Daytonology

2009-07-23T22:47:00.001-04:00

Daytonology is...

Daytonology Two Year Anniversary

2009-07-23T22:37:00.000-04:00

Back in January there was this post, announcing yer humble hosts impending departure from Dayton and the closure of this blog.

The move is on hiatus due to the dire job situation but the blog is done. Daytonology has been running on empty for quite a while now, so this two year anniversary (the first posts were during July 2007) is as good a time as any to close the blog. Two to three years is the average life span of a blog, too.

Since there are things linking here the blog will be online for a few more months. This will give people who surf in time to remove links if they have any (if other bloggers are like me they periodically check their link roll and cull dead links).

Come December the delete button will be pushed and this blog will finally disappear into the ether.

The Space Race is Over

2009-07-19T22:04:00.003-04:00

Since this is the 40th anniversary of the first men on the moon, a good song on the subject, sort of, by UK folk-rocker Billy Bragg. Bragg was a fan of Simon and Garfunkle as a teen before going through the "cleansing fire of punk" (as he says) and one can tell the influence of a certain Paul Simon song here. In fact Bragg cribbed a line from it for this lyric. Y'all can guess that song.

Anyway, a good song from one of Billy Braggs best albums:

The Space Race is Over

When I was young I told my mum
I'm going to walk on the Moon someday
Armstrong and Aldrin spoke to me
From Houston and Cape Kennedy
And I watched the Eagle landing
On a night when the Moon was full
And as it tugged at the tides, I knew deep inside
I too could feel its pull

I lay in my bed and dreamed I walked
On the Sea of Tranquillity
I knew that someday soon we'd all sail to the moon
On the high tide of technology
But the dreams have all been taken
And the window seats taken too
And 2001 has almost come and gone
What am I supposed to do?

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get to the moon
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we've all grown up too soon

Now my dreams have all been shattered
And my wings are tattered too
And I can still fly but not half as high
As once I wanted to

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get to the moon
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we've all grown up too soon

My son and I stand beneath the great night sky
And gaze up in wonder
I tell him the tale of Apollo And he says
"Why did they ever go?"
It may look like some empty gesture
To go all that way just to come back
But don't offer me a place out in cyberspace
Cos where in the hell's that at?

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get out of my room
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we're all just going nowhere

Urban Bohemia and Left Wing Political Style

2009-07-19T18:42:00.007-04:00

Stadt luft macht frei, City air makes one free.

This old German saying, perhaps coming from the Middle Ages or Renaissance, could be the theme of a cultural tendancy of modern America, too, as it is so contrary to the American ethos, which is, at heart, anti-urban. As we here in the Dayton region know all too well.

That cultural tendancy is for cultural and political free thinkers and innovators to seek out the city as a favorable mileau for innovation, leading to the formation of urban bohemia, but also the ongoing connection of this bohemia to a left politlcal turn, meaning either revolution or reform, either socialist or anarchist.

This phenomenon was perhaps already visible at the dawn of Bohemia, in 19th century Paris.

Bohemia & The Paris Commune

Bohemia was first named by Henry Murger, staging a play on Bohemia in 1849 and later publishing Scenes de la Vie de Boheme in 1851, just after the 1848 revolution, the one that overthrew Louis Phillipe. It's unclear what role Murgers bohemians played in that revolution. In fact it appears that Bohemia was pretty much apolitical at first. Yet it's certain members of the bohemian subculture participated in the great proleterian insurrection of 1871, the Paris Commune.

Perhaps that is a bohemian in the red coat, on the right of the above illustration of the Communards marching with Marianne, symbol of the French Revolution. Both literary figures of Parisian bohemia and at least one artist, Gustave Courbet, participated in the Paris Commune.

And this wasn't "left wing political" style, as over 20,000 died or were executed, with even more deported the colony of New Caledonia. Observers hostile to the Commune noted that it was "the death of Bohemia".

Another time and place where urban bohemia (and when isn't it urban?) intersected with politics, or at least social criticsm, was in Berlin, perhaps during the Wilhelmine era but certainly after 1918 with the coming of the Weimar Republic. This was most clearly seen with Berlin manifestation of the Dada movement. Dada was essentially apolitical in its original form in Zurich, but took a decidely left wing turn in Berlin, with artists such as the painter/illustrator Georg Grosz and collagist John Heartfield creating bitter, politcally charged artworks. It must be said that Grosz himself was no follower of any political line, distrusting ideology and political supermen, as he makes clear in his excellent autobiography: Ein klienes Ja und ein grosses Nein (A small Yes and a big No)

The Political Turn in American Bohemia

The first urban bohemia in the United States was probably Greenwich Village, which became a location for artists and writers in the early 20th century (perhaps earlier?). The development of the Village as an artists enclave parallelled the great "second immigration" to America from eastern and southern Europe and the second wave industrialization.

Artists of this era documented and even celebrated this booming urban world, especially artists of the "Ash Can School". One of these was John Sloan, one of the great painters of the American city, as demonstrated by this wonderful painting of a part of New York.

Greenwich Village was also a center of political and social creativity. An example of this was The Masses, a magazine put out by the Village creative class. In the example below the same John Sloan who did the above painting provided this cover on the miners strike in Ludlow, Colorado (later immortalized in the Woody Guthrie song "The Ludlow Massacre").

The Village tradition of politically committed artists, writers, and illustrators lived on into our times. A good example is World War 3 Illustrated, a collection of comix and illustrations put out by people associated with the East Village scene, such as Eric Drooker and Peter Kuper, The East Village was a modern geographical and cultural expansion of the old Greenwich Village of The Masses and Ashcan School.
This same East Village scene was the setting for the popular musical Rent.

One doesn't usually associate musicals with either bohemia or political content, but Rent is perhaps the exception. The story of Rents relation to 19th century Paris via Puccini is probably known to readers thus need not be detailed here. What is probably not known is that the writer/composer Jonathan Larson was himself quite political, having developed an earlier musical on the right wing ascendence in 1980s America. And Larson pretty much lived the bohemian life of little money and day jobs, concentrating on his art.

And of course there is that theme of AIDS running through the musical. In fact one thing that made Rent radical was it's putting of gay and lesbian relationships on equal footing as straight ones.

Urban bohemia had long provided cover for sexual innovators and non-standard relationships, so became a tolerant mileau for gays and lebsians. One of the sources of modern gay rights movmenet came out of the Greenwich Village bohemia, the explicitly political Gay Liberation Movement.

Art and politics were to cross again with the advent of AIDS and the hostile social and political climate the disease engendered. One response was via the work of artists like Keith Haring, part of the street art scene, and the edgier David Wojnarowicz, who went beyond art and fought legal battles in the culture war against the right wing.

Haring was already well known in art circles for his graffitti-inspired work when he joined the new ACT-UP movement. ACT UP is a good example of the politicl potential of a radicalized creative class. In this case it was not just artists but individuals involved in commercial art, the adverstising industry, who developed a potent visual identity for the movement, which was innovative in agit-prop tactics, civil disobedience, and media manipulation.
This continued on into non-gay alternative politics, probably best known via the anti-globalization demonstrations in Seattle, but also via the Indymedia/Infoshop movement, which is probably more anarchist than left (if one had to put a label on all this).

New York has been mentioned a lot. But urban bohemias exist outside of NYC. Particularly on the West Coast, but also here in the Midwest, in Chicago.

Chicago had it's own Greenwich Village in Tower Town, the neighborhood directly west of the old Water Tower, around Bughouse Square (traditionally the Speakers Corner of Chicago), an intersection of the political, literary, and artistic (as can be seen by this collection on Chicago's free speech tradition. Frequently seen in that collection is the Dill Pickle Club, which rang the same politico-cultural changes as Greenwich Village.

Chicagos politicized bohemian spirit continues one in modern things, like some of the plays of Theatre Oobleck. And some of the newer neighborhoods, which are described as "hipster" but also have a certain political turn, as one can see by these pix of a mural on various freedom fighters, in the traditional colors of anarchy and revolution, red and black.

The Mexican revolutionary Zapata
Bob Marley and some woman who I don't recognize.

An odd juxtaposition, Ghandi and Che Guevera. Could they be any more different in style?

Dayton Bohemia and Left Wing Political Style

Yer humble host wouldn't know because, though a longtime lefty in spirit, he's not part of the local bohemia. Since the scene here is more music based one won't see (or hear) much politics because, unlike in Europe, the US alt/indy scene isn't that political. Yes, the left does have the best music, but its usually the British left.

Locally, if there is a political turn it's more of a libertarian one, or indifference to politics (which is the usual image of the bohemian, someone who lives for art)

About the only local artist that works political content into his work is Drexel Dave Sparks, though he's probably more a libertarian than a lefty (based on his previous incarnations online as Sparkdog, host of the late, lamented Fat City News). An example of DD's political content; bedpan commentary on Bob Taft:

I recall one other local visual artist (whos name escapes me, but I do know he is an Iraq veteran) who's done some interesting things on the Iraq War and related themes. And there is a fellow associated with The Circus who does rap/spoken word with some proto-political content..more about social conditions...which have political implications.

And that's about it for Dayton. Which brings up the the fact that this political turn in urban bohemia is probably found only certain large cities. Yet it neglected aspect of the creative class concept, which tends to depoliticize the cultural creative scene, rather than recognize a bohemian tendancy to political radicalism, or, at very least, political critique.

Mock Turtle Press

2009-07-19T08:09:00.003-04:00

More signs of life in the dying city.

Stopping by Jazzy Java Cafe I happened across a basket of little chapbooks with a donation can. Entitled "Collage" this is a collection of stories. The one bought was "short stories by Dayton authors". So it seems people are still doing zines here.

The publisher is "Mock Turtle Press", who maintains both a facebook and myspace page. Here's a link to the hipper myspace site (and, as is usual, the "Freinds" section provides linkage to local cultural creatives and their freinds and associates).

Perhaps what's interesting here is the concept of mixing print & paper (zines) with a presence in the social networking online world. The myspace/facebook sites promotes the zine, but one wonders if a zine could work the other way, promoting a blog or online place.

Stuff like this is heartening; small shoots of independent cultural production in a desert of soul sucking cultural conformity and conservativism. It's the small thrills of looking at the little postcards and mini-flyers at, say, Gem City or Jazzy Java or that coffeeshop at Paccia, or at the 5th Street Deli (and the larger band and event posters in the windows); that there are things happening out there, a scene of sorts creating and producing things, usually music but other types of cultural activity, too.

In short, a local bohemia or alternative scene.

Perhaps Dayton could evolve something like the Bristol Underground Scene. Or maybe it already has and all is needed is a wikipedia entry?

The Dayton Daily News Beats the Creative Class Drum

2009-07-19T07:01:00.002-04:00

Daytonology has done some desultory blogging about Richard Florida's Creative Class concept and the local attempt at doing Creative Class things, the Dayton Create initiative.

But not too much because yer humble host isn't part of this class, or category. Not because of cynicsm since Florida is on to something (albeit something difficult to measure).

What's good to see is the Dayton Daily News continuing to report on the progress and the positive editorials on the intiatives. Recently there was one on UpDayton, the young adult group, who have been quite active: Creative Class Living Is Up to Name

The article mentions the "summit" sponsored by UpDayton, which came in for quite a bit of critique from the local blogosphere (Daytonology Included):

One group organized a summit last spring where two hundred or so people showed up to mull over what to do first. What could have been a boring, discouraging gripe fest was a mass brainstorming session that wrapped up with participants settling on four big things to tackle.

...oddly enough the DDN itself is the source of the regions' largest ongoing "boring, discouraging gripe fest"; the readers comments to their local news articles, especially ones dealing with urban affairs.

I guess this editorial signals that the editors do not share the views of their more vocal readers.

The editorial discussed UpDayton's "Don't Dog Dayton" video contest, which is one of three things they are pushing for in their Grow Downtown intiative. Another is revitalize existing festivals, which are, presumably, not attractive to the 20 and 30 - somethings (one of the local bloggers has noted the festivals decline, so a definite issue here).

It will be easy for UpDayton and the other DaytonCreate initiatives to get lost in the generalized malaise and negativity, the black hole of bad local karma, so a big pat on the back for the DDN for keeping this (admittedly small) counter-trend in public view via their editorials.

Building Xenia Junction.

2009-07-18T12:29:00.006-04:00

Xenia developed into one of Ohio’s railroad towns, a species of place that had some importance to railroading due to repair facilities and as a junction point for the railroads that criss-crossed Ohio during this era.

On the map this looks quite confusing, so this post will attempt to untangle the knot of railroads via a chronology.

The story starts with a pioneer railroad, one of the very first in the state. The Little Miami Railroad reached Xenia in 1845, five or six years before Dayton received it’s first railroad. The early lines didn’t have powerful engines, so grade was a consideration. One can see this in the Little Miami right-of-way; The Little Miami took a valley route into Xenia, departing the Little Miami bottomlands at Spring Valley and following the valley of Gladys Run into town:

The Little Miami Railroad, entered town on the exceptionally wide Detroit Street (on the east side of the street), which was a bit unusual for Ohio (there are at least two examples of this in Kentucky, in Frankfort and Lagrange).

Xenia railroad lore says that a promoter donated a building on Detroit Street as a station, with the proviso that trains would stop there for all time. And apparently passenger trains did continue to stop there after the union station was built in the 1850s.

Next a few diagrams showing the evolution of the junction.
Xenia, starting with the Little Miami.

In the mid 1840s Columbus had no railroads, so a daily line of mail stages went into operation between the railhead at Xenia and Columbus and Dayton.

The next year the line was extended to Springfield. The original route was to be via Clifton and it’s big mill, but the promoters of Yellow Springs offered money to route the line through that town. The route via a mill might have been because the railroad was initially conceived, in part, to provide an outlet for the merchant millers of the Little Miami valley.

At Springfield one took a stage to make the connection with the Mad River Railroad railhead at Bellefontaine. There was also a line of “daylight stages” to connect with Columbus, perhaps via the National Road. The journey from Cincinnati via Xenia, Springfield, stage coach to Bellefontaine, overnight in Bellefontaine, then on to the lake port of Sandusky took around 27 hours in 1847.

The next line was the Columbus and Xenia, which presumably replaced the stage to Columbus.

This line would eventually connect with the Columbus and Cleveland railroad, and ultimately to the eastern seaboard via the Lake Shore Railroad east from Cleveland, becoming a main line into Cincinnati, relegating the old Little Miami north of Xenia to branch line status.

The C & X entered Xenia via the valley of one the forks of Shawnee Creek, joining the Little Miami in the valley just south of the forks of Shawnee. The Xenia junction was starting to form

The Columbus and Xenia had originally projected to connect to Dayton. Instead, a railroad was projected east from Dayton. This was the Dayton, Xenia and Belpre.

The DX&B was intended as a “resource road”, connecting the Hanging Rock Iron region (and early coal fields) to Dayton manufacturers, and also offering a connection to tidewater via the Baltimore and Ohio branch across the river from Belpre at Parkersburg.

This line was never completed. Grading extended as far as Jamestown and then work ceased.

In the 1870s there was a second attempt at a “coal road”, a narrow gauge line from Dayton to the vicinity of Wellston and Jackson in Appalachian Ohio. Narrow gauge is usually associated with logging and mining railroads out west, but here it was used as a long distance cross-country line.

This line was eventually converted to standard gauge and taken over by the Baltimore & Ohio.

Xenia Junction in Detail

This vignette shows the old 1850s two story union station. Union because it served more than one railroad at the time. These lines soon went under joint operation and eventually merged. Ultimately they were taken over by the great east-west railroads. In this case the Pennsylvania and Baltimore and Ohio.

The junction in the 1870s. One can see the station, a roundhouse, a freight house, and some sidings.

By the 1890s one sees the Baltimore & Ohio branch swinging into the junction area, with its’ own depot. This is probably a fairly accurate track configuration for that era.

Xenia Junction in the 1930s, from the air. This was the peak of railroading in Xenia, with various shop and support facilities, a small yard, and some sidings. One can see that structures from the 1850s, 70s, and 90s survived into the 1930s. The Greene County historical society has a collection of artifacts, photos, and a scale model of the junction, worth a visit for railfans and history buffs.

The same site today. All the railroads are gone and the junction is now a cycling center, with Xenia Station as a visitors center for bike trails radiating from Xenia on the old railroad right-of-ways.

Another view of the junction. The building is a reconstructed baggage station and railway express office, and has a small exhibit on railroading in Xenia.

And in this aerial one can see how the bike path follows the old Little Miami grade out of the valley to Detroit Street. Some surviving buildings are keyed from old maps to the aerial, showing how some of old Xenia survived into our time (although it should be noted that the station is a reconstruction).

It might be worthwhile taking a closer look at the Sanborn maps to how much of industrial Xenia has survived. Though it had good rail connections Xenia didn’t develop into an industrial center the way nearby Springfield did. And why that was is a good question for econmic history.

Another future post would be to investigate the development of the railroad system in south & west Ohio, since there might be an interesting economic geography story to be told. This would look at the rise of Cincinnati & Dayton as a railroad centers as part of the development of a regional network. Maybe more the subjec of a book or journal article than a blog post, though.

I-75 Interchange Boom: Springboro/Franklin

2009-07-16T21:29:00.003-04:00

A first look at two developing interchanges on I-75, building blocks of Daytonnati. These are exits 36 and 38, for State Route 73 and 123, radiating out from Franklin to Springboro and Red Lion.

These exits are developing into substantial business centers, certainly in area or land consumed, if not in actual employment.

An areil showing development patterns in the vicinity of the interstate. As one can see there is still plenty of open space here.
But shading the business district, which is mostly industrial or warehouse, not so much retail, the extend of the development becomes quite clear. There is also business activity in "Old Franklin", including at least two legacy industrial facilities from the 19th century, still in operation (Franklin developed as a small industrial center, as did many of the towns on the Great Miami river).
A close-up of exit 36. This is the "truck stop exit" but behind the big rigs there is a substantial industrial and large-floorplate business presence. This interchange was already under industrial/office development in 1983, so it's taking decades for build-out. It all belongs to Franklin, which apparently has an agressive annexation policy.

Exit 38 is probably the best known to Daytonians for the Dayton Daily News' new printing plant, but also Buddies Carpet Barn and La Comedia Dinner Theatre. Springboro has annexed the east side (right) of I-75, and Franklin the left, or west side.

As one can see development is extending deeper into the surrounding countryside from the strip development along SR 73. The desirable, high-visibility frontage alont I-75 is sucking development to the north and south along the interstate. An example is the green space across the highway from the Dayton Daily News, which is going under development.

This was a brief glimpse, but Daytonology will go into a bit more detail later.

A Quick Look at Employment and Business Growth

From County Business Patterns, some numbers. CBP does provide some gross data on types and numbers of business establishments by zip code for the late 1990s and early to mid 2000s. An imperfect measure of interchange-specific growth but a good barometer on how this corner of Warren County is booming. Employment was topping 15,000 jobs and business establishments increasing to over 1,050 by the mid 2000s, before the recession.

Later, a closer look at the interchange development.

Xenia: Antebellum Expansions

2009-07-16T20:55:00.003-04:00

As we've seen in the previous post, Xenia was platted as an 24 square block rectangle, with two exceptionally broad cross-streets, one laid out across an old pioneer road or trail, the Bullskin Road. The platters extended outlots east to, it seems, the line of the original Virginia survey, and south to a fork of Shawnee Creek.

Logically one would expect the town to extend east along the outlots, and south to Shawnee Creek (as a possible mill site). This did happen to some extent, and its notable the platting of town lots into outlots didn't cross the valley and watercourse that made a diagonal traverse of the outlots.

What's more noticeable, however, is the platting activity along Shawnee Creek. We don't have maps showing the orginal surveys in this area, or a chronology, but these streets appear in an 1855 map of Xenia, part of Greene County Atlas.

The 1840s and 1850s was the era of railroad construction, and Xenia played early in this. The lines entering Xenia around 1855 are shown here, and one can see how the platting is around the railroads and their junction, which happened to be along Shawnee Creek. One can speculate that the platting action was driven by anticipation of growth due to developing railroad junction. Growth that never came to the extent expected.

The platting form was probably determined by the various roads and turnpikes radiating from Xenia, since there wasn't a survey grid to work off of.

In this Xenia resembled Kentucky towns, where road alignmnets were not governed by survey grids, but ran cross country, radiating from county seat towns. Lexington is a good example of this, with the town grid determined by topography and water courses, but with a very pronounced radial pattern for the turnpikes extending from the grid into the surrounding countryside.

A bit more on railroading in Xenia in a future post.

More on The Urban Policy Roundtable

2009-07-15T17:14:00.002-04:00

There isn't much in the news on this. So far the Washington Post has provided the best coverage.

You can read their report on the confab here: Obama Paints a New Vision for Nation's Urban Policy. (and it should be noted we havn't actually had one since the LBJ/Nixon years)

The article quotes Obama at length, so here are some excerpts from the POTUS' s remarks.

....he said that he defined "urban" as not just inner cities, but also their surrounding suburbs, asserting that there is no longer a divide between the two.

"Even as we've seen many of our central cities continuing to grow in recent years, we've seen their suburbs and exurbs grow roughly twice as fast," said Obama. "It's not just our cities that are hotbeds of innovation anymore, it's our growing metropolitan areas."

He said he would send members of his Cabinet and the Office of Urban Affairs to look at innovations in cities around the country to elevate as best practices.

Obama noted Denver, for its plans to build a public transit system to handle the city's anticipated growth; Philadelphia, for its urban agriculture; and Kansas City, which has weatherized homes and built a ecologically minded transit system in one low-income neighborhood.

The foot stomper is in bold. Obama is calling for a metropolitan vision, trying to get beyond the parochial and limited view of "urban" = "inner city/black". And in this he is borrowing on some thinking coming from Brookings; their Metropolitan Policy Program is probably one of the best urban policy think tanks.

Obama is proposing some interesting things regarding inner city neighborhoods, mentioned in the previous post, but it seems this advocacy of a metropolitan model for urban policy is quite new.

The Washington Post followed up with an editorial today on the topic: Rethhinking the Cities.
The WaPo chides Obama a bit in that the stimulus money isn't necessarily metro-focused, as well as other policy glitches (like the abandonment of the Vechiles Miles Driven tax and urban areas getting less stimulus money). Yet the thrust is correct: the time has come for the Feds to catch up with almost 20 years worth of new thinking and policy innovation on urbanism, much of it happening at the state and local level (unfortunatly none of it from the laggard Dayton area):

The 1990s brought a resurgence of cities and ushered in a new way of looking at them as part of sprawling metropolitan areas with interdependent localities. Today, according to the Obama administration, these areas are home to more than 80 percent of the nation's jobs and residents and 90 percent of the nation's economic production.

Urban policy already is being redefined by many states and localities around the country.

That's one reason this blog has changed focus to the Dayton region, recognizing this is a interdependent regional economy even if there is still that cultural parochialism. Or, to put a postivie spin in on it, a rich variety of communities and places that comprise the region, yet function together as one economic unit; one media, employment, and retail market.

The Return of Urban Policy?

2009-07-13T22:29:00.003-04:00

Just off the AP Wire: White House starts urban policy outreach.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama said Monday that federal policy has encouraged urban sprawl, has hurt city residents and damaged the environment.

Pledging a top-to-bottom review of how the United States deals with cities and metropolitan areas, Obama invited political leaders and policy experts to the White House to solicit their ideas for a national urban policy. Citing the connection between education and employment figures, transportation and pollution, White House officials said their next budget proposal would address how to remedy long-festering policy questions about the pace of urban growth.

I-75 Linear City: The Middletown Interchange

2009-07-13T20:52:00.005-04:00

The Cincinnati Buisness-Courier printed a lengthy article on the developments along I-75, recognizing a linear city is developing between Cincinnati and Dayton. The article was entitled I-75 Ceasless Makeover to Include New Interchanges.

The subtitle was even more signifigant: Line between Cincinnati & Dayton Blurs.

Since the POV was Cincy-centric they listed developments by exit number northbound on I-75.
The article is posted at Dayton Most Metro and Urban Ohio. The geographically imparied can read it while using the map below as a key.

As this spine develops people in south suburban Dayton will be more and more oriented south as the I-75 corridor develops into the new job and housing center for the region.

Though the article says the line is blurring, it's safe to say exits 19 through 24 (which is being rebuilt to include an additional interchange with Liberty Road) are within the orbit of Cincinnati, and exit 29 is a special purpose exit with unusual retail like the Hustler Superstore, the two "flea markets", Solid Rock Church with the Touchdown Jesus, the prison, and the new outlet mall.

Beyond that things get more interesting....at least when it comes to blurring lines of influence.

This is the area where Dayton's influence might be felt more, but also the old industrial city of Middletown. In fact the development at the Middletown interchange, Exit 32, is probably the direct competitor with Austin Road (apparently Middletown is also proposing another intechange, too, at Manchester Road).

The New Middletown: The Renaissance District

This Middletown development, east of I-75, is called the Renassiance District. And, unlike development outside of Dayton, its all within the city limits of Middletown, representing economic growth for a city who's core is nearly as dead as Dayton.

The Renaissance District is developed around a brand new hospital, replacing an old hospital deeper into Middletown. The basic land use concept:
...and the master plan is shown below. A notable feature is the greenway following the forested banks of a little creek, and the greenways running east/west south of OH 122. In the map, orange is offices, red is mixed use (retail & office) and dark brown is multifamily. So the concept follows old-school zoning, but does try to mix things up more.

Theoretically some of this could be either walkable or bikeable, depending on how it sis developed.

Middletown selected Al Neyer, a Cincinnati developer, as their lead developer for the site. The aerials here are from Neyers online prospectus.

Looking West: The first mover was Paychex, who consolidated their Cincinnati and Dayton operations into one cener at this site. A good example of the business case for a consolidating into a central location serving two population centers. SR 122 is in the process of being widened and realigned, and I-75 is being widened to eight lanes. In the distance is the "new" downtown Middletown: the retail/hotel/food-drink zone around Town Mall.

Looking North: The new hospital is visible here, and is quite visible from the freeway at this time, too. One can see the belt of woods proposed as a greenway, and some new office buildings, possibly related to or supporting the hospital.

Looking South: One can see the possibilities here, with lots of open space between Union Road and the interstate. Ideally the property closer to the interstate would be developed first as it's more visible, where buildings can act as billboards of sorts.
The Town Mall retail/hospitality zone is visible to the right (west) of I-75. Town Mall itself is empty, and this retail district has morphed into a de-facto power center, with a veneer of hotels and food/drink places and maybe some strip centers.

If the site planning is kept to the relatively high standard shown in the master plan map this could be one of the most attractive interchange developments in the region. There is a real posssibility here for some innovate use of open space to connect office and retail into future residential areas to the east of the site

Platting Xenia

2009-07-13T16:30:00.006-04:00

Xenia, the county seat that is also a suburb. Perhaps not as engulfed by sprawl as Chicagoland’s Wheaton (Dupage County) or Atlanta’s Decataur (DeKalb County), Xenia would not be as large as it is today if not for the proximity of Dayton.

Yet the place has it’s own history and industrial traditions. And, along with Troy, one of the more imposing courthouses in Southwest Ohio.

The history of the founding of Xenia is a good case study of land ownership and subdivision in the Virginia Military District. But first the tale of the town’s founding.

The 1881 History of Greene County, by R.S Dills, has an oral account of how Xenia was selected as county seat. The tale starts by introducing a Mr Lewis Davis, who met the early pioneer John Paul, who had settled in 1797 on Beaver Creek near the Little Miami, near the site of the later Trebein community:

Upon one of his previous trips ….(Davis) chanced to meet Paul, who told him that on his tract of land he purposed laying out the county seat, backing up his assertion by illustrating the feasibility, advantages of location, etc. Davis, who was a large land owner and veteran pioneer; and seemingly. possessed of an intuitive knowledge as to the direction of greatest development in a country, disagreed with Paul's opinions, and informed him that there never would be a county seat there.

Taking his map from his pocket, and spreading it upon the ground, he proceeded to demonstrate the grounds of his dissenting. Premising by the remark that county seats naturally located themselves upon thoroughfares between points on the Ohio on the south, and Lake Erie on the north, the southern point manifestly Cincinnati, and Sandusky the northern. Then placing the butt end of his riding-whip on Cincinnati, he dropped the small end on Sandusky, which, upon examination, cut the county at the forks of Shawanoes (Shawnee) Creek.

Placing his finger upon the spot now occupied by Xenia, he said, 'There will be the county seat..' He then pushed on ….

After remaining a week or so, he returned to Cincinnati ; but upon approaching the cabin of his friend Paul, he found it vacant and locked. A few days subsequent he learned that Paul had, immediately after the conversation above mentioned, gone to Cincinnati and entered all the land in the vicinity, and upon which is located now the city of Xenia. Thus it would seem, from the conjunction of facts and prediction, that Xenia was located in the above manner."

In the selection of a county seat, the preference seemed at first in the direction of Caesarsville; but upon due deliberation the present site of Xenia was determined upon, and on the 4th day of August, 1803, Joseph. C. Vance was, by the court., then sitting at the house of Peter Borders, appointed to survey the seat of justice. Giving bond in the sum of fifteen hundred dollars for the the faithful performance of his duties, with Joseph Wilson and David Huston as sureties, he proceeded to lay out and survey, in the autumn of the same year, the present. city of Xenia.

The surrounding country then was a wilderness, in which the native denizens of the forest held high carnival. John Paul had previously bought this tract, and donated for public buildings, it is said, that portion bounded by Main, Market, Detroit, and Greene streets.

The Forks of Shawnee Creek

The following contour map shows the lay of the land at the forks of Shawnee Creek. On can see the land rise to the east, and the creek and it’s forks curve around a bench or flat.

It was this flat that was to be the Xenia townsite, which was platted roughly at right angles to one of the forks of Shawnee. The square donated for public buildings is shown as a dashed line. As with many town plats of this era a set of outlots was appended to the grid of town lots, extending up into the hills to the east. Fractional outlots also extended to the Shawnee fork. This is a good example of early settlers’ sensitivity to topography and site.

From Virginia Land Warrant to Town Plat

The previous post noted that many of the Revolutionary veterans sold their rights to land to speculators. This might be the case with the land around Xenia, as the Warner and Addison Lewis, the warrant holders, did not appear on lists of Virginia veterans, and claimed thousands of acres via the first surveys.

It should be noted that an early road or trail passed through here, the Bullskin Road from the Ohio River to Detroit, passing through the site of “old town”, AKA “Old Chillicothe”, a former Shawnee village.

In 1798 Warner & Addison Lewis conveyed the land patent, or deed, of the future Xenia townsite to one Robert Pollard. This survey was 1,000 acres.

Then, in 1801, Pollard conveyed the property to Thomas Richardson and his wife, of Hanover County, Virginia.

Finally, in 1808 the future Xenia survey and an adjacent tract, 2,000 acres in all, were purchased by John Paul from Richardson (or his agents), presumably after that fortuitous meeting with Lewis Davis.

It appears that the purchase by Paul was the first time the property was owned by someone actually living in the Ohio country. Which does raise the question of communications between Virginia-based speculators, the Virginia Military District land office, and pioneers wanting to purchase land.

After Paul purchased the land he sold a portion of it (apparently not the full 1,000 acre survey) to Joseph Vance and others, who actually platted the town. Paul did donate the public square, however. One notes that the town was oriented around the Bullskin Road, which became Detroit Street, the principle north-south street.

After Paul purchased the land he sold a portion of it (apparently not the full 1,000 acre survey) to Joseph Vance and others, who actually platted the town. Paul did donate the public square, however. One notes that the town was oriented around the Bullskin Road, which became Detroit Street, the principle north-south street.
As one can see by the above map and the earlier contour map the town was laid out based on local topography, the creek and the adjacent flat, not the original survey nor by true north.

By 1855 Xenia had outgrown the original plat, with the eastern outlots being subdivided into town lots and new plats developing on either side of Shawnee Creek. By this time the railroads had arrived, which probably set off a real estate boom.

John Paul Moves West

John Paul's life story is an excellent demonstration of the movement west from the Eastern Seaboard.

Paul was born in 1758 in Germantown, PA, now a part of Philadelphia. His family moved west around 1767, to Redstone, on the Monohgalena River. Redstone was a well-known jumping off point, the source of the flatboats that floated settlers west down the Ohio.

From Redstone the Pauls pushed on to what is now West Virginia, then on to Kentucky, where the family settled in what became Hardin County. This was the Revolutionary War era, and young John Paul joined up with George Rogers Clark's 1778 expedition, participating in the the capture of Kaskaskia and Vincennes from the British. In 1790 Paul married Sarah Grover at Danville, Kentucky (at that time still part of Virginia). Paul moved north to Ohio in 1797.

After his involvement with the founding of Xenia Paul moved west. He at first bought the future site of New Albany, Indiana (near Lousville) at a land sale in Vincennes, but thought better of that sale. He found a better site, but had to wait until the land went on sale to buy it. This he did in 1809, purchasing the site of Madison, Indiana, and was a co-founder of that town.

Paul died in 1835, having lived long enough to see Madison become the largest in Indiana.

Following the Ludlow Line to the Top of Ohio

2009-07-12T08:45:00.004-04:00

The boundaries of the Virginia Military District, between the Scioto and Little Miami rivers north of the Ohio, left open the question of how to "close the survey", since the fourth "side" was left open.

The Virginia Military District's boundary would be closed by surveying a line between the sources of the boundary rivers. Conceptually simple except that the Scioto was considerably longer, and its northern course turned west, extending past the source of the Little Miami.

The first attempt to run a survey closing the VMD was by Israel Ludlow, platter of both Dayton and Cincinnati, and namesake of Ludlow Street in downtown Dayton. His survey was the Ludlow Line, and can still be traced through the modern landscape.

The lands of the VMD did not extend all the way north to the source of the Scioto at first. The Greenville Treaty Line of 1795 marked the end of US and state lands, because north of the line was "indian country". Aboriginal title would finally be extinguished north of the Greenville Treaty Line in the early 1800s, permitting this last piece of the VMD to be claimed and surveyed.

At the time of the Ludlow survey the source of the Scioto was thought to be a large swampland called the Scioto Marsh. The discovery that the headwaters extended beyond the swamp led to a second survey, the Roberts Line. This survey ran at a sharper north by northwest angle, terminating north of what is today Indian Lake (but was then yet another swamp) and then via right angle to the Scioto headwaters.

The Roberts Line was accepted by the Federal government, but the Feds bought out the Viriginia claims between the two lines, resulting in the Ludlow Line remaining the boundary of the VMD south of the Greenville Treaty Line. North of the treaty line the Roberts boundary was used, as shown on the map below. Also shown is a modern map, demonstrating how these 18th century survey lines are still visible in the modern landscape, usually as country roads and fence lines. And that the irregular metes and bounds surveys generate erratic road patterns compared to the gridded landscape west of the Ludlow Line.

The red cross marks Campbell Hill, at 1529 feet the highest point in Ohio. This is the "top of Ohio".

The countryside around Campbell Hill is noticeably different, too. While the surrouning area is the flat Midwestern plain the vicinity of Campbell Hill, particularly to the east and south, is rather hilly, with wooded, steep slopes and flat valleys and bottoms. It almost looks like it was missed by the glaciers (like southwest Wisconisn), but this is not the case.

If one starts at Deeds Point in downtown Dayton and follows the Mad River north one will end up in these valleys, because this is the headwaters country of the Mad.

The Ludlow Line is just visible on the left side of the map, shooting into the county seat of Bellefontaine, pronounced 'Bell-'Fountain by the locals (and everyone in Dayton, too).

The cultural landscape is as interesting as the geological one. Nearby are the two Piatt Castles, built by a notable political family of 19th century Ohio, who relocated here from Cincinnati in the 1820s. The castles (large mansions) are from the 1860s and 1870s, though.

Campbell Hill itself is not as impressive as the countryside to the south, being a large rise rather than a true hill or peak, yet one does have a slight feeling of the land dropping away to the the west; perhaps the horizon is a bit lower. This effect is more noticeable in the winter.
Campbell Hill has a modern historic signifigance as a Cold War relic. The Air Force built a radar warning site here in the 1950s, complete with a military housing area. All that's left are the radar and radio towers, visible above, and some of the housing.

A few pix of the countryside in the vicinity of Zanesfield, in the center of the hill and valley country southeast of Campbell Hill.

A suprising connection between this countryside to the Dayton scene is the annual Southwind Music Festival, held on the grounds of the Zane Shawnee Cavern, owned by a remnant band of the Shawnee (descendents of Indians who stayed behind when the tribes were relocated west). Southwind is a project of local music scene folks (check out the "freinds" section at the link) bringing bands one would ordinarily hear late at night in a downtown bar to a a sunny summer outdoors setting. This festival is part of the larger jam band/festival scene best exemplified by the Bonnaroo event down in Tennessee.

This country was long home to the native Americans. One of the last reservations in Ohio was the Shawnee/Seneca reservation between what is now Indian Lake and the Greenville Treaty line. The indians retained this land until the 1830s, when they were finally moved west.

Indian Lake itself is a major feature of the region. This lake is the headwaters of the Great Miami, but it's not a natural lake like the glacial lakes of Michigan and northern Indiana. Indian Lake was once a big swamp akin to the Scioto Marsh, but was turned into a resevoir in the 1830s and 40s to feed the Miami and Erie canal

With the rise of free time and recreation the lake became a resort area in the 20th century, and still is popular with fishermen and as a vacation home site.

As was noted the difficulty in determining sources of the Scioto led two boundary surveys of the VMD. So the Scioto Marsh countryside north of Indian Lake is the "last of Virginia" in Ohio.

The red line in the above map is the end of the Roberts Line and the blue line would have been Ludlows survey ending in the lower reaches of the Scioto Marsh.

The Last of Virigina: the end of the VMD survey at the headwaters of the Scioto, as expressed in field boundaries and country roads:
The heart-shaped Scioto Marsh was rather large. It is all drained today, yet the rich black soil is still visible in aeriel photographs of freshly tilled fields, as one can see here. The Scioto has been channelized in this area, but one can still the contrast in the north-south orientation of the fields west and north of the river vs the angled field to the south, probably based on surveys run off the old Ludlow line or Greenville Treaty Line.
The (drained) Scioto Marsh: flat as a board yet near the top of Ohio. The Scioto Marsh apparently warrants a historical marker, and it does have a history. The place was not typical wesern Ohio farm country, but relied heavily on hired hands imported from Appalachia, who organized and went on strike in 1934 (discussed in the old WPA Federal Writers Project Ohio Guide).

A modern book is out on the marsh: Unearthing the Land, The Story of Ohio's Scioto Marsh.
which discusses the strike, but also the natural history of the marsh and its subsequent draining and cultivation.

So, the Top of Ohio. Where the generic Midwest gets interesting. Perhaps even an example of a subltle American Heimat?

The Virginia Military District

2009-07-11T20:57:00.004-04:00

Daytonology is going to experiment a bit with a regional perspective, investigating the area outside of Montgomery County, including the rural landscapes of western Ohio.

In this post a quick introduction to "Virginia in Ohio", the Virginia Military District, VMD for short.

The Virginia Military District is the land between the Scioto and Little Miami River, which means it includes a substantial portion of Greene County. When Virginia ceded it's claims to sovereignity over the Northwest Territory to Congress in 1784 it retained this portion of land for military land grants in case land ran out in it's original military reservation in what is now Kentucky.

Land went under survey and tracts were located starting in 1790. It should be noted that Virginia retained the title to land , not sovereignity or jurisdiction, which went to the Northwest Territory. This was a bit different than the Connecticut Western Reserve up in northeast Ohio.

Chains of Rights and Title: From Military Service to Property Ownership

The land was a bounty or reward to Virginia veterans of the Revolution who served in the Continental Army. There was a rather involved process for obtaining land, starting with the veteran obtaining a certificate of service, which entitled him to a land warrant for an amount of land depending on rank and service. This was for just an amount of land, not specific pieces of property.

Then property in the VMD was surveyed for the amount of the land in the warrant. After the survey the warrant was exchanged for a patent, which was equivilant to a deed. This patent was how title transferred from Virginia to the veteran.

This diagram illustrates the process:

However, this assumes a Virginia veteran would travel all the way to Ohio to locate his tract.

In reality certificates, warrants, and patents could be bought and sold. Speculators could purchase certificates of service (in other words, rights to land) from veterans and obtain a warrant in their own name based on this certificate; the actual veterans name would never appear on these warrants. Or speculators could purchase (and sell) warrants and patents, without ever leaving Virginia.

As an example, of the 34 orginal "proprietors" (indivduals locating property via survey based on warrants) in Xenia Township, little more than half were actual Revolutionary veterans. And none of the orignal proprietors settled in the township, having sold their patents to others.

Surveying the Virginia Military District

What distinguishes the VMD from the rest of Ohio (and the rest of the Northwest Territory) is that this is the only large portion of the state to be survyed using the ancient metes and bounds system used in colonial Virginia and Kentucky. All the other large surveys in Ohio used rectangular coordinate systems. Since metes and bounds used natural landmarks to establish corners the result was an irregular system of land subdivision, with eventually was manifested on the landscape via woodlots, fence lines, and road alginments.

To illustrate, a map of a portion of Greene County bisected by the Little Miami River, in the vicinity of Old Town (between Xenia and Yellow Springs). To the right (east) is the VMD, to the left (west) are "Congress Lands", surveyed using the township and range system.

The irregular nature of the property surveys in VMD is evident. Stripping away the property lines to expose the "bones" underneath subsequent land subdivisions one can see the orginal surveys: townships subdivided into sections and quarter sections with range and section lines running north/south versus the considerably larger, irregular orginial surveys of the VMD.

One can discern that some of the VMD surveys might have been run using the Little Miami as the base line, illustrating the importance of natural features to metes and bounds surveys.

This becomes very clear in the southeastern part of the VMD, where it meets the Scioto River. This is Appalachian Ohio; beyond the wide bottoms of the Scioto the land becomes a rugged maze of hollows, valleys and ridges. And VMD surveys here follow hollows and valleys up the tributaries of ths Scioto and Ohio, as shown by this map of the Scioto valley between Wavery and Portsmouth. In this case the VMD is to the west (left) and Congress Lands to the east (right).

A modern example of the difference in landscape are these two maps of the modern rural road system in the Congress Lands (vicinity of Arcanum at the Darke/Preble county line) and the VMD (far eastern Greene County at the Madisona and Fayette County lines just north of Jamestown)

One can see the pattern is quite irregular, even if the topography is nearly identical.

Virginia in Ohio? Cultural & Landscape Features

Some cultural geographers have noted there are some aspects of this landscape that illustrate a southern influence, such as barn types and perhaps larger sized farms (though this might be a stretch) due to the larger initial surveys. Legal issues with property lines lacking permanent monuments would be another. And, of course, the irregular road and field patterns.

Although many of the original patentees never left Viriginia settlement was, ultimatly by Kentuckians and Viriginians (Thomas Worthington, a personage in early Ohio history, was a Viriginian and VMD settler), but there was also a strong stream of Pennsylvanians in the mix, plus some North Carolinans.

The countryside does remind one a bit of Kentucky, though. Especially as one gets closer to the Ohio river in Highland and Adams County.

And there was that tobacco economy in the countryside around Ripley, akin to a similar rural economy in the Kentucky counties directly across the river. Though, in that case, the tobacco variety (white burley) was first developed and grown in Ohio, and then was adopted by Kentucky farmers. Sidebar: The Tobacco Museum in Ripley is worth the visit, especially since the guides used to work in the industry.

One demographic aspect that reflects proximity to the South is the presence of a rural black population, something uncommon elsewhere in rural Ohio. This was due to freedmen crossing the Ohio, not to southerners brining slaves to the VMD. Slavery was illegal in the Northwest Territory and Ohio's first constitution prohibited involuntary indetured servitude.

As an example, county seats of Greenville and Eaton, north and west of Dayton, have less than 1% black population (Greenville at .6% and Eaton at .4% ). In contrast Hillsboro, a county seat in the heart of the VMD, is 6.4% black. Xenia is 13.5% black, but that may be due to the proxmity to Wilberforce University (Greene County had Ohios' highest rural black population in the 19th century). The rural VMD village of Jamestown is 4.1% black versus the Darke County hamlet of Arcanum, which is 0%. But maybe these percentages aren't that signifigant and might require further study.

Coming Soon: The Ludlow Line and the Top of Ohio.

Beerman Towns: Northtown

2009-07-11T07:58:00.005-04:00

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 enlargment 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 areas developing closer-in (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 urban form)

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

Northtown in its contex on North Main Street, set in areas that were already developed east of Main. Whats' 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 seperated 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 characterstic L form of Beerman's later centers appears, but the L comes very close to Main, leaving only two rows of parking. And ther'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). 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, too).

The rear entrance to the shopping arcade....

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

The access drive to the front parking....
..the two "big boxes" on the northern part of the site. One of these is a supermarket, perhaps it always was.

The L, closing off the south side of the shopping center, here made up of one-story buildings. 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 desginers 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: 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.

Beerman Towns

2009-07-07T21:23:00.005-04:00

Arthur Beerman was one of the most successful businessmen in Dayton during the postwar era, building business empires in retail and in real estate.

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 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 was 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.

At the end of the decade 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. These three “Beerman Towns” are good examples of the evolution of the shopping center during the early postwar era.

Dissecting 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.

The Evolution of 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.

However, one can see that Easttown is also sort of a "U" shape, too, with a building to the east closing forming the U. One doesn't see this at Westtown; perhaps this center was never completed?

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 perhaps looking back to the taxpayer strips of the 1930s and proto-strip centers like McCook, as the front parking is less, 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.

Coming soon, a closer look at the Beerman towns, starting with Northtown.

Ohio Modern Goes Dayton

2009-07-05T09:25:00.004-04:00

Belated news. This was recently announced and didn't recieve much attention at all. But its worth noting since the postwar boom essentially built a new city in Kettering, but also impacted other areas. Suburban Dayton has an excellent stock of mid century modern housing, and even a few intact office buildings from the era, like Financial South and the offices around the old Hills & Dales shopping center. Not too much retail survives intact, though.

From the Dayton Daily News:

State Historians, Preservationsits will look at architecture in in Dayton and it's Suburbs

DAYTON — A world war had ended and industrial states like Ohio were booming. Returning soldiers found good-paying factory jobs, started families and bought their dream home in brand-new suburbs. Schools, parks and shopping centers followed.

It was a time of unprecedented growth and prosperity. Between 1950 and 1960, Ohio’s population increased 22 percent and more than 1.8 million homes were built, including 127,000 in Montgomery County alone.

Now, a half-century later, state historians and preservationists say it’s time to start studying that period in earnest and preserving its significant architecture before progress sweeps more of it away.

And they want to begin their study in Dayton and the surrounding communities of Fairborn, Kettering, Huber Heights, Oakwood, Trotwood and Vandalia, the Ohio Historical Society announced Monday, June 22.

.....From the article: For more information, contact the Ohio Historic Preservation Office at (614) 298-2000 or Barbara Powers directly at bpowers@ohiohistory.org

We take this postwar suburbia for granted. For most of us it is "everyday life", nothing special since we are surrounded by it and mostly likely grew up in it. But its been over half a century since WWII ended so there is enough building stock to see variations in style and built form. Suburbia isn't static, and does exhibit evolution in form and pattern of development.

What this study will look at will be the brave new world of Cold War America, a time of mass prosperity and optimism in the future. The forward looking exuberance of the era's achitecture reflects this.

Building Northridge: Ridge Avenue @ Neff Park/Harshman Plat

2009-07-05T07:16:00.008-04:00

Continuing with the series on the development of Northridge and points north, Daytonology investigates the earliest plats, Neff Park and the Harshman Plat (named Fieldston in later mapping) on Ridge Avenue. This would be the first section of Fieldston; the additional property would be platted under this name further west on Ridge. For a discussion of Northridge platting history see Platting Northridge.

Ridge Avenue dates from sometime between 1875 and 1898, but this part of Ridge was the first part platted in town lots, perhaps in response to Stop 3 of the Dayton & Troy interurban.

The maps below show the two plats, Neff Park in light orange and Fieldston in yellow. The arrangement of the interurban running down a median is clear in these maps, providing a traffic-free right-of-way into the city.

The lot lines as of 1930 for the plats west of New Troy Pike (Dixie Drive) compared to a modern aeriel. The area of interest is outlined in red, and the interurban stop shown. Since this was within walking distance of the stop the assumption is that this street would see a lot of pre-war development driven in-part by transit access.

A close-up of the platting on Ridge as of the 1930s. Harshman's Fieldston plat on the south side of the street has noticeably larger lots, and there's evidence of lot splitting.

(click on the pix to enlarge for more detail)

Drawing the 1930s lot lines on the modern aerial one can see how the area densified, with two houses on one lot in some cases. The lots closes to Dixie Drive have been combined for auto-oriented commerical use. The configuration of Dixie Drive itself changed as the road was enlarged to four lanes, taking the interurban median and the frontage road. If there was any pre-war commercial development at "Stop 3" (intersection of Ridge and Dixie) it has been subsequently removed and replaced

Mapping out the prewar housing, determined by visual inspection of houseforms. The entire block was not built-out before WWII, and there is evidence of larger lots being split for additional housing in the postwar era, particularly on the south side of Ridge Avenue

And a few aerials of the neighborhood, giving a bit of the flavor of the place. This is interesting as it's such a transitional area between different ways of building-out suburbia.

A Stop 3 Gallery

If there is a Stop 8 place name this is Stop 3. One can see a transition from 19th century house types to bungalows and foursquares, to the 1940s cottage style, and then to some postwar types.

This house is a good example of the urban I house found on the backstreets of North and East Dayton. It's a later form (developed in the later 19th century) since it doesnt have the four windows on the gable end facing the street, and was either built when Ridge Avenue was opened up (predating the interurban plats) or it was one of the first houses built on the Neff Park plat (north side of Ridge). It's in excellent condition (on the exterior).

One of the ubiquitous four squares, this one is a bit different as it doesn't have a hip roof . A little bungalow next door. Note that there is no sidewalk here, yet the houses are still set somewhat close to the street. Perhaps the transference of siting practices for urban lots to a suburban locations when suburbia was new..."we've always done it this way".

The Northridge area has some of the best bungalow, Craftsman, and "California doll house" style houses in Dayton. This housing stock is an unrecognized treasure. Here, two bungalows. The one to the left is probably earlier, and has some fine detailing.
A 1940s cottage that is also a version of the "California Doll House" (the famous concentration is in Carmel), which uses exaggerated forms, distorted scale, and picturesque styling to create a storybook cottage feeling for small houses.

Three generations of urban vernacular. One the far left a version of the ubiquitous four square. In the middle a postwar houseform often found on prewar plats. The form might have evolved from pre-war bungalow cottages, but the styling and material are akin to the postwar brick ranch, except the siting on a lot is to put the gable, or short end, of the house facing the street, to take advantage of narrow lot frontage.

In this case the lot itself was a large lot belonging to the house on the far right, but was split to put this house on it, increasing the density of the neighborhood. And on the right, another I house, one of the first on the street.

Finally, another example of the excellent Northridge bungalows, exterior pretty close to original condition and with a nice privet hedge in the front yard. To the right is a postwar ranch, illustrating how build-out stopped during the Depression and resumed during the 1940s and postwar era, using quite different architecture.
The result is a visually rich neighborhood, avoiding the monotony of serial construction and housing from just one stylistic era.

Ohio Opinions on Gays & Lesbians (& guesses about Dayton)

2009-07-04T16:32:00.004-04:00

The recent Quinnipiac Ohio Poll has some ten questions on gay issues, questions #30 through #40 at the link. The poll breaks down responses by various demographic categories. The big finding is that over 60% of those polled support a statewide anti-discrimination law and support for civil unions is 50%-50%. Gay marriage is still opposed by over 50%.

Theres's an interesting denominational split here, though. The poll asks three questions on degrees of recognition of same sex partnerships:

1. support marriage

2. support domestic partnership

3. no recognition at all

And then segements the responses by three denominational groupings

1. Catholic

2. Protestant

3. Born-Again/Evangelical

Of course full marriage recognition fails for all denominational groupings. Yet for Catholics the "no recognition" answer gets only 37%, vs 51% for born-again/evangelicals and 40% for Protestants in general. So a plurality of Catholics support some form of recognition, whether it be civil unions or civil marriage.

This pattern of Catholic support for gay issues tracks across the other questions, too.

Other results mirror findings in other national and state polls.

-Support for gay rights increases with education
-Support for gay rights increases with income
-Young adults (Quinnipiac uses an 18-34 age cohort) support gay issues at a higher percentage than the middle aged and seniors.

An interesting result is the born/choose issue, whether lesbians and gays are born that way or choose their sexual orientation. In this range young adults say lesbians and gays choose (51%), yet this does not affect their support for gay rights (66% support) and some form of recognition of same-sex partnerships (only 28% say "no recognition). The born/choose question also has the highest "don't know" answers, over 10% in all age cohorts and demographics.

For entertainment value, there is question that asks: "In general, do you think society is paying too much, too little, or about the right amount of attention to the needs of gays and lesbians? "

50% say too much, 15% say too little, and 24% say about right. I guess this is about media coverage of lesbian and gay issues; should gays sit down and shut up? Not likely.

Dayton Opinions on Gays and Lesbians

We don't know but we can make some guesses.

The Dayton Daily News has taken strong editorial stands supporting gay rights. Most recently on the don't ask/don't tell policy, which is a sore subject given the big defense community here. These editorials and news stories usually generate strings of homophobic commentary. Is the vitriol representive of ingrained local prejudice?

Considering how long it took gay rights to come to Dayton (requiring a key vote from the reviled Rhine McLin, and perhaps one of the many reasons she is reviled) one can surmise this is the case.

Daytonians (city and suburbs) are not highly educated, are not particularly affluent, and the supportive young adult cohort is leaving the metro area (Dayton has the highest rate of outmigration for this age group in the region based on a study from the 1990s). So Dayton is older, poorer, and less educated. Precisely the factors that lead to less support of lesbians and gays.

One can say this is the case for Cleveland and Toledo as well. The difference is that these lake cities are heavily Catholic (more the eastern & southern European variety) compared with the Dayton area, which seems to be more evangelical/fundamentalist. In other words they are more like Chicago, possibly the most gay-supportive metro area in the Midwest. And Cleveland and Toledo did pass antidiscrimination ordnances earlier than Dayton, and have moved (especially the Cleveland area) on recognition of same sex partnerships. So maybe the lack of a substantial evangelical community is a decisive factor for making for a more welcoming and accepting social and political climate.

Yet, this poll was a statewide poll. And evangelicals are 46%/46% split (!) on supporting anti-discrimination protection for gays and lesbians. So there is social progress, even with difficult customers like the born-again evangelicals.

The Big 80s in Dayton

2009-07-04T09:41:00.004-04:00

The big recession and Michael Jackson’s recent passing brings to mind the 1980s, when there was another big recession and Jackson made it big, really big. And how did that decade play out in Dayton, economically speaking?

Taking an Economic Pulse via Building Permits.

One way to measure economic activity is by employment and unemployment. Another indirect way is to look at construction; the expansion of the built environment in response to demand, speculation, and financial incentives (such as tax laws governing depreciation and the availability of credit). The way Daytonology will do this is via building permits and construction employment, the assumption being that the volume of permits reflect the local and national economic climate (even if the permits didn't lead to actual construction).

The Texas A&M real estate center maintains an excellent web-page on historical stats, which is the source for the numbers here. The numbers are incomplete for non-residential permits as they start in 1980 and extend only to 1995 for non-residential permits. Residential permits extend to 2009. Yet this is enough to measure peaks and troughs of the 1980s and early 1990s .

And, since the numbers are for the entire metropolitan area one can take a regional pulse using the building economy as proxy.

Office Permits.

Graphing out the office permits, and laying in the two large recessions that bracket the decade. The steep “Double Dip Recession” of the early 1980s killed the stagflation of the 1970s but also helped kill a lot of manufacturing, and was a key event in moving to a non-union, low wage economy. The early 1990s end of the Cold War recession was a key part of the Clinton election campaign (leading to the campaign staff catchphrase “It’s the Economy, Stupid!”). The effects of that recession were a bit delayed, locally, really hitting after the “official” trough.

As for office permits, one can clearly see a spike in activity at the end of the decade, which, incidentally, was the period just after I-675 opened to traffic, The 1980s was a boom time in real estate, but the boom came late to the office construction market in Dayton. Some of the products of the late 1980s boom: Newmark, Lexis/Nexis, the Colonel Glenn developments and the build-out of the Route 725/I-675 corridor in Washington Township. Other suburban landmarks were built earlier in the decade, like the Prestige Plaza tower near the Dayton Mall and some of the high-rises on Poe Avenue (along I-75) north of Dayton. The last two skyscrapers downtown, One Dayton Center and the old Citizens Federal tower, were part of the late 1980s office permit spike.

Retail Permits.

This was a very good decade for retail growth nationally, and the Dayton metropolitan area was no exception. The Dayton Mall area saw major strip center and big box development, which extended east down Route 725 to Centerville. The first Wilmington Pike/I-675 strip centers opened in this decade, as did Cross Pointe in Centerville.

The 1990s would see retail construction activity in Greene County, at Fairfield Commons and Wilmington Pike, perhaps accounting for the recovery out of the early 1990s recession

Retail and office construction in the 1980s was responding to the financial climate of the decade, particularly two tax laws (1981 and 1986) that affected depreciation of commercial real estate and a generous lending climate near the end of the decade. The boom did bleed over a bit into the industrial and warehouse markets.

Industrial Permits

People were still building industrial and warehouse space during the 1980s, in fact the high spike for this time of construction permit came at the end of the decade, before dropping again to relatively low levels.

Everything Counts in Large Amounts

Borrowing from the Depeche Mode hit of that decade, we put the non-residential trends together for the big number and also separate them to compare.

Adding the trends together, and laying in the I-675 construction period. A big construction project in its own right, I-675 improved accessibility on the edge of the urbanized area. Property that was held in speculation at the interchanges went under development after it was certain the highway would be built

Separating the three non-residential permit types and comparing the numbers. The peaks of residential and retail construction were a bit off, with office peaking a bit later in the decade.

Robert Bartley, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, called the 1980s the Seven Fat Years and they certainly were in Dayton for non-residential construction (compared to the nadir of the double dip recession). The 1980s (and the 1990s) gave physical form to the suburbia we know today, as well as adding two skyscrapers to the downtown skyline.

Housing Permits

The Texas A&M site has a longer range of housing permits for the Dayton metropolitan area, taking those numbers to 2008.

Graphing residential and non-residential one can see that multi-family housing seemed to be tied more to the business cycle, with troughs corresponding to recessions. It’s interesting that the 1990’s boom didn’t see a peak as high as the 1980s, and activity pretty much collapsed in the 2000s, signaling a very anemic multifamily market in that decade.

Single family housing peaked around 1987 and again in the early 2000s before collapsing in the latter part of the decade as the local economy slid into recession. It appears that the big run-up in the 1980s resulted in a somewhat stable plateau until the collapse after 2005. Notably, the “It’s the economy, stupid” recession of the early 90s didn’t drop single-family activity to the depths of the double dip recession.

Construction Employment

The above were graphs of construction permits, not actual construction. One way to measure construction activity is by looking at construction employment. Using historical (pre 1997) and current (1998 and later) databases one can measure construction employment in the metro area from 1977 to 2006, a 29 year range. The only issue with this is that it would measure employment for public works construction, too (roads, utilities, schools, etc).

One can see the 1990s run-up here, and also a second peak around the time of the 9-11 recession, before a bumpy slide down during the 2000s. 2008 and 2009 are not shown but employment has dropped into the 10,000-12,000 range with the recession (around 1985-1986 levels), erasing the construction job gains of the past 20 years. Still not as low as the trough of the double dip recession.

Since this time series goes back into the 1970s and knowing there was a steep recession in 1974, perhaps one is seeing the 1970s peak in 1979-1980, which seems quite low compared to subsequent peaks. Perhaps an indication on how anemic and stagnant the local economy was during the 1970s, when the metro area lost around 17,400 people.

The 1980s and 1990s peaks actually improved on the 1970s when it came to construction employment, even as population growth was relatively minimal (15,300 in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000).

Of course, population is an imperfect gauge of housing permits or homebuilding, as the market might be more responsive to household creation (as well as the credit market and the speculative environment) not raw population numbers.

Selling a Commodity

2009-07-03T12:18:00.004-04:00

There is a smell of desperation in the air. The desperation of how to "sell" a bland and generic place like Dayton as a place to do business.

Dayton is the average mid-sized Midwest industrial city. In other words it is a commodity, since there are plenty of average mid-sized Midwest industrial cities out there.

So how do the economic development people sell a commodity? By selling a commoditity. And not just any commodity but the most basic, bland commoditity of all.

Water.

Yes, thats right. They're trying to sell Dayton because it has a reliable water supply. Not really that special in the Midwest; the home of the Great Lakes, largest freshwater supply on the planet.

The Dayton Development Coalition has their H2Open website, which is actually sort of clever with its watery animation....

The site asks the question "...need water for your daily operations?" Which makes one ask what sort of industry need a lot of process water?

A USGS fact sheet on industrial water withdrawls suggests a few:

"Some industries that use large amounts of water produce such commodities as food, paper, chemicals, refined petroleum, or primary metals."

Well, the area already has some paper industry. In fact the big Appleton Papers off I-75 plant has expanded while other manufacturing operations have shut down. But, so far, nothing in the way of chemicals, refined petroleum or basic metals (in other words steel mills and and metal smelting). And since Dayton is surrounded by primo ag land one could see food processing. In fact there already is industrial soybean processing at that impressive Cargill plant on Needmore Road.

So, perhaps this is more plausible than it looks at first glance.

The Return of the Tea Party

2009-07-02T23:36:00.002-04:00

The Tea Party folks produced one of the best-attended political events in recent memory back in the winter, and Daytonology was there.

The organizers have continued on, hosting a website, and organizing community groups to further the cause.

And they are trying for a reprise, a second Tea Party rally combined with a good old-fashioned Fourth of July fireworks. But this time it's in Brookville: at "Golden Gate Park", 3 July, starting a bit late, at 7 PM. Check out the excellent Tea Party site for details.

Unfortunatly this conflicts with the Cityfolk Festival for yer humble host, but if past is prologue there should be an even better turnout since the weather is going to be a darn site better than at the last event.

Tracking the Recession in Metro Dayton

2009-07-02T21:08:00.003-04:00

An update of the Recession comes to Dayton post measuring how the Dayton metropolitan statistical area (or MSA) slipped into hard times. This time Daytonology investigates the past few months of job gains and losses and compares them with the last two "good" years, 2006 and 2007.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics employment numbers are used instead of unemployment due to the funky way the unemployment numbers are arrived at. People who fall of the unemployment rolls don't count as "unemployment". So the unemployment numbers can improve as people exhaust their benefits and are no longer counted, even if they still don't have a job.

A better measure is counting how much employment--jobs--a local economy is producing, or shedding. So that is the number used here.

The graph is monthly private sector employment, which rises and drops based on the month and season. If one graphs enough years a pattern emerges, which one can see in 2006 and 2006:

1. A low in January
2. Increases in jobs during the winter, spring and peaking in June
3. A dip in the summer.
4. Another seasonal high in December.
5. A big dip between December and January.

And one can see how 2008 deviated from the monthly employment "pulse" , losing job sover the year before crashing in the fall and winter.

Yet, it seems that the local economy is following the pattern of employment growth after January.

Comparing 2009 with 2006 and 2007

A closer comparison of 2009 with 2006 & 2007 demonstrates that job creation in 2009 has been quite anemic, with February being the trough, losing about 800 jobs over the January low, but then making them up again in March. There is small employment growth in April and May. Compare this with the fairly robust seasonal employment gains in 2006 and 2007.

Yet doing a side-by-side comparison of month-to-month numbers it's interesting to see the close match in the April-May numbers, which seems to indicate that the 2009 economy is performing close to 2007 and 2006 in generating jobs, for that one month.

It will be interesting to see if the economy starts to follow the 2006-2007 pattern for the rest of the year. If so one can expect one more month of job growth (from May to June ), then a dip in July and August.

Capital Strike against Dayton

2009-06-28T09:54:00.006-04:00

Daytonology usually doesn’t post much about partisan politics, but things are getting interesting so a brief excursion to the “paranoid style in American politics”.

What is a Capital Strike?

The concept of a “capital strike” comes from neo-Marxist theory. The basic concept is that capital (i.e the business community, including banks and investors) can go “on strike” if they don’t like a political regime, withholding investments and relocating work out of a country until resulting hard times forces the unpopular government to capitulate to the demands of capital or be voted out of office.

The concept has maybe too much of a whiff of conspiracy theory to it, but perhaps it’s more correct as a description of a set of individual uncoordinated decisions over time by individual actors holding the same or similar values, indicating both a loss of confidence and a refusal do business in a place for various reasons.

This seems to be the case in Dayton due to the lack of investment in the city and the steady drumbeat of critique. This has come to a head in recent weeks with the departure of NCR.

Business Loss of Confidence in Dayton: A Soft Capital Strike?

The Dayton Business-Journal has a front page story on the business community having issues with the city: Businesses Critical of City Efforts

It has some prominent quotes from Raj Soin, who has his headquarters at the old IBM building 1st and Ludlow, about his difficulties with the city.

Soin is not just a local businessman having problems with the city bureaucracy. He is also a heavy contributor to the Republican Party, particularly the former mayor Mike Turner. Perhaps there is also a political interest in removing the current leadership in the city?

Then there was the exclusion of the city manager, mayor, and entire commission, except Joey Williams (who is part of the business community, being the local CEO for JPMorgan Chase), from the politically connected Dayton Development Coalitions’ attempt to re-direct Strickland’s’ NCR bribe money to various econ dev things. Politically connected in that leaders of the DDC were heavy donors to GOP candidates.

One wonders if it’s the Dayton Development Coalition who’s meant by the unnamed “regional officials” in this excerpt from the D B-J article

"Regional officials acknowledge a pervasive view exists in the business community that it is hard to work with the city. They add there also is an underlying lack of confidence in city leadership, both elected and hired, to overcome the challenges that lay before it, no matter how much effort is given".

Then there are is the Dayton Daily News commentariat, with their steady attack on mayor Rhine McLin (see previous remarks at this blog), most probably politically motivated to drive up the negatives of McLin

It could be that McLin is a poor leader, but it is impossible to say due to the questionable motivations of her critics. But it is interesting that unnamed sources pretty much signaled that the business community doesn’t have confidence in the current leadership.

Which might be why there is no movement on investment in the city or any private sector support of urban regeneration except from the central area planning effort privately funded by Dr Irvin (who is usually a GOP political donor, but has contributed to McLin in the past).

It is noticeable that the only two large downtown private sector investments during the McLin era, Caresource and the announced renovation of the Arcade, are by outside businesses and investors without Dayton connections.

Local investment in the center city is minimal.

Contrast this to when a conservative Republican was mayor. During that era there was substantial involvement by the business community and other members of the local power structure in building the Shuster Center. Which proves that there are enough resources to make things happen downtown, it just required the will (and financial committment) to execute.

Separated at Birth? Suburban Louisville & the Holy Roman Empire

2009-06-28T07:17:00.003-04:00

The political evolution of both led to colorful, jigsaw puzzle maps of minor and major political entities intertwined with each other:

Suburban Louisville:

The Holy Roman Empire:
As Voltaire famously quipped, the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire; it was (mostly) what we call today “Germany and Austria”.

The Holy Roman Empire (or HRE) consisted of a multitude of microstates of various types; counties, principalities, landgraviates, commanderies, free cities, lordships, abbacies, etc with only a few large enough or prosperous enough to have real power. The last survivors of this colorful mess are the principality of Lichtenstein and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

Yet these microstates had the trappings of sovereignty; taxes, coinage, a small army.

The situation is similar in Louisville. Suburban cities come in various “classes”, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th class, depending on population, which can be quite small. Area can be small, too, with a “city” being just a few square blocks. And these cities can levy taxes and have police. And just like the minor armies of the HRE petty states, the micro-suburbs of Louisville might have a police force of one or two police cars.

The petty states had little real power. Certain legal affairs was under the Empire, adjudicated at the imperial court in Wetzlar, and a form of regional governance and representation existed via the Reichkriese (“Imperial Circles”). In Louisville infrastructure issues like water, sewer, planning and zoning, and criminal investigations were the responsibility of the county or countywide special purpose districts. The smallest micro-suburbs had little to do except keep side streets paved and collect the trash.

Which is the big difference with Dayton, as Dayton suburbs are considerably more self reliant. A lot of the things that are county-wide in Louisville are the responsibility of individual suburbs in Dayton, which are large enough to generate revenue to cover the full panoply of municipal services. Thus, city/county merger here less likely than it was in Louisville.

The Strathmoors: The Start of the Louisville Micro-suburb.

The minor suburbs of Louisville are perhaps unique in the US since very few suburbs are this small. So a brief history.

It all started in the Strathmoor area, a suburban area of the 1920s & 30s. When the city tried to annex this area after WWII, the subdivisions that made up Strathmoor decided to take advantage of the new Kentucky municipal law, and incorporated as minor cities. But they didn’t incorporate as one large suburb of “Strathmoor”, rather as smaller suburbs: Strathmoor Gardens, Strathmore Manor, Strahmoor Village, plus two other British-sounding names, Kingsley and Wellington. And some plats didn’t incorporate at all, and were annexed by Louisville.

This is quite a bit different than what happened in Dayton during the same area. At that time Southern Hills was investigating incorporation to avoid annexation by Dayton. Instead of incorporating as one smaller suburb of Southern Hills (which would have been the size of Oakwood), they followed their consultants recommendation and attempted to incorporate all of Van Buren Township as one big super-suburb, which became the model for future suburban incorporations and mergers.

Barriers to Regionalism

2009-06-27T10:56:00.003-04:00

The Dayton Business Journal has some extensive reportage on regionalization issue due to a recent panel discussion hosted by the D B-J. There will be another panel discussion about Southwest Ohio regional economy in July.

There was also an D B-J editorial on the topic, essentially endorsing some form of regional government.

The event occasioned some comment over at the Dayton Most Metero regionalism subforum, which is probably the best online place to have an informed discussion on the subject (see also the last few posts on the Akron/Chattanooga/Louisville economic development thread, also at DMM).

The D B-J mentioned two previous looks at regionalization, by the Dayton Development Coalition: one in 2006 and another in 2007.

Barriers identified in the 2006 study were:

1. lack of unity between the races
2. fear of higher taxes
3. minorities afraid of losing power and fair represenatation
4. fear of the spread of poverty
5. fear of losing power in large government
6. voters remaining unaware of regional combination attempts.

The D B-J goes on to say that the 2007 identified some additional barriers:

1. the general perception of Dayton city
3. the economic state of Dayton (the article didn't clarify if this was the city or the entire area)
2. competition between suburbs
3. transitory nature of government officials
4. opposition from affluent suburbs because of costs and "carrying" other communities.

It seems the barriers to conventional city/county merger form of metropolitan government are insurmountable in this area, though it is heartening to see Joey Williams and Dan Foley taking the lead on the issue (from the political side). Yet, the local business community seems to be finally getting behind the concept, if the Business-Journal interest is any indication. Still, no clear champions have surfaced from the private sector to really push the issue, which is in itself a big local weakness.

Since governmental merger is a non-starter, perhaps people need to get creative and look at different approaches at regionalization. Since the big regional concern is economic development...the weak local economy, which crosses city and suburban boundaries...that should be were regional efforts should concentrate, since it is the one area were people agree something needs to be done.

Dayton @ Columbus Pride '09

2009-06-21T18:35:00.002-04:00

Yer humble host has been going to the Columbus Gay Pride Parade since 1988, which was his first Pride parade.

That parade ended at the Statehouse and was subject to in-your-face counterprotests all along the route by groups of local fundamentalists, who had no conpunction about attempting to engage the paraders in debate over Scripture.

This parade was the 7th. The first Cols parade in 1981 had marchers with paper bags over their heads for fear of being indentified. Apparently Columbus was quite homophobic. In fact there are anecdotes about Columbus gays visiting Dayton for nightlife since they weren't subject to police harrassment at the bars in Dayton the way they were in Columbus.

Columbus Pride morphs into Ohio Pride

But apparently repression pushed organization. The local Columbus gay community pushed the gay rights issue, leading to anti-discrimination laws and the community becoming integrated into the local political scene to some extent. Since the anti-gay climate thawed in Columbus earlier than elsewhere in the state Columbus became a sort of statewide gay pride celebration. The central location of Columbus helped, too.

The Columbus gay pride parade started to draw spectators....and participants...from across the state. Occasionally contingents from Dayton marched in the parade, like the gay Catholic group Dignity and the Lesbian and Gay Center. And one would see contingents from Toledo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and smaller places like Zanesville.

Ohio Pride back to Columbus Pride.

But as things became more tolerant and local gay communities became more organized local Pride events arose beyond Columbus. Cleveland and Cincinnati now have their own Pride events (Cleveland probably is the big event for Akron, Youngstown, Elyria and Lorain as much as Cleveland proper). Dayton started having a public event a few years ago (though had a private Pride Dinner since the late 1980s).

So Columbus has become more of a local event than it was in the, say, 1990s. Yet there is still some out-of-town presence, such as marching bands from Cincinnati and Indianapolis (Columbus' unofficial sister city). There was a bit of Dayton, to, as Joe Lacey, the school board member, was marching with the gay Democrats (no gay Republicans this time, but the Libertarians marched). And Masque had their strech limo accompanied by their bar staff, probably.

And that was about it.

Yet Columbus Pride still draws thousands, lining the parade route as it passes from the State House to Gooddale Park in the Short North, who join in and follow the parade into the park.

So it's still one of the big gay celebrations of the Midwest.

Dayton Art Belt

2009-06-21T11:32:00.004-04:00

Vandalizing buildings with dumb/bad tagging is one thing (even if it takes some daring urbex penetrations to do the work). Taking graffti to a new level is another

And that is what is being proposed by one set of older taggers. The DDN reports:

"....Though the secluded lot surrounded by warehouses was littered with broken glass, soiled mattresses and refuse, what “RAC Mount” (an artistic alias) and the graffiti crew ROT saw was a canvas.

Mount, 32, and the crew rented the lot, secured it and removed much of the rubbish. The warehouse walls around it are slowly emerging graffiti masterpieces.

It’s our private outdoor gallery,” Mount said. “Eventually, we want to bring peoplei to view it, but we’re not there yet.”....

...Mount and members of ROT (Reign of Terror) hope to one day build an art belt of legal graffiti murals around the Dayton area. With that in mind, the crew is looking for property owners willing to let them paint on exterior building walls. The crew can be contacted via email at: daytonartbelt@gmail.com.

The DDN also provided this photo spread of legal graffitti.

Yer humble host prefers old-school realism style murals....these are too abstract. But this is a mere matter of taste. Within the abstract, stylized, yet colorful aesthetic of graffiti art these work. One could really get into a set of outdoor graffit-art spaces around the city---the proposed art belt.. This would actually be a bit edgier and one-of-a-kind than traditional urban wall murals like the work of Judy Baca and the floodwall murals found in Ohio river towns.

So yeah, let's hope the ROT gets some support and enquiries on their project.

Making Dayton City look More "Ghetto" Than it Really Is.

2009-06-21T11:04:00.003-04:00

Todays article at the DDN revealed something interesting about the graffiti vanalism wave that is spreading across the city: It's being done by suburbanites. Suburbanites from the affluent suburbia between Dayton and Cincinnatti.

It's not like the city isn't already shabby and run-down enough, now some suburbanites feel they have to make it look even worse, in the cause of copying a trend from elsewhere. Perhaps a manifestation of the whigger phenomenon, where white suburban kids copy inner city black cultural styles and speech forms. Except in Dayton the inner city blacks apparently do not deface their city with such aggressive graffiti....since we havn't seen much of this until the recent tagging wave.

And it might be why one see's most of this stuff on the east side of Dayton city.

Dayton & Troy @ Chambersburg/Murlin Heights

2009-06-19T23:47:00.004-04:00

Chambersburg was an early village on the New Troy Pike. It was platted in 1830 and apparently did collect some houses and such.

The Dayton & Troy ran on private ROW, but moved to street-running through pre-existing settlements. In this case the line bypassed the town. And the line had two stations on either side of the bypass, named Murlin Heights, after the traffic manager.

The only other place in the Miami Valley were something similar happened was at New Lebanon, where another interurban (with the same investor, Valentine Winters) bypassed the town and used a different name for the station.

The interurban ROW still appears on the property maps. And there are still traces of the line on the ground , too, via property lines and various subtle features of the landscape.

What's not evident is the loop for the local passenger service that was supposed to be here.

One the south side of Murlin Heights (south of Chambersburg/Little York Road), one can see a tree line and what looks like a road. Perhaps the route of the old roadbed and right of way?

On the north side of Murlin Heights the vegitation seems to follow the line of the curve of the ROW as heads back to following Old Troy Pike, or Dixie Drive.
And in the mid-section, maybe more as property lines, though one can see a small tree line that marks the old roadbed a bit clearer in the midsection of village.

But maybe not much of a village anymore. By the looks of the aeriel pix most of the old side streets of the plat have been vacated and the original structures replaced by smallish commercial things with the predictable parking lot in front. Readers familiar with mostly intact rural villages of the Miami Valley will recall that structures are usually much closer to the roads and streets, particularly those of antebellum provenance.

There are a few structures on site that do indicate commuter traffic as they follow the bungalow and foursquare typologies popular during the interurban era Plus a few small side-street plats showing real estate speculation was occuring here prior to the Depression.

The Dayton & Troy/Lima Route Interurban Railroad

2009-06-19T22:01:00.003-04:00

Built in 1901 and closed in 1932 for a good 30 years of operation. The D & T drove the development of the Northridge area, and also suburban development for points north.
The builders were the Clegg family (local industrialists and real estate speculators) and Valentine Winters (a banker who was involved with other traction lines out of Dayton).

It's unclear where the stops were. The map below is a best guess based on available sources. There were three stops in Vandalia, at least two in Chambersburg, renamed Murlin Heights, after the traffic director of the D&T. There was also a stop at the cematary between Murlin Heights and Stop Eight.

And the seven stops in Northridge + one in Dayton at the old McCook Field.

The line also ran a local service as far as Murlin Heights/Chambersburg, were there was a turn-around loop. Presumably this local made more frequent stops to serve the plats that made up Northridge.

The line was a mix of single and long runs of double track. Suprsingly the section through Northridge wasn't double-tracked as there is an account of a grisly accident on single track: A fast moving northbound regular train missed signal or train order, rammed a stopped local car and partially telescoping it, resulting in injurys and deaths.

D & T Rolling Stock

The alpha and omega of the passenger equipment. Top image is an early Barney & Smith car (made in Dayton) from 1902. As one can see this resembled standard railroad passenger coaches, as did most early interurban equipment. Dayton-based B&S used to specialize in passenger cars, but moved into interurban busines, which kept it alive into the 20th century.

The bottom car was the last passenger equipment bought by the D&T. Built by the Cincinnati Car Company in 1929, it was nearly the last word on interurban design. Built more like a streetcar, with the front and rear folding doors and lower floorboard. It looks fast, and had a eye-catching orange and maroon color scheme.

Electric Fast Freight

Most interurbans had some freight buiness, usually "less than carload", or LCL, freight. These were usually handled by baggage compartments or "box motors", like the car below. Sort of a powered freight car.

The D&T, however, did generate substantial freight business, operated on a "just-in-time" basis via trains scheduled on demand. So the line also had a fleet of freight cars, one shown in the lower pic. D&T line had two Dayton freight houses, one downtown (still standing about a block north of the 2nd Street Market), and the other off Keowee Street. At the peak the D&T handled about 500K tons of freight daily. Freight service declined after 1926, when PUCO started to grant long distance trucking franchises.

More Passenger Equipment.

The upper car is a longer passenger car than the early Barney & Smith equipment. D&T also had a short-lived sleeping car service since trains did eventually go north to Toledo, and a dining car.

Though we've seen single cars so far, the D & T was prepared to run multi-car trains. The line bought a number of passenger coaches from the New Haven railroad to supplement its powered equipment. Apparently steam road and interurban passenger equipment was compatible...at least in the early days.

Dayton & Troy and Early Northridge Suburbia.

The following map shows the area of the very first suburban plats along New Troy Pike, the one most likely generated as by the arrival of the interurban, and how the platting worked around the interurban.

The line ran on the west side of New Troy Pike. Most plats on that side accomodated the line by running a frontage road paralleling the right of way, resulting in the line running down a sort of median between the frontage road and Troy Pike.

The two official stops were "Stop 3" at Ridge Avenue, and "Stop 4" at Ebenezer (intersection of Frederick Pike). The local service might have been more informal stops, as the ones shown here don't look all that convenient for some of the plats.

Coming soon, a closer look at Neff Park and the northern sections of Garden City.

(pix are from Daves' Railpix, which has good documentation for the other Dayton interurbans and streetcar companies)

Ebenezer

2009-06-18T16:21:00.003-04:00

1 Samuel 7-12: Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh and Shen, and called the name of it Ebenezer, saying, Hitherto hath the LORD helped us.

And that is the source of the old place name on the New Troy Pike. First given to the oldest congregation and church in Northridge, the old Ebenezer Methodist Church. But later expanded to then entire crossroads area, and eventually the school district that was formed in the early 1920s.

The congreation formed up in the years after the War of 1812. The first church was a log and clapboard structure on what is now the northwest corner of the Dixe Drive/Frederick Pike intersection.

In 1860 a replacement church was built on the southwest corner of the intersection, and this church still stands today.

Here is the church when it was still a church, in the background with the belfry. In the foreground is the station for the Dayton & Troy interurban railroad. One can see the semaphore signal and the station name board.

Roughly the same scene today. The interurban tracks are gone and New Troy Pike is widened todays Dixie Highway. The old church still stands but is now a business.

Looking at the old Ebenezer Church from a different angle. One can see the tall windows that one would expect for the sanctuary.

The best source for Northridge history, "Life on the Ridge" (put together by Northridge HS students as a class project) says one of the early schools was located here, and is still standing. This might be it. Built in the 1880s to serve the farming community of this part of Harrison Township.

As we've seen in a prior post the New Troy Pike corridor was the site of early suburbanization due to the interurban. Apparently population grew enough to warrant a replacement for the old Ebenezer church of 1860. In 1919 the new church opened, and the congregation renamed itself the Victory Methodist Church. Apparently this was double meaning. Victory over sin and also victory in World War I, which had ended in the previous year.

The new building was this quasi-English gothic affair done up in random rubble stone.

And Victory Methodist is still there today, but in expanded form. A landmark on the Dixie strip from the early days of suburbia.

(on edit, some modern images of the church, showing the addition and some adjacent prewar housing)

The Villages of North Clayton- bankrupt!

2009-06-18T12:36:00.002-04:00

Dayton's only true New Urbanist subdivision, Villages of North Clayton, is being taken to bankruptcy court"

$6 Million Owed, Bank Wants to Foreclose

This sounds a lot like Newfields. The parallels are so close: Innovative (for its time) multi-use developement proposed for the north/northwest suburbs but goes belly-up due to a bad economy and maybe a bad location (slow-growth side of town).

I guess the question would be if this would have been in Greene or Warren County would it have faired better? There is Stonehill Village out beyond Beavercreek, that is trying to do some more innovative site planning, but as of now it's not really as New Urbanist as the Villages of North Clayton.

I guess add this the list of innovative Dayton-area projects that went nowhere.

(tip of the hat to commentor "Joe" who provided the DDN article info)

Kettering Tower Facing Foreclosure: Symbolic...

2009-06-17T21:47:00.002-04:00

...of a few things, actually.

The Failure of Dayton: Skyscrapers are totemic structures, and the tallest building in a city usually has some signifigance, the home to the major bank or corporation or a personal statement by a sucessful local buisnessman. Thus the bankruptcy of the Kettering Tower, the tallest building on the skyline, is a nice visual shorthand for the economic and social failure (or, at best, stagnation) of the Dayton region.

The Death of Downtown: The Kettering Tower's vacancy rate was not reported. But we do known that the downtown vacancy rate is around 30%-40%...and thats just the buildings that are actually still on the market. Very few businesses and proffessionals want to locate downtown so no one to lease to. Recall that skyscrapers exist mainly for economic reasons, that land prices and demand for space is so high that it makes economic sense to go "up". In downtown Dayton the tendancy isn't to go "up" anymore but to go "parking lot" or grassy field. The latest "market signal" for a large downtown property was the Arcade auction, sold to a single bidder for around $600,000 - $700,000.

The Decline of the Skyscraper: Maybe not that popular of a building type anymore? It seems the campus concept and midrise/lowrise construction is more popular for office space in the smaller metro areas. Form follows finance and maybe tall buildings dont make financial sense in certain markets.

It should be noted that the Kettering Tower is not foreclosed yet. The court has appointed a reciever, which is CB Richard Ellis. The double irony is the CBRE is the agent for NCR's sale of their former corporate HQ, and was the agent (along with Miller Valentine) for the 2005 sale of the tower by the Kettering Trust to the currrent owners (a NY investment partnership).

Negative DDN Comment of the Week: "Indian Country"

2009-06-16T20:04:00.003-04:00

The commentariat at the DDN can either be a source of anger and frustration, but it can also be a source of entertainment. Usually in the "Jerry Springer Show" sense of entertainment, but sometimes comments rise about the norm and show a bit more wit.

I like this one as it illustrates the Wright-Patterson AFB employees perspective (well, at leat one employee but (s)he is probably representative. Cute reference to Indian County, but one wonders how one drives from Warren County through Dayton to the base.

Well ‘tl’, this is just entertainment for me. I live down in Warren county and work at WPAFB. So I only have to drive briefly through ‘Indian country’ to go to and from work. I avoid Dayton like the plague it is. Until the voters in Dayton proper vote out the current regime, nothing can be done about the situation. And I cannot vote in Dayton, being a non-resident. I can only shake my head in wonder over it all.

The Big Paw
2009-06-16 12:45:44.6

Strickland's NCR Money In Play: Some Questions & Comments

2009-06-14T15:41:00.007-04:00

There is some good and not-so-good reporting by the DDN in the last few days, lifting the veil a bit on things work, or don’t work, in this area. Particularly this article, which follows up on some earlier news.

The basic outline is that Srickland had made that $30M offer to NCR to stay in Dayton, and this NCR money may still be on the table.

Using Strickland's NCR Money to Subsidize Austin Road Site Development

Montgomery County, the Dayton Development Coalition and the Chamber of Commerce are making play for the money on behalf certain job creation/economic development initiatives, one of which is some unspecified “infrastructure” development at Austin Road.

Past reports on DDC earmark requests suggest that this may be to subsidize site development of RG Properties “Innovation Point” at the interchange, not for actual road work on Austin, Byers, or Springboro Pike. The cost in the request to Strickland is $6M, just a bit off from the $6.7M in the earmark request, so its reasonable to assume the money if for the same or similar things.

This is where the reporting fails, as we don’t known what is being done under the generic term “infrastructure”. Is it corporate welfare for RG Properties, or is it true public works stuff on state and county highways?

The County/DDC/CoC Plan and Dayton City Officials

The other juicy tidbit in this and a previous article is how Dayton city government (the commission and manager) were shut-out of the play. So far we’ve read that the mayor and city manager were not aware of the letter proposing new plans for the money, or maybe aware and not having time to comment, as we see Rashad Young chose his words carefully

Dayton City Manger Rashad Young said he had no opportunity to review or offer input on strategies outlined in the Dayton Region Rapid Response Economic Development Recovery Plan.

Maybe not a big deal since this seems to be a county/DDC/CoC intiative. Except there’s more.

What wasn’t reported was that at least one other commission was aware of this initiative. That would be Joey Williams, since his signature is actually on the letter to Strickland. This opens up even more questions:

First: Why was Joey Williams involved in the first place if this was a county proposal?

Second: Why didn’t Joey Williams bring this initiative to the attention of at least his city manager?

Third : What about Nan Waley and Matt Joseph? Totally out of the loop, or not?

So, a place where one would like to see some follow-up reporting.

The article goes on to quote and paraphrase county commissioner Dan Foley:

“Everybody knows the city needs all of our attention,” said Foley, adding county commissioners must be champions for all communities in the county.

Foley is quite correct, Dayton is just one of many incorporated communities in the county (and there are still large areas of unincorporated land, rural and suburban), and would benefit as much as any other locality from a generalized economic development initiative.

The Return of Revenue Sharing?

And there’s even more. A bullet point in the article notes:

Strategy will be developed for the city of Dayton to benefit from the job growth associated with this plan even if the new jobs created aren’t located in the city.

This sounds a lot like the revenue-sharing mitigations proposed to get Dayton city government on-board for the construction of I-675 back in the 1970s. So, interesting stuff going down in the wake of the NCR news. Lets hope Strickland is still good for that $30M.

Platting Northridge

2009-06-13T06:32:00.011-04:00

Northridge is really a collection of separate developments. Almost all of them were platted before 1930. So what appears as a generic postwar suburban strip dates from an earlier era.

19th Century Land Subdivision & Ownership

The pre-history of Northridge was as farmland, without much in the way of villages. There were features from the turnpike era, such as a toll house at the intersection of the New Troy and Frederick Pike and the “Four Mile House”, which apparently was a coaching inn or perhaps a place to change horses for stagecoaches. Recall that this turnpike was in competition with the canal and the “Old Troy Pike” for northbound traffic (at least before the railroad).

The only notable aspect of this landscape were the farms owned by a Roma band. Roma or Rom is the proper name for gypsy, and this was the land apparently owned or associated with the Dayton gypsies, who came to America from England, not eastern or central Europe. Their story can be found here: When Dayton Was Home to the Gypsies

An interesting feature of property division are the small farms along what is today Needmore Road the ownership of what later became Deweese Parkway and Triangle Park by a member of the Mead family.

Not too much change by 1895, which is about six years before the interurban line came through. One should note that Ebenezer church, which became a place name for the Fredrick & New Troy Pike intersection, is a rare 19th survivor: the church still stands.

And the road that was later to become Ridge Avenue appears, connecting New Troy Pike to Main Street what was then the northern suburbs of Dayton.

20th Century Developments.

1901-1914

The interurban railroad came through this area in 1901 and apparently sparked some suburbanization, because ~~by 1910~~ in 1923 a local rural school district was organized for Harrison Township between the Stillwater and Great Miami, the Ebenezer district, taking its name from the crossroad settlement.

By 1915 the first subdivisions or property speculations appear. These probably were driven by the interurban making commuting possible so would be the true “interurban suburbs”.

Neff Park: on both side of New Troy Pike

Fieldston: (or Fieldstone) a small plat on the south side of Ridge Avenue

Garden City: In multiple sections north and south of the Neff Park plats. The first section developed was the southern property, followed by multiple sections to the north.

S.H. Site Company: Associated with Garden City, this was perhaps land held in speculation.

One can also see the channel realignment of the Great Miami, eliminating a an oxbow.

1920

Land development and speculation accelerates going into the Roaring 20s. One would like to know when the New Troy Pike was paved, as this would be an impetus to development, perhaps more signifigant than the interurban due the increase in auto ownership. Also, by 1920, New Troy Pike had become part of the cross-country Dixie Highway.

Ome Gardens & the Ensley Plat: Along the river to is the big Ome Gardens plat (a portion which would be later replatted as Embury Park). At the intersection of Wagner Ford Road and New Troy was the Ensley Plat.

East Riverdale: A portion of Neff Park was renamed (replatted?) as East Riverdale.

Needmore: The first Needmore plat is on the south side of Needmore Road.

Brenner Realty Company: One of the old Roma farms is aquired by the Brenner Realty Company, who also owned the property on the northeast corner of Needmore and New Troy Pike. J.W. Brenner shown as owning property along the south side of Needmore, too, directly east of the Needmore plat. This land might have been just a farm at the time, not yet a speculation.

In 1920 the name Deweese first appears: RW Deweese owning a quarter section at the bend of Ridge Avenue, west of Neff Park.

Mid 1920s

The heyday of subdivision activity in Northridge.

Harrison Terrace: Another 19th century Roma farm subdivided. This was probably the northernmost plat, aside from ribbon development, before hitting Murlin Heights.

Dixie Heights: The Brenner Realty speculation, platted and named after the Dixie Highway. One wonder if by this time it was the automobile driving development since the plat is named after a highway.

Needmore addition: the Brenner property at the intersection of Needmore and Dixie Highway becomes an expansion of the Neemore tract.

Woodland Hills: The big Funk property on a quarter section east of the upper Garden City plats is platted as Woodland Hills. This is really two plats; Woodland Hills and, more in the valley, Woodland Hills Park. This division is actually quite evident today in the street plan.

Fieldston addition: A part of the Deweese property at the bend in Ridge Avenue west of Neff Park, is subdivided.

Fieldston Downs: Farmland south of Garden City between Dixie and Ridge is subdivided. This property had remained mostly intact since the 19th century.

Ensley Executors: Apparently to settle the estate of a dead farmer? The last Ensley property gets subdivided. Refer to the first map in this series and note that this family held extensive landholdings in the 19th century. This parcel was the last of those.

Wrapping up the Roaring 20s: Platted by 1930

Northridge was mostly platted-out by the onset of the Depression. There were a few plats added before the Crash.

Outing Park: This was the Brenner property east of Needmore, on the south side of Needmore Road. One can guess at the name. Perhaps to take an outing into the country to a picnic grove or some such place. Or perhaps an outing to look at lots in the new plats surrounding Dayton, like this one.

Brenner Realty Plat: Brenner acquired the last former Roma farm and platted it. Though the plat map doesn’t show a name this was eventually recorded as the Home Site plat (the name in the auditors’ records).

Jensvold Plat: A small plat east of the eastern part of Neff Park, off Maple Grove Avenue.

Eagles Park: Not a plat, but apparently a picnic grove or some other recreation area run by the Fraternal Order of Eagles, at the intersection of Wagner Ford and Dixie Highway/New Troy Pike.

There were some very small one street plats west of Dixie/New Troy, but they are not shown here. Most of the development seemed to be east of Dixie/New Troy north of the Neff Park developments at Ridge Avenue.

Property Fragmentation and Ribbon Development

We’ve seen property in certain areas was already fairly fragmented before suburbanization started. The process just accelerated with the advent of the interurban and later the automobile.

To illustrate here is the 1920 map of Northridge, in two sections, with the 1895 property lines drawn over in yellow. One can see how ribbon subdivision along Dixie Highway/New Troy Pike was already occurring via small parcels being sudivided further into large house lots. This was occuring on the side roads, too.

Land ownership and subdivision was becoming finer grained, perhaps due to splitting up property for speculation, or for early versions of hobby farms.

The Situation in 1930: Plats to Streets

The obvious plats and land in speculation shaded in yellow on this early1930s property ownership map, illustrating the mix of plats, smallholdings and ribbon development that characterized the area, as “first draft” of the automobile suburbia that was to dominate after depression and war.

There was no new development here until Marianne Country Estates of the 1940s (we’ll see that later). One notes that “Stop Eight” had become a place name by this time.

From around the same time as the property ownership map comes this street map. This was probably the first street map to show Northridge in full, yet not the place name just yet. Northridge was named in the early 1930s, as a contest for school kids to rename the Ebenezer school district. The members of the district voted on the name at a mass meeting

To some degree these were ghost subdivisions during the Depression, particularly in the northernmost plats, due to the collapse of homebuilding. Build-out happened after 1939, with the wartime boom and postwar suburban expansion.

The interurban ceased operations in 1932, a fitting coda for this era. The known interurban stops are shown as red circles. There is a missing one since there were seven north of the river.

We’ll take a brief look at the interurban next.

(a note on viewing the maps: to view detail mouse over the map and click, and the maps will enlarge. To go back to the blog hit your browsers 'back' button)

Dayton & Suburban Crime: Looking at the FBI Report

2009-06-11T19:55:00.005-04:00

Recent exchanges on the Esrati blog comments comparing city vs. suburban crime piques interest as to the question.

Generalizations that the city has just as much crime as the suburbs was challenged via a comparison from Sperlings Best Places, which itself was supposedly derived from the FBI unified crime reports. The FBI report for Ohio (not all cities are shown) for 2007 is here.

So let's go to the source. First off, when surfing into the FBI site there is a big fat warning statement about doing comparisons. A good point is that one police department might be more aggressive than another, and crime does go unreported. Demographs and the nature of the jurisdiction also plays into the picture.

With that in mind lets go ahead an compare anyway. But not Dayton to it's suburbs. Let's do an apples to apples comparison of Dayton to other big cities in Ohio: The three Cs plus Akron, Toledo, and Youngstown.

The way this was done was very simple. Divide the population by number of crimes reported. So higher numbers mean crimes are fewer per person, or rarer and lower numbers means crimes are more common.

As one can see Dayton has a lower number, indicating a higher density of property crimes. In fact it is in worse shape than some larger cities for this crime category.

Next, looking at violent crime, Dayton is more in the middle. Cleveland is the worst in this category.
Suburban Crime

The FBI stats do not show all localities. For example places like Trotwood, Moraine, Clayton, and Springboro are missing from the crime report. But there are enough suburbs shown to provide a glimpse of patterns of property crime (the FBI report breaks this down to some detail, to burglery, larceny, auto theft, etc).

Dayton is thrown in as a benchmark and to prove that it still has a higher property crime density than all the suburban jurisdictions shown. But it is interesting to see Beavercreek not being especially free of this type of crime, ranking in between Englewood and Huber Heights.

The worst suburbs for property crime (by this measure) are Xenia, Riverside, Miamisburg, Fairborn, and West Carollton. The best, or the ones with the lowest density of property crime are Germantown, New Lebanon, Bellbrook, Sugarcreek Township and German Township.

It's nice to see Germantown and German Township on this list as low crime areas as it confirms a hunch yer humble host had about these places as great (and safe) places to live.

Transportation Routes North

2009-06-10T19:47:00.004-04:00

Setting out a framework for "North": the development of the Vandalia/Butler Twp/Northridge area as a transportation corridor into and out from Dayton. What will be shown is ground transportation, but the airport will be acknowleged, too.

Early Improvements

The first transportation routes were the rivers, via canoe, and perhaps some indian trails or old pioneer roads. The first improved transportation was the canal extension north, duing the early 1830s, and the turnpike construction, also during the 1830s. Most of this was on a north-south orientation. There were two turnpikes to Troy, the one shown here and one to the east of the Great Miami running through todays Huber Heights, once known as the Staunton Road (after the first Miami County seat).

The exception to the north-south orientation was the famous National Road, heading east-west, as an early long-distance road crossing state lines. The early turnpikes didn't extend beyond country villages or the county seat

The Railroad Era

The 185os was the boom era in railroad construction. The first (and only) railroad north was chartered in 1851 as the Dayton & Michigan, but construction was delayed, with the line being finished first in 1859. Shortly therafter it was leased in perpetuity by the Cincinnati, Hamilton, & Dayton (the second railroad to enter Dayton) and CH&D itself was aquired by the Baltimore & Ohio in 1917 (eventually to become the CSX).

This line had only two stations in the area, both well away from the city, so no commuter traffic developed. The line was also distant from the turnpikes, so two stations served the two turnpike villages: Tadmor for Vandalia and Johnsons Station for Chambersburg.

Interurban Interlude

The interurban was a railroad of sorts, but was powered by electricity rather than steam, and interurban lines were usually short haul regional railroads. They differed at first from streetcars as the equipment was more similar to convetional railroad cars. Dayton was a major center for interurban lines, which radiated out from the city, connecting up with lines extending from other places (like Lima, Toledo and Indianapolis).

The line running north, The Dayton & Troy, opened in 1901 and eventually connected through Lima to Toledo. The interurban was the first impetus to suburban development as it permitted quick and frequent service into Dayton and, unlike the mainline railroad, had frequent stops, which are shown here.

The eighth stop gave its name to a local road and the collection of suburban plats that grew up around the stops is known today as Northridge.

Not shown on the map was the "local" commuter service that ended in a loop at Chambersburg, which was given the more suburban sounding name of Murlin Heights.

The First Automobile Routes

Interurbans overlapped with automobiles. As auto ownership took off in the 'teens and especially the 'twenties interurban use declined and eventually the Dayton & Troy closed in 1932 (after a bridge collapse that cost too much to fix).

Paved roads facilated auto travel, as did the first long-distance highways. The first cross country highways were named highways, like the Lincoln Highway. The named highway through Dayton was the eastern leg of the Dixie Highway, intended to connect Florida and the South with the Midwest. The Dixie Highway route followed the Troy Pike into Dayton (which was renamed Dixie Drive).

After the mid 1920s the numbered cross-country US Highways came into being, with US 25 supplanting the Dixie Highway and the old National Road becoming US 40. The US Highways was the first cross-country highway system.

During this era air travel was becoming viable. A private flying field was established on the flatlands northwest of Vandalia in 1928-1929. This early airport apparently was not too busy, as Dayton made it into Ripley's Believe it Or Not: "The Birthplace of Aviation doesn't have a municiple airport".

The field was transferred to the city of Dayton in 1934-1936. WPA airfield pavement improvements in the 1930s led to the first scheduled passenger air service starting in 1936 with three daily flights from the predecessor of TWA.

Limited Access

During WWII the improved airfield was expanded and converted to military use, and a defense plant was constrcucted to the east, across US 25. This probably drove the demand for a easier way to get to Vandalia, bypassing the congested Northridge area. The result was the 'super-highway', Dayton's first limited access divided highway. The "super" did have at-grade intersections, so it wasn't a true grade seperated expressway like we know today. It was probably like OH 4 beyond Huffman Dam, with at-grade crossovers and frontage roads.

The "super" apparently dead-ended at US 40 (allowing cross-country traffic to drop into the city from that highway). On the Dayton side it ended at a traffic circle, which was probably one of the very few in the Midwest on a major highway.

The Interstate Era

Though it looks a bit isolated, the super-highway might have been part of a larger plan. During the war there was planning for a national system of expressways, which was the forerunner of the interstate system. So the planners of the 1940s might have been thinking ahead when they set the alignment of this highway.

By 1957 the interstate highway act was passed and the system was under construction. The old "super" was connected north to Toledo and Detroit and south (during the 1960s) into downtown Dayton and named I-75. A new freeway, I-70, was built paralleling National Road. The intersection was a classic cloverleaf interchange.

An unusual feature of I-75 was that the old "super-highway" remained a quasi-expressway after the the completion of the northern and southern extensions, with dangerous at-grade intersections (with and without stoplights) between the cloverleaf and the the traffic circle exit. This was only corrected in the early 1970s, say 1970-71-72, when full grade seperation was achieved.

In 1974 the old US 25 designation north of Cincinnati was retired.

Interurban Suburbia and Suburbanizing Industry

Coming up: A look at development from the interurban era in Northridge and the expansion of industrial Dayton north along I-75 after 1970.

Peachtree City Today: The Golf Cart Community

2009-06-09T16:34:00.003-04:00

Peachtree City was planned for 80,000, but this was revised later to about 50,000-40,000, which means it is around the same size planned for Newfields.

Today's street map looks pretty generically suburban...at first.

(the purple is available industrial/office land).

The zoning and plat map tells a different story, showing how the periphery is zoned as large lot housing, whith higher density subdivisions and multifamily in the center. And the open space system winds through the development following creeks and watecourses. One greenway seperaates the housing from the industrial park, as in the original plan.
Greenways are nice, but whats even nicer is that they function as transportation corridors, being the route of a paved pathwy system spidering through Peachtree City.
(color coding on the map show various neighborhood "villages).

A close-up of one "village" showing the path system in red, and the path system drawn over an aerial of the same area; what appears to be a generic (albeit considerably better planned) suburban landscape from the air has a secondary transporation system linking subdivisions, condo complexes, schools, and shopping....

...meaning one is not tied to the car. In Peachtree City the alternative transport is not the bike (though these probably exist, too) but the golf cart.

The path system is really a network of cart paths, some with grade seperation.
And the carts are used for more than just golf. Two pix showing dedicated golf cart parking at a restaurant....
....and a school. Presumably one can also take a cart shopping or to work.

This might sound corny, but golf carts are actuallly a green/sustainable way of doing personal transport. Golf carts eliminate the need for a car for short trips and errands, thus reducing air pollution and traffic congestion. Golf carts also solve some of the passenger/hauling issues that one would have with a bike.

You have to wonder why more suburbs aren't built this way, since the Peachtree City model is such an appealing...and sucessfull...concept.

Peachtree City: "Suburban Living at its Finest"

2009-06-08T19:26:00.004-04:00

The NCR move brings three Georgia places to our attention.

1. Columbus, the small industrial city 100 miles south of Atlanta on the Alabama line

2. Duluth, in suburban Gwinnett County, northwest of Altanta

3. Peachtree City, southwest of Altanta

Peachtree City is the most interesting, as it's a rare example of a sucessfull attempt at creating a new town.

Why a sucess? Perhaps the location. The land was bought because of all the areas around Atlanta in the 1950s Fayette County land was the cheapest. But the site was also close to Hartsfield airport during an era when Atlanta was developing into a major regional air hub.

So an easy commute for people and business needing to be close to the airport. The obvious ones would be pilots and others directly connected to aviation, but also a good location for what NCR wants to put here, which is a training center and customer service operations.

Suburban Living at its Finest

This was the title of a section in the 1957 prospectus for Peachtree City. And this would be very fine indeed as this was one of the first mixed-use planned postwar suburban communities. The only two predecessors that come to mind are Park Forest, south of Chicago and Lakewood, near Long Beach, California. Niether of these approach Peachtree City in sophistication.

And, at 1957, this scheme is well before the iconic 1960s-era new communities of Columbia, Reston, and Irvine. Yet it was not developed or planned by outsiders, nor was it subsidized by the government (as in the later new towns). Peachtree City was a totally home-grown private sector project by Georgia developers and designers (with some site planning contributions from an emigre German-Swiss designer working for a golf-course desgn firm).

A quick look at the overview (north to the right) shows a commercial and office center clustered around a lake, with residential areas (in yellow) strung out to the south, seperated by belts of open space along creeks and watercourses and with little convenience shopping areas.

An industrial park is arranged around a railroad and highway, but seperated from the residential areas by more greenbelts.

A close-up of, perhaps, Phase I, showing how generous open space belts and corridors seperate the various land-use functions, but also how things sort of cluster around the lake and highway.

A birds eye view of the proposed town center on the lake, and some residential areas, also showing the start of the industrial and office park at the upper part of the image.
This rendering is rather fetching. One notes that this plan has a church as the centerpiece of the composition on the lake, perhaps a nod to the more observant regional religous culture of Dixie. The retail (?) along the lake are a loose interpretation of the Sarasota School of modernism (the South did have a little-known regional take on modern design).

Interesting to see a forerunner of Reston's Lake Anne Village, proposed 9 years earlier in the exurbs of Atlanta.

And, finally, the industrial park. One notes here the mix of grade seperated railroad and highway access, what we might call"multi-modal logistics" today. Back then railroads where still in the carload freight business (vs the bulk hauling they do today), puling boxcars up to factories on industrial sidings.

A private airport is proposed at the upper right hand corner.

Peachtree City, Dayton, and Failure to Execute.

Dayton could have had a Peachtree City in Don Hubers' failed Newfields project. In fact there are a lot of parallels, especially the open space system, the mixed-use concept, and the choice of a site in an area with lower property values but still somewhat close to the city.

The difference was, of course, a mix of timing and economic capacity. Newfields came online during an era of economic difficulty and regional stagnation. Peachtree City was at the edge of a booming metropolitan area, near an airport that was becoming a major US air hub for both domestic and international travel.

Next, Daytonlogy will take a quick look at modern Peachtree City.

Dragging Down Dayton for Political Gain

2009-06-05T12:59:00.002-04:00

Ellen Belcher penned a very prophetic column just before the NCR announcment:

Dragging Down Dayton Gets the Region Nowhere

This passage was particularly good:

Here’s the thing, though. The animus toward Dayton — covert and overt, conscious and unconscious — is poisonous.

Is anybody better off if — borrowing from the Rush Limbaugh school of politics — Dayton fails?

Ned Hill, an urban affairs professor at Cleveland State University, said that sourness about cities isn’t “just self-defeating. It’s self-fulfilling.

And one can see how this sour poison is working in the NCR argument. It's an excuse for various people with political axes to grind to attack the Democrats and the left in general and Rhine McLin in particular. So one has politically motivated Dayton bashing becuase its important for certain political agendas to drag down Dayton.

This is the case for any bad news on about Dayton. Is it raining today? It's that damn Mayor McHats fault. Dayton has gloomy winters? Rhine McLin should resign posthaste.

There are probably issues with McLins' leadership and Dayton governance. In fact this blog is critical of Rashad Young, the city manager who serves at the pleasure of the mayor and city commission. Yet the undercurrent of the critque is dominated by right wing ideology and a very thinly veiled racism. In fact racism is apparently a bigger deal here than people want to admit, and is behind the high degree of bile and venom to the anti-Dayton/anti-McLin remarks.

Of course if a white male Republican, say another Mike Turner, was mayor, or if a bunch of conservative Republicans controlled the city commission you'd hear nary a word. The reason why is the political agenda would be to minimize urban socioeconomic problems because the goal would be to make the conservatives look good.

And one would see attacks from the left and the Democrats, the way presumably anti-Perdue people posting on Atlanta-centric forums are minmizing NCR's economic impact or questioning if it was really worth the money Perdue paid them to move

So political obsession and partisanship screws up peoples minds, leading to a sort of low dishonesty.

Dayton was identified over a decade ago by urban affairs expert David Rusk as a city beyond the point of no return, so problems have been around for a long time now, beyond the ability of Republican Mike Turner or Democrat Rhine McLin to addresss in any substantive way.

And a problematic Dayton is due to the people who live there...and here...as it's due to the suburbanites anti-urban, racist, classist and fearful attitudeds toward the city. This has led suburbanites to essentially cede the city to the underclass, which is white trash as much as it's black ghetto.

The result is the city is a socioeconomic bantustan, a behavorial sink ruled by a minority woman, who then becomes the target of potshots by suburbanites who helped create and enforce the conditions of economic & social exclusion, the consequences of which become ammunition for the ongoing dragging down of Dayton.

This place is really sick, and perhaps Nuti saw that after he became CEO of NCR, saying 'no thanks' to the bad karma that is Dayton and Vicinity.

NCR

2009-06-02T20:18:00.003-04:00

..is gone.

Symbolic, perhaps, of the end of Dayton's 20th century "company town" era. The final shutdown of Moraine Assembly was, too. NCR and GM, via Delco, later Delphi, dominated Dayton by their sheer scale and, in the case of NCR, the domineering figure of John Patterson.

Maybe not such a healthy thing, even though it brought a lot of jobs here in the 20th century.

Those jobs started to disappear in a very big way with the NCR manufacturing shutdown of the early 1970s, where up to 20,0oo jobs were eliminated. That was the start of 30 years of industrial shrinkage. NCR was the first mover, kicking off the era of decline, and now it's finally leaving for good.

It's tough to put lipstick on this pig.

One can say that its only 1,300 jobs. But these were fairly well-paying jobs that contributed city income tax to a cash-stripped municiple govenemnt. The larger impact was NCRs contribution to arts an charities, where the hurt will be felt by people without any connections to NCR and who don't live in the city. The DDN reports that NCR was the top contributor to the CultureWorks fundraising campaign for performing arts organizations. This is a big hit since the performing arts in this city hurting (witness the impending demise of the Dayton Ballet).

There is a lot of speculation why as well as the official story. These are all available by reading the Dayton Daily News or Atlanta Journal-Constition sites, or the local Buisness Journal sites.

It was probably not just the $60M offered by Georgia, though. The basic argument of lower taxes, lower personell costs, and a larger labor pool and air connections probably were deciders.

Executive Level Economic Development

One can read the various comments at the DDN site and Dayton Most Metro and Esrati and pick up how its all Rhine McLins fault. If one reads how this deal went down one notes the mayors of Atlanta, Duluth, Peachtree City, and the county officials for Gwinnett County (Duluth) were not involved. This was a deal done by the Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue and his economic develoment staff working directly with NCR CEO Nutti and his people. Local governements were apparently out of the picture.

The equivilant thing in Ohio would have been for Strickland to make this a priority working directly with NCR. No evidence this was happening and it might not have made a difference if Strickland did try something if Nuttis' mind was made up.

Reinventing Dayton

We are finally seeing the end of chapter in the economic life of Dayton. One constant in the economic history of this city is the constant reinvention of the local economy, almost a textbook case of Schumpeters creative destruction played out over time in a regional economy. Looking at the larger firms left here, only one, Reynolds & Reynolds, goes back to the 19th century. The other large IT firm, Lexis-Nexis, started as spinoff from R&D related to defense logistics and IT.

Interestingly enough this feature of local economic history was noted by a socialist, Joseph F. Sharts, in his Biography of Dayton. Sharts tells how entire industries rose and then faded away due to changes in the underlying economic forces. A process that is playing out into our time.

So we are closing the book on an era, which is now properly the subject of history.

Landscapes North: Northrige/Vandaila/Butler Topography

2009-05-31T07:29:00.005-04:00

One of the peculiar features of the Dayton area is the landscape, which isn't quite the midwestern stereotype of flat lands and cornfields.

An example is the reigon directly north of the city, between the Great Miami and Stillwater rivers. Using a topographic map from around 1903 (before the start of suburbanization) as a basis one can do some topographical analyses.

Identifying various types:

1. Midwestern Plains: the stereotypical midwest landscape, a mix of farms and woolots.

2. Flat to Rolling Country: still charactersitic of the plains, but more rolling, not as flat

3. Hills & Valleys/Creek Valley: valleys along watercourses, steeper slopes.

4. Bluffs & Steep Slopes: well defined valley walls with steep slopes and ravines.

5. Flats & Bottoms: nearly dead-level land along the rivers.

6. Bench: Flat land just above the river bottoms, seperated from them by a low bluff or hill

7. River Oxbows/Changing River Course: The Great Miami apparently meandered in its bottoms, changing course from time to time, leaving oxbows. This process has stopped due to flood control.

8. The Ridge: A somewhat unique feature, perhaps a glacial remnant, a higher piece of land with steep slopes on either side.
Also shown are "the narrows", which is really not a river narrows but a tight spot on Frederick Pike, where the road is wedged between some steep slopes and river.

One can see how the fairly flat landscape of the midwestern plains breaks into tongues of more rolling yet still mostly level terrain, but then drops to the river and creek valleys via hills and steeper slopes, and how extensive the flatlands are along rivers.

Laying the rectantular coordinate survey system over the landscape yields the "Midwestern Grid"....
..which drives the location of property lines and later roads. Eventually there was the canal (shown as a lighter blue) and railroad (in black) and country villages.

..finally, the cultural landscape on the eve of suburbanization:

A closer look at two parts of the landscape. the Northridge area, with Dixie Drive drawn in in red.

..and the Vandalia/Chambersburg area, which is at a higher evelvation. The drainage divide between the Stillwater and Great Miami is shown. North Dixie Drive and US 40/National Road are drawn in for reference.

Taking two diagrammatic cross sections one can see, in the first, how the land steps down to the Great Miami. The low bluff that seperates the bench from the bottom lands is evident inside the city of Dayton, too, in South Park (at the Emerson School), St Annes Hill (Dutoit Street and Steamboat House hills) and Front Street (the hill on 2nd as it passes between the buildings). In West Dayton its visible as the rise just the the east of Paul Lawrence Dunbar Street.
The cross section along the Great Miami Valley shows how the land rises from south (left) to north (right), which might account for the relatively high bluffs and valley walls in the vicinity of Vandalia and I-70, vicinity the Taylorsville Dam. The rise in evlevation is 262 feet, from 748 feet near where north Dixie crosses the river to 1,010 feet near the airport. The river is at around 770 feet at Taylorsville dam.

And how, when one is in the bottomlands near the Great Miami @ Dixie, one does not get a sense of being in a valley due to the indistinct bluffs and valley walls.

So perhaps a more subtle and varied landscape than one would expect.

Top RTA Routes by Riders/Hour

2009-05-29T19:58:00.004-04:00

Another way of measuring RTA use.

The chart posted at the DDN has a riders/hour number for each route. Presumably this is the number of riders divided by the number of hours travelled. This is maybe another way of measuring heavy use.

Laying out the routes, least to most riders/hour, Route 7N (Main Street to Shiloh) is the obvious outlier, well above all other routes.

Dropping that one and looking at the rest, trying to ascertain breaks in the data in order to group routes, these are the top routes using the riders/hour measure, comprising 79.6% of all rides on RTA.
The key shows line weight for mapping the groups on a route map, here shown on the colored RTA map

...and stripping away the RTA map to see the geography as a diagram. 7N gets an extra-heavy line up Main.

Using this measure one does see three suburban lines appear:

X5 to Dayton Mall

16S down Wilmington to the shopping district between I-675 and Alex-Bell Road

19N up Brandt Pike to the new Meijer in Huber Heights

22N, Northridge local service up North Dixie ending just north of Needmore .

It does seem the North Dixie/Northridge area is generating suprising amounts of riders for a suburban area, becuase 17N is also well-used by this measure. Together 22N and 17N comprise a high-use corridor leading into the city. Maybe an opportunity for transit oriented development (or re-development since this area is mostly built-out).

RTA: Regional Transit for Appalachians?

From the previous post, black and carless concentrations mapped. But note that East Dayton is better represented here, since the Xenia Avenue/Linden route to the Easttown hub is now appearing. So RTA use in East Dayton, while not as heavy as in some of the black neighborhoods, is somewhat better represented using this measure.

Consipicuous by their absence are the south suburbs; the Far Hills/South Dixe corridors. This part of Mongomery County doesn't appear to generate signifigant riders using the total number of passengers or the rides/hour measures.

Perhaps one can infer that some of the suburban routes that do appear are used for commuting or shopping by carless inner city residents (and maybe X5 is still serving what few commuters are going downtown).

Expanding the System?

The logical choice would be east to Greene County. And there are pockets of carlessness in Greene.

..most of them, suprisingly enough, in Xenia. The way Greene is tracted Xenia is split up between seven tracts, some extending out into the country, so the map probably distorts the extent of this . Most of these tracts have fairly high carless numbers, and one has two college campuses (CSU & Wilberforce).

Wright View and downtown Fairborn (the older part of Fairborn) also have fairly high carless numbers, the highest in the county outside of Xenia.

RTA does serve one of these pockets, sort of, by running to WSU, where it interfaces with Greene County CATS on-demand system. One could envision an extension of 1E into Fairborn from WSU.

CATS might be enough for Greene County, and maybe some form on-demand system might suffice for parts of Montgomery County, too.

Who Does RTA Serve?

2009-05-26T18:55:00.004-04:00

RTA is in dire straights. It is caught in a spiral of declining tax subsidy forcing higher fairs and reduced service, making the system less and less appealing to riders. But people do use it.

The Dayton Daily News posted a 2007 table that provides some analyses of daily rides. This is an invaluable bit of information if one wants to study the demand or usage of the system.

Here's a graph of RTA routes ranked by number of weekday riders. This isn't the only way to measure use (the table also uses riders-per-hour), but we'll use this as the breaks in numbers are more obvious. The routes are grouped by breaks in the numbers, with an arbitrary cut-off of 1,000 riders per day to establish this as RTA's primary market or service area. Interestingly, this group of routes handles 2/3rds of RTA's daily riders.

The top of the chart has different line weights for different riders/day, as a way to show volume. Mapping this out on a grayed-out RTA routemap one can see that RTA runs a lot of lines that don't have high volumes, and that most of these are crosstown routes or serve the south suburbs.

Stripping out the RTA map the pattern becomes quite obvious. RTA's highest volume routes are on Salem, Main, and two routes that snake through West Dayton. For the remaing routes the service areas generating the highest volumes are in West Dayton and the Northwest Side.

For the east side the route to Ohmer Park and Belmont seems to also be heavily traveled, but there is somewhat lighter use on the parallel 5th (to the Linden hub) & 3rd (to WSU) routes. Heavy use on these might not extend to the end of the respective lines.

(click on this and the other charts to enlarge for the text)

Again the lack of high volume lines to the south suburbs are apparent (and this includes the Far Hills corridor; which has some the lightest local service traffic). The only suburban lines to exceed 1,000 riders/day head north to Englewood, Huber Heights, and Vandalia/Northridge. Vandalia/Northridge has the highest volume. The only high-volume line south is to northern Kettering, ending at the Woodman/Dorothy Lane shopping area.

RTA= Regional Transit for Africans? Blacks and RTA.

There is an unstated assumption that RTA is primarily a transit system for blacks, hence some of the coded racism in the comments relating to RTA issues at the DDN, or local racist jokes about what RTA stands for (yer humble hose has also heard RTA= return to Africa).

Using the admittedly outdated 2000 census numbers and maping out minority (i.e. non-white) census tracts it does seem that RTA's most heavily traveled routes are in or very near minority neighborhoods, so one can safely infer that the black community is indeed RTA's best customer, or they at lease use the routes in their neighborhoods.

Route numbers and riders per day are labled and provided in a table.

Carlessness and RTA.

Another measure is to use the 2000 census numbers for housing units without access to a vehicle, which is another way of saying carless households. There is an extensive post here at Dayonology discussing carlessness in Dayton, which might be worth reading in conjuction with this post.

Mapping out the census tracts with the highest carlessness, one can see an overlap with the minority areas, but also extending beyond them into East Dayton and certain suburban areas (Drexel and Northridge). So carlessness is probably the obvious reason people take the bus. It just so happens that a lot of the carless are apparently black, too.

Adding this dimension might explain the heavier traffic on the Northridge/Vandalia and West Third line. It might seem that some part of carless East Dayton are not served that well; in the case of Twin Towers, the Xenia Avenue route just misses getting counted as it is just below 1,000 riders/day, so there's the correlation.

The map notes that W 3rd is a high-volume transit corridor, if one adds up the volume of riders on the various routes that are on 3rd for all or part of the time.

Policy Implications

One can see why the RTA board doesn't want to raise taxes to increase the subsidy of the system since there are racial and socioecomic issues involved. The question would be "why am I paying for this and who rides the bus anyway? " The answer would be that 2/3rds of the riders are on lines serving black and carless areas, which are also areas of the poor (not mapped but there is an overlap).

The usage implys where worst-case cuts could occur. The lowest ridership routes are the ones that serve the three outlying villages: Brookville, Germantown, and Farmersville. These probably could be cut and not even missed. The next lowest routes are the suburban and crosstown routes, particularly the ones serving the Dayton Mall area. These could be cut too.

The lines shown here are the ones that really are the core of RTA and should be protected and enhanced at the expense of suburban service to points south. Given the volume on some of these runs the possibility of suburban or outer-neighborhood retrofit making things more transit-oriented are a real possibility. Good test areas for this would be Drexel, Northridge, North Main, and Salem.

So, maybe a smaller, but more relevant RTA with better service for the areas it does serve? And a planning strategy to retrofit suburbia along routes that could already be generating a higher volume of suburban riders.

The Old Market House in the News

2009-05-25T17:45:00.003-04:00

Indirectly, of course, since it was demolished in the late 1950s.

The article is here, and is about delays in the project due to unforseen site conditions, long lead times for certain items, and RTA blaming the contractor.

The contractor notes the unforseen site issues in the passage below. The underlined items sound like remnants of the old market house or its neighbors, since buildings along North and South Market had under-sidewalk and perhaps under-street vaults. And maybe the market itself had a basement:

Myers said construction problems relate directly to the unique circumstances of the site, a narrow space between buildings formerly called Market Street. Underground issues included foundations that were not known to be there, existing utilities that had to be rerouted or modified, electrical problems, basements and vaults, and a gas line that was supposed to be there but could not be found.

Too bad no one thought to do subsurface investigation here. Perhaps this was even an opportunity to do some urban archeology.

For more on the market house and neighboring buildings (lengthy map and pix essay):

From Market House to Bus Hub

Bank Street in the News Today

2009-05-24T14:16:00.002-04:00

The wide open spaces of a part of Wright-Dunbar are explained in the Dayton Daily News today.

Apparenlty they are owned by the city and Sinclair College, part of an expansion plan (which has been "released", but not published) to take over more of West Dayton between Edwin C Moses and the river levee.

And there is one holdout owner, Donald Farra, who refuses to sell: Sinclair, Retiree Battle for Land.

Interestingly, his house appears in a Daytonology post of last year: The Last of Bank Street...
and a susbesquent post chronicles the elimination of a neighbor The Last of Bank Street Revisited.

The DDN article also indirectly explains a puzzing aspect of the demolition covered in Bank Street Revisited, which is why the city bothered to demolish a house in an area of empty land when there are worse nuisance vacacnies in the city?. Answer: it wasn't the city, it was Sinclair.

Suprisingly, no one has questioned if this is the best use of the property. This is right on the river, and is already semi-wooded land from the demolished neighborhood that once stood here. One would have expected a Wright-Dunbar Phase II, closer to the river, levee walk, and bikepath. Instead we are going to get some banal, monolithic institutional building surrounded by parking or at best empty lawns, since that is the "Sinclair Style".

And Dayton will become just a little more dreary.

Chopping Away at Hills & Dales

2009-05-20T19:52:00.005-04:00

Hills & Dales Park was in the news last week due to some restoration work underway. Unfortunatly they can't restore the park to its former glory. Becuase too much was lost.

What we know today as Hills & Dales is a rump. A fragment of a much larger open space that would have been one of the great urban parks of Ohio, had it survived.

And here is a map of Hills & Dales at its greatest extend, with some surrounding roads labled for orientation. This park did not have a golf course, but it did have polo fields. And it did have extensive tracts south of Dorothy Lane.

An interesting "Olmstead" feature was Southern Boulevard, which was apparently planned to extend from Patterson Boulevard (into the city) to Alex-Bell Road (the southern part of this open space system is not shown here). An excellent demonstration of the parkway concept, which the Olmstead firm helped pioneer (this firm designed Hills & Dales and adjacent properties).

By the 1920s Hills & Dales was still mostly intact, adding features like an Open Air Theatre and some 'camp' features (Maplewood Camp and Big Hill) south of Dorothy Lane. The land hogging golf course appears, but the impact is mitigated by the extensive open space to the south and north (the golf course then was half as large as today).

The plan to extend Southern Boulevard apparently had been dropped by now, but a connecting road was exetended from Far Hills Avenue into the park (Park Road). The nice feature are the extensions to Far Hills and South Dixie Drive, acting as a forest preserve/park/greenbelt framing the developing southern suburbs.

By the early 1930s it was all gone. When Patterson (or his heirs) donated the park to the city they only donated a part of the orginal park, reserving the southern half. And note the east (right) side of the park has been eaten away by estate subdivisions; todays Ridgeway and adjacent streets.

A close-up showing how certain features of the 1930s (polo fields and open air theatre) disappear via the expansion of the golf course, leaving a rump of a park along the ridgeline directly east of the golf course.

But the greatest loss was the southern half, which would have provided park space for todays Moraine area and a greenbelt/forest preserve along Far Hills across from todays Fairmont school grounds.

Instead of donating the complete park the Pattersons apparently kept this half and subdivided the property. In the 1930s some of the old park roads can still be seen. This was a ghost plat as next to nothing was built (it must have been platted very close to the 1929 crash). The area was replatted after the Depression and there are more roads here now.

Researching this an interesting find was how Hills & Dales was eroded to the east. Apparently the original eastern boundary went deeper into Oakwood.

..but was whittled back to provide an estate subdivision, which is todays Ridgeway neighborhood. Some features apparenlty were not gifted to the city as a public park, as the Old Barn Club and Hills & Dales Camp do not show as park property in the 1930s map.

And, indeed they were not, as they ended up subdivided, as shown on the modern map from the Auditors website (right hand map). Also note the disappearance of some park roads, especially the Park Road connector to Far Hills.

All thats left of a massive belt of open space that would have defined suburban growth patterns if intact was chopped back to a rump, the landscaped fringes of a big golf course.

Just another example of how things never quite pan out right here in Dayton.

Or maybe an example of spin on the local notables who turn out to be keeping an eye out for the main chance. Yes the park is "donated", but only half, since the other half was an opportunity to cash in on real estate development in a boom time for real estate (the Roaring 20s). This would have especially been the case for the Ridgeway area as primo estate sites facing what was left of the park.

Which makes the park not just a leftover landscaping for the golf course but a landscaped backdrop for an exclusive estate district for the rich of Dayton.

The Air Force Museum and the National Park

2009-05-18T19:23:00.002-04:00

DDN editorialist Ellen Belcher opened up an interesting discussion with her op-ed on the relationship of the National Musuem of the US Air Force and the Dayton Aviation National Historic Park.

The Air Force Musuem is one of the great tourist attractions of Ohio, and it's free. So is the National Park (at least the parts that are actually controlled and staffed by the Park Service). And co-0peration between Wright-Patterson AFB and the National Park Service is ongoing, though not as visible as during the establishment of the park. In fact, this partnership is written into law, into the enabling legislation establishing the historic park.

But the question for local boosters is how to tap into this tourist flow to the Museum. Perhaps the issue is less what the Museum can do (it's mission is, after all, preseving and interpreting military aviation) and more what the local convetion and visitors bureaus can do.

And that its a good example of local balkanization as there are two; one for Greene County and another for Mongtomery County. How well do they cooperate in promoting tourist attractions in the entire region? The Museum is, technically, in Montgomery County. The nearest concentration of hotels for visitors is in Greene County. So it seems there is at least a mutually beneficial relationship possible, promoting the Museum but also the national park sites, one which is actually on the base in Greene County, and the other in Dayton.

Perhaps mostly a problem of marketing to a national audience.

Yet, finally, isn't it a matter of what turns the public on? Maybe people are just more interested in vintage fighters and bombers and the men that flew them. The Wrights don't seem as compelling a story, one that visitors with limited time will pass on.

Maybe this National Historic Park has, by its very subject matter, a somewhat limited audience compared to the Museum.

Urban Nights: Almost Getting It

2009-05-16T19:17:00.003-04:00

It’s getting close. Urban Nights is finally getting close to meeting its promise of an urban festival.

Yer humble host attended some of the early Urban Nights and was usually disappointed. Usually the most action was at Front Street (not a player this year) and even a lot of at Wright-Dunbar (which is sort of the “black Urban Nights”, since things there are somewhat themed around black culture).

But downtown was always cold coffee. Things were too spread out. Activities inside of buildings, not well attended…or not attended enough to liven up the streets. So one saw knots of people wandering the empty acres of downtown from place to place. Sort of sad and pathetic as this visual mocked the entire concept.

Concentrating Urban Nights

Yesterdays Urban Nights still had that, example being that stage over at the Litehouse, well away from anything. But this seemed the exception. Instead the planners this year concentrated things in the heart of downtown. Particularly on Jefferson Street.

There was an entire series of events and venues set up on this street.

The Circus was a very key player here, taking the old bar at the corner of Jefferson and 3rd and adjacent restaurant space for a gallery/installation thing and a live music stage. The entire block between the Century and the corner was activated. Probably the best move was the drumming outside right on the corner, which created a knot of people and some interest/. Crowds draw crowds and this is exactly what went on here.

Across from this and complementing it was a stage (“Community Stage?”) in the parking lot next to the bar and pawnshop on Jefferson. So even more music. Up the street from this stage that was C-Space, with yet another music space.

And then follow the alley to Courthouse Square to hear yet another band, this time with a beer truck and food kiosks and tables and chairs. And, on 2nd, there was a stage next to the Kettering Tower (and the music and gallery things inside). This wasn’t so successful because it crowded the sidewalk. Time for some orange cones to temporarily narrow the street, opening space for the audience and pedestrians.

So this programming of things in close proximity, some with an “on-the-street” presence, created enough of a critical mass of people in a part of downtown to where this felt like more of a city festival, creating enough foot traffic and people on the street to make things interesting.

The question is how to do more of this. One thinks of the big parking on the NW corner of Jefferson & Third as a possible space...for something. More along the alley to make that a corridor from the Jefferson Street action to Courthouse Square.

Joint Programming

Urban Nights was jointly programmed with the Film Dayton film festival and A World Affair food thing. These were in the Neon and the Convention Center. In theory this is good as it brings more people into downtown at the same time. But not sure how much synergy was here as these were indoor events. Maybe different joint programming would be to do this in conjunction with an outdoor festival of some sort, like Taste of Dayton happening at Riverscape during the same time Urban Nights was going on.

Yet, in the final analyses, Jefferson Street was the highlight, along with Courthouse Square. It's time to bring back those Affairs on the Square (anyone remember those?)

Defense Earmarking for The Dayton Region

2009-05-14T19:25:00.002-04:00

The posts on the Defense Welfare State just touched on earmarking. Considering the billion-dollar impact of the defense budget earmakring is really not that much of a big deal. But it's still interesting as a demonstration of areas of interest to local movers and shakers and the Congressional delegation.

The interesting thing is how the Dayton Development Coalition develops an earmark request that is around $500M, with most of it for non-defense programs and projects, yet the actual earmarks are nearly totally directed at defense spending.

Who's earmarking? Mike Turner, Sherrod Brown, and George Voinovich. Dave Hobson used be here, but his first-term replacement is running scared from the "GOP base" so is holding off, at least for now.

Whats notable is that one can see various combinations of earmarking, but also that Turner added two earmarks that was not on the DDC list, for Radiance Technologies to work on "Open Source Research Centers" and ATK Aerospace Structures to work "Rapid Automated Processing of Advanced Low Observables"

A substantial about was requested for new facilities, but was already included in Obama's defense budget.

A full list of defense earmarks and the defense contractor beneficiary:
The ulitmate beneficiary of advanced military technology is, of course, national security since this work ensure US technological superiority.

Incidentally the source for the data was the Dayton Daily News, which maintains a full list of the Dayton Development Coaltion and Mike Turner earmarks for 2009, inlcuding links to descriptions of the programs.

Local Reps Earmarks

Dayton Development Coalition Earmarks

Technocratic Affluence in Greene County

2009-05-12T16:43:00.002-04:00

This graph from the earlier posts on the Defense Welfare State is a good illustration of the growth in "technocratic" employment possibly due to defense spending and the proximity to Wright-Patterson AFB: the scientists, programmers, analysts, technicians, and engineers associated with a technologically advanced military activity:

Mapping out the numbers, from the 2000 census. One can see the obvious cluster in Beavercreek and along I-675, but also concentrations in Yellow Springs and Sugar Creek township.

Some of the other census tracts adjacent to these also have concnetrations over 7% . Wright Patterson and adjacent office park clusters are also shown.

What's mapped are old numbers, from the 2000 census. For income in Greene County since 2000 this graph of the number of tax returns in the four highest categories (adjusted gross income over $50,000) there is a remarkable rise in the number of returns over $75,000, espcially over $100,000.

Most of those $100K and up returns are in Beavercreek, nearly 40% of the county total. Which demonstrates a concentration of affluence, possibly deriving from the concentration of technical professionals in the area.

Location choice is driven, perhaps, by employment at the base and in the office clusters, also maybe by Beavercreek not having a local income tax.

Mapping out the retail centers like Fairfield Commons and vicintiy and The Greene one could see how getting leads to spending, as technocratic affluence would support a robust retail and food/drink sector in Greene County.

But one can also see how this could be a culture that probably has very little to do with Dayton or elsewhere in the metro area, except perhaps for additional location choices "south" or across the county line in exurban Miami and Clark County.

The Defense Welfare State II

2009-05-10T21:32:00.004-04:00

The civilian + military payroll pumps over $1B into the local economy. So the the geographic location of concentrations of the workforce will also be concentrations of prosperity

We can't map the off-base military with the information available at the census website, but we can, roughly, map out civilian workers by mapping "government workers" as a thematic map from American Factfinder. This would include non-military workers, too.

The map below illustrates the concentration around Wright-Patterson (red oval), but not so much around the VA (red circle). Various surrounding communties show for reference.
Taking a close-up of the eastern Greene County concentration, the census tract making up Wright Field (and the military housing on Airway Road) has 35.5% government workers, followed by census tract along Kitridge Road and Bellfontaine Pike, at 31.7% (which also has a lot of city of Dayton workers). Interestingly enough Yellow Srings has 25.2% government workers.
One can pretty clearly see the concentration of workers in Beavercreek and the countryside east and north of Fairborn. This is the payroll that is helpint to support the Fairfield Commons retail center and perhaps even the real estate expansion in the area.

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Employment Growth in Greene County

An assumption is that the PS&T sector is being supported by billion-dollar defense procurements. One can perhaps indirectly see this by the growth in sector employment in Greene County. One doesn't need a map to know this is not happening east of Xenia, that this growth is concentrated in eastern Greene County.

And one can also assume relatively high renumeration, at least for the managers and owners of PS&T establishments. This is confirmed by using the Brookings Institution Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) website, which provides reports for the number of returns filed for various income categories.

This detailed data goes back to 2000 and ends at 2006, so one has seven years of data points. Graphing out the top four income categories on can see how Beavercreek is becoming more and more affluent, with increasing growth in the very top income category. Returns for the >$100K category increased by over 1,100 between 2000 and 2006., and somewhat less robust growth in the $75K to $99K group.

Perhaps an indication of how defense spending is helping to establish an affluent society in eastern Greene County, particularly if discretionary spending is moslty within the county.

Veterans Benefits

Mapping out the veterans as a % of the population; there's a lot more and they overlap the government workers somewhat. It is possible to be a veteran and also a government worker.

In this case the close up shows percentages by tract. One can see parts of Fairborn, Huber Heights, New Carlisle, Medway, Enon, Beavercreek, and especially the southern part of Riverside as the big concentrations. Probably not unexpected: Yellow Springs has a lower % the than surrounding exurban area.

But the largest, 44.7%, is the tract that has the VA, the old Soldiers Home.

Veterans benefits are largely payments to veterans with service-connected disabilities, in other words either war casualites or injured on-duty. One can see an upward trend turing the Iraq-Afghanistan War years, with a big jump in 2007.

The "other" category are mostly other types of payments, mostly survivors benefits, but also a category for non-service connected disabilities.
There is also a small collection of programs tha provide other types of benefits or services, like money to modify houses for disabled veterans (accessibility for the disabled), modfication of cars and vehicles so disabled veterans can drive, educational aid, vocational training, and similar things.

Although veterans benefits are fairly small in the grand scheme of local defense-related spending, the money is still pretty large, topping $100M in recent years.

The Defense Welfare State: In It's Own Place

Mapping out the distribution of veterans and especially government workers its pretty clear that the Defense Welfare State is pretty much concentrated east of Dayton, mostly in Greene County. One can infer this is also the case with technical professionals working in nominally private sector firms doing a lot of defense contracting.

Studying the government worker map its pretty clear that there very low percentages in the hip urban areas frequently mentioned in the local blogosphere: South Park, Oregon, Downtown, the UD area. The one somewhat equivilant suburban area, Yellow Springs, is by far more popular than urban Dayton. The downtown number might be changing as this census data predates the big loft/apartment boom in the center city.

Government employment outside of Eastern Greene County is concentrated in the Salem Avenue Corridor, and these might be government workers for Dayton as well as for the VA and base. But it does indicate that perhaps defense employment and might be providing a floor to neighborhood economies in predominantly black areas within Dayton.

Yet the strong suburban orientation in government work, coupled with the veterans' geography, sort of indicate a figure in the carpet, a world that really is it's own place, economically and sociologically. Perhaps not as connected to Dayton as one would like to think.

The Defense Welfare State

2009-05-09T15:33:00.003-04:00

Like in that Starship Troopers movie, service guarantees citizenship....in the Defense Welfare State.

The concept of the welfare state is foreign in the use, and the term is a pejorative. Since Daytonlogy has a social-democratic metapolitcs, the welfare state is, at this blog, a positive. A way of providing social insurance against the vagaries of the economy.

In our area defense spending provides both social insurance to military, civilians, and veterans, (via Wright-Patterson AFB and the Veterans Administration complex on Gettysburg Avenue), but is signifigant enough to provide a "floor" to the local economy, mitigating disruptions caused by the business cycle and the decline in manufacturing.

The Consolidated Federal Funds Report shows defense related spending for 2007 (and past years to 1993) as around 26% of spending. But it fails to account for civilian retirement, veterans benefits, and and other smaller programs. Adding these, called here "Defense +", one comes up with 33% of all Federal spending in the metropolitan area.

Drilling down into that 33%, one can see procurements account for a full 40% of defense spending. This includes procuring services from the R&D and IT contractors out on I-675 in Greene County as well as the more mundane things like construction contracts and supplies. Another 33% is for military and civilian payroll.

In raw numbers, for 2007, there was $3B in defense spending in the metro area.

The following is not adjusted for inflation, but one can see some patterns, with more growth during the Bush years due, perhaps, to the post 9-11 war on terror (peaking at $3.2B), and stagnation and decline in spending during the Clinton era.

Opening up the "other category" are two programs that dont fit well in the other broad groups. Impact Aid is aid to local school districts because they have to teach the additional students from military families (the impact of having a military installation in or near a school district).

AVFEA is apparently an education program for military members.

Defense procurement probably has a great indirect, difficult-to-measure impact on the area, as the economic impact is the purchase of goods and services, showing up in the economy as wages and salaries for the staff of defense contractors of various sorts, as well as purchase of supplies and equipment by these contractors. Again one can see the plateau in the Clinton era, and a jump in the Bush years.
There are two programs that appear in the funds report for research, here aggregated into a R&D grants category. Presumably these are going to contractors or universities. One can note a big jump in this category after Mike Turner entered Congress. Perhaps one is seeing some earmark activity here? In any case it's a noticeable jump.

A closer look at the payroll line. During the 1990s the Defense Electronic Supply Center (DESC)(AKA Gentile Air Force Station) was closed via BRAC. This, along with Clinton-era cuts, contributed to a noticeable dip in payroll, enough to offset the masking effects of cost-of-living (COLA) adjustments for the remainder of the workforce.

Then a consistent ramp-up during the Bush era, probably showing the effects of inflation and COLAs as the Federal workforce in the metro area was not increasing during this time.

Fortunately the cuts in the 1990s happened during "good times" of relatively high employment in the metro area.

Since funds report provides this annual payroll number, we can compare it with other economic sectors in the Dayton region, using the County Business Patterns data for the Dayton MSA. The most recent year for County Business Patterns is 2006, so lets use that year.

The civilian + military payroll shown here in blue, next to other categories (including non-defense payroll).

Manufacturing is contributes the most payroll, followed by health care and social services. Then comes the Professional, Scientific, and Technical (or PS&T) category. The defense payroll is the fourth. And, adding the non-defense Federal category, the total Federal payroll almost equals the PS&T category. An impressive demonstration of the Federal role in the economy, just by payroll.

And something to keep in mind if the Manufacturing sector was in rapid decline starting in 2007, as Federal payroll would be a category insulated from the vagaries of the economy. Also note that Federal spending--defense + nondefense-- is, along with Manufacturing, the one sector that is probably brining in the most money from outside the region (in the Feds case via taxes).

An example of this is the PS&T sector. Adding defense on top of it and one equals Manufacturing as the largest aggregate payroll sector in the region (and may well be surpassing it by now).

A key point here is the $1.4B in procurements and $10M in R&D grants could be driving some portion of the Professional, Scientific, & Technical category via the miltary contracting for engineering, consulting, scientific and IT services. It would be a challenge to measure this with any degree of accuracy based on public sources.

Next, a look some possible geographical impacts and veterans benefits spending.

The Arcade Has Finally Been Sold

2009-05-06T18:55:00.002-04:00

The Badger State boys actually did come up with the $600K + bucks to pay for the Arcade, in the face of an undertow of local skepticsm. Some good discussion on this at DMM Forum (or you could pop a blood vessel by getting angry at the inane negativity at the DDN readers comments).

Berg and Sturtz ended up forming the "Wisconsin Financial Freinds of the Arcade" to raise money from freinds and associates up in Plymouth, (which is sort of a suburb of of Sheboygan), as well as contributing their own money to the cause, beyond the $1,000 down payment.

For all the talk about "Dayton Originals" and "keeping it local" , this is a 100% out-of-town effort. There was hope that Bob Schiffler would be the angel, but he backed out as it didn't work out for him, for whatever reason. And let's see what he does with the old Moraine Embassy and 25 S Main buildings; already a full plate. Instead two small-time renovators from rural Wisconsin made the sole bid, paid the down payment, and actually came up with the balance of the back taxes.

Berg and Sturtz may yet bring the Arcade complex back to life. It's an audacious move considering the national and local economy, especially risky real estate deals. But they just might do it.

The dicey part is what happens if and when the restoration is done and the doors are open.

There is a lot of nostalgia around the Arcade, people remembering the old days and wishing it were so again. Well, to make it so they have to use the building.

If people are opening a business or professional practice or already own one they need to consider locating in the Arcade. And if people are going on a shopping trip they need to go shopping at the Arcade (assuming there will be shops again). If they want to buy a condo or rent an apartment they need to consider the Arcade. The building just wont be economically viable if there is no income coming in from tenants.

Berg and Sturtz might be brining money in from Wisconsin but they aren't going to be bringing in tenants. That's something for the greater Dayton community to provide. And its up to us to patronize those tenants, too.

Newfields Cluster Housing and a Suburban Road Not Traveled

2009-05-05T19:00:00.009-04:00

This final Newfields post will look at some of the housing and ponder a bit on this suburban road not traveled.

The village center was at the southern edge of the development area, connected to some of the first housing via a path, either for walking or cycling. The path passes through common-use open fields defined by forests and preserved tree lines along old fences. The following marked-up aeriel illustrates these features:

The original housing illustrates both the mixing of single- and multi-family units and the concept of cluster housing.

Cluster Housing & Open Space

Cluster housing was another suburban innovation coming out of the 1960s in reaction to the uniform sprawling plats of the postwar era, with their chain link fenced back yards and lack of parkland. The concept was to cluster the houses closer together, freeing up land for common open space, which could be left wild or developed for recreation

Illustrating the concept: Settlers’ Point was a cluster housing development of the early 1970s in exurban Oldham County, KY, outside of Louisville. One can see the housing clusters arranged around landscaped cul-de-sacs, with the adjacent common open space. As one can see Newfields followed very similar concept, with even more generous open space.

The difference being that Newfields was apparently to have a connecting pathway system and was planned to have those mixed-used village centers.

So lets follow that path, from the village center into the first housing cluster.

Looking back over the lake at the village center.

….and then encountering the multi-family housing, perhaps townhouse condominiums. The exteriors are done up in a rustic style using wood siding, but with nice big windows and accent landscaping. This condo development was at the entrance to the housing cluster. Apparently each housing cluster would have this mix of multi- and single-family units, so a mix of age groups and lifestyles and perhaps incomes in each little neighborhood.

The path curves past these into the common open space (presumably to be maintained by the New Community Authority) and passes the backs of the housing clusters.

The original houses here made use of the change in grade, overlooking the open space with big windows and a mix of wood and brick materials in a no-fuss modern design. The side facing the street would probably appear as split levels or a one story ranch. The little wing-wall on the lower floor patio gives a bit of privacy.

The path curves along the edge of the green space, housing nestled into the landscaping, and in the background, and a line of mature trees defining the space in the background.

Finally the paths curves between the houses via a common open space between the backyards

This is a very convincing approach to improving suburbia…if one is a landscape architect. The relentless uniformity and repetition of a typical suburban plat would be avoided, and houses would either open onto green space, almost like living in a farm pasture or big park, or be very close to it via the path system.

Some other Newfields housing. Different types of single family houses...

…and apartments and condominiums, one set at the edge of a forest.

Much of it in the woodsy-shedsy early-mid 1970s style, fairly restrained architecture compared to the suburban bloat and "revivalist" design references of today. A modernist rustic aesthetic would be quite appropriate for an innovative community designed around generous open space.

The Suburban Road Not Travelled.

One can imagine the rest of the property developed like this, accommodating 30,000 people via a landscape plan that would fairly successfully merge housing of various densities, business, and retail into a matrix of landscaped highways, greenways, fields, forests, and creek valleys.

Newfields would be a true green suburb, similar in intent to Milton Keynes, the “city as forest”
(or in this case city as "Midwest rural landscape") . Although designed around the car, the nature of the planning implies some degree of walkability or bikeability via the pathway system and mixed use of offices, shopping, and recreation in the village centers, as well as mixed incomes and lifestyles in the housing areas.

As such Newfields seems an interesting counterexample to New Urbanism, demonstrating that certain intentions of that movement can be achieved within the modernist paradigm, sans the somewhat ersatz and nostalgic trademark aesthetic.

About the only nostalgia in Newfields was the stated intention to preserve some of the old farmsteads, with their great bank barns. These remnants of the Midwest cultural landscape would be preseved as focal points for the various new developments, either as community centers or as businessess. In this case as a doctors office.

No More Experiments?

Newfields was the last suburban experiment in Dayton until the Village of North Clayton (which seems to be developing very slowly).

Though not really experiments perhaps golf course communities could be following some of the concepts here, with houses arranged around open space; fairways, tees, and greens. The bike and walking paths become golf cart paths. But these are cold coffee compared to the ambitious and greenway concept illustrated at Newfields.

The only local development to incorporate an open space system of greenways (vs. a golf course) is Stonehill Village in Beavercreek, being developed by the Nutters of Nutter Center fame.

This development on the other side of town from Newfields might make good on the promise of an improved form of suburbia.

Newfields Survivals: Village 1 and Village Center

2009-05-04T19:47:00.008-04:00

In the previous post it was said things were actually built at Newfields. In fact enough was built to get a feel for what the new town might have been like.

The maps showing the HUD sell-off parcels show some of this, with “Development Area 2” having some things built

What was built was:

9 single family homes

1 duplex

12 condominiums & townhouse units

12 apartment units

...and a commercial building, community center, and swimming pool.

(funny to see a double there. It’s still standing, too).

A close –up of Development Area 2, showing how multifamily was sort of mixed in with single family, and the start of the village center. This was to be “Village 1”, the schematic design discussed in previous posts.

An aerial from 2000. Again with some of the original features labeled. What wasn’t shown on the HUD map are some aborted development areas, were curbs and roads where laid out and parking was even installed in some cases.

One can also see there’s some later development, so apparently HUD did interest some developers to come in and do conventional housing.

Village Center Planning and Buildings

The centerpiece of the design was to be a village center arranged around a small lake or pond. It’s unclear who the designer was. The Newfields book says TAC, Walter Gropius’ old firm out of the Boston area , was to be design consultant for the first village center. It’s not known if they actually did any work. But someone did design this and do some site planning. (As an aside TAC did do work in the Dayton area, designing a modern house in Centerville in the 1950s).

An office building, community center, and pool were built, and extensive parking lots laid out. Additional development was apparently to go in north, perhaps townhouses or apartments.

This village center was actually served by RTA at first, but the line was terminated probably when the development went into foreclosure.

This aerial illustrates the aborted development next to the village center, and how the community center and office building related to the lakefront

The extensive open space and cut-off walkway/patio system indicated more things might have been planned. Absent a site or development plan one can only speculate. In this case perhaps the walkways would have been extended to the outer parking lot, and would have been flanked by maybe shopping and apartments and townhouses.

The office building is unusual as it doesn’t privilege the parking lot façade. For a spec office building, it is very open to the common-use public space, like the circular gathering space (maybe intended for things like craft fairs or community events of various types), and opens onto the lake with lots of windows.

To the rear, or parking lot side, are the angular geometries of late modernism, with long sloping walls of metal roof material, punctured by band windows. The building steps back following the angle of the parking lot. The design actually minimizes the bulk of the building., yet also giving a sort of futuristic look.

Angular form in the 1970s also symbolized “solar” and “ecology” (there was a ‘green movement” back then, too), so maybe a play with that symbolism, too.

Its unclear if the red vinyl siding is original. This was the corporate HQ of MotoPhoto which had red as its corporate color. The next door community center was more restrained. This design had a similar angular form, but done up in gray wood siding, giving it a more rustic and weathered feeling. Maybe that was the original color and material.

Unfortunately the sloped walls of the community center were perhaps a good invitation for kids to try to climb them to the roof, so chain link fences were installed.

The village center was a radical design concept for the Dayton region, especially if retail was going to be built. The concept was to turn away from the parking lots (orienting things to the lake), which is never done is commercial or retail construction.

Not to mention integrating offices, retail, a community center and maybe housing in a fairly tight development, instead of spreading functions out in large, separate zoning blocks. We are close to the ideas of New Urbanism here, but far away from New Urbanisms nostalgic aesthetics.

Newfields Innovations, Failure, and Denoument

2009-05-02T14:12:00.010-04:00

Newfields had one lasting contribution to suburban planning in Ohio, but is also a good case study of a beautiful theory ambushed by reality; a suburban experiment that failed.

Dual Developers and New Community Authority

Title VII new communities were intended to be demonstration projects and had to incorporate development and planning innovations to be eligible for HUD assistance (HUD administered Title VII).

One of the innovations that helped sell the Newfields application to HUD was the Dual Developer Concept.

The ideas was that Newfields would be developed jointly by private sector for-profit developers and a non-profit quango, called the New Community Authority, or NCA. The NCA would be responsible for developing & operating the open space and community support features (including preschool) and have some involvement with the town center. The NCA was, perhaps, as the convener of the design think tank that would do the detailed planning as the community grew.

The NCA was structured so it could be expanded as new areas were developed. The board of directors originally had private developer representation (but not a majority of the board). As the new community became populated it would eventually move to full resident representation. As the NCA had bonding authority and was responsible for some infrastructure development and maintenance it would generate revenue via an "income charge" on the residents, perhaps akin to a local income tax.

The NCA remains a lasting contribution of Newfields, as the enabling legislation remains on the books in amended form as Title 3 Chapter 349 of the Ohio Revised Code. The NCA is being used for modern developments like New Albany near Columbus, San Mar Gale near Oregonia and the Big Darby plan for the open country west of Columbus.

Newfields Politics

Why a NCA? Apparently Huber thought of incorporating but as this was so close to Trotwood Trotwood could have prohibited annexation. And Dayton would not sign-off on the Federal A95 review unless it could annex the new town. And Trotwood and Dayton where already at loggerheads over annexation as Trotwood had outmaneuvered Dayton in the 1960s for the annexation of the Salem Mall.

So a compromise had to be brokered.

Trotwood would get to annex phase I, Dayton would get to annex the panhandle and the "town center" area. The part of the new town out in Perry Township was left for future decisions. The sweet part of this deal for Dayton is that it would have an opportunity to annex what could have been a new "edge city" as well as industrial land.

The book on Newfields also implies some monetary payoffs by Huber to certain Dayton political leaders (such as the father the current Dayton mayor) were needed to tamp down political opposition from the city.

Dayton did start to annex westward as the new town went under development, which is why the city limits encompass that farmland south and east of Trotwood.

Causes of Failure

Newfields was built on very shaky financial and market projections. As early as 1972 some internal financial projections were showing that the economic model was unsound.

And assumptions on capture rate of new housing proved to be very rosy. As was noted Huber chose this area over Bellbrook as land was cheaper due to slower growth. Perhaps things would have been different if the area had expressway connections or was more desirable to the local real estate market.

The big postwar Huber success, Huber Heights, was in an underdeveloped, stagnant suburban area. The Hubers pretty much made that area boom. So expectations would have been similar for Newfields, assuming ongoing growth. But that was not the case as Dayton region stopped growing in 1970, entering an era of prolonged population stagnation and economic structural adjustment.

There was also the issue of the “housing project” character of Newfields.

The intention of Newfields was to have a mix of density and socioeconomic groups, and was developed with Federal assistance. This would have been a radical concept in the context of the conservative suburban real estate market of that era, possibly contributing to racial steering into the Trotwood area in the 1970s, due the local real estate community perhaps abandoning the area as suitable housing for whites. And the developer, Don Huber, had a history with partnering with black developers in urban renewal projects prior to Newfields. Was the thinking that Don Huber was going to develop a big Madden Hills instead of a new Huber Heights?

In short, maybe Newfields was unmarketable in the context of the Dayton regions racially and economically segregated housing market?

The Boaz Allen & Hamilton Evaluation & The Basic Flaw

An evaluation of the entire Title VII program by accountants Boaz, Allen, and Hamilton for HUD pretty much confirms some basic flaws in the entire program in finance, program design and management, and developer assumptions.

B,A, & H don’t say this but the fundamental demographic assumption underpinning Title VII was proven false; that urban areas would continued to grow during the 1970s due to rural depopulation and internal metropolitan area population growth. Instead internal population growth leveled off and rural out migration ceased. And, in 1970, no one forecast the economic disruption of the oil price shock of 1973-74, with the subsquent recession and inflation.

The B,A, & H study contains this sensitivity analyses for Newfields, showing negative cash flow for the duration of the project if some fundamental economic assumptions changed, which is what happened during the 1970s.

Timeline & Endgame

There where also conflicts between the first project manager and Huber, leading to the resignations of the both general manager and NCA manager.

Things did happen in Newfields. About $20,000,000 was spent on land acquisition, development, and management/consultant cots.

1972

Enabling legislation enacted for the New Community Authority.

1973

The New Community Authority was created, a new general manager hired, a revised master plan developed, ground breaking in September, and HUD project agreement in November. Dayton begins to annex the Panhandle. Newfields name and logo by Chermayeff.

1974

Revenue bonds floated for commercial building in the community center, construction of the first lake, recreation center, and housing units. Title VII program suspended by HUD in October, general manager fired and some staff suspended.

1975

Additional layoffs, NCA informs HUD the project is not viable, Newfields defaults on interest payments (picked up by HUD per agreement), Huber closes out his construction company for Newfields. (Don Huber remains in business in Dayton today, though, recently developing land in Beavercreek)

1976

NCA director resigns, HUD finds project not economically viable, accelerates principle and interest payments on bonds

1978

Foreclosure action by HUD and negotiated solution proposed.

What was proposed was that the property be disposed of three ways. Winters Bank (today’s JPMorgan Chase), which had loaned money to the defunct NCA, and HUD would self off the panhandle property and split the proceeds. HUD would sell the westernmost part of the property to the State of Ohio, which would convert the vacant land to a state park. HUD would sell the phase I property as three development areas. So, interesting to see here that the State of Ohio ends up holding part of the bag via its agreement to take some empty land off the hands of the Feds.

On the map...the Ohio state park in green, HUD/Winters sales and split in gray, and the remaining development areas sold off by HUD in red.

It's not known if the HUD/Winters Bank land ever was sold. It seems to be still for sale based on signs on the property.

1979

Sycamore State Park dedicated, November 1979. So it will be 40 years this fall.

All that’s left of the bulk of Newfields land are the empty farmlands and the wooded Wolf Creek valley of Sycamore State Park

And the aborted development in the HUD sell-off areas. The Newfields name was abandoned; Newfields Boulevard (the main road through the area) was renamed Sycamore Boulevard

And Newfield went down the local memory hole. What was to be a suburb of +/- 30,000, perhaps the most ambitous suburban developement of the 1970s, is totally forgotten (or there is a polite silence about it).

Yes, things were actually built here, and Daytonlogy will investigate this area as taste of what could have been, and as Dayton's only example of another 1960s-era suburban experiment, cluster housing.

Sources:

There are various publications on the Title VII program, both government and non-government. Some of these (like the Booze/Allen evaluation) specfically mention Newfields.

For Newfields itself:

The downtown library History Room has the original and final EIS, the two applications, and supporting info that was sent to HUD, as well as the new town newsletter.

There is also a book: The Politics of New Town Planning, The Newfields Ohio Story, by Fredrick Steiner, published by Ohio University press. 227 pages. The book is perhaps a bit one -sided as it tells the story from the perspective of Gerwin Rohrback, who was the first project manager or director, not so much from Huber, who declined to be interviewed. Rohrback was trained as a landscape architect at Harvard along with McHarg, but went into urban planning.

Newfields Planning: Milton Keynes in Ohio?

2009-04-30T22:49:00.003-04:00

Although there is evidence that the ecological planning concepts of Ian McHarg were used in Newfields, a more direct antecedent was the last and most radical British New Town, Milton Keynes.

Milton Keynes

Located off the M1 motorway halfway between London and Birmingham Milton Keynes was named after a local village, not (as sometimes thought) the poet and the economist. It was designed by Sir Richard Llewellyn Davis in 1967-1968 and was published in planning and architectural journals in 1969 through 1973, so would be exactly contemporary with McHargs’ Design with Nature as an influence. Llewellyn Davis would be retained to do the first plans for Newfields, probably in 1971-72, so Milton Keynes can be seen as a direct precursor.

Llewellyn Davis was influenced by US thinking on planning and architecture (including the example of Los Angeles, which was quite an interest item with UK design theorists) and by the avant garde concepts coming from the UK-based Archigram Group.

“Got to Have a Loose Fit”
(apologies to the Happy Mondays)

This led to the Milton Keynes incorporating the concept of “loose fit” and indeterminacy. Form was indeterminate, with development (including the town center) loosely plugged into “grid squares” formed by a 1km square net of access roads draped across the landscape. Height was low (“buildings no higher than the highest tree”), and the town was to merge into the landscape.

There was also the concept of City as Forest, with generous plantings along the road net, the motorway, the housing areas, and in the park belts in the river bottoms. The idea was to make the city more wooded than the surrounding countryside (which is, interestingly enough, how Dayton and its older suburbs look from the air). Essentially this was a merger of US suburbia and UK new town planning, assuming an automobile-oriented society.

Llewellyn Davis apparently was aware of land use suitability planning as topography and drainage, along with the road system, was used to locate open space, resulting in two north-south open space systems based on river valleys and the motorway. Ecological considerations came into play in species selection for the forest planning. Tree belts were also planted along the net roads. The town center was on the highest elevation, but acted as a connecter between the two north-south open space systems…

….which one can see in this aerial rendering, showing what almost looks like a US style suburban office park bisected by boulevards connecting the two open space systems, flanked by landscaped 1km net roads.

In real life it does look rather fetching, and one can see how the depressed highway concept for Newfields may have had a Milton Keynes precedent.

Though designed primarily with the automobile in mind, Milton Keynes was also designed with an extensive bike/pedestrian system, the “Redway” (named after the red tarmac paving material), which acts as a secondary transportation system grade-separated from the net roads. The 1km dimension for the grid squares was selected to permit walkability to bus stops, so public transit was a consideration in planning.

Milton Keynes in Ohio?

In Ohio, Llewellyn Davis already had a road grid to work with, which was distorted a bit in the plan. One can see some similar concepts, like a town center (and community college) set in parkland but accessed from a freeway, and the use of the topography and drainage to generate the open space system, which determines the blocks of developable land.

It seems there is a “net” concept operating in the Newfields deisgn, too, but one of greenways rather than access roads. Which implies a version of the Milton Keynes ped/bike Redway system.

A missed opportunity was the incorporation of Old Town Trotwood into the scheme (which would have been easy to do). Country villages were incorporated into the Milton Keynes plan, but this didn’t happen here.

The concept of convenience centers was an innovation, where schools and recreation centers would occasionally be paired with neighborhood shopping (shown as red boxes) to provide community focal points throughout the scheme, with larger schools (junior highs, two red boxes) paired with larger shopping areas. In generic US suburbia schools and retail are quite separate.

An unusual feature of the plan is the “panhandle” extending to the east, This was envisioned as a mostly industrial area, but was mainly driven by political considerations. More on that later.

Newfields Plan Development

The initial plan was quite schematic and envisioned most of the land under the control of the developer. In reality ownership was quite fragmented, with some property held as life estates and others remaining as in-holdings, not purchased at all. So the planning was altered to address this reality.

But not altered too much as one still sees the town center/community college, and the Wolf Creek valley and tributaries as the organizing feature of the scheme. (Purple is shopping and blue are schools). The Wolf Creek Expressway appears, arcing its way along the panhandle into Dayton.

Another scheme has more of a village center concept, with three village centers (dashed circles and oval) comprised of housing of various densities, shopping, and schools. In this case one can see industry along the railroad line, which was still active at that time.

One of the goals of the Title VII new communities was socioeconomic integration via mixing apartments and townhouses in with houses. This was a radical feature for suburban Dayton, where single family housing is usually quite separate from multifamily, leading to socioeconomic segregation and social exclusion. One can see that mix in the above graphic, where orange denotes high density housing snaking through the new town, following the greenways.

The Design Think Tank

All this was in outline. Detailed design of the new town was to be done on a case-by-case, subcommunity-by-subcommunity basis via a design think tank made up of design consultants, the staff ecologist, and residents. The intention was not to have a predetermined form, but to take a more ad-hoc, participatory approach. This seems to be a reflection of the 1960s interest in process, letting the process determine the form. Which once again relates to the concept of indeterminacy, eschewing a comprehensive, top-down detailed master planned approach.
One can see this in action with this preliminary study, which provides a generalized outline, but also locates how various housing densities would mix, color coded in shades of red. Yellow would be single family and dark red, perhaps, a high-rise.

The label says study, but Village 1 was, believe it or not, partially built. Subject of a future Daytonology thread.

Newfields and Ecological Planning

2009-04-28T22:16:00.002-04:00

Newfields started out inspired by Reston, and this early sketch shows the intent a bit, to dam up Wolf Creek for a lake and put a community college and shopping center near by, with housing all around.

Instead Newfields would be influenced by the new concept of land use suitability planning, also called ecological planning.

The approach was developed during the 1960s by Ian McHarg and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania. McHarg was a Scot, trained in landscape architecture at Harvard, and a sort of public intellectual during the 1960s (with his own TV show), as well as an innovative planner and designer. The concept was to overlay constraints to determine the best place to build.

The concept, via examples alternating with biographical and philosophical writings, was popularized via McHarg’s book, Design With Nature, published in 1969, just in time for the New Communities legislation. McHarg himself would design one of the Title VII new communities, The Woodlands, north of Houston, using ecological planning principles.

Design with Nature was perhaps one of the most influential books of its era, influencing generations of landscape architects and planners. Eventually the overlay technique would be the intellectual foundation for computerized Geographic Information Systems, AKA GIS.

It’s interesting to think of Design with Nature next to Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities (published in 1961). Both books bracket the decade, but are quite different in their conclusions. Jacob’s book was a ringing endorsement of the old urban world of the pre-automobile city just as it was about to die. McHarg’s was the apotheosis of the garden city concept, transcending that hoary idea and pointing to the future, the start of ecologically based planning.

The planning technique introduced in Design with Nature was to ascertain land use suitability via overlay. The procedure was to map various constraints, such as soil quality, depth to bedrock, wetlands, watercourses, floodplains, aquifers, steep slopes, forest and vegetation cover, cultural resources, and other factors as layers. The sum of the overlays would show areas were one could build and where one could not.

An early example of this technique was the plan for The Valleys, an exurban area northwest of Baltimore, where an overlay of constraints led to recommendations for controlled development based on the nature of the land itself

The technique would become more robust over the course of the decade.

It was a convincing technique, except the one thing that was not overlain was private property, which meant this concept was somewhat utopian for regional planning. But it could be used for large areas controlled by a handful of landowners, or one large owner, which was case in Newfields.

In the case of Newfields, there is this evidence that the land use suitability approach was being used, as soil classifications, depth to bedrock, woodlands, and slopes were being mapped as “Natural Systems Sensitivity” to determine developable areas and suggest a form for the new town.

One can already see the valleys of Wolf Creek and its tributaries surfacing as a constraint.

Next we will look at some actual planning for Newfields.