Here’s a look at an interesting side of the Grafton Hill neighborhood (across the river from downtown Dayton), which makes it somewhat unique in Ohio. 

 

Probably only Cleveland’s Gold Coast saw a similar phenomenon of a concentrated apartment boom, particularly in the postwar era.  Cincinnati has some of this, but more spread out in the neighborhoods east & northeast of downtown.

 

The story here in Grafton Hill starts earlier.

 

Multifamily started here probably before WWI, but really picked up in the 1920s, mostly on the streets bounding the neighborhood.

 

 

The most impressive is the 10 story Commodore, the first elevator building in Grafton Hill, and the first high-rise outside of downtown. A good illustration of what a grand neighborhood this once was. In other places this would be a primo address.

 

 

And the balcony buildings on Grand and Forest and Forest and Palmer are perhaps the most delightful, with the light brick, iron railings, and vaguely Spanish feel.

 

 

Also on Grand, Chicago-style courtyard buildings.  This massive three-building ensemble arranged around a courtyard, with an early adaptation to the automobile with the underground garage. I like the corner “French door” windows with railings at the corners.

 

 

Closer to Salem, The Deluxe Apartments. This terra cotta extravaganza with a decorative brickwork façade treatment is a perhaps closer in style to the generic Chicago-style courtyard building.

 

 

Others included the Plymouth (1923), at Central and Plymouth, which was the first large apartment building on the interior streets of Grafton Hill.

 

 

And Dolly Manor. Built in 1929 this was probably the last building to go up prior to the Depression (and note the neighboring relic of old Salem Avenue).

 

 

 

And that is it until 1944. If anything was built nothing survives from the 1930s and early WWII era.

 

Noir City

 

WWII kicked off a new real-estate boom in Grafton Hill. These apartments reflect city living during the film noir era of the mid to late 1940s and very early 1950s, a fascinating transitional era in US cultural history that is still be explored. Aesthetically these buildings are a good study of a provincial city transitioning to modern design.

 

Note the geography: Large apartment blocks are starting to cluster on Central Avenue.

 

 

The first was the Grandview Apartments (1944) a neat deco/streamlined thing on Grand Avenue, with some interesting detail (including the door surround and corner window treatment). Sort of a mix of classically inspired detail (quoins around the windows) and moderne (corner streamlines, and curved aluminum canopy)

 

Incidentally Grandview was named before the hospital located in the area in the late '40s.

 

 

I think there were other 4 plex smaller buildings. Only one other one, The Elizabeth, survived to the present day.

 

Yet, the story here is about larger buildings.  The first big postwar buildings were these on Plymouth and Central, from 1947 & 48. Sort of a transition from deco/streamline to modern: symmetric façade composition, with brick banding on the flanking bays, and a streamline entry canopy.

 

 

 

Though not apartments, Grandview Hospital locates on Grand 1947. One of Daytons’ early modern building, but again a bit uncertain as it retains the classical tripartite façade composition.

 

 

And the first postwar elevator building, the 5 story Meridian from 1951. This is more modern, with the blank façade , rectangular windows, and lack of decoration. A symmetric tripartite façade composition is retained

 

 

Both the 1947-48 Plymouth/Central and 1951 Meridian have nice entry treatments, with stone facing on both, and that period streamlined decorative lettering for the Meridian. Note the subtle difference in the stonework, with a more modernist, perhaps FLW-esue treatement with the long thin dimensional stone (or is it brick) on the Meridian, vs the the more streamlined concrete or limestone surround on the Plymouth-Central

 

 

Large scale apartment development went on hiatus during the 1950s in Grafton Hill, during the first flush of the suburban boom.  But, at the end of the decade, activity revived.

 

Swinging Grafton Hill:  The 1960s Apartment Boom

 

The 1960s, particularly the early though mid 1960s marked an apartment boom in Grafton Hill, perhaps a local reflection of a forgotten “return to the city” trend that was occurring nationwide at the time.   

 

This cultural turn is just starting to get some scholarly interest.  A good example of this is The Answer to Suburbia: Playboy’s Urban Lifestyle, by Elizabeth Fraterregio, in the July issue of Urban History, which takes a feminst/cultural studies interpretation.  I think more can be said about this, but a good start in showing how the city was being re-valued in opposition to suburbia.

 

The article mentions how Playboy was a popularizer of city living, in radical opposition to earlier mens magazines, and that it had a TV show in 1959-1960, Playboy’s Penthouse:

 

”The opening sequence for the show followed a sports car as it made its way through the bustling traffic up Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive toward the heart of the city. To the strains of an original jazz composition by Cy Coleman, the camera panned across downtown to an illuminated tower in the nighttime sky.  The next shot showed a vehicle as it stopped in the front of a high-rise, then cut to an interior of an elevator as it climbed to the top-floor penthouse.  The doors opened and the camera/viewers ere invited by Hefner to join the festivities…”

 

So one can see an urban lifestyle being featured here, as a model.

 

One also sees this a bit in 60’s spy-fi movies, like Dean Martin as Matt Helm, and so forth.

 

This trend preceded the better-known historic preservation/old house restoration movement and loft housing to some extent, which itself partly grew out of the oppositional “counterculture” and urban arts bohemias of the 1960s.

 

A modern ironic/nostalgic echo of the era was the “lounge”/””cocktail nation” pop culture fad of the 1990s (though this fad didn't have a spatial turn, aside from hipster rediscovery of lounges surviving from the period).

 

In Dayton’s case there certainly is architectural evidence that Grafton Hill was a popular place to live during this era.  If the market wasn’t there and the area wasn’t hot, nothing would have been built.

 

 

The 1960s was the heyday of elevator buildings: mid rises 5 stories or higher.  Grafton Hill probably the highest concentration of these buildings in Dayton.  These buildings are not cheap to build, so that they were built is yet another indication of a strong market for this neighborhood.

 

 

The 1960s kick off with Riverview Terrace (1961). Amazingly it still has its original window sash. In terms of design this is sort of "old" looking for 1961, almost a throwback to the 1940s and 50s style.

 

 

Next comes the Schantz Apartments of 1962, on the site of the old Schantz mansion. This is the first low-rise of the era, and is one of those long "barracks-style" buildings. I suspect there might have been some decorative lettering or signage on that blank brick wall. But a fair modern composition on the entrance facade(including that chimney as a verticle accent)

 

 

Around this time a medical building goes up on Grand, which is sort of interesting as it has exeterior wall-washer sconces and a big glass atrium and decorative stair

 

 

Next a series of elevator buildings go up on along the river.  Townview (1965), is the first postwar Grafton Hill apartment house to have a garage included (and what looks like a little retail space to the left)

 

 

Not in Grafton Hill, but just across Salem and part of the same wave of mid-rise construction were two buildings in Jane Reece Terrace, facing downtown. The first, Horizon House (1965) was torn down by 1988 or 89, but Lantern Arms (1966) survives. Neat “playboy penthouse” with the barrel vault roof (maybe originally with a window wall?).

 

 

The ironic thing about these riverside apartments is that there was not much of a skyline to look at at that time. The first really tall postwar downtown high rise was the Grant-Deneau Tower which topped off in 1967, after these buildings opened.

 

Back in Grafton Hill, the two Miamiview towers. Miamiview South (1965) has or had a pool on the roof

 

 

Miamiview North (1966) had either a rooftop penthouse or party room. I think I looked at an apartment here once back in 1988 and was impressed on how big they were. This was a deluxe apartment in its day.

 

 

Also in 1966 the Rockwood, on Grand Avenue. This one is actually a fairly good design. Sort of modernist entry treatment (barrel roofs were popular here?), and also custom detailing on the windows. Another building with a basement parking garage.

 

 

The last market rate elevator building was the tallest and most deluxe. Park Layne, under construction in 1969 and leasing in 1970, with a pool, doorman, and secured indoor parking.

 

 

The Sixities also saw a boom in low rise apartments of 1 to 3 stories, yet another indication of the popularity of this neighborhood.  Recall that todays  hot Dayton neighborhood, the Oregon, was a big redneck slum at this time.  Interestingly Dayton apparently didn’t have any hippy area like, say, Mount Adams or Old Town or the Cass Corridor.

 

 

On Grand, this duplex is a very correct modern building from 1965. Again the barrel vault canopy detail, but also window styling using horzontal and vertical band windows. Below are two buildings on Superior from 1964. Very basic compared to the Grand Avenue example.

 

 

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On Grafton an interesting set. The first is from 1966, the second, Grafton House, was open in 1967. The second one has a few 1960s touches...white brick, and the facade composition was a bit more modern than the 1966 one.

 

 

And then this thing from 1966. Either the Superior or the Sher More.  That funky wanna-be-A-Frame birdsmouth roof, including the lower canopy, are pretty unusual.

 

 

Note the atrium with decorative stair just visible, and the diamond/lozenge decorative detail in the verticle window panels, and tapered V shaped sidewalk to the front door.  Groovy!

 

On Central, looks like by the same developer, the Regency Windsor (1966) at Central and Plymouth and Regency (1965)(which apparently has or had basement parking).

 

The sidewalk to the entrance was laid out on a sort of curve. The old Meridian of 1951 is visible in the background

 

 

Moving into the later 1960s one starts to see revival styles, paralleling what was going on in suburbia at the time.

 

The Sher-May (1967) on Grand is a good example, almost suburban with the speckled brick and faux mansard roof. And the one story "motel" building on Federal (now vacant) is sort of a take-off on cape-cod/colonial style. Don't have an age on that one.

 

 

As far as I can tell the last of the market rate low rises in Grafton Hill was colonial revival Overton Manor of 1968. This building replaced, I think, some four plexes, which themselves replaced old mansions, like the one next door.

 

The deep and sometimes wide lots on Central were ideal for apartment house construction.  In the case of Overton Manor this permitted a circular drive to the portico entrance.

 

 

The last multifamily construction was, I think, subsidized. The Metropolitan (1971). The city directory listed a DMHA district office in the lobby, so this might be a housing project of some sort. If so it's one of three mid-rise projects in the city.

 

The last mid-rise (9 stories) in Grafton Hill was 465 Grand (1973)(senior housing?). In the foreground the low-rise Grand Rock(1965).  That name reminds me of the Eden Roc, one of those faux luxe Morris Lapidus hotels in Miami Beach.  Looking at the Grand Rock facade, one can see it is a copy of the apartment building we saw on Grafton earlier.

 

 

Speculating on Grafton Hill

 

I dated these building mostly from city directories. So the dates I give are when the buildings were occupied. Prior to this was a notional four phase process:

1. Financing

2. Land aquisition

3. Demolition and construction

4. Leasing

 

I show a two year timeline for the buildings just to get a feel for the activity in the neighborhood, but its pretty obvious there was a real bubble or boom here in the 1964-1966 years, maybe starting earlier , in 1963.

 

 

The question I still have is “why?”

 

Why this neighborhood? Why was there a market for apartment living in Grafton Hill? Who built the apartments? And why was it like to live there?  Who lived there? Did the local medial take notice of the apartment boom?

 

I have some guesses, and did speculate a bit at the start of the post, but this is within living memory so people are probably around who remember this place at that time.

 

I had posted a query on this at a local history website, but no comments.

 

 

End of the Apartment Era and the Present Day

 

According to a 1970's rental market study the apartment market collapsed in Grafton Hill in the late 1960s due to white flight. The study noted the Park Layne was an anomaly as it started to lease after the market collapse. (this study is in the River Corridor Commission boxes at the WSU special collections).

 

I suspect changing lifestyle trends and a localized apartment glut might have played as much a part as racial change.  A lot of units went on the market here in a short period of time.

 

Also, the 1970 census has this tract at 5% to 9% black, so white flight hadn’t occurred in a big way yet. This did happened in the 1970s, when the tract went to 50%-75% black in 1980.

 

 

Since 1973 there have been some demolitions in the neighborhood, as some of the apartments (and maybe older houses too) have been removed, particularly on Central.

 

The last we’ve heard for Grafton Hill was a proposal to reconstruct some of the old mansions on Central, and that new high rise on Riverview & Central

 

 

 

Fantastic!

 

    Is there any data on demographics? Were these apartments occupied primarily by singles, families, elderly, or any other group?

 

    Thanks again for the tour.

Jeffrey, as a measure of how utterly hardened provincial born and bred Daytonians like me are, I grew up in Belmont, across town, and I had absolutely NO clue about this neighborhood or its history. What a fantastic, eye opening analysis.

 

I didn't give a rat's @$$ about Grafton Hill before reading your article and now I "grok." Great work.

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yet another excellent thread jeffery!

 

it's funny there are exact duplicates of most of those buildings in and around other parts of ohio, like columbus, clevelandia, lorain, etc. -- but not all in one neighborhood like that.

For the Commodore, the Grafton Hill tour at the Preservation Daytonw website says 1920s, though I expect one could find the exact year or very close by working with the criss-cross directories.

 

it's funny there are exact duplicates of most of those buildings in and around other parts of ohio, like columbus, clevelandia, lorain, etc. -- but not all in one neighborhood like that.

 

I was thinking that Gold Coast (?) area in Cleveland, between Ohio City and Lakewood, next to the lake, would be sort of equivilant for a concentration of apts like this.

 

Regionally, Chicago has this too along the lake, but closer in, like Dearborn and Division and Rush Street and sor forth.  The Also called the "Gold Coast"...a mix of mansions, townhouses, and big apartment buildings.  It remains a very good address, though.

 

The social and cultural history aspect of this is really intriguing, moreso than the artchitecture per se, as a counterexample of to the anit-urban attitudes of modern Daytonians.  Proof that even in the heyday of suburbia there was an interest in urban living here.

 

 

Beautiful stuff. Dayton has some wonderful areas that an out-of-towner isn't likely to just stumble across.

 

...

Regionally, Chicago has this too along the lake, but closer in, like Dearborn and Division and Rush Street and sor forth.  ...

 

In Chicago, Rogers Park has some very nice courtyard apartments from the twenties/thirties, too. The walk along Jarvis between Sheridan and Jarvis Beach is pretty sweet.

Speechless again!

 

Around this time a medical building goes up on Grand, which is sort of interesting as it has exeterior wall-washer sconces and a big glass atrium and decorative stair

 

 

The ironic thing about these riverside apartments is that there was not much of a skyline to look at at that time. The first really tall postwar downtown high rise was the Grant-Deneau Tower which topped off in 1967, after these buildings opened.

 

 

The Forest Grand Medical Building was also designed by Paul Deneau (architect of the Grant-Deneau Tower). Deneau also did the Lakewoods apartment building on Wilmington Ave. The Grant Deneau Tower is currently under consideration for the National Register.

My current 'hood sure is a little bit weird development-wise, isn't it? A couple of these have closed or have been demolished in the past couple of years. My building is all one bedrooms and studios, it makes you wonder why all the bachelors were flocking to Grafton Hill a half-century-plus ago!