Sunday, October 14, 2007

South Park Corner Store -a-rama

A quick look at this obsolete building type.

South Park is one of the parts of Dayton that had corner stores inside the neighborhood. South of here, in Ohmer Park and Walnut Hills, there are no corner stores on the side streets. South Park’s concentration is not quite as dense as St Anne’s Hill (which seems to have one on nearly every corner,) but it's pretty close :

Each store had a trading area of just a few blocks. In the days before refrigeration and large-scale home food storage, shopping was probably more frequent and for smaller loads of food, hence a close net of stores selling foodstuffs (this was the pattern for St Anne’s Hill, so I assume it holds for South Park).

South Park also had access to a large neighborhood market house at Wayne & Burns Street (where US 35 meets Wayne). This was Dayton’s equivalent to Findlay Market or West Side Market (in Cleveland).

Wayne and Brown/Warren probably formed another neighborhood retail location for the residents (perhaps these streets could be seen as strips of corner stores, serving the neighborhoods off the street)


For South Park, I don’t know what was in specific stores (this could be found out via the city directories), but they are interesting as a building type. A gallery of corner stores:



Corner stores might seem pretty generic, but lend themselves to a bit of formal analyses. Up close, the original detailing could be elegant, yet simple:



For an in-depth tour & stab at typological analyses click here.

5 comments:

Teri L said...

Jeffrey-
My great grandmother ran a "corner store" I believe on Tecumseh St in the Oregon District.

The building that I think it was in, is still there, now a residence, but retains the look you have detailed above.

You've brought back some memories.

kevin said...

I wish I had an old image of it, but 301 Morton St. use to have a single-story storefront just to the right of it that was once a butcher shop of sorts in its later years, I heard. It was torn off in c1998 by a guy that bought it for $1 from the city with the promise of rehabbing it. Ultimately, it was part of the 2001 South Park Rehabarama.

Thanks for your posts, Jeff!

Jefferey said...

Teri, that must be the store at Tecumseh and 6th? Thanks, yes these bring back memories for me too, but from another city.

Kevin, that was a greak link. Whoever is doing the house history research for the Rehabarmas is doing a great job! These are helping me date some of the houses in the other neighbohoods im looking at.

I figure there was a probably more out along Brown and Warren, too.

I see that link connects to the Wellmeir family geneology.

Incidentally there is a Wellmeir or Wellmeyer Street in Linden Heights. Neighborhood legend there has it that the Wellmeier who platted that street also owned a big house on the corner, facing Linden.

kevin said...

Betsy Wilson House Histories

Yes, they are done so well. I sure wish she put her business card out or a sticker on the back of the house histories. I'm considering her do one on my Oak St. house. She'll dig up more than we have. The histories you have been reading at the houses were a gift from her to all the houses on the tour.

Betsy said...

Thanks for your kind words. I wish I could take credit for such incredible generosity as well, but I was paid by Full Circle Development and The Home Group for the House Histories I did for Rehabarama.

Jeffrey, your work is fantastic. When do you do things like eat and sleep?

Betsy