Highway59

Yes, yes; Salem Avenue had a thriving business district stretching from Riverview Avenue up past Grand; Salem and Grand being a big deal (everyone remembers Sully's in the terra cotta building on the corner!) up through the 1960's when things fell apart. Shannon Buick was down where Reichard Buick is now, with shops carry-outs, drive-ins and even a Liberal's grocery, running up both sides of the street until you got up to Oxford Avenue, or thereabouts. I remember my cousin and I playing around Liberal's until closing waiting for my uncle to get off work, circa 1964 or so. Once you drove up to the Temple Israel/Catalpa Drive area, the business area picked up again with a lot of street-level mom-and-pop shops, and getting more and more commercial past Good Sam at Philadelphia, past the Goody Goody, on up to the next Liberal's at Siebenthaler. I would argue that through the mid-'60's, Salem was the happen' street in Dayton. City lights and trackless trollies; what else could you ask for?

It's in St. Anne's Hill, I believe. Ohio needs more Arts and Crafts homes. Speaking of Arts & Crafts homes, there's a fantastic little A&C bungalow on the corner of Waldo and Manette, at the Wayne Avenue back entrance to Woodland Cemetery that's going to waste/rot, but still standing; I think I'd have to try to save it if I still lived in town. A perfect porch. And one small architectural gem that was lost was the little "Italian"cement staircase with ornate wrought-iron railings going up the side of the white house that used to stand next to Esther Price Candies on Wayne, just a block northeast of this bungalow. You can still see it on the Google Street View if you switch back to the June 2011 street shot; it's all gone by the November 2015 picture. I've drive by that a million times and never noticed it there. I would have liked to have bought the whole thing and reassembled it elsewhere; too perfect to just scrape into the landfill...

That old Montgomery County (Dayton) postcard shows the "Old" fully-restored court house on the left, which is still proudly standing at the corner of Third and Main, the "New" court house (it was called that when I was a kid) just to the right of it and torn down when I was in high school in the mid-'70's with the rest of that block (except for the "Old" court house) and then the old DP&L building to the right of the "New" court house that they tore down in the '70's (a very confusing period for all of us in Dayton at the time.) There's a nice photo up there of the restored OLD court house with the NEW DP&L building behind it. That whole block was Urban-renewaled into "Court House Plaza" in the '70's and contained the OLD court house, the NEW DP&L building, the 28 story headquarters tower for Mead Corporation and a six-story Elder Beerman store. I believe all of those buildings are nearly empty now except for the OLD court house. (Yeah, yeah, Beerman's is now some County office thing, but whatever; it all seems gone with the wind to a Native Daytonian now...)

The jpeg file is too large to upload. My apologies; I'll try to figure out another way to get it displayed here; it's worth it...

OK, let's try jpg. format...

Let's try that picture one more time...

I know I'm a little late to the party here, but once I saw this series of posts I thought it would be a perfect spot to share this picture of Dayton circa 1930 or so. Note the Hulman Building (what's a Liberty Tower??) under construction, dating this shot to either 1930 or 1931. I remember saying when I first found this picture that "Dayton was bigger when it was smaller." I guess it was the whole density concept that escaped us all until we found ourselves in sterile, paved cornfields, trying to remember the Haymarket, Maple Street, and the flat-iron building that used to stand at the western edge of First Street before the bridge to Salem Avenue. I found this photo in some old encyclopedia, a Compton's maybe.