South Park Urban Morphology

South Park is having the Rehabarama starting this weekend. So, a historical look at the development of the neighborhood.

Urban Morphology?

I discussed my interest in vernacular architecture and the urban fabric elsewhere on this blog. A related interest is urban morphology, the study of the development of city form, via analyses of street and lot patterns as well as how the city was built-out.

I only found out there was such a thing last year.

Urban morphology is an academic field of study in Europe, as there is long urban history there, going back to ancient time. Good USA works in this field are "Built for Change, Neighborhood Architecture in San Francisco", and St. Louis, The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape.

There is also a good PhD these on Over The Rhine urban morphology available via OhioLink.

USA town plans, however, are usually thought of as being pretty banal, some form of grid. Maybe not worth a second look?

Yet digging deeper, what seems obvious might not be so; analyses of platting and plan yields some history and permits a bit of speculation on how things came to be.

For Dayton, the story begins with the original town plat, including a town lot grid oriented to the Great Miami River, and an broader out lot grid extending east to about Tals Corner.

Out lots are found in the original plats of nearly every large city in the Ohio Valley; Louisville, Lexington, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Indianapolis all had out lot plats, which helped generated the street pattern of these cities. The concept apparently originated in the Mid Atlantic colonies, and was brought west with the initial post-Revolutionary War town plats in Kentucky and the Northwest Territory.

The Cooper Out Lots

Though Dayton was platted in 1795, title was uncertain. Surveyor Daniel N Cooper acquired pre-emption rights in 1801 from the Federal Government, and re-platted the town and eastern out lots in 1802.

Subsequent to the first plats Cooper platted three ranges of out lots extending south of the town to a east-west section line of the Federal rectangular coordinate survey system (later Stewart Street). Apparently Cooper owned all this property, possibly extending eastward to at least a north-south section line.

The fact that all this land was in private ownership is key, as that land subdivision did not have to follow the rectangular coordinate system, oriented to the four cardinal directions. Land could be platted via metes and bounds, with parcels in any shape.

This was the case with the Cooper out lots, which followed the lines of roads out of town to the south, and also the lay of the land, partially following a low bluff that marked the edge of the Miami river flood plain. Cooper may have thought of this rise as a good mill location,(which it was to be later). Lanes were included in the plats as access to the out lots, which later became Hickory and Brown Streets.

The topography probably drove the location of Warren Street, which is named as it led to Warren County to the south. The direct route out of Dayton, following Main Street, would have encountered Fair Grounds Hill, which would be a substantial grade to climb for freighter wagons and stages heading toward Cincinnati during the pre-canal era.

An alternative lower slope route out of the city lay to the east, between Fair Grounds Hill and what is now Woodland Cemetery. Warren Street angles southeast to take advantage of this gap.

There also was probably some sort of intermittent stream or watercourse that followed this route from the east, across today’s South Park.




Canal Era Plats and Out Lots

Though growing, Dayton did not grow beyond its original town plat until the arrival of the Miami and Erie Canal in 1829. The canal followed the route of an old tailrace, which followed the course of a slough or floodway between the Mad River and Great Miami. This tailrace was in existence as late as 1839, according to the map below.

The executors of Cooper’s estate platted additional out lots in 1827, possibly anticipating the canal, or in reaction to population growth in Dayton. These out lots cover much of present South Park. The out lots follow the orientation established by the Cooper plat along Hickory Street, but shift to an east-west orientation further south.

In 1832 Seelys Ditch was dug. Intended as a branch canal for commercial use, the ditch was the location of some early town lot plats, some of the first extensions of the city beyond the original town plat.


A close-up of the South Park area.

Based on an 1839 map. One can see the original streets of South Park here, as country lanes. The first town lot plat in the South Park area appears, showing how blocks of out lots could be bought by speculators and subdivided into town lots.

Though this map doesn’t show it, I speculate there still was a watercourse running through the southern part of the land, south of Oak Street. The line of Oak Street was to drive the orientation of the Park Drive plats:

Mid 19th Century South Park

30 years after the 1839 map, this 1869 map shows considerable extension of platting. Park Drive appears, as well as out lots platted into city lots along Hickory and especially along Warren and Brown.

Apparently (my speculation) the area to the east of the north-south section line was platted by the City of Dayton as out lots in the 1840s. I don’t know how extensive this was or the configuration, but it implies the city had some control over this land (perhaps acquiring it from the Cooper estate?)

Another key change was that between 1850 and 1869 Brown Street was cut through to make a more direct connection to Warren. Thus, Brown and “Old Brown” Streets. Warren south of Oak is renamed Brown.

The old out lots are outlined in red, showing how they generate the street system and lot division; the urban morphology palimpsest for this part of Dayton.


Taking a look at the urban fabric. Red boxes show a structure on a lot (sometimes more than one).
Removing the base map patterns emerge. Perhaps one can see “Slider town” (the old name for South Park), as sort of a suburban area, at the Brown/Warren/Oak intersection.? Note that this was the location of the infirmary or pest-house, where people with communicable diseases were quarantined.

In this pre-public transit era the outskirts of older Midwestern industrial cities like Dayton was often for the working class and poorer people, living in small houses. Country villas might be scattered in the fringe too, but for suburban town lots, it was for the less well-off.


A close –up of the “historic district” part of South Park. Note this map shows buildings on lots. A great resource for historic preservationists and vernacular architecture buffs. Note the streets west of Park Drive, between Park and Warren/Brown: lots of buildings shown. Are they still there? Or have they been replaced? Another interesting thing is that how much of this area was not built on yet. South Park is mostly a later 19th century neighborhood
Though some of the old out lots are shown vacant in 1869 they were subdivided in 1870, resulting in the more-or-less final form of South Park. Horse cars extended through the area in the early 1870s, first on Brown, then on Wayne.

The water course, from east Dayton is now the “city drain” , shown running down the middle of Park Drive, going underground (into a sewer?) at the west end of the drive.



I will take a closer look at the South Park platting history in a later post.

(and if you want a closer look at these maps, just mouse over them an click...they will enlarge)