Jeff

Playing around with rephotography. Based on old images are from the Lutzenberger Collection at the Dayton metro library. Perhaps these are not true rephotography as I don’t line up the pix exactly and in one I break a rule where you have to have things in the modern one that are in the original…in one set that’s not the case. East 3rd, 1871: Last week: Patterson and 3rd, probably the WWI era, or very early 1920s (the ramshackle building to the left was the canal toll collectors house) Last Week 4th & St Clair. This building was built in the late 1860s Today The original Webster Street Station (big building is the freight house, little building to the right is the station. Railroad was the Dayton, Xenia, & Belpre, later the Pennsylvania Today Canal Street in the late 1920s, after this branch of the canal was filled in. The building to the right is an old canal building from 1850 (the year the railroad came to Dayton), a commission and forwarding house. From the caption: ” The building on the left was A. N. Nixon’s Tobacco Warehouse. The center building was said to be more than 100 years old when it was torn down in 1934. The building on the right was Chambers Canal Depot. It was built in 1850 and was still standing in 1935. All merchandise was received and shipped from this point between First and Second Streets.” Today Since this is such a significant building (the very last canal building, or building built to serve the canal trade, left in the city) here is a closer look. Very nice classical façade Since I was in the neighborhood a few shots from Webster Station. I was trying to avoid taking pix of the obvious subjects, and trying to avoid pix that convey a feel of “density” or “loft district”, though there are a few of those, too. The alleys of Webster Station are an unrecognized resource as they are of characterful brick, and I could see them redeveloped lined with townhouses, like Efreths Alley in Philadelphia….if there was a market for urban infill housing here…. In Dayton it is best to be content with & appreciate what is rather than wish for what is not nor ever will be…. I was going to use this for a thread on Wayne Avenue from Belmont to Downtown…..never happened…. The obligatory SSP/SSC boosterish “ooh look at the rowhouses and skyscrapers, we’re urban !” pix: The old Dayton & Troy Interurban Railroad freight station seemed to be a good subject. This is probably one of the very few purpose-built interurban freight stations remaining in the US. The D&T (also called The Lima Route) stopped operation in the 1930s The real feel of Webster Station is imparted by a quilt of one story industrial and commercial buildings and parking lots…. Radio Free Dayton The frieghthouses. What were once team tracks are now parking lots. The same area from the air, probably early 1920s. (image courtesy of Wright State University Special Collections and Archives Dept) The old Mad River Railroad right of way. The Mad River (connecting with Springfield and Sandusky) was the first railroad into Dayton The curved building. This is sort of a neat building, because it is, after all, built on a curve, and because it is sheathed in part in metal panels pressed to look like stone. The silos are one of the icons (for me) of this neighborhood….. …route of the Basin Extension Canal, soon to be Tech Town campus This area will be all redone in landscaped parking lots and low-slung commercial buildings, a more planned version of the parking lots and low-slung long slung commercial buildings one finds elsewhere in Webster Station. And there will be more grass and trees to make it less hard-edge urban and more comfortable and inviting and suburbanesque. I like the old fashioned lights on this sign There’s that old interurban freight house again! For me, if ever I should leave here, the image or memory of Dayton that will certainly stay with me is a night freight rumbling and clanking overhead on the railway embankment through downtown.

Yeah, my sister, brother-in-law, their family, and a friend of my nieces went on an extended tour of the mideast this past summer, and they went to Dubai as part of this. My BinLs brother is a banker in Quatar or Bharian and one of the UAW emirs or princes was one of his clients so they had a big discount on the Dubai trip (including airfare on Emirates Airways). Anyway, Mahmud (brother in law) had a ton of pix from this trip, including Dubai. One thing that I picked up on is how prevelant English is, and our alphabet. They use arabic, but there is a lot of English-language advertising. Dubai from the pix reminded me sort of a desert version of Singapore or Hong Kong (not as dense yet, though). Actually, from these trip pix the Mideast didnt seem as underdeveloped as one would think. They where based out of Amman on the trip, and the pix from Jordan where pretty nice, actually...very much like California, I thought. Amman looks to be a bit more interesting that Dubai, though smaller (mainly ebcause it is built on hills). The Jordanians have some nice resorts, too. There was one series of pix from this Dead Sea resort they stayed at that would be easily comparable to top-end resorts here in the USA (i noticed one of the hotel companys operating there was Movenpick, which is from Switzerland, and has a presence in Canada, too). Petra, too, was nice, but the city nearby seemed a bit touristy. They also went to Cairo and Alexandria, and these places, particularly Alexandria, start looking a bit rougher. Yet still, the prevelance of English. The four lane highway between Cairo and Alexandria looked like it was lined with these big billboards adverstising "Piraeus Bank" (I thought Piraeus was a part of Athens?), and in the Alexandria I spotted billboards for a real estate development called "Alex West", which made me think of Daytons :"Alex-Bell Road" or "Alex Road"...I think we have an Alex West! (an industrial park). Anyway, I sort appreciate this oasis concept working in Dubai. Its not that this is foreign to us, as we have those cities of the Mountain West which are essentially oasis cities of the 20th century, not tooo far from the Dubai concept.

Id like to know who the scientists endorese for the Dayton area rep to the school board. I am not informed on the candidates here and don't want to vote for the creationist candidate by mistake.

Bill has retired, but the donuts are still good at Bills. The place as a big reputation in the Dayton area, though there are a lot of local donut places around, it seems.

First sited in Massachusetts, the species apparently had migrated to Ohio by the 1840s.... ....going through some old newspapers doing research on Dayton's industrial past, I couldnt help but be amused by the boiling political pot of the 1840s as reported in the old papers...where it was Whigs vs the Locofocos instead of our Republicans vs Democrats (well, a Locofoco was a type of Democrat)....this Buckeye Gerrymander was part of a series of Ohio political beasts run in the Dayton Journal/Advertiser....

Yeah, from what i recall (and this was 10 years ago or more) Gwinnett was pretty much tracthouses in pineywoods. Not really that super-affluent, which seemed to be more directly north of Atlanta proper. From what I recall DeKalb was sort of older suburbia (but some old money areas like Druid Hills). I recall suburban gangbanging more from my Califas days...Cali is the world of the suburban gang. In Sacto there was those asian gangs, Vietnamese or Cambodian. They just didn't give a damn..they actually had a shootout between two of the asian gangs in shopping mall! ..Florin Mall on the south side of Sacramento. I don't think things are that dire here yet, I hope.

One of my favorite parts of downtown Cincy.

Very good series here, rob. Johnstown is quite photogenic. And it is nice to see they apparenlty still have a viable white ethnic community there, too, to support those urban churches. I really like these small Pennsylvania cities that are posted here and at those other urban forums, or at least what I see on the pix. I saw a pix of a Straub Beer truck in your threads..i think this brewrey is in St Marys, near where your gas engine show was. It was one of the locals that survived the big megabrewrey mergers and mass marketing and is now somewhat popular with beer aficionados. I was pretty suprised to see that incline in operation as this type of tranist is all but gone in the US. I think Pittsburgh is the only other place left that has these? Also, about the Johnstown Flood. There was a very good documentary on PBS a few years ago on it, shown on the American Experience show, narrated by David McCullough...apparently he had some sort of family connections to Johnstown.

A big congratulations to Pigboy for winning that national award !!!!

I really don't have a problem with that. Of all the things he Federal govenment spends money on this is probably the most legitimate. The Constitution does, after all, mention "provide for the common defense" in the preamble. As for Michael Redmonds comments upthread, there are plenty of voluntary urban Republicans in Dayton, too.

As you all know I am a big history buff, and have been reading some original sources for early history here in SW Ohio/Dayton. One of the things I am reading are the memoirs of Benjamin Van Cleve, one of the first settleres of Dayton. Van Cleve was involved in provisioning the armys based at Fort Washington, did surveys for Symmes and the Northwest Territory, as well as farming. The memoir contained this political testament of sorts, and I liked it as it seemed so common-sense, also interesting as Van Cleve looked askance at excessive partisanship, which is something to remember for our own time. "I had never made politics my study further than this, that the evil dispositions of men made Government & laws necessary that power was delegated to men possessing passions & prejudices & liable to imposition ambitious & fond of power. That all public officers are public servants, that they ought to be supported, but the people ought ever to be jealous & watchful of their rights & oppose the encroachments of power & usurpation. I always felt at least for the persecuted & remarking the shifting and sycophancy at the time of Mr Jeffersons elevation to the Presidency perhaps induced me to rank among the Federalists-but I have never supported either men or measures because they where of this or that party & indeed I have always been averse to every man who is warm or violent of any party, believing that party measures are destructive of the general good." –Benjamin Van Cleve, 1799

Gary Burbank has more of a KY connection than just a house. He was a popular DJ in Louisville in the 1970s, starting out on top 40 radio, WAKY, then moving to one of the two big local stations WHAS. At WAKY: At WHAS: ..top row, second from left: More pix more pix here WAKY always had some wild DJs...others where Bill Baily and Coyote Calhoun. WHAS had a good talker back then too..Milton Metz, the old guy in glasses next to Burbank on the group pix. His show was "Metz Here"..it was a call-in talk radio show. Metz was somewhat liberal, too, which is pretty rare nowadays in talk radio. The only liberal on nowadays that I've heard was the Ed Shultz guy, though I understand Springer does a liberal show, too.

This certainly was interesting...esp the info on the transitional engines, which could be configured to run on steam or via internal combustion. These really do date from an overlap era, and some of the configurations of these engines do look like steam engines (like the govenor with the little metal balls that I can see on an engine in one of the displays....I dont think they have these on modern engines). One of the makers of smaller internal combustion engines was the Foos company in Springfield.

The Spaghouse in Louisville used to be Levys menswear store. They where in buisness as late as the 1970s (in the malls). The place used to be garishly illuminated, and a local (now obsolete) expression for someone who had too much to drink was that he was "lit up like Levys". The reason the Ohio is so wide in Louisville is that it broadens just before going over the Falls of the Ohio, and a dam there might make the river high here, too (or it really is wider at Louisville, as two longish rivers enter the Ohio below Cincy..the Miami and the Kentucky) I must relocate to Cleveland....

Oh, David Brooks is cool. I read his BoBos in Paradise and thought he picked up pretty good on a certain demographic, though his attempt to coin a neologism didnt realy take off the way "Generation X" did for Doug Coupland. Brooks social commentary does sort of have geopraphical connotations (I think his latest book was "On Paradise Drive"), so I can see a Brookings urbanism study quoting him or riffing on some of his obsrevations. Brookings itself used to have a reputation as left-liberal, but I've notice they've been moving toward neoliberalism in some of their policy analyses.

Yes, the Electroliners, like most of those very early streamliners, where articulated. I know articulation wasnt too popular with the mainline roads as it reduced the flexibility of changing cars the way one could with conventional rolling stock, but it worked for the North Shore due to the tight curves on the Loop. Some roads did some streamlining that didnt require a lot of shrouding. The Norfolk & Western had custom built locomotives at their Roanoke shops that had a clean look, but still kept most of the mechanicals by the wheels and cylinders exposed. I think this was the case with the SP Daylights over in California and the CN Royal Hudsons.

Have you all heard of Russian Constructivism? From back in the 1920s until the Stalin era? They where doing some pretty agressive designs back then already, and some of these newer ones seem to harken back to the old 1920s Constructivists. (and yes, Rem Koolhaas and his followers (and Zaha) owe a debt to Constructivism, too). ...and their "disurbanist" urban planning did away with the city ..totally communist utopia, but it looks like the later commie architects where picking up on the aesthetic.

Woah..did I read this right..Phoenix is getting a rail transit system?

This is one of the more innovative things I've heard of. It sounds like one of those micro-enterprise or micro-loan concepts that have been surfacing in the Third World, but this is'nt just for buisnessess, but also for non-profit projects too, apparenlty. Pretty neat idea! Do they have a list of grants or projects they are supporting. I missed that on their website.

Because it costs gas and manhours to transport the illegals, and signs are cheaper and are good publicity for the sheriff (read: political grandstanding).

CINCINNATI - A growing number of suburban apartment complexes in the past six years have become havens for Hispanic immigrants, including some illegal immigrants. That is certainly the case in Montgomery County, too..it would apply to asian and african immigrants as well as latinos. The Lima paper uptrhead did a good series on this, but interesting to see the Enquirer illegal<-->crime spin in their headline.

It seems WKU attracted a folks who went to my high school (probably as they had a lot of kin in that part of Kentucky). Interesting architectural trivia...Peter Eisenmann the architect was a Hilltopper basketball fan as, for some reason, he listned to their games on radio when he was a kid. It even got a brief mention in a John Prine song ("Grandpa Was a Carpenter").

Yes, I do like those online maps at the site, especially how you delinate the various neighborhoods around downtown.

This was reported in the Dayton Daily News today.....a community portal for the Oregon District oregondistrict.com Im not sure what this is exaclty..it sounds like a promo site for buisinesses in the district, but it also has the capablilty of doing online personal profiles. It is centered around the Oregon District, so is sort of a community website.

I have two of Veragas books, and I recall some of these Camden images being in them...the progressive deterioration and demolition of the urban fabric of Camden and other cities. If I recall right there was some sort of a controversy around his work or his written statements (about Detroit, I think), and I think his work was the inspiration behind Lowell Boileaus' "Fabulous Ruins of Detroit" website, though I'm not sure of the chronology there. It could be that Boileaus' site and "The New American Ghetto" surfaced around the same time. I'd say Veragas' work has been as much an inspiration for my pix of Dayton as Myer and Wades' Chicago Growth of a Metropolis and American Scene painting.