarye said was pretty much how housing used to operate in the postwar period. If it was an investment, the idea was you'd make a little at the end, but it was seen more as a way of "getting your money back" at the end, (and a locked-in periodic payment) instead of renting (presuming long-term ownership, which is what the 25- or 30-year mortgage implied). The housing deflation probably reflects coming off a bubble in some areas, but for Ohio it probably reflects the decline in incomes and employment, i.e, a decline in demand. Which is what Hts121 implies, that housing prices have to come into line with incomes....that the housing market is adjusting to whats going on in the 'real economy'.

The DDN op-ed was pitching private-sector (or a public-private joint venture concept) for 3-C This is being considered up in wesern Mass. A private freight rail owner is thinking about starting passenger service from the Berkshires down to a Metro North terminus, and is paying for the feasibility study. The understanding is that the station development and construction would be born by the local municipalities. So this would be an interesting example of local governments partenering with a short-line owner (or do we call this regional rail?) to get passenger service established. @@@@ I'm leaning toward the above comments that improved bus service might be more realistic from a cost and ease-of-implemnetation POV, since there is a demand. Those Chinatown busses seem to be pretty popular and are apparently in better condition or are better rides than Greyhound. Seems there is a lot of denial here that 3-C is dead. I'm wondering why this thread isn't being moved to the failed or never-started projects subforum.

I'm really looking forward to this. Yet another parallel between Columbus and Louisville (two cities one wouldn't think would have any parallels at all). They have something in Lou called the Mellwood Arts Center, which, like Wonderland, was an old food processing place, in this case a meatpacking plant and slaughterhouse (Fishers Meats, home of Mellwood hams and bacon), ..though I thnk this old Wonder Bread site is in a much better location vis a vis the city than the Mellwood site in Louisville. BTW, whatever happened to that Milo School art colony in Milo/Grogan. I thought that was going to be something similar to this? Or was that more a live/work thing?

I dont know if this is the same "Linden' area, but there is an interesting development @ Cleveland and 11th, in that Northeast area, where they are trying to create an old-style buisness district at the intersection of two busy streets (incorporates a bus hub or stop, too). Pretty neat development, something I'd wish we'd see here in Dayton in the outer neighborhoods. I could see this little development as a node on that BRT proposal.

Time has a cover story on the jobs situation. Two parts: Where the Jobs Are >snip< General Electric is also trying to poach some Motown engineers to staff its expansion at Appliance Park, in Louisville, Ky., and three other locations where it is establishing "centers of excellence" in refrigeration technologies. The company is in the middle of a $1 billion investment in its appliance sector that will create 1,300 jobs at all levels over the next four years. GE has repatriated — insourced, if you will — a refrigerator-manufacturing line from South Korea (thanks in part to a new union deal and a weaker dollar that makes U.S. labor more competitive) even as it waits for the housing market to rebound enough to restore demand for fridges. "We think it's going to be a slow crawl back over the next several years, which, for us, is why we are investing now," says James Campbell, CEO of GE Appliances & Lighting.... >snip< (to note that GE is making SW Ohio a center of expertise in aerospace and electric systems, which benefits Daytonnati) ...and Where the Jobs Aren't They're not in Ohio, based on the maps accompanying this article, which is about structural unemployment and how this is lockin-in in manufacturing and construction.... >snip< The inability to confront the structural-unemployment question is a greater threat to future prosperity than high unemployment itself. Other countries have seen many years of high unemployment go hand in hand with solid economic growth: Britain and West Germany in the mid-1980s, Australia in the early 1990s, Canada in the mid-1990s, South Africa today. Unlike these other countries, the U.S. has no recent experience with chronic high unemployment and sees itself as a job-creation engine that may occasionally stall but never seizes up completely. The idea that the problem may be deeper and structural barely registers. >snip< The article set also talks about how this recession is affecting men more than women. And this might account for why we arent seeing "Depression" levels of hurt, since if most blue-collar families are dual earners the wifes income (say she is a nurse or med tech or something like that) helps pay the bills. Just speculating on the impact of dual earner households. Anyway, according to the article set, the job growth is in the various medical fields and in proffessional and technical services. Pretty much what we've seen all along.

I'm not sure that that passenger service was purpose-built as a rapid transit line. The rail connection between the bridge and downtown Louisville might have had more to do with providing main-line freight and passenger transfer from the bridge to the riverfront operations of the L&N lines coming into the city from the east, the old Short Line to Cincy and the Louisville & Lexington connection. These eastern lines were relocated to terminate at the riverfront after the Civil War sometime, including a freight house, so this would be a logical connection, a riverfront transfer line between the K&I, intercepting the line coming in across the 14th Street Bridge, then across the wharf on a track elevation, then connecting with the L&N riverfront lines. Runnig electrified passenger service over this was perhaps incidental to the main purpose of mainline "steam road" transfer operations (and providing an second passenger depot, this being the Central Station, AKA the "7th Street Station").

...though the bulk of this thread is on the school, I like your set-up for that New Years shot (which is a good one, too). Really liked that.

Dayton: South Park is apparently the new up-and-coming Historic District, still. This has been going on for years, but I think things are reaching a certain level there, now, a positive buzz about the area. The "University"/"Miami Valley Hospital" area near South Park is also becoming interesting, with a lot of renovations and infill in a handfull of side streets between the hospital and UD, and UD itself is becoming a major developer in the part of Dayton between downtown and upscale Oakwood. As part of this there is a lot of demolition and boarding-up in the older parts of this area between, say South Park and US 35, and between Main and Warren Streets, north of the hospital. This area is slowly being cleared of structures..residential and retail...yet there is some suprising moves, like the restoration of the Marvin Gardens row. MacPhersontown is nearly complelety restored now, and is like a baby Oregon without 5th Street. Huffman and Dayton View are sort of "failed" historic districts, where restoration has stalled and even moved in reverse. St Annes Hill is holding on, but the area to the east of it, Newcom Plain, is on a downward spiral. CDM is right about the decline of the middle neighborhoods. That's the big story of the last ten years. I'd add Old North Dayton seems to be really sliding as does East Dayton...accelerated deterioration and vacancy as far east as the foot of the hills. North Main has really crashed. With the closure of Q and relocation of Omega Music to the Oregon the last relics of the old Santa Clara Arts District are gone. The residential west of it has major vacancy issues. That was a big "Fail", a local attempt to do something like Short North. Grim. Otherwise trends are as they always where..south and east are the big suburban boom areas, and things are stagnating Northwest. Austin Boulevard is the new hot suburban area, and we are waiting for development to re-start at Wilmington Pike and I-675, which has become a major retail center. There is some office stuff that is supposed to go in there, and yet more major strip centers. There's a big new hospital going up on Pentagon Boulevard (WSU /Fairfield Commons Mall area), which is pretty much the crowning touch to development in this area...which is pretty close to build-out. The big suburban fade is the venerable Town and Country shopping center, which is a lot more vacant and gets less foot traffic these days. I think The Greene did have an impact on this place. Seems like the big stall with downtown residential was an early warning of the collapse of the housing market, since it happened maybe 1-2 years before the rest of the market declined. The townhoses are being built, but I think the Merc is dead. The next thing to watch is the loft industrial building, one of the Delco buildings, next to 5/3 Field, since there is some talk about re-doing that into residential (Sandy Mendelson and a developer who did the Brown Street retail infill). @@@@ The unreported story in Dayton is the ongoing somewhat peacemeal reconstruction of unfashionable and half-abandoned inner neighborhoods. These are not historic districts, but there is quite a bit of new construction in the 'Inner West" area, in Wolf Creek and a bit in McFarlane. In Lower Dayton View a Hope VI redevelopement has extended beyond the confines of a public housing project to do single-family-home infill in a "Detroit" type landscape of vacancy. One is starting to see this reconstruction on the east side in Twin Towers, which has underwent a big decline. The shrinking cities model says that these areas should be decommissioned and returned to open space. Instead they are being incrementally redeveloped with new housing.

Finally made it Park + Vine back before XMas, got a book and some notecards. What I like about that place is they are doing some local artist support. I notice a lot of their notecards are by local artists or graphic designers or maybe even photographers.

This is a long thread, but somwhere upthread are some posts by me looking at Ohio employment numberrs based on BLS stats, for the private sector. I think these are probably more indicative of whats happening in the job market, and they have improved, but have not begun to take this state out of the hole it dropped in during 2007-2009. Based on the monthly BLS private sector numbers we appear to be in a recovery during 2010, as the pattern of gains and losses mirror that of when the state economy wasn't in recession, but the recovery isn't adding jobs to move us to, say, 2007 employment levels, for the foreseable future. The period to look at will be the next few months, February through July, to see how many more jobs are added, as its during this time period that the state economy actually adds jobs. This seems to indicate that the quote above is probably right. By looking at the drop in unemployment, we could just be seeing a statistical artifact due to how this is measured. The unemployed are just not being counted anymore since they are not "in the labor force" or "not in the job market" or whatever wording is used to describe this phenomenon. It doesnt mean the jobs are coming back.

The art deco tower (yeah, wow..and in Mississippi no less) was renovated into 76 apartments, retail space, and a business center, cost $30M +. Part of a larger project including the King Edward hotel. This according to Preservation magazine. @@@ There's some strange stuff in these pix. How about that clocktower buidling. Or that neoclassical monster with the courtyard behind the columns? The nice thing is the way the old state capital (i guess) terminates the vista down that busy street. I always wonder why US cities dont make more of these "european" style neoclassical/baroque urban ensembles. Indianapolis has a similar arrangement, but that street is underdeveloped, IMO.

To do an apples to apples comparison one should look at comparable areas: Cincinnati= the Basin compared to Cleveland = say, the neighborhoods between downtown and 50th Street, south to the Kingsbury Run valley (?). These would be comparable areas: close-in mostly working class areas (with some exceptions). It might be interesting to look at those online Sanborns, too, over at the OPLIN site, assuming they are still up. @@@ Yeah, I've been looking at the track layouts in the aeriel and thinking of rereading Condit's book on Cincy railroad development. What's interesting is the amount of street running going on. It looks like they have a line down Eggleston, east side of the street, from that freight terminal (?) at Reading Road down to the riverfront. And you can see some riverfront track elevation coming in from the east (perhaps similar to what Louisville had) but it ends and goes on the surface across public landing and then there's street running again west of, say, Main (west of public landing). Also those elevated tracks coming in off the C&O Bridge look interesting, too (west side of the pic). I wonder if it would be instructive to post the pic in the thread header side-by-side with that antebellum pano that was posted earlier? You could see how the riverfront had more-or-less solid line of commercial buildings fronting directly on the river vs the ragged look of the 1920s. It looks like theres one-story warehouse buildings where Vine meets the river in the 1920s pic.

I guess Im appalled at how grungy the watefront is in the thread parent pic...closer to the river. Yet so much was lost heading down to the river, south of Dixie Terminal. Blocks and blocks of old things. The Public Landing...that was always a big open space, correct? @@@ I keep on going back to that Eggleston Avenue area east of Lytle Park, how that area was totally transformed. Eggleston must have been a major street at that time. And I think I can see the incline going up to Mount Adams, too. @@@ I recall reading some of Hearn's pasages in an architectural guide to Cincy...this would be the east end of downtown, vicinity of the canal and Deer Creek, if I recall right. Maybe some of this was incorporated (or name-checked) in a song by the Tillers..."George Street Beat", seems to be very specfic about Cincinnati places...there's a lyric about a "Rat Row". Not sure where George Street was, on these pix (or on a map).

This was interesting. That shrine isnt the usual thing you see in the architecture books, which emphasise a sort of purist aestehetic (like Ise and Katsura). This is more elaborate. Still for some reason I like the way the Japanese do things. There's a certain style or attention to detail (you can see it with the paper items at the shrine), and in general... ...also, thanks for those generic "city scene" pix. Though they say the Japanese economy is weak they look fairly prosperous. The density is impressive too. It's almost as if one of those Latin American favelas or barrios was fixed-up and rebuilt more permanent, with paved streets and legitmate utilities and permanant buildings. Same kind of density, it seems. Also interesting to see that the train station as the message board in English, with english characters ...is this pretty common?

^ No its not. @@@ Nice to see they still have the big tree up @ Fields'

OTR also has what looks like a version of the NYC tenement, sort of "half -dumbells", or maybe brick tenement versions of the telescope houses one sees in Buffalo. You can see these Cincy tenemnets around Findlay Market. Incidentally you find rear tenements in the Great Lakes area too. Chicago and Buffalo have these rear houses or tenements; fitting two houses or apartment bldgs on the same block. Uusually this is done via putting in two two-flats or three-flats, or a two-flat in front and cottage in back. They are called "Alley Houses" in Chicago and "Back Houses" in Buffalo. I wonder if they existed in Detroit or Cleveland? So much of old Detroit is gone so it's hard to say, but maybe they did exist in Cleveland? This alley house phenomenon would be one way of increasing density, though the street scape wouldn't look as built-out like Cincy since even in the denser areas that had a lot of alley houses in Chicago the buildings were usually seperated by gangways, as ColDayMan notes. There was no solid street wall. Incidentally ColDayMans usage of "gangway" as an urbanist or architetcutural context is the first I've heard outside of Chicago (other than in the nautical sense of a ships gangway). I used to think this was a local dialect thing?

On the west side, a 'soul food to health food' restaurant is going to open on Germantown Street @ Adelite Avenue: Diamond D's Diner Diamond D’s Diner will serve chicken, fish, soups, salads, vegetables and other items that Vinzant described as “soul food to health food.”

The old Wympee at the corner of Wayne and Third is being turned into a "localvore" restaurant: Heres the Facebook page: Olive, an Urban Dive "our motto: local over import, labor over convenience and service over everything else. we chase chickens, when we say free range, we mean it." @@@ More on Press from the DDN food blog: New Coffee Shop Coming to Oregon The venture is owned by the husband-and-wife team of Brett and Janell Barker of Dayton. Brett Barker has been in the business for six years and managed the coffee shop at the former Pacchia. He said it was time for the couple to launch their own shop. “I think we have the passion, the knowledge and the drive to create something special,” Barker said. I think the wife is also an artist/printmaker who was in a show at the Cannery earlier in the year. Good sign that they have experience in the biz. @@@ It seems Wayne is starting, in a small way, to turn into corridor of interest since there is Olive, Garden Station (garden/art space), Press, Dublin Pub, Cocos (for now), the Theatre Guild, Ghostlight, and South Park Tavern in the stretch btween Third and Wyoming.

Yeah, we all are familiar with the West End areils, but was interesting is the east side of downtown, which we dont see much. This would be that railroad complex at the end of Reading Road and I guess Eggleston Avenue shooting down to the river. Fascinating.

Back in the 1990s there was a wave of indie coffee shops in Dayton city, starting with Front Street. These faded and all that was left was Boston Stoker, the Pacchia coffee shop (now Sidebar), and Seattle East (now Ohio Coffee), and North River (not sure if its still open). Seems like indie coffee culture is returing to Dayton. Two more are going to opening soon: Press (on Wayne, but maybe a gallery as much as a coffee shop? Ghostlight, also on Wayne, but in South Park.

The former Wympee at Third & Wayne is being turned into "Olive, An Urban Dive". Apparently the city is giving them a hard time about that "Wympee" signage, that they need to have taken it down, or get a variance to keep it. There some discussion of this at the "Olive" Facebook page and at the Esrati blog.