steeber

Thanks. While I completely agree that I wouldn't want to spend a shopping day at the wig shops and bad pawnbrokers, there's something about a city which naturally deteriorates a little - or settles in on itself - which is simply more authentic. The tendency, then, is to declare "blight" and re-do everything -- Napoleon-style. When they renovated Grand Central Terminal in New York, they threw out the character with the shmutz. Hence, you can no longer show people from whence it all came, as if twenty, thirty, even forty years of history never happened. That's all.

They do them all the time. The Miami became about a third of a department store. It worked. But the whole complex was imploded for the Schuster Center. When in doubt - implode.

I'll never forget driving by on Salem and seeing that the Beth Abraham windows were now clear glass. That did not feel good, needless to say. I have a whole series of photographs of the sanctuary, with windows intact. May share one or two of them. I do know about DaytonHistoryBooks.com They do have great images - true. By the way, did you know that the B-52 was invented at the Van Cleve? You can find that on Boeing.com. Thanks, and my condolences. I've no parents left, so I know all about it.

Our families may have met somewhere. Was it Beth Abraham? Losing a parent as a part of something makes it even harder. I do know this because my father (whom I lost in '09) was the catering manager of the Hotel Miami (across the street from the future Beerman's site) for a few years, shortly before it became a part of Rike's. Just found some hotel material which I will share. My parents were wed in the Sky Terrace. My mother's first job was at Yeck and Yeck. I believe they may have been located in the Kuhn's Building. My great Aunts and grandmother knew the Arcade when it was brand-new. Two aunts worked "at the NCR" as they would put it. I was bar mitzvahed at Temple Israel. Most interesting! The Van Cleve I only know from lore, sadly. My mother apparently slightly rebuffed my father when she met him, claiming to favor the Van Cleve in some way over the Miami. It was a lot newer. That favoritism didn't last. The Van Cleve had the famous Wagon Wheel Bar and apparently great food. The rooms were tiny, though. I know Nathan Milstein (the famed violinist) stayed there once. It was very close to the Miami. That parking lot still wants its hotel back. So - Irving Bloom, et al? I did have some Hebrew school in the old Community House connected to the sanctuary. Mrs. Fox was my primary teacher. I did two years of Hillel too, and I know that's moved. As they say - small world. It was Temple Israel, so our families may have crossed paths. My Bar Mitzvah was there in 1979. I just saw your post on the Miami Hotel. Amazing. My parents were married in the Van Cleve Hotel, which I think was just up Ludlow Street from the Miami.

It's fine. Oh, these keyboards do slip. Luckily it was RAPID, and I caught my plane with a minute to spare. A Cleveland Brown was placed in the middle seat (in coach) - almost crushing me. No wonder they left town for a while.

Thanks for caching the error.

Here's something to stroll by: http://fav.me/d39d4qi I happened to take the earlier shot, having trained into the city on the Rapid, between flights. I checkout out the same block (across from The Arcade) and found it had been utterly transformed. As always, the earlier shot represents the "real" city, before it was kind of snuffed out. But compare and decide for yourself. Cleveland's still a plumb!

Thanks to some discovered treasure in my personal effects, I can now offer a brief tour of the long-departed Miami Hotel -- since 1960 and until 1999, the red part of Rike's (or Shillito-Rikes, Lazarus, or what you will). My personal connection to this is my father. He was catering manager at the hotel for a couple of years just prior to the hotel's sale to Federated Department stores. My father met my mother at the hotel and as fate would have it catered his own wedding there. He was married at the Sky Terrace (at rooftop), and the sizable reception was held in the elegant Empire Ballroom. It's hard to imagine how much the social scene has changed since 1958. The family photos show a huge buffet table tended to by chefs and servers. It would have sufficed for a state dinner. My parents had their first apartment there, at the hotel. I still have one of the chairs. The Miami was built 1912-1913. Its lobby somewhat resembled (in its Edwardian style) some of the public rooms aboard the Titanic, which went down the year the Miami opened (after drying out from the Great Dayton Flood). I remember my father describing for me (as I had to know) the cloisonne porcelain lamps in the lobby. You'll note the formal service on the tables in the dining room. The Purple Cow Coffee Shop (part of the Albert Pick chain) entered from Second Street. The Adam Room required that guests enter through the lobby, which apparently was a bit of an issue for unaccompanied women. Traversing a lobby alone, in the late 50's, was still considered unseemly for a single woman. All of this was chiseled apart (even the gold leaf ceiling in the Adam Room) in 1960. Shoes were sold where the Adam Room held forth. Part of the Empire Ballroom became the Rike's Auditorium. You may remember it located on the Mezzanine. The stage was retained. Virtually nothing else was. This material comes from two sources: a hotel handbook and a convention prospectus.

To have this degree of foresight and appreciation for the things around you as a high schooler, no matter how many of these shots were simply a product of a love for photography, is something I wish I had at that point in my life. I think where I am now would have been much different. It wouldn't have even crossed my mind several years ago to document what I see on a daily basis. For all I knew, it would always be there. I don't know how much insight I felt I had at the time. I simply couldn't get away from the subject. {I'm smitten with the same obsession in NY.} It took me over. And it was a nice convergence with my growing love of photography. As you, I wish I could have been on the scene 5 years earlier -- shooting even more and having a good 35mm SLR, so I could shoot a lot more. The main camera I used offered 12 exposures, and even then the film was 89 cents a roll. What is fortunate was just my not giving up. I kept going back. Sadly, I did lose a whole roll of Arcade Market shots, made just before the arcade closed for renovation. Thanks for the kind comment.

This image (an 8x10 glossy) was given to me by the Reibold Building manager, sometime in 1977. I think it's from about 1967. It clearly shows S.S. Kresge's terra cotta store (circa 1920) and building adjacent to the Reibold. The building is missing its original small stone steeples which made it look a bit like an art deco castle. The Reibold Building itself has just lost its ornamental renaissance revival entrance, in favor of a soulless modernization in brickwork. Interestingly, the Kresge structure had replaced the Merrick Furs structure seen in this post card view: It was a shorter building. As such, ads were painted on the north side of the Canby Building, probably in the earliest years of the XXth Century. When the taller structure was razed (sometime around 1975/6), the final ads to be painted before the taller building enclosed them, were revealed. We can see that the Blommel Sign Company had placed the ads on the wall, surrounded by a trompe l'oeil Greek Revival frame. Above that is a photographic studio ad, which may have referred to a business inside the building. None of this mattered, as the two remaining structures were raised the following year (about 1978).

Thanks very much... I will keep going!

Our families may have met somewhere. Was it Beth Abraham? Losing a parent as a part of something makes it even harder. I do know this because my father (whom I lost in '09) was the catering manager of the Hotel Miami (across the street from the future Beerman's site) for a few years, shortly before it became a part of Rike's. Just found some hotel material which I will share. My parents were wed in the Sky Terrace. My mother's first job was at Yeck and Yeck. I believe they may have been located in the Kuhn's Building. My great Aunts and grandmother knew the Arcade when it was brand-new. Two aunts worked "at the NCR" as they would put it. I was bar mitzvahed at Temple Israel.

Thanks gentlemen (or gentle people) for the encouragement. These images have power in them, and they are affecting me too. I will share what I have. I think the push should be, always, to reinvest in Downtown Dayton (and Dayton in general and as a whole) in the spirit a worthy city with a grand past and endless potential (as I've always thought). 1976 or 77: Note the hatter ("Wormser - Hatters to Men") and Fanny Farmer in the American Buidling. The lamp in the foreground was there when Lincoln spoke, just a few feet away.

Sheraton should have spent some real money on it but mainly changed the designation. The well-liked coffee shop was retained, but the rooftop dining room was no longer anything special. Truthfully, I wondered why the restaurant was built facing the industrial belt. Facing West would have made a lot more sense. The hotel was an unusual pre-fab building. The outer walls were cast first, out of reinforced concrete. It met the same fate as another 60's hotel relic (which I liked as well) -- the Christopher Inn in Columbus.

The very same. At best, these Rolleiflex negatives reveal stunning clarity and tone. My negatives were produced under varying conditions, are 30+ years old, and have seen a lot of weather conditions. So I'm getting great to fair results. The Rolleiflex was lent to me by my father, who bought it new in 1960 (or about). I think it needed a good cleaning by the late 70's. Not sure the meter and the shutter were always getting along by then. I still have this magnificent camera. I may load it up again and try it out. Some of the other shots came from a Leica (which got sold a long time ago) and a Tower (Leica copy from Japan). The wide angle on the Tower was decent. The 50mm lens was cloudy. These days our tools are a bit more advanced, but it's still hard to produce really top quality.

In trying to capture seemingly hundreds of frames, it may be easier to group them into themes. I've scanned some negatives which revealed scenes I hadn't looked upon since taking them, 34 or more years ago. A few: One of the most over-looked but masterful-looking buildings (owing to its location - kind of off to the side). This is grand deco. When it was the Ohio Bell Building (one of two Downtown), I tried to visit the lobby. The guard wouldn't have it. But I saw a glorious one. This muddy shot (thanks, always to office building window tinting) was obviously from the First National Building -- a nice tower I once explored while still brand-new. You could travel from floor to floor, enjoying the views -- not a guard or any other person in sight. I still remember that 'new building' smell. Ah, 1974. The Grant-Deneau (since horribly re-named "The Miami Valley Tower", then "40 West 4th Centre") was a great place from which to see the city. It would have been a great place for a roof-level cafe. This is 1977 or so. Another view from the same tower. Courthouse Square was in its brand-new expanded state, not quite completed. 1977 Elder-Beerman as a shiny, new department store - 1977. State Fidelity Savings, right, was quite new -- not yet open to cars and people. This was sort of a return to the Reibold Building. I'd say this is about March 1978. At this point, The Mall Motor Inn had become a Sheraton. The Ted Parker restaurant had been transmogrified into a lesser thing called "The Sundowner". The Elder Beerman store sits empty, waiting for what should have been another tenant. That was a great set of windows. This is a lost view. I shot it from Rike's parking garage. The current garage doesn't afford anything like this view, and even if it did, you wouldn't see the Old Post Office - now thoroughly shrouded by the Municipal Parking Garage. Again - March '78, I remember being a guest of the Dayton Chamber of Commerce (19th floor of Winter's Tower) through a high school project. I had shot from there before, but this time, I wanted something a bit more comprehensive. I shot images of Downtown as though it were all about to go away. Somehow, I knew that this could all be temporal. The march of time was tearing down everything in sight. The above is a brand-new composite. The 75mm lens made this fairly easy, although it has a weird unwrapped-globe appearance. I have good negatives for all of the views. There are all kinds of little treasures to be mined here. It was fun revisiting these. As I go along, particularly given interest, I'll add more of what I have. For the purposes of sharing via the 'Net, these have been sampled way down. More to come.

These things were all over the bulletin boards in college -- super cheap "Hollywood grade" movie film usable in your camera. I never got around to ordering any. There was enough decent film on campus.

Very nice job on this... so much energy devoted to the subject. Glad this city inspired you to do it.

I'm continuing to modify this section.

Glad to offer the pictures. There are many more -- some even surprising me. I was remembering the apartment buildings in Westbrook Village. I know there were houses behind our unit in Castlebrook (which was once a recommended place to live). I didn't know they may have been a part of the same complex.

RS: So glad you posted these. They date from a time when I had just spent a school year in Dayton -- 3rd Grade -- Cornell Heights School. My family settled in Toledo that summer, so I lost a bit of time with the Gem City. I recall riding through Dayton with my Aunt in 1970/71. She was frustrated at the state of the "dirty" old courthouse (perhaps "new" too) and proclaimed that somebody needed "to do something with it". She also pointed out the brand-new Winter's Tower. Both she and my mother were born and raised in Dayton, so the city, for me, was viewed in glimpses, during visits. My favorite place of all, at that time: the Dayton Museum of Natural History. I had spent a little pre-Kindergarten in Dayton, in '67. Two things stuck out then -- the Victory (Disney) Theatre, where I saw Bambi, and Tikes/Santa Land -- wherever Santa Claus held forth, on the 8th Floor of Rike's. I remember standing in line to see the corner windows. You're quite right about the social landscape at that time. Society has been pulling itself apart since about 1966. Great to see a little bit of Malone's windows and some forgotten vestpocket business along Main (so many!!). It was Loew's -- basically the distribution and theater company for MGM. Dayton had one of the nicest of its houses. I watched it go. Thanks again. Great collection. Got more?

In Bing Maps it appears to be basic slate grey now. Perhaps they should revive the decorative effect and have it featured on-line. A contest?

Growing up, the upstairs dining room was one of my favorite haunts. I think they shared some of the career waitresses with the dining room Downtown. All of that was part of a service age we have been convincing ourselves we no longer need or want. Having a family connection there would be even harder.

That's too sad to contemplate for any length.

Wow. I wandered around through the unfinished Westbrook Village, at the time that my family moved to Castlebrook - Summer of '74. Driving through that complex a couple of years ago sent chills through me. It was a perfect fossil! I do remember the municipal garage going up. Must have been '79. Nice to meet you, and thanks for commenting!