Fall Almanac 9

The first to fall is the first to go.
Earth wears its mantle damp and chill —
Patina of November snow.

Leaves raged with fire just days ago —
Now grays, ash browns, pale yellows tell
The first to fall are the first to go.

Remains of harvest in desolate row
Brace for the final winter kill
Beneath their shroud of November snow.

The rakes now dry, the plow and hoe
Await Spring’s promise to fulfill —
The first to fall are the first to go.

Lit by the sky’s anemic glow
The pines are standing stiff and still,
Defiant of November snow.

In barns of silence wait those who know
What lies beneath the fields they till —
The first to fall are the first to go,
Together with November snow.

November Snow- Joseph Pacheco


Moving into true winter weather, whith highs below freezing and lows into the 'teens.

And we did see some November snow this week, the first snow of the season.

The underbrush seems to be getting less green?

Urban Hand Made

Sort of an indoor craft fair in one of the Cannery buildings. I really like their graphics.



This space has been used for various arts things, among them some Circus events and the .edu show of artists affliated with local colleges. This time various craft things, like jewelrey and such, with food and drink, too.
One of the things that was particularly good here was someone selling hand-painted china. No pix but I was impressed with the product. It's worth going to just to see his work, and it was reasonably priced.

The other thing that brought me out was this trio. They were on Rev Cools show on Friday night and I think are a new version of an earlier band here in Dayton. They are called Venus Love Circus

Urban Handmade has an online presence. The show will be happenig on the weekends leading up to Christmas as an alternative to mall gift shopping.

Sorry County Blues

These boys aint from Dayton, but I appreciate the sentiment, given the hard times that has come become among us, from the Lonesome River Band, one of the best topical Bluegrass tuens of the recent past:

Simon ploughed the prairie with a furrow straight and long

Where a woman can grow restless and a good thing can go wrong

She asked him again boy tell me when this dirt farm’s gonna pay

Then she drove off in his pick up truck left him standin in the rain

Empty pockets and payments overdue

Starin’ in the face of a low down case of the Sorry County blues

Daddy said son hit the road or this place’ll drag you down

But momma cried when Tyler left for the dirty factory town

They punched him in they punched him out and they stood him in their lines

He built the bigger louvers workin’ double overtime

Well they used him, till they had all they could use

Now it’s rise and shine in the handout line with the Sorry County blues

She reigned supreme the teenage queen down at the county line

Now Darlene keep the motel clean she’s a waitress on the side

But even though she seems to grow a little broker every day

Had the kids all fed and into bed when the Landlord called to say

I hate to do this to you baby but there’s no other way to chose

She’s packin’ her things you know she sings them Sorry County blues

Well they were worn hard you might say they were born to lose

Now it’s one step forward and two steps toward them Sorry County blues

Yeah it’s one step forward and two steps toward them Sorry County blues

Ooooooohhh Lord

Dayton Flic

Yer humble host was doin' some websurfing on Dayton Funk, as that's how he first heard of Dayton, as a young'n highschooler in redneck Louisville suburbia.

Lo and behold lookee here...and update on the old skool funk scene:



..and don't you just love the skyline scene in the background, too?

"Back in the day, (that would be 1982 - Dayton, Ohio Y’all) Jenny Douglas, Chris Bowman, Roger “the Dodger” Parker and Jared Michael Nickerson laid tracks reel-to-reel stylee in Dean Bowman’s basement studio.
A few takes and a few mixes later, Dayton Flic & The Music Suite came to life.

Fast forward to 1999, with a bassline and a hook, Jared Michael Nickerson did a taste of tracking at the home of guitarist/engineer Chris Bowman back in the Gem City and in 2007, enlisted the fabulous Justice Dilla-X on vocals at Eric Ronick’s Thin Man Studios in Brooklyn, N.Y. to top off Takin You Back and T.Y.B. remix.

- The result, as described by Dusty Groove America - “Basement soul grooves that reach for the cosmos.”

More here

Wright-Patt Commuters: Leaving the City.

The orgins of Dayton's urban crisis? Or one of the orgins?

Losing the middle class to suburbia. One big component was base personnel leaving the city. So lets see how that happened and where they first went.

This fascinating map from a late 1940s traffic study was part of my "Roads to Wright-Patterson" post, showing how traffice planners used concentrations of base personnel living in the city, particularly in Northwest Dayton and North Dayton, to justify the Route 4 expressway. It appears the highest concentrations were in Five Oaks, Grafton Hill, the better parts of Dayton View, and Robert Boulevard neighborhood.



It should be noted that this map also shows the old black ghetto of Innerwest Dayton and the better areas out Germantown Street as concentrations, indicating there was a sizeable black workforce out at the base even in the 1940s. In fact more blacks were working at Wright-Patterson than whites in next-door Westwood.

A later traffic study included in the Harland Bartholomew master plan actually shows traffic volumes all the way out to Fairborn. What makes this interesting is that one can see how multiple routes were used, including up Valley Street, then across Huffman Dam.



What the above map also shows is that a lot of traffic was coming up Smithville Road, then turning down Airway Road. This indicates, already in the 1952, a suburban trend for the base workforce. Daytonology will take a closer look at that later.

The 1950s ODOT Study: Leaving the City

Using the same ODOT study I used to study Fairborn commuting, one can track traffic flow from the base to all the traffic count zones in the urbanized area of 1957. The data actually permits a look at both the Wright and Patterson sides of the base, but I combine them for the sake of simplicity to show the parts of town that had the most interaction with the base as a whole.

Rank ordering traffic count zones by number of trips in a 24 hour day certain zones cluster at the top. The very top zones for trips is downtown (which is interesting) and the Page Manor/Beverly Gardens Wherry Housing area.

Below certain zones cluster in a group of very high numbers of trips. These are the old emergency housing areas, areas close to the base, and Gentile Air Station in Kettering, which was an Air Force supply point.



Below that I group zones with above median trips by natural breaks......


...then map them all out.



A facinating geography as Vandalia is an unexpected concentration. What is noticeable is that east Dayton and Robert Boulevard are no longer big trip generators, and Northwest Dayton still has a lot of trips to and from the base. The Germantown/Lakeview areas in West Dayton also show as having a lot of trips, probably indicating commuting from the black workforce.

Looking at the map a different way, I outline areas with over 100 trips per day with Wright-Patterson, then overlay a map showing development in the late 1940s and 1957, and include shopping areas as possible generators. One can see the trend to the east/southeast, but also some concentrations at early shopping centers (indicating destinations for the military personnel who live on base?).


What one can see is losses in NW Dayton, particularly in Grafton Hill and Five Oaks. One can infer this was part of a stream of personell chosing to move closer to the base, especially after infrastructure was laid in to permit development of suburban areas.

Yet if there was a trend to the eastern and southern suburbs, what backfills the northwest Dayton real estate market?

The following diagram shows a notional "systems" concept of interlocking real estate submarkets during the 1950s. Start with step 1 and work you way backwards (click on the chart and it will enlarge):


There are some steps missing, that occured in the 1940s, I think, which was the removal of most of the black neighborhoods on the east side and their residents ending up in West Dayton and the change of Edgemont from white to black (not sure about that chronology, though). There is also the phenomenon of "internal suburanization" on vacant land in the city.

Yet it's interesting how this might have workded. I say "notional", but I've read enough in the Urban League files and in a masters theses on racial change in Westwood in the 1950s to say some of the migrations I note here did indeed happen during this period. This is all subject for some future posts on racial change in Dayton from the 1930s to the 1970s.

The Socioeconomic Status Angle

Another approach to this shift is "where do white collar workers live?"

Wright-Patterson, as a research and command base had (and still has) an certain professional/managerial aspect to it, which may have been reinforced when Fairfield Air Depot closed in 1945, removing a substantial part of the blue-collar workforce.

Since northwest Dayton was the white collar part of the city in the 1930s and probably into the 1940s, this would have been a logical residential location for professionals and managers hired to work at the base, especially if there was a track record of prior residence of Wright Field research staff (and I have anecdotal evidence that it was). Why there and not Oakwood? Due to Wright-Field predecessor McCook Field being just across the river from Northwest Dayton.

So the legacy of McCook might have been that northwest Dayton remained a favored location for R&D personell into the war years and even after the war. But they were already leaving by the late 1950s.

New Suburban Landscapes: The Worlds Away show

Not in Dayton. In Pittsburgh.

This excellent show dovetails nicely into Daytonologys new focus on suburban studies. Organized by the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis a version of the show travelled to the Carnegie in Pittsburgh, where yer humble host spent some time getting inspired and challenged.

Minnesota Public Radio reports:

The Walker is billing "Worlds Away" as the first major museum exhibition examining art and architecture in the contemporary American suburb.

More than 30 artists, architects and designers supply a critique and an appreciation of suburbs, while trying to imagine their future. Despite its overwelming presence, Walker curator Andrew Blauvelt says suburbia is a cultural blindspot, especially when it comes to academic inspection.

"On one hand, it's everywhere and seemingly all over," Blauvelt says. "But from an intellectual standpoint, there's very little engagement. It's mostly very biased notions, intellectual notions against the suburbs that kept academics from researching it."

The "catalogue" is worth the buy as it is not just reproductions of the art but also very good collection of essays:

Since this in unavailable at local bookstores and it's unlikely the show will travel to the area (well, maybe to the Wexner) you can visit online by surfing into the Walkers' website:

Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes


Examples of some of some of the art. The upper one was a gian wall-sized painting that operates almost as a mandela, but a bit of quattrocento there, too, in the coloration and perspective:


The lower one was a photo of a conceptual art piece by a farmer/artist near Phoenix, who cut a house plan into his alfalfa fied.

But there also was film, models, animations, photography.

What I like about this show was that it took suburbia serioulsy. There was ironic comment in some of the aesthetic intentions, but no New Urbanist nostalgia or Kunstlerseque nihilism.

Of the more interesting exhibits was INTERBORO's In the Meantime: Life With Landbanking, on the Dutchess County Mall north of NYC, just a fascinating mix of narration and audiovisuals, projected onto a cardstock model of said mall and wall surface behind it.

Closer to home Lateral Architectures Flatspace series reinterpreted big box landscapes outside of Columbus via models and computer animatios and flyovers. This is moving more into the arena of landscape urbanism and spatial pratice, away from traditional "planning" and landscape architecutre.

Worlds Away occasionaly had a social and political subtext, but the intention was primarily aesthetic. Suburban studies, particularly the "New Suburban History", deals with social history and politics a bit more, and is a fairly new discipline qua discipline.

Expect continued suburban blogging from Daytonology, as Dayton is arguably the most suburban city in Ohio. Yes, in some ways even more than Columbus.

Postwar Fairborn: Early 1950s Gallery

As we've seen Fairborn made the transition to a blue collar Dayton suburb.

Fairborn participated in the early 1950s housing boom by filling in some older plats, like Osborn View and Wright View, and adding new subdivisions.

The following map shows how Fairborn grew by adding new subdivisions on to existing plats and started to extend south, up the hill on Maple Street, as well as a large plat added on to Wright View.

The orange colored ares outlined in bold were all under development by 1955/56, and would have been counted in the 1957 traffic survey.




A quick gallery of early 50's style. This was a transitonal era into ranch houses from the cape cod/english cottage style of the 1940s. Mouse over the images and click for some detail.

These houses are on a plat just north of the intersection of Route 444 and Central Street, and was under development by 1952, so these are some of the earliest postwar houses. One can see the modernist detailing being added to more traditional forms of the 1940s, and some early ranches (the first in Dayton are from the late 1940s).



This next plat was added to the east of the 1940s Krumms Allotment plat east of Maple Avenue, on the northeast side of Fairborn. Again, these examples show some modern detailing like L-plans, band windows, corner windows, prominent fire places as accent features, and horizontal brick half-walls.

The upper right house looks like it come have come from Levittown.

The next houses are south of town on the Osborn View and Pleasant View plats. Again, small houses perhaps built for the industrial workforce, with modernist touches (like the one on the upper left, with the brick wall and stone decorations popping out in a stairstep pattern, and the corner windows, band windows, and low pitch roof emphasising the horizontal).

Most of the houses on the Pleasant View plat east of Maple are very spartan, without much decoration except for what the owner has done.


The lower right house was on a plat just south of Osborn View, built on the hill coming up from the Mad River plain. Note it seems slightly larger. and may have been a bit later than the others we've seen.

And to close, a quick look at honky tonk downtown Fairborn, with its hotels for transient military passing through the base (though the depot was closed there was still military activity going on) and a corner store on the busy Main Street (no strip centers yet).

...plus that old car from the 1940s; probably went down Route 4 to Dayton many a times.

Main Street Fairborn is worth a closer look as a postwar shopping area, but not built as an auto-strip. Lest one think downtown Fairborn is not of much value, Main Street Fairborn was actually investigated by the dean of the Utah State architectural school when she taught at UC as an urban design problem, and her work on Fairborn was published.

Next, though, we'll look at where the base workers ended up after the war; the suburbanization of the Wright-Patterson workforce.