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.