BigDipper 80

^That's because all the pedestrians were at the ballpark! :laugh: In all seriousness though, downtown definitely struggles with actually having feet on the street outside of the Oregon District, which makes downtown *look* a lot less vibrant than it is. You can wander toward Warped Wing or Century Bar and be the only person around for a half mile, but once inside it's absolutely packed with people. It's a very strange dynamic that makes areas feel a lot more dead than they actually are. I might have to draw up a map that shows everything that's already been rehabbed or is currently occupied, because so much of the stuff flies right under the radar.

With the amount of new projects going on in the 3 C's right now, it's impossible to keep track of it all (heck, most of you can barely keep track of what's going on in your own back yard much less the other two C's!), so it's easy to forget that there's exciting stuff happening in Ohio's smaller cities too. Downtown Dayton has seen some phenomenal growth over the past couple of years, and 2017 is really shaping up to be a game-changing year for the city's central core. I've tried my best to document the projects that have either just finished up, are under construction, or should hopefully break ground this year below. Let's start with a quick map of downtown, highlighting everything that's taking off here. Red blocks are proposed/about to break ground, orange blocks are under construction, and green blocks have wrapped up construction within the past year or so. 1. 2. Let's start with the elephant in the room... the Arcade. 3. The University of Dayton recently announced its plans to rehab the complex, but I haven't seen any timeline for this project yet. Supposedly it's underway though! 4. Right now, I'm taking a "wait and see" approach. 5. Everything in this photo is slated to be fixed up soon: from fore to back - the old Dayton Daily News building, Arcade Square, and the Centre City tower. 6. This was slated to become apartments/dorms for Sinclair College but it fell through. The city cleaned up the lot to prep it for re-sale. 7. The Dayton Grand Hotel, a block north of the DDN building, is supposedly undergoing renovations to be completed at the end of 2017, but I haven't seen any progress at all on this project. 8. A little further up Ludlow is the new Hannah's Bar, which is the first proper bar to open up west of Courthouse Square. 9. The 111 Building, near Hannah's, is soon going to be home to Taylor Communcations. 10. Jumping back to the corner of Fourth and Main, we find Dave Hall Plaza, where the Levitt Pavilion is supposed to break ground soon. That's a good thing - this "park" right now is pretty useless and sketchy. 11. The Centre City building is slated to become apartments/condos if they ever get their financing in order. 12. Another angle on the Centre City building. 13. One of the biggest projects currently underway is the $100m Fire Blocks District. A whole bunch of buildings along Third have been bought up and are in various stages of renovation. The brown building in the center is currently being converted to office space with ground level retail, and the red building will be apartments, with restaurants joining the Century Bar on the ground level. 14. The new owners have kicked out most of the sketchy bars and porn shops that used to be in these buildings. There's plans to add retail and dining downstairs with residential up top, and hopefully a grocery store when the market conditions are right. 15. Every building in this photo is owned by the Fire Blocks group. The metal facade should be coming off the Price building soon in preparation for its conversion into a hotel. I've got some renderings of the District I can post if folks are interested. 16. This formerly-sketchy nightclub was bought by some flippers and fixed up last year and is currently sitting vacant at the corner of Fourth and St. Clair. 17. A little further down are these new townhomes by Charlie Simms, who is also the developer behind... 18. ...these... houses? Fortresses? Abominations? The next time any of you from the 3 C's complain about bad infill, just remember that you don't have this monstrosity in your central business district. 19. Simms also built these, which are a bit better, but still mostly just a box with a cornice. But hey, at least he sees the value in investing in downtown, and his projects seem to sell pretty well. 20. They're right near the Second Street Market, which I'm sure is convenient for the homeowners. 21. The old DP&L plant around the corner from the market is currently undergoing an office conversion. 22. The Oregon District is technically its own neighborhood but the CVB considers it part of downtown so I figured I'd at least show off the new Oregon East/Wheelhouse development. It's coming together very nicely, with retail below and residential upstairs. 23. Also somewhat new is Crafted and Cured, a charcuterie and beer shop. They recently opened a raw bar in their building as well. 24. There's rumblings about the Paru Tower (the one with the cornice) getting renovated soon, but it's currently still empty. 25. Even Sinclair College is getting in on the construction craze, with this thoroughly disappointing health science building. 26. Nothing new here (well the condos in the background are new-ish), I just wanted to point out the plaque of how high the water got during the 1913 flood! 27. Both of these townhome complexes are new within the past few years. 28. Cooper Park, downtown's main park, finally has the fence down (although the grass hasn't all grown back yet). It was closed off during construction of the new main library, in the background. 29. The library is supposed to wrap up at the end of the summer. It's a huge improvement over the old one from the 1960s, but not as cool as the original Romanesque one that used to sit here. 30. The Delco Lofts are slated to be done in July. They've done an incredible job renovating the old warehouse. 31. Phase 1 of the Water Street district is done, which includes offices, apartments and townhomes, but Phase 2 is supposed to break ground soon and will include more offices and a hotel. 32. The Oregon District's 5th Street Deli is slated to move into this block and change into a barcade soon. 33. Germantown's Mudlick Tap House is uprooting itself from Germantown and relocating to this building, which was a former sketchy nightclub. You know you're doing something right when downtown is poaching exurban bars! 34. Unfortunately, the Mudlick Tap House is right across from the dead zone that is the Masque club parking lot. It's such a prime location on Cooper Park that I really would hope it gets at least downsized at some point. The long building with all the windows is part of the Fire Blocks District, for reference. 35. This little guy at First and Jefferson is slated to become home to a mental health company, Access Ohio. 36. The only skyline-changer currently under construction is the new 7-story CareSource expansion along First. It's basically just going to be a shorter clone of their other tower at Main and Monument. 38. (Not pictured at the moment) Riverscape park recently finished up building little waterfall runs for kayakers in the Great Miami River. I think people from outside the Valley are surprised at how many recreation options there are here, but I always see people paddling in the river and Dayton has a remarkably strong biking culture, with some of the best trail networks in the state except for maybe the Towpath. 39. We'll wrap up with a photo of the biggest completed project in recent memory - I-75 is finally done! I think that just about covers all the exciting stuff happening in downtown Dayton... that doesn't mean that the inner ring neighborhoods are being left behind though... not by a long shot! But that may be a topic for a future post. Hopefully this helped give you a little bit of insight into some of the developments happening here in the Gem City!

Unless it was an historic flood like the 1913 flood which sent the contents of the Northern Ohio Lumber & Timber Co. out into Lake Erie. But there's been a lot of fill dirt added to the interior of Scranton Peninsula. And I'm hearing the rim of the peninsula will either remain parkland such as along Scranton Road or become parkland such as along Carter Road. Was this 1913 flood caused by the same massive storm system that led to the Miami Valley flood that same year?

I feel like that Rusted Root song found its way into a bunch of movies in the late 90s, I remember hearing it everywhere for a short period.

More great news for 3rd Street! Now if only someone will buy that former car dealership building at 3rd and Mound and turn it into a brewery for my sake...

WRRM and WGRR were the bane of my existence when I lived in Cincinnati. I have a conspiracy theory that Bob & Marianne and Chris & Janeen are actually the same people, since their morning shows are exactly the same.

The real question is, are there enough garage spots for Dusty to stop complaining about the ones that got taken out near his office for the streetcar? :laugh:

If you haven't been to Naptown in a while, it's time to take a road trip to visit our friends next door! The Circle City isn't so sleepy these days. -- To get to Indy from Dayton, you have to pass through Richmond. Like a lot of Indiana towns, it has some great commercial stock downtown. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. A quick pop over to the capitol building while we let the sky open up and pour for a while... 11. 12. 13. I got to be an Indiana legislator for a day! Well, a few minutes... well, I didn't actually get to pass any bills... they probably didn't want an Ohioan in the legislature. 14. "Hey babe, let me help you with that" 15. 16. 17. Cummins loves architecture, and I love their new building downtown. 18. 19. I call this the LEGO building. 20. 21. Chicagoesque. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. Indy has rowhouses? Whaaa? 27. 28. 29. 30. Popping over to MassAve for a hot second. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. I'll have to plead ignorant on what neighborhood this was from... somewhere on the north side. 37. It's like a fully-restored Glenville or Old West End or something! 38. More Chicago nonsense (in the best way, of course). 39. 40. Of course no tour of Indy is complete without a stop in Woodruff Place. 41. 42. 43. 44. Fountains weren't on yet, but the 'hood is even better when they're running. Get over there and check it out for yourself!

I think the complaint isn't so much that "downtown dwellers don't want suburbanites coming to their neighborhood", it's that they come in and go out for the one event and trash other peoples' home without really going out and patronizing the neighborhood. They eat, make a mess of Fifth Street, and then leave never to think about downtown until next year or until Oktoberfest. It's a different crowd than if that crowd actually dispersed throughout the basin and would spend some time at Smale and then maybe go up the Carew Tower and ride over to Rhinegeist before getting dinner at Senate. I do agree that it's a pretty fine line though, and honestly it's kind of impossible to try and demonized an event or group of people so large that will be filled with many different sorts of folks with different motives for visiting. As Josh said, even a tiny bit of exposure can be a good thing.

The downtown crowd isn't exactly Taste's market. It's the same obnoxious crowd that goes to Oktoberfest, but it revolves around eating "small plates" from local restaurants which IMO isnt that appealing when you're surrounded by those same restaurants at Taste on a daily basis and not making the trip down from Applebeesland for a day to try "tasting menus".

Not to derail this train further (he says as he shoves the train off the tracks), but that's pretty much anywhere with a captive audience. It's just as bad at Cedar Point, which is why I usually just keep a cooler in the trunk instead of buying food. What I don't get is why places like that don't sneak the cost of parking into admission - they could advertise "free" or cheaper parking while on average get more money out of people since the parking surcharge would be per guest instead of per carload.

^This wouldn't surprise me - it's an event where people pay to eat a small amount of food from a local restaurant instead of just going to the restaurant and getting a meal, so I would assume that it attracts those folks who just want to try things and go home without actually going to the actual place downtown, coupled with the fact that you just ate and drank on 5th Street and don't really have an incentive to go up and eat/drink/party/whatever more in OTR unlike Oktoberfest which is obviously more "party all night" oriented.

^You know, a movie about the "real" Elliot Ness and his media-whore antics would probably be really fun to watch. You should sell that script to someone!

Whenever I'm driving around I'm always struck at how prevalent "classic rock" and 80s-format stations still are. In the middle of nowhere you'll pretty much only find country, Jesus, and classic rock. How has the rock and pop from the 70s and 80s managed to be so impervious to changes in musical tastes? I know a lot of music played on stations falls out of favor for a while and then gets picked up again down the road, but I swear there's 50-ish songs that have been played nonstop on the radio for 35 or more years now.

^Purely anecdotal, but I do think people have an irrational fear of traffic and other people, based on conversations I've had with a few people about all the growth at Crocker Park. It's easy to think that it's something more nefarious but really a lot of the time I feel it just comes down to "this is nice how it is right now and these new apartment people will take my parking spot." Yes, these people may be living in a dynamic urban (or faux-urban in the case of Crocker) environment, but I don't think they really comprehend that crowds come with those environments, especially in Ohio.

The 25 best cities in the US for people under the age of 35 Ohio got 3 cities on this dumb-a$$ list: 7. Columbus 16. Cincinnati 23. Dayton Read the rest of the list here: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/22/the-25-best-cities-in-the-u-s-for-millennials.html

McMicken gets my bid, especially around Mohawk place and the stretch west of Ravine as it wraps through the lower portion of Fairview. I also really like State for some reason, I bet it was really great back in the day. East Clifton and Mulberry also have special spots in my heart, that hillside is a neighborhood unlike any other I've been to. Almost forgot to add Dayton Street! Such a phenomenal block. Honestly the basin has so many amazing streets. I'd add Ezzard Charles too if it still had more historic stock along it, just because of the way Union Terminal dominates the view.

You've said it better than I could - having even one building that is significantly taller and set off from the rest of the skyline can really throw things out of whack and diminish the impact of the rest of the skyline. Detroit has the same problem from some angles, where the RenCen just completely dominates everything to the point that it looks to make up an entire third of the skyline.

Swenson's gets a pass, they have good enough food to allow for bad urbanism! :laugh:

One other thing that makes Cincinnati unique among Ohio's cities is that it has a distinctive-enough skyline to avoid being a Houston or a San Diego, but even if the skyline was awful, there are enough showpiece buildings that the city could still have a strong national visual brand. No one raves about New Orleans' or San Antonio's skylines, but one photo of Jackson Square or the Alamo and you already have a vision of the city in your mind. Cincy could easily have had that same image with Music Hall or Union Terminal if its skyline was really crappy.

It depends on the angle which you're viewing the skyline, in my opinion. Each skyline has its' advantages and disadvantages. Cleveland's skyline from Edgewater or from a Clinic garage on the east side is way more impressive than the typical "magazine view" from the Flats or the Innerbelt Bridge or Voinovich Park, and Cincy's best angle IMO is from Mount Echo. Personally, my favorite views of Cincinnati delegate the downtown skyline to the background and instead focus on the rooftops and steeples of OTR and the basin. Columbus' skyline looks the most substantial and impressive when you're heading east on I-70. At any rate, "tallness" in my mind doesn't equal "best". Philip Johnson put it best when he compared the growth of ever-taller skyscrapers to a measuring contest of the phallic variety.

This just blatantly shows how much of a sycophant he is. He's never really cared about things like sanctuary cities or BLM, he just used them to pander for votes, and hopefully this slip-up gets enough people to see that.

THIS is the Vegas I love. There's something about the crappy old hotel towers covered in neon and popcorn lights that still somehow works.

I don't know about that one but I do know the tiny Marburg bridge over the rail ROW is getting replaced, so maybe it's all part of the same thing.

Yeah, "treelawn" and "devil strip" are Cleveland and Akron words, respectively. Practically no one knows what the heck you're talking about outside the respective metros, as I found out multiple times after moving to Cincinnati.