Arthur Beerman was a macher, the Dayton version of Chicago’s Arthur Rubloff..  Unlike Rubloff Beerman built business empires in retail as well as in real estate, becoming one of the most successful businessmen in postwar Dayton.

 

Beerman was not a native, having moved to Dayton  from Pennsylvania in 1929, while in his early 20s.  He started in retail, but also ventured into real estate, forming the predecessor to Beerman Realty in the depths of the Depression. 

 

By the postwar era Beerman was already a player, being part of the consortium that purchased the Arcade and eventually owning that complex outright.  The Arcade was perhaps an influence on an early Beerman suburban shopping center.  More on that later.  Beerman’s retail interests started in the late 1930s and 40s with the Cotton Shops, a housewares chain that was eventually parlayed into the Beerman variety stores, later department stores.

 

So Beerman was in tune with the retail scene as well as the real estate environment.  He merged these interests in the postwar era via a series of shopping centers.

 

Beerman Towns.

 

Beerman was an early developer of shopping centers in Dayton.  His first may have been the McCook Center, from the 1940s.  This might have been the earliest, preceding Miracle Lane, the first true strip center in Dayton. 

 

It’s certain that Beermans’ Main-Nottingham Center was one of the very first strip centers, joining Miracle Lane and Town and Country as the first three outlying strip centers as of 1950.  Main-Nottingham as later renamed Northtown. 

 

After Northtown came Easttown, out Linden Avenue just outside the city limits.  Easttown was open around 1954-1955, as the surrounding area was undergoing mass suburbanization. 

 

Four years later Beerman moved again, developing Westtown, off West Third near Gettysburg around 1959-1960. 

 

 

There was a Southtown, but that is another story as it’s related to the development of the Dayton Mall and comes around 17 years after these centers..  These three “Beerman Towns”  are good examples of the evolution of the shopping center during the early postwar era. 

 

Location Decisions

 

Taking a closer look at locations one can see how savvy the site decisions were.  Drawing a circle around each center and then looking at development patterns, one can see how nearly all of these were located at the edge of the platted area of the city. 

 

 

This platted area, shaded in yellow, was mostly subdivided before the Great Depression, but was filling up with houses during the 1940s in response to the  wartime and immediate postwar housing boom.  So already a market;  people from these older areas would be able to drive out to the new shopping centers rather than fight parking hassles downtown or in their small neighborhood shopping areas.

 

And the areas in white, undeveloped in 1950, would quickly be platted and go under development.  The new shopping centers could intercept these new customers before they could head downtown for shopping (as well as providing neighborhood retail for the new plats).

 

The shopping centers were located on arterial roads leading out of the city (Main, Linden, West Third), which isn’t so unusual.  What is sharp is that they were located near intersections with the major crosstown roads on the periphery of the city (Gettysburg, Siebenthaler, Smithville, and eventually Woodman Drive), so the trading areas of the centers could extend in all directions, tapping into the newly developing suburbia.

 

Shopping Center Form

 

Comparing the three Towns by using aerials and black plans one can see the evolution, perhaps, of shopping center form.

 

 

For buildings one can see how Northtown is somewhat smaller and tentative compared to Easttown and Westtown.  And there seems to be two early “”big boxes” (perhaps a grocery store) next to the two center buildings.  But Northtown does have a first draft of the “L” plan that one also sees in Westtown and Easttown.

 

 

 

Pavement diagrams shows how parking gets moved to the front of the site over time, as the strip center form is worked out.  Northtown has substantial rear parking, Easttown not so much, and Westtown none at all.  Yet  in all cases there is a drive to the rear of the site (for parking in Easttown and Northtown, perhaps service access for Westtown), separating the buildings.

 

 

Putting it all together, one can see how Northtown really is a transitional form from something that looking back to the taxpayer strips of the 1930s and proto-strip centers like McCook,  as the front parking and buildings are closer to the street.

 

 

With Easttown and Westtown the fully developed strip center form is evident.  Most of the parking is in the front and the L form of the center is stronger. Buildings are more integrated vs. the two big boxes somewhat separate from the center that one sees in Northtown.  One also sees outlying buildings either in front or to the side of the main buildings; early versions of out lot development common in later strip centers.

 

Northtown

 

Arthur Beerman owned the Arcade. In fact, his real estate interests had offices on the upper floors of Commercial Building at the intersection of Ludlow and 4th. And on one of those floors was the offices of the Main-Nottingham Shopping Center, apparently the leasing and development offices of the first "Beerman Town", because Main-Nottingham would later be re-named Northtown.

 

And the Arcade might have been the inspiration for certain features of this shopping center.

 

Suburban Growth in Northwest Dayton

 

This enlargement of a dot map from the Harlan Bartholomew planning studies of the late 1940s and early 1950s shows population growth from 1930 to 1952. In reality most of this growth was probably from 1939-1950, the pre-WWII "Pearl Harbor Suburbia" boom coming out of the Depression and the wartime and early postwar expansion.

 

And what's notable, too, is that this was mostly infill on dead or lightly developed plats from the Roaring Twenties or before. The two early outlying suburbs here, Fort McKinley and Shiloh, are quite early, products of the interurban boom from before WWI.

 

 

 

Stripping away the plats, and showing the main streets + population growth, one can see how Northtown was positioned to attract shoppers out from closer-in areas developed before the Depression and undergoing final build-out  (reversing the usual shopping trip into the city) but also to intercept shoppers heading into town (and from future plats that might occur in the 1950s).

 

The earlier Miracle Lane (first true strip center in Dayton from around 1946-47) is also shown, performing a similar function on Salem Avenue that Northtown did on North Main. Northtown was developed in the 1949-1951 time frame.

 

 

 

Let's Go Shopping (for suburban form)

 

Beerman's first shopping center was probably McCook Center off Keowee Street, where some of the features here make their appearance. But McCook seems much more ad-hoc compared to Northtown.

 

Northtown in its context on North Main Street, set in areas that were already developed east of Main. What’s notable is the center was somewhat integrated into its site, with streets from adjacent development leading into the centers parking lots. The land behind the center was developed as apartments.

 

 

A closer-up, illustrating how the center was somewhat tentative, working out some basic strip-center concepts.

 

There are two larger stores, ancestors of the big box anchor store of today, but they are separated from the center by an access drive to rear of the center. There is plenty of parking, but the center buildings are still held fairly close to the street. About half the parking is hidden to the rear of the center. The characteristic L form of Beerman's later centers appears, but the L comes very close to Main, leaving only two rows of parking. And there's that access drive to the back parking.

 

 

 

Northtown today. The center apparently had facade updates over the years.

 

 

The Beerman's downtown Arcade might have been an inspiration here as, unlike other strip centers, there is a second floor of offices and a little shopping arcade connecting to the back parking.

 

Fairly unusual for a strip center, but there are contemporary examples in Dayton from the same era of two story mixed-use buildings going up at new suburban shopping nodes (like at Patterson and Wilmington or Far Hills in Oakwood, and in Fort McKinley). In this case this transitional building type is incorporated into a strip center.

 

 

Inside the shopping arcade, which is really just a wide hallway with storefronts arranged in a sort of zig-zag pattern to make the hall seem less of a tunnel.

 

 

(the offices are via the door to the left, which is probably original, with the original hardware.  One suspects the light fixtures and terrazzo is original as well).

 

The rear entrance to the shopping arcade....

 

 

...and the extensive rear parking area. Note the apartments in the background as an illustration of how the center was somewhat integrated into surrounding housing. Though this is pretty desolate, a better landscaped and pedestrian -friendly parking area like this could be model for modern attempts to integrated strip centers into housing as a walkable ensemble.

 

 

The access drive to & from the front parking....

 

 

 

…and the two "big boxes" on the northern part of the site. One of these is a supermarket, perhaps it always was.  One wonders if the other was one of Beerman’s early department stores.

 

 

The L, closing off the south side of the shopping center, here made up of one-story buildings.  You are present at the creation of postwar suburbia: this was the start of 59 years of shopping center development.

 

 

Yet memories of the old ways of city building linger here. Note how the L is so close to Main Street, with only two rows of angled parking. It's almost as if the designers were still thinking stores should still be held close to the busy street, creating a street wall, not be set back away from it.

 

 

The details here are another illustration of how tentative this design is. Note the corner entrance of the store to the left. This would be typical of corner stores throughout Dayton, and is a detail carried over from the pre-war era of retail construction. Yes there is a corner here, but the "street" heading off the pix to the right isn't a street at all, it's another access drive (without sidewalks) to the rear parking.

 

 

Northtown Neighbors

 

A quick look at adjacent development;  this neat little two-story modernist take on the “taxpayer block” directly north of the center carries the mixed used concept of Northtown to a spec office building with ground floor retail.  With minimal pull-in parking in front.  Have to love the name of that hair/nail salon:  Arrogance.

 

 

Across the street, how what was once a residential street (with fairly old housing since this was an “interurban suburb”) was retrofitted for retail in the postwar era by tack-on storefronts (as the first draft).  Later recycling would remove the houses for smaller commercial buildings on house-sized lots

 

 

Northtown: Past as Prologue?

 

What's interesting is how some of the later Beerman developments have returned to the mixed-use concept of Northtown, with stores on the ground floor and offices above. An excellent example is the Mad River Station across OH 725 from the Dayton Mall (which is no longer a Beerman property). And especially the Shoppes at 725, which harkens back to the era before shopping centers.

 

A correction is that Westtown was developed in the mid 1950s, just a bit later than Easstown. It was open by 1957.

Wonderful thread, Jeffery!!!

 

Read bits and pieces of it previously on Daytonology. Awesome thread, it cleared up many of the mysteries about Northtown for me (like- Does that shopping center really have two floors? If so, why the h*ll does it?), especially since I drive by there once every couple weeks. It is a really cool center, definitely didn't realize it was a Beerman project. Even though it's not really recognized now (Westtown and Easttown definitely get the recognition as Beerman centers in my mind), I would argue that it's Beerman's best.

 

Again, awesome thread, Jeffery!!!!

Thanks!

Very interesting! These strip malls remind me of one built in Greenhills, I believe in the 1950's sometime.

There were Beerman stores in all three of these centers, as well as McCook. At the southern end of Northtown across an access drive from the main part of the center was a movie theater. The "neighbor" building north of the center had Chicago Deli, a jewish style deli. Where the Handyman store is now was Mendelson's Sporting Goods.

Totally off-topic: Jeffery, have you ever run across any information on the history of Breitenstrater Square or the early history (pre-1950) of the Belmont area in general?

 

Information about Breitenstrater is completely absent from the web. A few years ago Cold Beer and Cheeseburgers at Breitenstrater Square had a picture allegedly of the "Breitenstrater sisters" on their farm on the same site, from the early 20th century. But last time I ate there they had taken that picture down.

The "neighbor" building north of the center had Chicago Deli, a jewish style deli.

 

The Chicago Deli was in business when I moved here, but in the shopping center, in the "L" facing Main Street.  I remember getting a corned beef sandwhich there.  That was years ago.

 

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Brietenstrater Square....an old women who was the heiress or daughter...or maybe even one of those sisters...used to hang out at the Officers Club at Wright-Patterson (been told this by a freind who worked at the base) for happy hour.  Guess she married a military man.  My freind told me she was quite the life of the party after a few cocktails. 

 

The farm itself had some greenhouses on it, so was maybe a truck farming operation or they sold to florists.  There was a dairy nearby, too. The shopping center came after the Beerman towns, later 1950s I think.  I did a bunch of research on that area (Patterson/Wilmington intersectipm) as I have this odd fascination with the Depression-era outskirts of town, the liminal space where the "old city" ends and "suburbia" begins.  Never pulled it together to post online, though.

 

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You asked about Belmont. 

 

Belmont was Belmont Junction, where the D-X interurban split into a line to Xenia and a line to Bellbrook and Spring Valley.  The Bellbrook branch ran down Smithville to Wimington and out.  This why there are older plats and more older housing along Smithville than along Wilmington, which developed later.  All this was part of Van Buren township and was annexed by Dayton in the ealry 1930s.  If Dayton had failed in annexing it would have been part of Kettering and the schools still part of Fairmont (they were built by the Fairmont district). 

 

The first Belmont plats were those long streets running west of Smithville...Nordale and Bellaire (not the original names), near the Belmont Party Supply and DeClarks. Subdivided in 1900, over a century ago.

 

The business district of Belmont I'm not sure about.  I think it started in the 1920s but really developed later, maybe more in the later 1930s and  1940s, just by looking at the storefronts.  There was a Beermans in Belmont, too.  But it relocated out to Smithville near the Van Buren Shopping Center.

 

BTW, there is also a Belmont in Chicago, and like the Dayton one it is bungalow land and with a 1920s-1940s era business district, Belmont & Central.

 

 

Wow. Thanks for the background on the Breitenstaters. I recall reading somewhere else that the shopping center was built on a former truck farm.

 

Thanks also for the analysis of early Belmont. I've seen old 1900 vintage USGS topo map quadrangles of that area and you can see the main streets like today's Bellaire radiating out from Smithville. Right, there are these old neighborhoods along Wilmington out through Beavertown.

hmm, interesting.

 

and here i had always figured elder-beerman's at the the bg mall had some kind of amish link.