Jeff

agreed...he is the major content provider, and not just in politics, but developement and planning news (Noozer does a good job on that, too...). This is what makes UO an excellent source for whats happenng in the state. I post at a few other specifically political boards, and that Ohio politics subforum and the content there was a big source for me in helping give the local spin on things. Thanks, Grasscat! Noozer, too!

The northern terminus was Dayton...and interestingly there was a light rail proposal for the Dayton end of the line back in the early/mid 1970 (I posted on that a few months ago). I think the line converted to standard gauge sometime in the 1890s, or at least when it was taken over by the Pennsy.

Good job on those maps, Pigboy! Thanks a bunch for posting them. Holmes County sure shows up on these....the Amish vote?

This whole thing reminds me of that old Merle Travis/Tex Williams song that is somewhat popular on old timey/bluegrass radio shows here in Dayton... Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette Now I'm a feller with a heart of gold And the ways of a gentleman I've been told The kind of guy that wouldn't even harm a flea But if me and a certain character met The guy that invented the cigarette I'd murder that son-of-a-gun in the first degree It ain't cuz I don't smoke myself And I don't reckon that it'll harm your health Smoked all my life and I ain't dead yet But nicotine slaves are all the same At a pettin' party or a poker game Everything gotta stop while they have a cigarette Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette Puff, puff, puff and if you smoke yourself to death Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate That you hate to make him wait But you just gotta have another cigarette Now in a game of chance the other night Old Dame Fortune was a-doin' me right The kings and the queens just kept on comin' round And I got a full and I bet 'em high But my bluff didn't work on a certain guy He just kept on raisin' and layin' that money down Now he'd raise me and I'd raise him I sweated blood, gotta sink or swim He finally called and didn't even raise the bet So I said "aces full Pops how 'bout you?" He said "I'll tell you in a minute or two But right now, I gotta have me a cigarette" Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette Puff, puff, puff and if you smoke yourself to death Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate That you hates to make him wait But you just gotta have another cigarette (Ah, smoke it! Hah! Yes! Yes! Yes!) The other night I had a date With the cutest little girl in the United States A high-bred, uptown, fancy little dame She loved me and it seemed to me That things were 'bout like they oughta be So hand in hand we strolled down lover's lane She was oh so far from a cake of ice And our smoochin' party was goin' nice So help me cats I believe I'd be there yet But I give her a kiss and a little squeeze And she said, "ah, Marty, excuse me please I just gotta have me another, cigarette" And she said, smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette Puff, puff, puff and if you smoke yourself to death Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate That you hate to make him wait But you just gotta have another cigarette

I dont smoke, never have, but I voted against this smoking ban. Its just more of this health-and-safety fascism. But also, in the case of Ohio, it could have passed for the same reason Issue 3 failed, and the gay marriage ban passed in '04....Moralistic Ohio voters see this as a chance to vote against a vice. I doubt the health arguments played that much a role as much as the moralistic busybody-ism that somtimes charactertizes Ohio....

...yes, it is the Dayton & Troy/Lima Route freight house. It was built in 1922. The side you are looking at is the one the trucks loaded at, though there was a track that looped around, which is visible in the pix. Another locally big LCL/fast freight interurban shipper was the C&LE, which had a freight house on Kenton Street. That one is still standing too.

I may leave Ohio, yes, but it has nothing to do with the politics here.

Thats good intel, thanks. Do you know where these seats where at? It seems to be pretty status quo here in Montogomery County for statehouse turnover.

Wow..yeah, thanks for that! You can really tell the urban/suburban divide with some of these districts, and notice the rustbelt small city Ohio pops out blue...Mansfield, the Portsmouth area, Steubenville, Zanesville(I think?)... Some interesting things going on on that map...particularly Akron and Summit County... This is almost as good as a precinct map for getting into the weeds on political geography, as these districts are fairly small.

Odd, that. When we would go we would end up on the same weekend they had those Jon Benet Ramsey-style kiddie pagents. Which was on the same weekend as the gay pride festivities. And we would stay in the Hyatt at the Convention Center. The elevators where a hoot...leather daddys, drag queens, and little girls made up like Tammy Faye Baker (and their gushy parents) Columbus can be like that.

The Fairview German Language School? I'd be pretty suprised if they actually taught classes in German, so I am wondering about the name...do they have some sort of foreign language emphasis there, where the kids are taught German as part of the curiculum?

^ are you going to merge them?

As in the last bunch all of these but one have things that are in the old and new pix. The old pix are from the Luteznberger Collection at the Dayton Metro Library. (note that 5th Street used to be narrower prior to urban renewal) (the house with the cupola was owned by the Gephardts, local industrialists) (the Lutzenberger pix are great in that one can see what the early housing stock looked like in the original plat area of Dayton) (the Bicycle Club started out as a house, built in the 1850s) Webster Station in the late 1920s. Even at this late date the neighborhood was still fairly residential (images courtesy of the Wright State Library Special Collections and Archives Department) Some close ups The Station @ Webster Station from the air .....note the passenger train coming in, from the Pennsylvania line onto the Joint Tracks. @@@

Nice analyses there , C-Dawg....good job. Lucas & metro Toledo remains pretty solid with the Dems... Here are some maps from ONN (unoffficial results) and my commentary..... Senate: Definate division ..the Lake Erie Shore, Western Reserve, and Appalachian Ohio go Dem, while Western Ohio is GOP. But note that even in the deep rural Maumee Valley area Strickland won. Dayton and Springfield remain blue islands in red state Western Ohio.... For the true blue (or shall I say red?) GOP counties, the Governors Race. Cincinnati and vicinity confirms, once again, its reputation as a Republican Valhalla, and the soy and cornfields of West-Central Ohio alwyas yields a bumper crop of GOP votes.... (but how about Preble County?....) And then the Congresscritters....the GOP gerrymander firewall holds..in what is a Dem wave elsewhere, Ohio stays GOP except for the inevitable loss of Neys seat....tho it looks like the challenges to Pryce and Schmidt did come somewhat close. Yet, how about Chabot doing as well as he did in what looks like a very urban district? (compare to Louisville, downriver, where the opposite result occured, but Louisville wasnt gerrymandered the way Cincinnati and Columbus are) @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Now if i knew enough about computer mapping I could do a "purple state Ohio" map using the Sec State by-county results, so one could see intensity of support by county. Or if precinct maps exist one could get really granular and map results by precinct...these do exist for Montgomery County, but in tabular form..don't have any precinct maps.

The GOP held all their Congressional seats execpt for Bob Neys, and that was sort of expected to go to Dem anyway. And the GOP sitll controls the statehouse, unless I missed the Dems taking control of either the state house or reps or state senate.

If anyone runs across the results by county for Ohio for the Senate and Governor races, please post them here. I would like to see how these races shake out geographically.

You know what I like... 8-)

I've always thought that Cincinnati is one of those citys where when I drive around town the builidings make me smile.

Yes, it (and Market) was the main buisness street during the 19th century as it was one block up from the wharf, so developed into a big mercantile center, and then into wholesaling, warehousing, and small manufacturing. By the 1950s the place was sort of an industrial/warehouse/wholesale area, on the road down. One of the big wholesalers was Belknap, which did a big big buisness with the South, selling hardware and all sorts of things to southern retailers. ...most of this was torn down not too long ago, though one building remains for Humana. The street this and the other warehouses/wholesale houses backed up on to was Washington Street, which had this very tight dark and shadowy urban canyon feel to it. In the 1970s that stretch of Main and Washington was the location for little bars and stuff, sort of "offbeat" semi-underground things. Yet Belknaps huge buildings just dominated East Main & Washington Streets.... The Belknaps Show was an event where small store owners came into town from out in the country to see what Belknap was selling in its showrooms... If you had a merchants card you could get things wholesale...my folks got to use my Ma's bosses' card and got some furniture for the house that way, as Belknap wholesaled furnishings as well as hardware, tools, bass boats, bycycles etc.... illustrated company history

Yeah, those narrow streets give that downtown some character...they remind me a bit of Charleston WVA and the sidestreets of downtown Lexington. And that new county courthouse? Woah...colonial Williamsburg run amok, yet it works somehow. Whats odd is that riverfront. Such a nice river, and the town looks like it is on a pretty high bluff over it, but it doesnt seemt to be doing much with the riverfront, aside from what looks like a big highway running below that bluff. What is the rest of the city like..it seems the downtown is a bit isloated from the rest of the city? By those railroad gulches?

Oh, this is easy London Paris Rome New York Vienna

Oh boy..i missed this thread. Pretty good tour there, Ink. Id like to kibitz here a bit, if I may. The 4th Street Live was the first attempt in the region for a downtown shopping mall. It was called the Galleria, and extended into the Starks Building and via a skywalk to the old Stewarts Department Store. There was a new Bacons Dept Store (Bacons is now Dillards) too, on site. Plus those two skyscrapers (one was the HQ of Brown & Williamson Tobacco Co.). It was really controversial as there was some great old buildings that was demo'd to build it, and it split the local preservation community as it was considered a key to saving downtown, at that time (though they saved the Prairie School facade of the old Kaufmanns) It was fun when it first opened, but then things went downhill (like Stewarts getting bought out by Hess and closed). So 4th Street Live is an attempt to do something with a big white elephant. The intersection where this is at is 4th and Muhammed Ali (formerly known as Walnut St), which is one of the nodes on 4th as downtown moved south on 4th. One of the things about downtown Louisville is that it is really strung out along 4th street, which was the main shopping street, but hotels, theatres and office buildings where strung out along it, too. Here is downtown around 1970....you can tell it stretches well back from the river. What happened was a big urban renewal effort that removed all the older buildings around downtown. It started with two 1930s public housing projects, Beecher Terrace (for the blacks) and Clarksdale (for the whites...this was the Jim Crow era). Then in the 1960s they did some massive urban renewal east and west of downtown, and also on the riverfront. There was additional demolitions in the 1970s for a convention center, Hyatt, and that Galleria. A bit of a close-up on the east side urban renewal. One of the things that went is was a huge medical center complex, which has become a real driver in the local economy, as this provides services for the entire region, as well as a med school for U of L and some high rise housing for seniors. You can also see the Port of Louisville bulk terminals, warehouses and stuff between the river and Spaghetti Junction freeway interchange. Cincinnati has this stuff too, west of the Mill Creek Valley toward Sedamsville and Anderson Ferry. In Louisville it was right downtown. This was all replaced by that big riverfront park. I also show the very edge of the Butchertown neighborhood, which is probably the oldest left in the city. Here are some shots of what was removed via urban renewal. The UofL archives have phots of every block and structure that was removed..these are from "Views of Louisville", not the urban renewal archives. I recall these areas shortly after they where torn down...lots of grassy lawns and open space around the downtown, and the developement that went in was usually pretty low density. These panoramas show some early skyscrapers. The high rise in the backround of the second panorama is the L&N Building on Broadway, which was the corporate HQ of that road, and an isolated skysrcaper which is a local landmark because of its giant L&N sign on top. Walnut Street shooting off into the West End from about 5th. Lousivilles close in areas looked to be built out at around 3 storys or so, not like OTR, but it was more dense than one would expect. Old rowhouses from the urban renewal area. The style in the second set reminds me of the townhouses of Pittsburgh a bit, with the gable roofs and dormers. And a diagram showing how downtown grew south along Fourth Street from Main and the river south to Broadway, with nodes of high rise construction developing at intersections. Louisville doesnt have a compact downtown like Cincy, its more linear, partly because the city blocks are longer south of Libert Street. Starting in the 1920s Fourth and Broadway, the "Magic Corner" was sort of considered the heart of downtown, with a second "State and Madison" corner at 4th & Walnut, and sort of a govt/finance center near the courthouse two blocks east of 4th on Jefferson. Most of the 1920s high rise construction was around 4th and Broadway, and on Broadway, with big apartment buildings going up. Downtown looking north, from probably 1970. The modern highrise in the foreground is "The 800", apartment buildings. built in 196t5 or 66. The top floor had a radio station, WLRS, which was a pioneer of the FM "progressive rock" format in the late 1960s & early 1970s, before the format went national. A bit of pop music trivia there. The 800 was one of the tallest buildings in the South when it opened. The telephoto shot is deceptive, becuase if you look at the ariels upthread downtown is nowhere nears that compressed. Here is a crop of the same shot, showing some of the buildings. The Kentucky Home Life Mutual was the tallest from 1909 (?) till 1956, then the Commonewealth Building was the tallest till the The 800 was topped off. The Commonwealth was a bizarre design as it is an art deco desgin, with the step-back massing (similar to the Civic Opera tower in Chicago), but stripped...no real detailing. It had a beacon on top, too. Very retro for 1955. I guess they had the plans from before the Depression and waited till the 50s to finish the buidling (the first few floors where built in the late 20s). The Todd and Lincoln buildings fell to urban renewal, the Starks Building is still a good address, and the Heyburn was one of the "Magic Corner" roaring twentys skyscrapers. The Starks and Heyburn where designed by a Chicago firm, and the Starks at least resembles some of those big blocky buildings on Michigan Avenue facing Grant Park (like the Santa Fe Building). Another 4th & Broadway monument from the 1920s is the Brown Hotel 1920s Broadway (looking west) Apartment houses The block of 4th north of Broadway had some of the big movie theatres which of course closed in the 1960s..the Palace, though, always had live acts, even in the 1970s, which kept it alive. Theatre Square was supposed to revive the 4th & Broadway area, but the place just isn't the same to me since they torn down the Commonwealth Building. Another view of downtown, looking south from the river, where they are building the Riverfront Plaza and Belvedere. Probably 1970. 4th Street to the left, shooting south into Old Louisville. Downtown pretty much has re-oriented itself to the area north of Muhammed Ali Blvd now, though there is renovation attempts going on on 4th as old stores are being converted into lofts and such.

^ Hmm...well, fiction and nonfiction, usually. Given the topic there is a lot of politics, history and sociology, and memoir, as well as how-to/self-help things, travel guides, etc. Yeah, given the larger scheme of things this is sort of a superficial rant, as its really about recreational shopping. For serious reading I usually use Ohiolink library access, and those Ohiolink books are the cost of a community borrowers card. Now if they ever decide to pull the plug on Ohiolink I would really scream.

A thread that will make sense only to Dayton people, but the theme is Ohio-wide..the standardization and homogenization of shopping in one buisiness, the book trade. The Books & Company at the Greene t may have the Books & Company name on it, but its like Hardees being called Hardees not Carls Junior, because the Books & Company at the Greene is really just a Books-a-Million. It has a similar marketing concept as the old Books-a-Million in Washington Twp (now closed) and an even worse magazine section. For such a big store at such an nice shopping center like the Greene it is really disappointing. And worrisome if they decide to ever close the "real" Books & Company in Town and Country, which is still somewhat "local" in flavor even though also being owned by Books-a-Million (one difference is the "Gay and Lesbian" section, which is rather large at the Town & Country store, compared to the Books & Company at the Greene, which as a small three or four shelf euphemistically entitled "Lifestyles" section, another is a fairly respectable fine and commerical art section). It is really getting the point that if I want to go recretional shopping at a booksore or magazine stand it means travelling to Cicinnati (three cheers for Fountain Square News and Duttenhoffers, among others). The book trade there is still somewhat independent and idiosyncratic and you never know what you'll find. Columbus does have a good place in the Wexner Center Bookshop, but its a bit far to drive (though I always stop there when Im in Columbus). Sad to think the better bookstores in Dayton, compared to the Books & Co @ the Greene now are obvious chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble.

You're welcome, inkaelin. Those rowhouses are pretty nice inside, but a lot of stairs. I looked at one when I first moved here from California. My complaint about them is that the windows are too small for me. I liked the built-in garage, though. That being said Cooper Place was a sucessfull proof-of-concept for Dayton in that they proved people will consider living downtown. I went on a tour of downtown today and the tourguide said they apprecieated $60,000 to $80,000 since they where built. I think the concept might be better than lofts, and I do like that they are trying to work off a traditional houseform for the urban Ohio Valley.