steeber

My mother was born in Dayton. I was not, but I came to know the city through visits there, beginning in the mid-sixties. By '74, I was permanently settled there, and Dayton became my education in urban planning, urban failure, urban triumph. Sadly, I tended to suffer the changes I was seeing -- having arrived at one of the worst decades for cities in the so-called Rust Belt. The urban renewal mindset is one I shall never understand completely, but it comes from a lack of feeling for history, detail, and just living in general. Just the same, I was learning photography from that very time and managed to capture some of my adopted city. I had spent a few years in Toledo, where I enjoyed specific things, like the Art Museum and Zoo. But I never got to know that town with any real intimacy. It was experienced in flashes and little adventures. Dayton was the real experience and gave me a perch from which to watch the country change, often very destructively, with the times. Looking at the attached picture, we see a view made from within Midtown Dayton, looking toward the South East. The view dates to the mid-to-late 1970's. The parking lot at the foreground has long since been usurped by a large municipal garage. Next to the parking lot is the landmark Municipal Building, constructed, originally, as a YMCA and used for that purpose until the 1920's, when the much larger Y was built along the river and Monument Avenue. A bit of The Dayton Inn is visible -- a horribly-modernized fin-de-siecle hotel originally known as the Algonquin (constructed 1899). For most of its Twentieth Century life it was known as The Gibbons Hotel and was the city's principal hotel until 1913 when the Hotel Miami was constructed at 2nd and Ludlow Streets. Around 1981 the hotel was renovated, brought up to code, given a luxury designation, and renamed The Daytonian. Unfortunately, the tastless maroon skin remained in place until more recent years when the Hilton Corporation removed it and restored a portion of the hotel's former classical beauty. Left of the hotel you can see the Third Street entrance to the Arcade Market -- easily recognizable by its Flemish facade. Well behind the facade is the dark hump of a dome which once covered the city's principal market house (as of 1904). The Arcade, a national landmark, had yet to undergo a massive renovation which would bring it firmly into the late Twentieth Century as an urban mall in 1980. The dome, at that point, became glass and steel -- as per its original purpose to act as a large-scale skylight and ornamental nexus for the city. Virtually everything else in the picture remains, save for the modernistic tromp l'oeil design (six bars, painted in perspective) on the Then-Centre City Building, previously known as the Knott Building and before that the UB Building -- a publisher and printer. In the distance is the very new Stouffer's Dayton Plaza Hotel (1976) - designed to serve the convention trade. It is now a Crowne Plaza hotel.