ColDayMan said I was on a mission after the last set of before & afters.  Well, with this set, mission accomplished for the southern part of Downtown, pix keyed to the removal map:

 

 

 

 

 

The next two sets show some old antebellum houses overtaken by commercial expansion.  One of these was the home of the Clegg family, who had some of the first factories in the city.  First set is a "fireplug set" as you have to use the fireplug to set up the re-foto.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This was part of the St Clair Street wholesale district.  On this block: rooming house, two Greek restaurants, wholesale dyestuff, wholesale produce and fruits.  I bet some of these date back to the canal era as this was right at the canal

 

 

 

^

note the ventilators for the power plant roof in both pix.

 

Garage-zilla!  Devouring the city!

 

 

 

 

 

Great set once again!

 

The retro cladding on the Price Store building is somewhat interesting, but I wouldn't mind to see it removed.

You got that right!  Fantastic (and I mean FANTASTIC) series, Jeffrey.  Very educational and great historic photos.

all those gorgeous buildings destroyed for that building  :wtf:

Pic 7...was the street widened quite a bit then?  The little diner looks too small compared to what was there before

As far as I know the street wasnt widened during urban renewal.  Though a lot of these are for the area where the parking garage was, this stuff wouldn have been torn down anyway, sooner or later, for surface lots, and you'd have a landscape of older buildings pockmarked by parking or standing amidst parking

 

 

Just for grins, the street with the diner, but looking north (northwest corner of 5th & St Clair).  The pyramid roof building in the background is the same one on the far left of the "before" pix upthread.  I didnt include it in this set since the buildings were  gone by the early 1950s, which is the time of that removals map in the thread header

 

 

Lutzenbergers caption:

 

Note: In 1830, David Stone and his son engaged in the produce and packing business here. Business activities in this corner included: a grocery store, general merchandise, a hotel, restaurants, and until recently, a saloon. The place was then called the “Liberty Corner.” The last business here was the Brown Furniture Co. Building, which was razed in 1933. A filling station was then, erected on the site.

If you look at the ground floor of the garage in set #4  youll see an attempt to do something with the ground floor.  They built the public TV studio under that part of the garage in the late 1980s, I think.  Before, I think it was just open space.

 

In the last one what was under the garage was the Trailways depot, which was later converted into a restaurant and nightclub.  Across the street is the Greyhound depot.  So sizable ground floor space was devoted to bus operations.

 

And quality low-rises like the ones torn down for that garage are what give cities their zest and character. You can never get that back. Those are the hardest kind of buildings to duplicate today. One trend you'll notice in many downtowns is that there is a severe shortage of historic low-rise buildings. The buildings that survive tend to be the big ones- grand dame skyscrapers, high-rises, or mid-rises with substantial floor space.

 

I think this is particularly a problem in cities like Dayton, Akron, and Toledo.  You did a good illustration of that in that series on the street parellelling the river in Toledo.  It's the big problem with Dayton in that the new stuff was mostly large scale banal modernism that did little or nothing for the street. 

 

Some of this modernist stuff wouldnt look so bad in a suburban setting where the excessive scale works in terms of automobile space, but they kill the detail one likes in older downtown areas, like you noted. Yet that scale was the result of a sort of organic small-scale approach to city building that is lost in modern downtowns.