Rusty Shackleford

My general feeling is disgust. I grew up in D8ton and I biked a lot into Warren County through this area in the late 1970s. Some of my best rides were on the small (at the time) roads like Pennyroyal down the hill into Franklin. It felt small, intimate, Balkanized in a small towny way. This suburbanized sh*t, along with the western reaches of Beavercreek which have already been paved over and desecrated, is like they are trying to turn Dayton into friggin' Columbus. I treasure knowing, for example, that there was a small crossroad village on Dayton-Xenia Rd just east of Fairfield Rd that had the name "Zimmerman" and had a green place name sign. Local identity is just absolutely forbidden when this kind of plastic schlock overtakes a region like cancer.

Drexel Dave - "Uncle Orrie" from the WOXY boards here. Glad you made it here, man! Your blog is a freaking masterpiece of folk art. I check it regularly.

What's going on with the Denver Hotel? My wife and I used to like to eat at the tavern there a few years ago when it was "Putter's Back Nine" or something like that. Then the hotel closed, and then a couple of years ago it reopened along with the tavern, but the menu was really limited (burgers and wings, basically.) It seems like a neat hotel that the local area can't really support with business...

Regarding the feel of the park post-change of ownership: My wife and I (no kids) went once so far this summer and we only stayed for a little while and then left because a "monsoon" blew through. But I was looking for obvious changes. My surface impression is that almost everything unique about the park in terms of entertainment tie-ins has been gutted. Of course, all of the Paramount branding is gone. But it's down to the level of granularity of that little walk through park area they had with things in it like the model of the Starship Enterprise being sanitized to blank space. OTOH we sat through one of their live shows and the production seemed to be MUCH higher quality and much longer than the stuff they put on during the Paramount ownership. Kings Island used to feel a little special, like an outpost of Paramount entertainment, and now it's much blander. Bring back the walk-around Klingons, I say. :-D

Someone needs to do a photo essay on the "Tuckys" of Dayton. Friends used to refer to a valley off of Eastman Drive (runs east of Woodman) as "Little Kentucky".

Wow, great essay and photo treatment. You really hit the nail on the head. I want to direct your attention to two pockets in the "affluent southern suburbs" that you identified that may make interesting sub-essays in the same spirit. One is the circled area where Shroyer loops westward into Far Hills. This area, which lays immediately south of Town and Country Shopping Center, is *also* a Huber community, and I believe it is mostly duplex and fourplex rentals built in the 50s and 60s. The other pocket is the one at the northwest corner of Forrer and Woodman, near the top of your map. The circular street in that detail is Wren Circle east and west. I believe the plat contains a collection of flat roofed former military housing, and I also seem to recall that it is set up as a co-op or as some kind of ultra low cost subsidized housing (this is some memories from the 70s.) I recall hearing about people living in those houses for practically nothing, and it really didn't seem to be that bad an area. Anyway, excellent detail. Thanks for posting this.

What a great thread. A few belated footnotes: My mom grew up in Dayton in the 1930s. She referred often to "Frankie's Forest Park", the name of the amusement park that was located at Forest Park Plaza. I was born in 1958 so I had no clue. My main memory of Forest Park is "The She" nightclub, which predated Dixie Electric Company on Woodman drive by a few years. Another sleazy youth oriented disco pandering to the 3.2 beer crowd. :evil: Tie-in: a friend's sister is married to one of the founders of Cables-to-go (networking & computer cable vendor), which I was told had a production facility located in the same space as the former "She" back in the 80s. One of the brothers in that family worked there as an assembler and he said that they used the counter space of the She's bar for production. And going to college in Dayton in the 70s, the name "McCook" meant only one thing: porn, and going with a bunch of other drunk guys after the bars closed to the "arcade" there at the McCook just to piss off the bouncer and the clerk and not buy anything. :roll: Apparently Forest Park closed as an amusement park in 1959: http://www.soaphs.com/content.html

You are the Ansel Adams of industrial debris. Really, you should look int having art prints made and framed. I haven't figured out the marketing yet, though. That's your problem. ;)

I found this: this article (from 2002) is stating that Woody's closed two years earlier. So 1999 sounds right. http://www.bizjournals.com/dayton/stories/2002/09/30/story2.html And this one: "Former Woody's site finally to be redeveloped": http://www.bizjournals.com/dayton/stories/2007/03/12/daily20.html?from_rss=1

Wow! I get first reply! :wave: Woody's was sort of a Dayton based predecessor of the "Jungle Jim's" concept: an independent, locally based, high end grocery store with a vast selection and many amenities, including an in-store restaurant (which was the part that forms the overpass section of the building over Alex-Bell Rd.) The only location was the one of which you posted pictures. Suburbanites from areas like Centerville and Washington Twp. (like a few friend's parents) would show weekly fealty to Woody's by shopping there exclusively. I believe they had many amenities that targeted older customers like concierge and valet parking services. Back in the 70s there was a certain level of local snob appeal to shopping at Woody's. I believe it went out of business in the mid-1990s, probably a victim of pricing competition in the local grocery market from stores like Meier's. Dot's Market in Belmont and Bellbrook is a much smaller scale, similar concept that still operates and has a loyal local following.

Cincinnati Mills (formerly Forest Fair) did a major version of the rehab that Hayward is proposing. They totally gutted and renovated the place and they "reloaded" with a bang a couple of years ago. But now the mall is declining again. My wife and I went there a few weeks ago and most of the stores we liked are gone; 1/2 the mall seems to be empty again. But it LOOKS NICE. I think the problem is that developments like this are synthetic. Some developer is trying to alter people's natural tendency to stay with certain shopping areas and neighborhoods. Some "synthetic" developments take off if they provide something people didn't have before. Other developments just always seem to have a permanent case of "cooties." Some new franchise looking to site itself will overlook malls like Middletown because the failure rate of stores there is high. Business owners will pay more for an assurance that they aren't crippling themselves. Also, being located in a trendy area helps. East Middletown isn't and never was trendy. Forest Fair and Fairfield are NOT trendy. Location, location, location.

I am running Windows XP SP2. Ok - it sounds like the problem is common and there has been no solution found. I had an idea. There is a Firefox extension called Greasemonkey (it is installed into the browser on your PC) that allows you to install scripts that will be run in order to do custom processing of web pages before display. Supposedly you can modify style tags, the HTML itself, or the DOM structure of the document. What I'm gonna do is see if it is possible to create a work around to this problem in Greasemonkey. If so I will post it here. Secondly, I will see if there are any Mozilla developer's groups I can troll with this problem. I would think they would be interested in something an end user can do to break Firefox.

I have experienced one great frustration consistently with Firefox: when "many" images are posted in one message, the bottommost ones are not visible. The postings in this forum apparently push Firefox to some internal limit. For instance, in http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php?topic=11299.0 the first 58 images in the initial post are displayed. A strip along the top of the 59th is displayed. Then there is a blank space for what appears to be the height of the remaining images down to the end of that post. When scrolling I can see gray boxes flash by that appear to be in the locations of the invisible images. Images in subsequent reply posts *are* displayed (don't inherit the problem.) It appears (to me) that "too many" image tags within the same <DT> (table cell) are not handled well. This accounts for the following messages' images being displayed. I tracked down the failure using the DOM inspector tool in Firefox and it looks like at some threshold, Firefox just refuses to display further images. Just curious if anyone has found a work around. I saw some old threads on the subject of messed up images but no real fix was suggested (I just upgraded to Firefox 2.0 and that did not help.) TIA.

Jeff, your articles are always impeccably researched, well organized and supported by excellent images. (Sheesh, sounds like a term paper grade!) Great stuff, and I've never even visited Louisville.

Don't get me started. There is a reason why there is brain drain. This area is hostile to smart people who do brain work for a living. The rah-rah of the various regional factions that publicize technology initiatives in Ohio cities are generally a case of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I'll put a human face on the statistics. I am in engineering - I am actually a BSEE but I develop software for a living, which I have done for over 25 years. I grew up and went to college in Dayton, and was hired into an HP division in the Bay Area for my first job out of school. In the late 80s I moved back into SW Ohio for personal family reasons. The internal culture of EVERY tech company I have worked at in this region is crippled and lame. When a "software development" job is advertised you have an attitude on the part of management like they are waving 100 dollar bills in a trailer park. The business culture around here actively looks DOWN on engineering and IT people. That may be the case nationally now since the dot com meltdown and the rise of H1B based staffing, but around here in the Dayton/Cinci area a programmer or engineer has always, since I attended college here in the 70s, been regarded as a piece of human flotsam. My point is that I have *sacrificed* my career in order to take care of some long term family matters here. People with 5-10 years of experience in other parts of the country out earn me 2:1 in many instances. My last job interview (a year ago) with a small software shop in Lebanon culminated in an offer in which the owner (who chronically badmouthed an employee they were ousting) said that if I hired on I was "to only serve one master, not two" (he didn't want moonlighters, so he used language that went out with the Emancipation Proclamation.) I do software contracting now. I won't even interview locally. The local tech companies are managed and run in a brain dead, "Theory X" management style and generally deserve to fail. A concrete example: Back in the 90s I worked under the Indian guy who spearheaded and whose name is on a certain technology park in Hamilton that now bears his name. He demanded 60-80 hour weeks out of his programmers. But he is a freaking hero to the Chamber of Commerce types....

What are the boundaries of the Huffman district? Is there a map somewhere of these Dayton historical districts? PS - excellent photos.

Here's what I know: The site has always had a reputation for being a partying hangout and has always been considered pretty dangerous. I lived in Dayton when I was in high school and I drove my dad's car down there one night with some friends to check it out. I recall hearing something hit the roof of the car when I approached the overpass thing on Grandin Road. Apparently some a$$hole in the building threw a rock at the car and it made a very deep, sharp dent in the roof. I disclaimed any knowledge but my dad was pissed! I imagine that the building was a base for gang activity and lots of petty crime. There is kind of a white trash/lowlife element around Warren County and that seems to be one of their "power centers". A couple of years ago I was looking for office space and I saw an ad online for extra space from the guy in the building who makes whistles: http://www.tinwhistles.us/jubilee.htm so I drove down there to check it out. The space was extremely cheap, something like 500 SF, for $300/mo or so, but basically it was a damp concrete-cave type space, and was utterly unfinished and really nasty. I mean, like suspended ceiling that was half torn down, and grossly stained carpet. It would be OK for light industrial or a craft shop, but I needed office space and passed on it. On this visit I chatted with an older fellow who was a watchman for the property. He fed something like 20 different stray cats that were hanging around the parking area. He told me that the foundation of the building (the footers) go down 12 feet, and thus nobody has been interested so far in funding the tear-down of the buildings. Oh, and during the daylight hours, I went hiking down there in 1976 or so with a friend along the railroad tracks (now replaced with the bike trail) and I took pictures of these disc shaped metal signs from the 1940s that used to be on the tower that advertised the NBC radio network. It was evidently a wartime advertising thing. (I believe that image #12 from the top, above, shows a badly rusted remaining sign where some of the NBC art is barely visible through the rust.) I need to scan those pictures and post them...

Thanks for the information! Yeah, I looked at your WHOIS information and found the ISP through the DNS records. Powweb has exactly one plan for $7.77/mo. I am just really impressed by the speed of this board, especially downloading images (which I realize in many cases are self hosted but still). Your message base has to be HUGE.

It does seem really zippy and fast. It's probably the best open source type BBS I've seen. May I ask, how do you host it? Do you have a dedicated server, a VPS or just a shared web hosting account?

Hi, I was curious - what lead you folks who run this board to select this particular forum package? I have an inkling that this package is stuffed with unique features. I posted a thread today about "The Greene" development, and lo and behold this evening that entire thread has been "spliced" into an existing thread about this project. I have never EVER seen a board package that allows anything like that. And how is this package as far as security? I have heard negative things about phpBB. The reason I am asking: I run a computer consultant's BBS that is on Ezboard.com. Ezboard gouges you for yearly "gold community" fees that you must pay if you want to retain control over the users of your board. Plus they do not really have any quality of service guarantees. And they had a big scandal last year when someone hacked them and destroyed many forums. But I have been stuck "dead" deciding on a new board package because of innuendo about security problems with some of the popular boards.

I don't get up there that much, evidently. It's good to hear that downtown is improving. But it's a shadow of its former self.

Yeah, it would be good to wait a few weeks. The Greene is quite pleasant as long as you suspend disbelief in the fiction. :| But this was also a pleasant late summer day. I wonder how well that street scene persists in late November? :wink: ...downtown Dayton as a destination was before my time, but probably there were enough regular people downtown in the olden days so the all the above didn't dominate the street scene. Yes, and I wrote that sloppily and in haste. You're absolutely right about the relative proportions. Downtown Dayton in the mid 60s through early 70s was pretty vibrant. There was a movie theatre, a major regional department store anchor, and lots of businesspeople and students, continually throughout the day. The insane person/crackhead/gangsta scene was still in the background and didn't dominate downtown as it does now.

I finally got to check out "The Greene" in Beavercreek today, apropos of this post: http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php?topic=10383.0 My impressions: Visually it reminds me very, very strongly of the Reading VF Outlets complex in Reading, PA. Hulking red brick faux "traditional" buildings, with parking lots on the outskirts. That means IT DOES NOT BELONG HERE. IT JUST ISN'T RIGHT. DAMMIT! :whip: Ok, I'll settle down... A major mindf*** to see this type of development in this location. When I went to college in the 70s in D8N, the Stroop/County Line/Dorothy Ln/Indian Ripple intersection was the sharp demarcation of farm country. Oh, well, Spring Valley Twp where I spent many a pleasant afternoon bicycle touring is trying to become a clone of Indian Hill. And the Belmont Auto Drive-In (site) just a mile or so north was torn down around 2001. I agree with the despair related in the rant-let posted in the photo thread about the entire Arcade downtown laying unused. That sucks. When I was a kid my mother would dress in her best and would drag me shopping down there with her downtown to the arcade, and we would get lunch at the lunch counter that was in the middle of the place right under the cathedral like apartment windows. It was kind of cheesy, very dated, but the overall experience would probably be classified as a historical landmark today. The development of huge all encompassing commercial developments like "The Greene" really bothers me. It's training the public to not care that we use up cities like snotty kleenex. It's the Disneyfication of our communities. In old downtown D8N you could see homeless, bag people, street preachers, the marginally insane, etc... but no First Amendment on private property! Keep it antiseptic. A place like this is about as real as Kings Island's Main Street, except that with the latter there is no pretense that it's actually a community with a history or a "soul."

A great long weekend getaway (which my wife and I did a few years ago): stay at Clifty Falls State Park and visit Madison for a day trip. It's not West Virginia, but then it's only an hour from the Cincinnati area. Madison has a wine tasting room and good restaurants.