Walking the Nickel: A First Look

The Nickel being West Fifth Street, west of the river. The black buisness district.

The black business district was a feature of African American urban life, probably best known in places like Atlanta, with Auburn Avenue, but also in other cities too. Dayton had one on West Fifth, developing as this neighborhood evolved into a black ghetto.

The map below shows West Fifth (shaded in yellow) as it was in the late 1940s. There was a buisness district on West Third, too, which is pretty evident as the built-up area on the upper part of the map.


An in-depth analyses is in progress, but will take some time as this was a fairly complex development evolution, with a lot of building subsitution and mixed use (not really that evident at first glance).

But here is a first look, doing a count of residential and business addresses from the city directory, as well as vacancy showing how this street grew.

The bar chart shows five year intervals for the early years as this was the period of the Great Migration (starting in 1910), with a big increase in migration from the rural South to the urban North. In Dayton there was also an informal Jim Crow policy keeping blacks out of downtown public accomodations. There might have been a relation to the increase in business on Fifth during the same era.

Then there was the first big drop in the 1960s, which was an era of riots and also freeway construction removing the eastern reaches of the Nickel.

After 1970 vacancies and demolitions increased until the street was all but gone by 1990 (and it is completely gone today except for maybe three or four buildings).

Another look, showing trends by type of use. It's interesting to see the residential numbers drop during the postwar era, even before the 1960s disruptions. Businesss use was pretty stable for 30 years after 1930, but crashing after 1960.

This is interesting as it could mean there was increasing poverty in the black community, thus less disposable income, due to jobs starting to disappear. But it could have been just a simple thinning out of an overcrowded neighborhood as new neighborhoods were opened to black settlement.

The first black postwar expansions was new housing on empty platted land off Lakeview, Germantown and McCall, in the late 1940s. The first large white area opened in the postwar era was Westwood, in the 1950s, and this corresponds with a decrease one sees between 1940 and 1960.



The tale of black expansion and white flight is another story, but one can see how it might have had an effect Fifth Street.

Next, a few posts looking at the Nickel in detail; the world of social clubs, pool halls, shoeshine parlors, barbershops, movie theatres, churches, all the richness of an urban neighborhood of the early and mid 20th century.