Dayton's Lost Highway

Not a cliché but a real no-kidding lost highway…really a forgotten highway, or maybe a never-built one?

I came across this stretch of road while doing some research on uneven development and urban sprawl in west & northwest Montgomery County and was intrigued…

Why build such a big wide-open road with huge median, through a bunch of 1950s suburbia?

It just keeps on going….where could it possibly go !?



Nowhere. The road dead ends in a wooded area just south of Free Pike.


Taking a look at some aerials it turns out this highway, Brumbaugh Boulevard, appears to have been planned to go much further south, and it looks like work was started on an extension south of Free Pike…

…but never completed. The grading is there, and one can even see the start of the median, in this close up.

It turns out Brumbaugh Boulevard was part of a big circumferential highway project, the implementation of a late 1940s highway plan for the county. The idea was to develop a beltway around Dayton by connecting and widening existing roads. It looks like this was one of the connecting highways, connecting with Miller & Infirmary Roads on the south and Turner Road to the east.

Note the date on this new article. 1957. A key year as this was when a limited access interstate highway bypass was authorized for Dayton, route yet to be determined.

One has to wonder about lining a beltway with houses, but one can speculate that the county required the ROW to be set-aside when the surrounding subdivisions were platted, and the wide median would have been cut back for additional lanes when the beltway was complete and started drawing traffic. Requiring frontage roads would have taken up too much developable land



The northern part of Brumbaugh must have been reconfigured when Turner Road was extended to the Trotwood Connector, and one wonders if a row of houses was taken out to make this connection

Will They Ever Finish Brumbaugh Boulevard?

The original beltway plan was an example of how the early postwar planning was even handed, by proposing a true circumferential highway that would open up (and connect) all the parts of the county to suburbanization, especially by creating easier movement between the southern & eastern and northern & western parts of the county.

That Brumbaugh Boulevard was abandoned (and literally so, with road construction apparently stopped in its tracks), and only the eastern & northern part of a beltway built (today’s “Wright Brothers Parkway”) demonstrates how resources were shifted to “favored sectors”, which reaped the development benefits of better highway access.

It is an example of uneven development in Montgomery County.

West/Northwest Montgomery County would have to wait until the Trotwood Connector/Turner Road extension of the 1990s, 40 years after Brumbaugh Boulevard, before being connected to the regional highway system.

Commenting back on

Since blog posts here transfer to Dayton OS, which had a comments feature, I had turned comments off here, so posters could surf over to OS to comment.

The idea was that since OS gets more readers, there would be more comments there, and maybe more discussion, and I would just use this blog to push content to OS.

Now I see Dayton OS has turned off comments to their blog feeds, so it's back to enabling commenting here, again (if anyone feels they really, really have to say something pertinent to the post).

Louisville's Innovative New School Plan

Taking a break from the Dayton area, with its’ myriad political dysfunctions and insoluble social and economic problems, looking at solutions being tried elsewhere.

If one surfs in here frequently one knows that Louisville is often used as a case study for solutions that could be applied to Dayton, if the political and economic situation permitted.

In this case Daytonology will look at an experiment in school integration that is about to be tried in Louisville, due to a recent Supreme Court decision that invalidated school assignments solely based on race.

Louisville’s Experience With Desegregation.

The background was that in the 1970s’ there were three systems, the Louisville City, Jefferson County (the suburban system), and Anchorage (a very small suburban system). The Louisville and Jefferson County systems were being considered for desegregation order for various reasons. While this was happening the city system went bankrupt, and was ordered to merge with the fiscally healthy county system.

Then desegregation via bussing was ordered by the courts, around the same time the Dayton schools desegregated.

Integration started in the mid 1970s amid riots and other civil disobedience (yer humble host was busted for rioting and sent to juvenile court for it). Though the violence and protest quickly subsided, racial integration continued in various forms till this year.

Interestingly, given the initial violent opposition, at first there wasn’t massive white flight from Jefferson County, as surrounding counties could not absorb big population moves, and the Catholic system refused to become a white flight haven. Countywide integration also precluded white flight from the city, and is probably why Louisville didn’t turn into a racial and socioeconomic Bantustan the way Dayton did.

In recent more and more whites began to leave the system, particularly the younger students, though it remains predominantly white today, unlike the Dayton system, which has resegregated.

What Kind of Integration?

However, with the new court decision the Jefferson County system took a new look at what “integration” means, and what it was trying to achieve.

The decision was to move toward socioeconomic integration, as opposed to strictly racial integration (which is becoming more complex as there is a growing Latino community in Louisville).

The theory is (and this is a gross simplification) that kids of a lower socioeconomic status will be lifted up by being in an academic environment predominantly made up of students average and above average socioeconomic backgrounds.

This is probably the first attempt in the US to deliberately try for socioeconomic diversity of students at a metropolitan scale (Jefferson County is still the dominant county in the metro area). Though this sounds radical, socioeconomic diversity would just mimic the kind of countywide rural systems common in Kentucky, were students of all sorts of backgrounds attend the same elementary and high school in the county seat.


How It Works

So the plan was to identify disadvantaged area (“Area A”) and then integrate the students with average or above average area (“Area B”)

Here are the two areas, by elementary school attendance district…Area B in yellow and Area A in blue:



The criteria for the two areas are:

Area A
(Must meet all three criteria)
...Below the district average for income
…Below the average education level of adults in the district
…Above the district average for the percentage of minority students who live there.

Area B
…At or above the district average for income
…Or at or above the average level of education of adults in the district
…Or below the district average for percentage of minority students who live there

Then, schools from Area A are clustered with schools from Area B, but schools must maintain a range of students from 15% to 50% from Area A (I think 50% is too high. Maybe 25% as an upper limit would be better).

There are two cluster proposals:

Contiguous


Non-Contiguous

…and there are pros & cons of both cluster approaches, which can be read at this Courier- Journal (local newspaper) website (source of the maps).

A positive outside appraisal comes from this article from In These Times, a social-democratic journal of opinion.

In any case this is what’s possible with a countywide school system. What’s also possible is to develop magnet schools for science, arts, and other things, akin to Stivers, but drawing on the entire county for talented kids (and on the entire county for revenue to fund these enhanced programs).

In retrospect the merger of the city and county system in the 1970s was the precondition for this approach, which would not have happened if not for the bankruptcy of the city system and a subsequent court-ordered merger.

Lessons for Dayton

There are none.

It would take similar catastrophic failure of the city system and outside intervention to bring about a similar merger here, in order to permit a countywide diversity plan. The end-result would be a return to white flight, this time from Montgomery County to Warren, Greene, and Miami.

Are the Dayton Police Profiling Inner City Latinos?

Seems so, based on todays Dayton Daily News articles.

You wouldn't know it just reading the healines, which sounds like a nice multi-culti article set for Cinco De Mayo..."Mexicans and their Markets". But check out the article entitled Hispanic Community, Stores, Support One Another.

From the article:

Sotelo said local police for the last six months to a year have been finding reasons to stop Hispanics on the street and in cars, and many of those who have been stopped have not had legal status. As people are arrested and deported, others without legal status have fled the area, he said.

"People I know who have been here eight or nine years, they're stable, but they're not legal," Sotelo said. "At first the police would stop people in their cars, so a lot stopped driving. Now they stop people for just walking.

The article also quotes the manager of the a Latino store in Old North Dayton who has observed similar things:

"If you've got black hair and dark skin, you expect to get stopped," Ruiz said.

Ok, two store owners. But apparently the director of the East End Community Services has noted the same thing:

"This is a major issue for the Latino population right now, and it's an issue for other immigrant communities, too," Lepore-Jentleson said.

So does Dayton "get" diversity? Doesn't seem so, as police action here is reportedly driving away Mexicans and others who may be undocumented, or even here legally (though I suspect the poor local economy has a lot to do with slowing of immigration, t0o).

But, we've already seen the hostility to the Islamic community demonstrated by the controversy over that mosque in Sugarcreek, and then the city commission barely supported a gay rights law (and one could see the hostility to that via some of the comments at Esratis' blog). Now some anecdotal evidence of selective enforcement against latinos.

No, the Dayton region has a long way to go when it comes to tolerance, unless tolerance means polite silence while intolreance works its ways under a placid surface.

The Middle Class Wage in Montgomery County

The recent culture war hoo-hah about Obama's "bitter" remarks was an opportunity to revisit whats happening to living wage or "Middle Class Wage". The NYT did an excellent article on this, discussing how $20/hour, or $41,600/year, was considered the wage threshold for being "middle class".

The 2000 census data actually has some good info on this, based on a sample, where you can find out the median family income of a family of four (with at least one member working) for a census tract.

Using this, one can graph out how county census tracts fall. I use the following cut-offs to group the tracts:

1. "Official" poverty threshold for a family of four

2. The "Middle Class Wage" of $41,600

3. A median based on the median family incomes of all the tracts (the mid point of the tracts)

4. A break in the data where one sees a upward slop kick in for median income

...Using these and applying them to the distribution of tracts leads to these groupings:

One can see there is a substantial number of tracts were median income is below $41,600, but very few wealthy or poor tracts, indicating what we all know in our gut, that the Montgomery County is a very middle class place, with a broad mid range of incomes. This is a reflection of Dayton's past unionization, I think. The NYT reports that unions played a big roll in spreading middle-income wages into the economy in the postwar era.

That basic wage blossomed first in the auto industry in 1948 and served, in effect, as a banner in the ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. As the news media frequently noted, salt-of-the-earth American workers were earning enough to pay for comforts that their counterparts behind the Iron Curtain could not afford.

As the years passed, unions succeeded in negotiating this basic wage not as an ultimate goal but as an early rung in their wage ladders. That was the union standard, particularly in heavy industries, and in the early postwar decades nonunion employers fell into line, spreading middle-class incomes broadly through the service sector.

Dayton played a roll in the immediate postwar struggle for a middle class wage (or "Family Wage" as it was called at that time).

It would be interesting to revist this in 2010, to see if there is more of an income sorting to the top and bottome..more "below middle class" and "elite".


Mapping out the distribution of the lower middle class, below middle class (median family income below $41,600, ) and working poor tracts.


...its pretty noticable that there are large geographic areas that aren't making enough to be considered middle class, but not officially "poor" either, and these areas extend out into the suburbs, like Drexel and North Dixie Drive and Riverside and the Dayton Mall area.

One can assume familys in the "lower middle class" areas could be somewhat at risk, too, if wages drop or remain stagnant, jobs are lost, and inflation kicks in (and interesting to see extension into suburbia here, too, with New Lebanon, Kettering, Riverside, West Carollton, etc all showing up).


A close up of the city. The uncolored tracts all have higher than $61,000/year median incomes for a family of four....


Next, just a quick look at "The Elite", the affluent tracts at the top of the distribution. Whats noticeable is how concentrated wealth is in the area, with Oakwood west of Far Hills just dominating the distribution at a whopping $200,000 median income for a family of four! Oakwood east of Far Hills is at the bottom of this grouping, though.

Another interesting thing is the tract up in Vandalia with a fairly high median income, which is not something one associates with Vandalia.

An interesting comparison would be to map out political contributions ($200 or more) to see how they correspond to the geography of income. One would see how the affluent areas dominate contributions for both partys, with Obama and Clinton being as much "owned" by the affluent elite as the Republicans.

The fact is when it comes to the real, no-shit bread and butter issue, how much people make at work, neither party will be doing jack for the folks in the areas colored red and green in the map above.

Emma Goldman in Dayton

Emma Goldman. This ragtime radical was nearly forgotten until the New Left and feminism of the late 1960s led to the renewed study of US political radicalism and the new field of woman’s history.

As an anarchist and a strong female voice in politics Goldman was of interest to both feminist and left-oriented scholars, resulting in a flood of writing on her life and work. Her life embodied certain stereotypes of the romantic, revolutionary; never ascetic, somewhat tragic, and always resilient. Then there was the high drama of political conflict (often violent). So she became a lefty pop culture figure outside academia. In short, Emma Goldman led a colorful life that embodied certain American values of individuality, freedom, standing up for the underdog, speaking one’s mind and do-what-you-will.

Goldman was a traveling agitator, moving about the country giving speeches. Often she was prevented from speaking by local authorities, occasionally even being arrested. This restriction of political speech (not just Goldman but other radicals, too) eventually led to the creation of the ACLU.

It was an early free speech group that brought Goldman to Dayton the first time. The tiny (five members) Dayton branch of the “Free Speech League of American” rented Mallory’s Hall “…an amusement place for colored people” and brought Goldman to Dayton on 28 January 1911. She stayed at the Algonquin Hotel, today’s Doubletree, where she was interviewed by the Dayton Daily News reporter for this front page story:

Apparently “The Queen of the Revolutionists” was an early celebrity, as the DDN article tone assumes readers have some familiarity with the subject. The article is written in a light, chatty style, not too negative. Also note that the final passage quotes the mayor that they won’t be interfering or watching her oration. This was quite different from her reception in some of the other cities on her lecture tour
...map from the American Experience PBS website on an Emma Goldman documentary: click here for the interactive version).

1911 lecture site then and now (Mallory’s Hall is the large building in the center).

As sort of an early comment on feminism here is this exchange between the reporter on Goldman on the police interest in her speeches:

The reporter writes about Goldman’s problems being chased by the law elsewhere:
“Miss Goldman is still in the little game of tag and so far has managed to outwit the sleuths. Not that they ‘want her’, but just that they don’t want her to talk.”

To which Goldman replies:
“Its perfectly natural that a man shouldn’t want a woman to talk so I don’t mind.”

And another news report, this time from the Dayton Herald:


Goldman returned to Dayton on February 19 1912 for a double engagement at the Jewel Theatre, formerly Beckels’ Opera House, on Jefferson Street. There are no good images of the Jewel, so here is a Sanborn showing the site and a pix of what’s there now:


The first half was a Sunday afternoon debate with a local socialist who was on the outs with his party, which led to the Dayton socialists telling their members not to attend. The second half was very poorly attended Sunday evening talk on ‘Motherhood’, which sounds like it might have been the “Why The Poor Should Not Have Children” lecture.

…the image was from a different lecture site (Butte, Montana), but note the central figure in the mustache. This was Ben Rietman, an associate and sometime lover of Goldman, who acted as a sort of advance man for her lecture tours. He might have been the one who set up the 1912 Dayton gig.

Press reports were ill tempered this time, with the DDN report being quite a contrast with the 1911 article.


Dayton Herald had this to say:
And the Dayton Journal had the event on the front page, with a pretty nice pix of Goldman (which unfortunately did not reproduce well), but a headline saying she was “All but Ignored by Dayton”, giving attendance figures of 200 for the afternoon debate and 33 for the evening lecture

The paper also mentions that $22 ($483 in todays’ money) was raised for the "Lawrence textile strike". This was the well-know (to labor historians) Bread and Roses Strike, organized by the IWW and a bit of a national cause célèbre at the time.

Anarchism never took hold in Dayton, nor anywhere else for that matter (except for Spain, where the Catalonian anarchists were featured in George Orwell’s writing). Emma Goldman was deported in 1919 along with hundreds of other radicals, and died an exile. She did return in death and is buried in Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery, near her former beau Ben Reitman and other radicals of the past, in the so-called “Communist plot”.


(to enlarge the news articles mouse over the image and click)

May Day at Daytonology

(great Eric Drooker graphic, huh? I love his stuff)

A holiday associated with military parades in Red Square really got its start in the good old USA, to memorialize events in that most American of citys, Chicago.

But first, here's a famous old socialist song from the 19th century, rewritten to modern form by the English activist/musician Billy Bragg:

The Internationale

Stand up, all victims of oppression
For the tyrants fear your might
Don't cling so hard to your possessions
For you have nothing, if you have no rights
Let racist ignorance be ended
For respect makes the empires fall
Freedom is merely privilege extended
Unless enjoyed by one and all

Chorus:
So come brothers and sisters
For the struggle carries on
The Internationale
Unites the world in song
So comrades come rally
For this is the time and place
The international ideal
Unites the human race

Let no one build walls to divide us
Walls of hatred nor walls of stone
Come greet the dawn and stand beside us
We'll live together or we'll die alone
In our world poisoned by exploitation
Those who have taken, now they must give
And end the vanity of nations
We've but one Earth on which to live

And so begins the final drama
In the streets and in the fields
We stand unbowed before their armour
We defy their guns and shields
When we fight, provoked by their aggression
Let us be inspired by like and love
For though they offer us concessions
Change will not come from above

Words: Billy Bragg Music: Pierre Degeyter

...and a midi to sing (or listen) along with.

The May Day story came out of the great Eight-Hour Day movement of the American and European working class (" Eight hours for work, Eight hours for sleep, Eight hours for what we will!") and worker unrest in Chicago.

A parade and rally at Chicago's Haymarket (a widened stretch of Randolph Street on the near west side, still there and still a wholesale foods place )




....went bad when someone tossed a bomb that killed some cops. Speakers at the ralley were railroaded for the murders, and some were hung, which led to commemorations, really memorials, on the 1st of May.

For more, from the Enyclopedia of Chicago History: Haymarket and May Day

May Day was orginally celeberated on both sides of the pond, but Labor Day became the US workers holiday, while, ironically, the Europeans continued with May Day, which remains their "Labor Day"



..as well as an occasion or traditional day for protests and dissent of various types. One usually doesn't see this in the US, except for the May Day immigration reform marches of a few years ago.

The association with Socialism came with the Second International adopting it as a workers holiday (even though the executed were not really socialists, rather than anarchists).

A famous US anarchist, but from a later era, was Emma Goldman, who actually came to Dayton twice. I'll be blogging on that tomorrow.