Jeffery

Believe it or not I have been cycling to Austin Landing!....on Sunday morning to do some shopping at that Kroger.....this place has a lot of potential to be bikeable at least. I come up over the top at Waldruh, but there is a very nice bike trail parallelling Austin Road north of the airport....it seems like they are set up to extend it across Spring Valley to connect with the developement....

Which brings to mind that Ohio has offered two of the better songs on modern urban issues...Youngstown and My City Was Gone.....anthems of the rust belt....

Music journalism deconstructing the different ways The Boss has performed this excellent (to me, anyway) song, and the audience reception Music Scenes: “Youngstown”: Springsteen’s Representation of a City Affected by the New Depression In this essay, three variations of the song will be considered: the album recording, a performance in the city of Youngstown, Ohio, and a 2009 live cut on tour with the E Street Band. Variations in instrumentation, vocal timbre, and tempo in each performance provide distinctive characterizations of the steelworker and the city, each embodying the varied and complex lived realities of Youngstown and its citizens in a postindustrial society.

That Krogers in Lexington is in Chevy Chase. This is sort of a 1920s era neighborhood which has a sort of "Watervliet Avenue in Belmont" (for Dayton people) feel....mix of 1940s/30s/50s retail surrounded by older houses. The transition era btw walkable and auto-oriented retail. Demographically and market-wise, Chevy Chase is sort of like Hyde Park Square and O'Bryanville...upscale. "I'm From Chevy Chase and You're Not", like the bumper sticker said (the pun works only with old-school SNL fans). It's not really a campus-oriented shopping area, tho it does draw on UofK for customers. Chevy Chase has been densifying, and this is new Kroger is a good example of where this is headed. It also conforms to a sort of new policy direction in Lexington to densify within the older parts of the city vs expanding their urban services area....plus, given the affluent market, this store could be a moneymaker for Kroger.....

Reported in the Dayton Daily News: Study Leads to Big Ideas for Dayton City officials are beginning to discuss results of the new Greater West Dayton Development Study. But two Plan Board members said this week the study doesn’t go far enough — suggesting instead that the city empty out entire neighborhoods and level them to rebuild. ...unfortunatly the study is not available on-line. The article does say that the money isnt there to do this wholesale demolition/reconstruction program, and that people actually living in the 'Inner West' might want a bit-by-bit peacemeal approach that is do-able... I titled this thread the 'Youngstown Solution' since I think this is what was proposed in Y-town...wholesale demolition and deconmmisioning of neighborhoods. In the Dayton example it seems they are talking more about reconstruction....which is more the 'Buffalo Solution', as they are apparently doing this in the neighborhoods east of downtown Buffalo.....

Hah..I was just back in this area...as part of a community gardens bicycle tour! There is a big garden on Troy Street next to that donut place (Granny C), and an abandonded garden very close to the apartments in these pix.... ....was hosted by the Campfire Girls (or "Camp Fire" as they are now called), but Campfire closed and the garden is going to seed. They apparently were getting vandalism from the apartments (kids tearing up and uprooting stuff)....sounds sort of depraved, when you think about it...vandalizing a garden for kicks....kids these days....

I've been reading a book on Snobbery (sort of light reading, tho I got the book from the UD library)....the last chapter or essay is called "With It- ism" as a form of snobbery.....which puts Hipsters in an interesting light, as perhaps a new take on the snob.

Perhaps, at one time, South Lebanon? Are there places you avoid because of your race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation? I was tuning in that signal when I first moved here. For me, as a place to live, East Dayton and parts of Springfield. Passing through?, ok. To live there, out-of-the-closet?, No way. I'd feel safer as a gay person in certain black parts of Dayton than i would in East Dayton.

Waukegan, Elgin, Aurora, and Joliet used to be called the "Satellite Cities"...and they were as you describe. Small industrial cities. Sort of like Hamilton, Middletown, and Springfield. Especially Hamilton since its on a river. That Fox River valley that has Aurora and Elgin was a bit like the Great Miami running btw Dayton and the Cincy area....there are smaller towns along it that used to be small factory/trading towns: Carpentersville (which had a big old factory/mill along the river), Geneva, St Charles, Batavia...sort of like Miamisburg, Franklin, West Carollton, Excello, and so forth. The Fox River valley between Aurora and Elgin was a built-up area beyond suburbia back in those days...suburban development pretty much ended at Wheaton and Naperville, and maybe Roselle...and you were in a countryside of flat to rolling cornfields & open farmland & "high prairie" .....towns like Bartlett and West Chicago were "out in the country" (West Chicago is an interesting case as its not really a suburb, either)..... Anyway, good call...not really suburbia. All these satellite citys would be familiar environments to Ohioans who know our own small industrial cities.

Elgin. Wow. A blast from the past, for sure! This was the end-of-the-line for the old Milwaukee Road commuter trains that ran from Union Station west...through my old neighborhood (Cragin). During summers when my grandfather had a vacation, we'd catch the train and ride it to the end of the line in Elgin (a treat for me, my sister, and my two cousins, who lived in the same building as us). The station was across the Fox River from downtown, and there was an island park in the river. Back then (1960s) downtown Elgin was pretty busy, so we'd walk into town. There was a short-order diner place in the ground floor of that little art deco high rise, the "Tower Grill", and my grandfather bought has grilled cheese, BLTs, milk shakes & floats...then we walked back, to that island park and to catch the train into the city (there still was a lot of open country btw Chicago and Elgin back then). There also used to be a big foundery directly on the river across from that island, near the station (north of the station). You could peek in the windows into the murky interior and seeing guys tap the furnances, and feel the heat My grandfather used to tell me I'd end up working in a place like that if I didn't get a college education (lol...& I was still a kid).... The other big industry in Elgin was Elgin Watch, which had a huge plant on the south side of town (sort like that big Crowe Collier factory in Springfield). I think that was replaced by a casino or shopping center. Thanks for the memories...

When you hear this was a mining boomtown youd expect a lot of jerry built stuff. Instead this place looks fairly substantial. A lot of brick apartment buidlings. Neat seeing those baby highrises, too.

Club 13! Nice... ...ink, did you get into any of the older neighborhoods to do some side-street pix?

Well, I was pretty negative about it in an earlier post. But as a way of making this interchange more competetive with those other interrchanges, it is a clever marketing ploy to say management/white collar take-home pay would be more here than in, say, Middletown or Franklin.

Just in this developement (or whatever is covered by the JEDD, which might extend beyond the development a bit).

How do they do this "exemption"...read about it here: Income Tax Looms for Some At Austin Road ...pretty clever, huh?

The thing that intrigues me about this is how the structured the tax collection from the JEDD...essentially expemting white collar employees from the local income tax collection. This might make the office development at this interchange more competetive vis a vis competiting sites on I-75?

De-Nile. A river in Egypt. Or what the design does to the urban context. I was expecting the "it's ALL good" spin and y'all aint disappointing! ;-)

Funny about these parish names since they are the same in Chicago. My dad and aunt went to a St Hyacinth in Chicago (Avondale) while my grandfather and I were baptized at St Stans B&M (Cragin). Last time I was in Cleveland (Fall of 2010) I was in that St Stans neighborhood and I think I got a coffee and donut or something in that coffee shop across from the church.

^ yeah, its sort of a pocket with good geogrpahic boundaries.... Warzawa is that area off Fleet and arouind St Stans?

Drove by the casino last month during a visit to Cincy. Man that is one butt-ugly building. I dont see how this is any assett at all to the city aside from a tax revenue generator. It has ZERO relationship to the nearby neighborhoods. Essentially you could pick it up and plop it in some suburban development and it would fit in better than it does. In fact for a city location it would fit in nicely in Queensgate. What a POS!

Bootsy Collins?

Great post. I'd rep you if I could. Yeah, street gang action helped change over one or two neigjhborhoods in Chicago that Im familiar with (the gang in question back then was the Blackstone Rangers). An good note on why Little Italy stayed Italian. There was an artcile in Urban History (an academic journal) a few years ago that gave the history on how the Mafia and local neighborhood guys kept things in line during the 1960s and 1970s, thus giving Little Italy a rep as a no-go area for the thug element.

Instead, they say, the change mirrors a national trend in which a growing number of companies abandon downtown skyscrapers for suburban office parks, where rent is generally cheaper, parking is often free and payroll taxes tend to be lower. This is what happened to Dayton. Taking a quick look at the article I do not see what you all are bent out of shape about. It seems factual, data-driven.... It also puts a postive spin about the work remaining in downtown Cincy is better-paid, maybe more managerial/professional....just the kind of people who would buy into lofts/condos in the surrounding areas and in downtown proper, and who would support hip & cutting edge eating and drinking places and upscale retail. The lower paying jobs go to suburbia, along with the lower paid workers...which is sort of what you all are advocating here at UO, isn't it? That downtown and center city areas become gentrified and thus preserved and revitalized and the poor and lower paid..along with their jobs... get suffled off to....the suburbs.

It's a priority since governments are representaive, and respond to the desires of the voters and politically active influentials. Middle- and Upper-middle class suburbanites vote and contribute to the political process, so policy-making is going to respond.... The interchange and road improvements was engineered by ODOT, but a substantial amount of the construction funding came from a joint-venture TIF, which means the interchange was locally subsidized. The rationale for the county (Montgomery County) to support it was that it would be a source--long term--of tax revenue. The county was being hurt by economic development shifting..over a 25 yr period--to the I-675 corridor, meaning it was mostly happening in Greene County. This was seen as a way as getting in on the action...but to the south, since this was the other big growth corridor in the region. The devlopement and funding of this interchange was a good example of ad-hoc coordination and cooperation btw different levels of government: funding, land aquisition, design, and construction.

So, is someone going to do a before & after comparison post?