Rock Show on Brown

Yer humble host doesn't come here much, but an opportunity to hear some new (to me) bands...funky Daytonesque Cornerstone Tavern, the last of the old Wyoming and Brown business corner. Sort of amazing that Miami Valley Hospital hasn't gobbled this up yet....
...the next two pix was not the headliner. The band is the Judy Blooms. Their myspace page says "Brooklyn", but they have some sort of Dayton connection. I have to say their closing song was their best tonight.


The main event was Andrew and the Pretty Punchers (their CD release party), and frankly since this was such a late show and in a very crowded venue, no pix and I didn't stay to hear much of them, so can't give a fair reading the band live.

Based on their CD, though, they are really interesting.

So far tracks 6 and 7 are my favorites (great chorus on 6), 3 has a catchy hook, and I don't like 2 (too plunky). A bit jarring was the leads' Englishy' accent on some of the songs (yet it 'works'). Repeat listens brings more out and one starts to really appreciate how tight & polished this effort is.

Bands like tonight and CDs like ths makes you realize you're missing nothing by avoiding corporate rock radio and sticking to local stuff. There is very solid music coming from this region, probably enough, if you add Cincy, Cols, Indy, Lex & Louisivlle, to actually program a rock or mix station using regional artists.

Celtic Fest

..always seems to draw a good crowd


This was a local band, Nine Castle Close. Celtic + Rock.


The crowds bled over into Riverscape, which is one of the nice things about this festival. Since its not on the street the park along the river becomes buys...


...including impromtu music making. I'd like to see more of this in Dayton.

While the City Sleeps...

"We never got it off on that urban renewal stuff..."

"What a drag ..."

"...too many snags"

"Now lucy looks sweet cause he dresses like a queen..."

"...But he can kick like a mule its a real mean team/

But we can love oh yes we can love"

¡Ay, Califas!

"...California, I'll be knocking on the golden door/
Like an angel, standing in a shaft of light/
Rising up to paradise, I know I'm gonna shine..."

Rancho Del Paso

Returning to sunny Sacramento after the gloomy Dayton statistical excursion and sour posts on declining downtown, here’s a look at how land development in California was different than Ohio.

I’ve always been fascinated by the tale of the Spanish and Mexican land grants and ranchos in California and the Southwest, this thin overlay of pre-US culture over the landscape, as well as by the development history of the state after the gold rush, which isn’t well known, even to Californians.

Rancho Del Paso is a good way to tell this story, especially since there is a lot online on this place. Most of what you see here was cribbed from various online historical & contemporary sources.
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The rancho was one of the last Mexican land grants, and like a number of the Central Valley grants went to an American. The grant was made in 1844, just a few years before the Mexican War.


Eventually via some legal maneuvers, in 1859 the rancho came to James Ben Ali Haggin and Lloyd Tevis, Kentuckians who emigrated to California during the gold rush, but made money as a lawyers and businessmen, and later mine owners, not prospectors.

James Ben Ali Haggin & Rancho Del Paso

The Ben Ali part was a reference to his grandfather on his mothers side, who was a Turk, and apparently he did look a bit Turkish according to contemporary accounts.

I don’t know if Haggin participated in bonanza farming of post gold-rush era, large scale quasi-industrial dry-land farming specializing in wheat. The Rancho might have been just a bit cattle operation, or not operated at all and held in speculation.

Historical accounts do say Haggin ran Rancho Del Paso as a big horse farm starting the 1880s, with paddocks along the American River bottoms, and horse barns and shipping facilities at “the arcade”, next to a Southern Pacific station (the transcontinental railroad bisected the property). This was a fairly successful operation, siring some winning horses. One wonders if the “Molly” in the Molly & Tinbrooks song came from here as she was a California horse.

Maybe not if the song predates horses on the Rancho.

Anyway....

...Haggin eventually moved operations back to his native Kentucky, acquiring the famous Elmendorf Farm near Lexington (still a horse farm today), and liquidated his California horse breeding activities in 1905. After returning to Kentucky Haggin apparently invested in Lexington real estate, opening the Ben Ali theatre in 1913 on Main Street, later torn down for a parking lot.

Haggin did keep Del Paso for a few more years, with the last days of the rancho as a conventional cattle operation

This 1901 map shows the souther part of the rancho across the American River from Sacramento, which had just started to expand beyond the original grid plat ("Oak Park"). Neighboring ranches were Rio de Los Americanos, and San Juan, which saw an early “sunset colony” at Fair Oaks, and Sutter's old rancho of New Helvetia, by this time subdivided into smaller holdings.

What’s noticeable is the lack of a gridded road system , as the land was never surveyed in the rectangular coordinate system (and was under one owner), so roads ran wherever they were needed, like the diagonal from the river paddocks to the “Ben Ali” crossing & horse barns at “Arcade”.

It should be noted that Haggin never lived on the property. He had a mansion in San Franciscos’ Nob Hill, a villa in Newport RI, and a townhouse in Manhattan.


From Rancho to Ranchette

In 1910 the Rancho was sold and subdivided, pitched as a property suitable for irrigation colonies and small holdings

This was a popular pitch for California land development, to attract Midwestern farmers with the promise of making money in intensive agriculture (thus smaller holdings), growing orchard crops and produce for eastern markets. The other attraction was the mild climate vs. cold, snowy, and gloomy winters.

By 1916 the area had been subdivided even further, with holdings by the “Antelope Land Company”, “California Citrus Lands”, and subdivision into irrigation/citrus colonies, such as “Arcade Park, the Pasedena of Northern California”, the “Cream of the Haggin Grant”.


The Pasadena reference is worth noting as the Sacramento area developed very similar to Los Angeles, little LA, really, even though it is closer to San Francisco. Large ranches subdivided and sold-off to Midwesterners, intensive agriculture like produce and orchard crops, and settlements linked by interurban rail and the new automobile technology and wired for electric power (Sacramento was a pioneer in long distance power transmission and hydroelectric generation). Housing was in the modern (for that time) bungalow style.

The obligatory orange grove image:
(there actually were colonys to the east called Orangevale and Citrus Heights, todays' suburbia)

A close up of the land development activity, showing an early suburban plat (Del Paso Heights) along the interurban line, and a large lot ranchette developments, as well as speculative holdings like ‘Interurban Acres” (of course one could say it was all speculative).



The Northern Electric was built through here in 1907, predating the end of the rancho by a few years. This line drove subdivision activity through the rancho (one plat, Rio Linda, was made famous by Rush Limbaugh), and had plans to extend eastward to similar citrus colony development in adjacent Rancho San Juan.

Only a small branch was built though (which later became the route of the new light rail line)

The combines here permitted quick shipments of small parcels, but the line did develop a solid freight business shipping fruits and vegetables (incidentally these cars were built in Niles, Ohio, neary Youngstown). Passenger service ended late, in 1940.
Roughly the same area as in the blow up, today. One can see the land subdivision lines, outlined here in red, the Del Paso Heights suburb, the interurban ROW in yellow, and the grid of ranchettes in the large lot development of "Oak Knoll" (as labled on the preceding map)
And a close up, showing how the lot sizes here (and elsewhere in this development) led to small time speculation, eventually permitting little subdivisions to replace the ranchettes, or for multiple ranchettes to be combined into larger developments.
Eventually the larger speculative holdings became postwar subdivisions. One can see this early pix looking over the old Ben Ali crossing, toward the eastern part of the Rancho.

Areas outline in red on the small map and in the pix were subdivisions from the early days of platting activity. In the foreground is early large lot development (the large squares), and one can see how the initial large long lots in some of these areas drove development patterns as late as the postwar era.

What's interesting is some of the diagonal roads from the rancho era (far left map) were preserved when the land was subdivided, and persist to this day.

The image in the lower right of the bungalow is from the Natomas reclamation area to the west of Del Paso, but this was a popular style throughout this area for the first settlers One can also see the iconic California tank tower in the background, too.

Del Paso Boulevard

During the 1920s, the southern reaches of the rancho developed into early suburbs, at first along the interurban, later along Del Paso Boulevard, which developed into an early suburban strip, somewhat akin to the "boulevards" of Southern California.
This was “North Sacramento”, which eventually merger into Sacramento proper in the early 1960s.

As an early auto-strip this area also picked up its share of honky-tonk neon and gaudy signs and googie coffeehouse architecture. Example being Lil’Joes, a Sacramento landmark, but you can see more of the strip at this excellent pix tour by a Sacto blogger


As suburbia sprawled well to the east and south the Del Paso area was left behind and deteriorated. Recently, the retro feel of the place, with it’s honky-tonk strip architecture and little bungalows, led to a revival of interest in the pace by hipsters, with the place becoming an arts district of sorts as well as local business forming the Del Paso Boulevard Partnership to publicize and improve the area.
The arts focus, development of live-work housing like Surreal Estates and various visual improvement are perhaps lessons for Daytonians to do something with their neglected urban strips. A note here is that this is a mix of individuals, business groups, and the city working together to make this happen.

And a pretty good web presence, too.

What’s interesting here is that this is happening on what would be a nondesrcript area, like in Fairborn or North Dixie here, which shows what hot commodidites “old” urban environments are in Sacramento, or other sunbelt boomburbs, or at least an appreciation of things beyond the usual Victoriana.

Reynolds & Reynolds finally leaves Downtown; Blogs discuss

The expected announcment of I/T operation Reynolds and Reynolds moving its back-office stuff from the old Elder-Beerman building downtown caused quite a bit of talk at the two most active urban affairs sites here, most of it hand-wringing about the fate of downtown.

Esrati and his usual suspects repeated past discussions and arguments, though I liked Genes' straight talk.

Dayton Most Metro forum had a similar discussion, but more around economic development and business recruitment.

And a newer blog, It's Great 'n Dayton, had a more thoughtful post on this, questioning if downtown is in the plans of the organizations that are the real movers and shakers in the region.

I've commented at all three places...you can link in and read what I had to say...so not much more to add, except an emphasis that we are in worse position now than 8 years ago downtown.

1. Residential conversions have stalled

2. The last large business tenants have left

3. Spinoffs that could have located downtown moved to the suburbs.

4. Downtown did land one new business, and I think its signifigant that this was an out-of-town company deciding to locate in the center city.

These events damn the local business community. In other places (as close as Cincinnati, Columbus, and Louisville) elements of business leadership and local wealthy individuals are committed to downtown, but in Dayton they bail. I think there is no excuse for this, and it just damns them, no matter how much they donate to the ballet and opera and orchestra (and maybe we need more Brecht here, for that matter).

That it takes a company like Caresource, moving from Richmond VA, just damns the locals even more, since management at Caresource apparently doesn't have cultural baggage that the management of, say Reynolds and Reynolds, Woolper, NewPage, and Terradata must have. or they would have moved to suburbia too.

As for housing conversion stalling, well, I can understand that a bit more as this is driven by economics, and a weak economy and weak demand means a tougher sell for center city housing. Maybe Dayton can't support the kind of in-town living found elsewhere becaus it's just not big enough or economically healthy enough to do so.

But that still doesnt excuse the leading companys in this community from abandoning the city, especially if their firms are sucessfull and growing, especially since there are precedents in the region for leading firms to remain in downtown.

No excuses.

Two Blogroll Adds

Two blog adds. One is local the other not. You can find them over at the blogroll to the left:

Tellhistory's Weblog

This is a nice little blog hosted by I think a history professor at WSU specializing in oral history . Since I am a big history buff (but without any academic backround) I really enjoy this site, especially the oral history/public history aspect of it.

There also seems to be an interest with Prince Edward Island up in Canada


The Urbanophile

This is one of the first non-Dayton adds as I try to link to some regional and generalist urban affairs/spatial practice blogs

The Urbanophile has a focus on Indianpolis and Indiana, with specialization in highways & transit issues. But the blog branches out a bit to cover urban affairs in general and in other citys within the region and beyond, and recently posted some things on globalization.



So far no culls yet. I will do a run through the blogroll to see if any of the linked blogs have become stale and do a cull this weekend.

Also, commenting is on moderation as it helps me cut down on spam and off-topic posts.