Suburban History: The First Office Park off OH 725

Over a half-century of suburbia but next to no history.

Daytonology aims to fill in those blanks with occasional posts on the historical geography, economics, sociology, and urban form of Dayton Suburbia, the place where the majority of us live or work.

People work in suburbia, with the Dayton Mall/OH 725 area being a major employment center. For the Dayton Mall /OH 725 corridor the first offices were purpose- built in the mid 1960s for Monarch Marking and Huffy corporate headquarters, followed by the NCR training center.

It wasn’t until after the Dayton Mall opened that the first spec (speculative) offices were built. Based on my research probably the first spec office park was Governor’s Square, on OH 725 in Washington Township. Probably built between 1970 and 1973, the first four buildings of this office park first appear on a 1973 photo revision of a USGS topo map, as does the start of Lyons Road, not yet connected to Yankee Street.

The location of Governor’s Square in today’s suburban landscape (outlined in yellow) (and for this and the next pix you can click on them to enlarge)




The same location in the 1973 photo-revision

As this was a photo revision and not field-checked, the USGS cartographers missed that these were four buildings, not two, paired around landscaped malls. A later aerial, from the I-675 environmental impact statement, shows the four original buildings, plus an additional four to the south.

The EIS aerial probably dates from the mid 1970s (1977 or before), and shows how Lyons has been extended to Yankee Street; extension west to Washington Church would happen as part of I-675 construction, as would realignment of Yankee).

Developement is still very light in this area, indicating that the 1970s was maybe a time of stagnation.



Governor’s Square was the start of western Washington Township as an employment center. There were other 1970s developments, and we’ll look at them later, but this was one of the first.

By 1990 the 1980s boom filled in the open space with a strip center and more offices and Washington Village Drive has appeared, connecting Lyons with OH 725. There were no physical changes in the 1990s.

But, by 2006 or 7. Governor’s Square was partially demolished and the land redeveloped for retail as part of the ongoing recycling of the OH 725 commercial strip. Perhaps this also indicates a softening of the local submarket for older office space.

The missing office buildings are shown in yellow outline.


The 1970s-era Lyons Road form OH-725 to Yankee, showing a landscaped median. Governors Square office park is to the left. This early-1970s design is an illustration of how site development was responding to early critiques of sprawl by making things "greener", softening the impact of auto-oriented develpment.


The 1980s extension of Lyons (built as part of the I-675 construction) would dispense with the generous landscaping.

Governors Square building. The buildings originally had a very dark brown soffit, but the complex was remodeled and updated in the 1990’s, adding new signs, light standards, and the soffit was rebuilt to add more visual interest.

Note the trees popping up in the back, from the mall courts.



The basic concept. Buildings are paired around landscaped courts or malls. One has a choice of leasable space opening to the mall area or to the parking.


The architecture is very low-key generic/functional, so it’s these landscaped courts that make the place. Perhaps a borrowing from the retail mall concept, they are a pleasant surprise, and maybe another indication of a humanist design intention, to do suburbia as something greener and better planned, while still being auto-centric.

I think the original lighting was those soffit lights, with the lighting standards in the mall coming later?


Recycling Governor’s Square.

In the 00’s Governors Square was partially demolished. Three of the four original buildings were torn down (the ones closest to OH 725) and the land redeveloped into three retail parcels. Two were developed as a Chick-fil-a and Walgreens. One site is still for sale.

But as part of the revelopment a back-circulation was established through the site, permitting one to wind ones way through the back parking of the retail buildings to the rear parking lots of a next-door strip center.

On this aerial the old Governors Square buildings are shown in a yellow shading, and some features labeled (including curb cuts between rear parking, an abandoned parking lot, and one of Dayton’s strip center bars, which open to the rear of strip centers here)



The vacant lot, with the last of the original Governors Square buildings. This façade would have opened onto one of the landscaped malls, which has been removed for an access drive.



Some original landscaping is left, though, like the lone tree behind the sign. The property is being marketed by a developer specializing in retail development.

Landscaping along OH 725, showing how things are not all pavement. Here there is some lawn buffering development from the street, and room for a sidewalk. These sycamores might be left over from the original 1973 landscaping, and now provide a nice screen to the new commercial development to the left. Note the sidewalk coming in from the left….



…this comes in from this Walgreen’s. Being an old Chicago guy its nice to see a Walgreen’s as they were pretty common on busy corners in the city, near bus transfer points. As an aside , Walgreen’s has a place in retail history as the first place to mass market cosmetics, due to a distribution deal with Max Factor back in the 1920s.



Chick-fil-a with the big US flag. This brand has moved from mall food courts to free standing stores, but yer humble host still prefers Kentucky Fried Chicken original recipe.



Closing with this abandoned parking lot. Curb cut at the back of the lot, to the right, lets one drive into Governors Square or the adjacent unnamed office park. No overlays, no striping, just crumbling asphalt. This would be an interesting redevelopment site, but for what?



...and Governor’s Square offices in the distance. In 1973 what you would be seeing would be a prairie or some row crop, not asphalt.

Another Conference on Urban Revitalization.

There was this conference in Columbus....

...called Restoring Prosperity: The State Role in Revitalizing Ohio's Core Communities. Sounds dry, but yer humble host eats this stuff up.

The covnenors were Brookings Institution and the Greater Ohio, and the sponsors where a mix of foundations and corporate types. Brookings has the agenda, sponsors, presentations, and supporting studies available online here.

Interestingly enough Brookings' co-convenor, Greater Ohio has opened their conference web-page for comments, so after reading what's proposed you can say your piece.

Work looking into, and I'm really interested what they end up recommending in 2009 with their final report. Incidentally, one of the presenters was Jane Dockery of WSU's Urban Studies program.

Here is the event summary.

The 2008 Ohio Summit – Restoring Our Prosperity: The State Role in Revitalizing Ohio’s Core Communities convened more than 1000 government, corporate, civic, neighborhood and academic leaders from around the state, including Governor Ted Strickland, Lieutenant Governor Lee Fisher, Senate President Bill Harris and Speaker of the House Jon Husted confirmed as speakers. The Summit was co-convened by the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings and GreaterOhio.

The purpose of The Summit was to elicit reaction to a draft set of proposals for state policy reforms that reflect a critique of past policies, aimed at revitalizing communities throughout Ohio. Each of the recommendations was carefully tailored to the unique assets and challenges of Ohio’s 32 core communities whose revitalization is the springboard to a more prosperous and competitive state as a whole. Comments derived from this gathering will help to shape the final report to be released in early 2009.

Recycling the Strip on Miamisburg-Centerville Road

Noticed this demolition underway. It was a McDonalds, and was there when i moved here in 1988. So its been around for 20 years until last week, when demolition began.

Some might say this is just architectural kleenex; forgettable. Use it and throw it away. I see it as "history" coming to the ahistorical eternal present of suburbia, where something is physically changing, and a new use (or no use at all) is coming to the site.



This process or aspect of urbanism is called building subsitution in urban morphology, and it's noticed more in older parts of the city, where there is an ongoing process of substitution going on through time,

This brings into question the concept of 'historic preservation' or 'neighborhood conservation;, as true physical history is one of ongoing building replacement (or, in the case of dying cities like Dayton, no replacement at all).

One doesn't think of this happening in suburbia due to the "everyday" nature of suburban space. The next few posts will demonstrate that suburban landscapes have history too, as they evolve through time, and these histories have parallels with 19th & early 20th century urban developement, particularly with the expansion of the centeral business district and commercial encroachment into residential areas.

The Thirteen Keys to the White House

The two political conventions apparently have broke Nielsen records, so politics is getting a lot of attention. Here is a non-partisan take on politics, on trying to predict the results.

I was introduced to this prediction approach by the Dayton Daily News op-ed page writers, who used in past elections. It was devised by Alan Lichtman (a historian) and Volodia Keilis-Borok (a geologist, believe it or not).

This was published first as an academic paper in 1981:

Lichtman, Allan J. and Voldia I. Keilis-Borok (1981), "Pattern Recognition Applied to Presidential Elections in the United States, 1860-1980: Role of Integral Social, Economic, and Political Traits," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 78 (11), 7230-7234.pp

..then as a book in 1996 entitled “The Keys to the White House”. So It’s been around for awhile now.

The way it works is that if one answers “false” to 5 or fewer of 13 statements or “keys” the incumbent party wins the popular vote.

Here are the questions and my answers.

KEY 1 (Party mandate): After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections.

False. Dems gained in the midterm

KEY 2 (Contest): There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination.

True. McCain wrapped it up pretty quick.

KEY 3 (Incumbency): The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.

False

KEY 4 (Third party): There is no significant third party or independent campaign.

True. No Wallace or Perot.

KEY 5 (Short-term economy): The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.

True. We are not in a recession.

KEY 6 (Long-term economy): Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.

False, I think.

KEY 7 (Policy change): The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.

False. No major changes (like privatization of social security)

KEY 8 (Social unrest): There is no sustained social unrest during the term.[/b]

True. Nothing like the sixties.

KEY 9 (Scandal): The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.

True. No Watergate or Teapot Dome.

KEY 10 (Foreign/military failure): The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.

True. Iraq was not a failure the way Vietnam was.

KEY 11 (Foreign/military success): The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.

False. Iraq was not an unqualified success like Desert Storm, and we are still in Afganistan and havn’t captured Bin Laden.

KEY 12 (Incumbent charisma): The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.

True. John McCain is considered a hero by virtue of his POW experience..

KEY 13 (Challenger charisma): The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.

False. Barak Obama seems charismatic to me, based on his convention speech in 2004 and this year.

Counting up the “Falses”

6 False, which means the keys turn for Obama, saying he will win the popular vote (but not necessarily the electoral vote) in November.

Now some of these keys are open to interpretation and how the voters see things. Some might say McCain is not really a national hero of major stature, or Obama turns out not to be as charismatic as he seems to me. One could consider Iraq a major success by virtue of the surge working.

And you sort of see how the campaigns are pitching their strategy in alignment with this model, with the McCain campaign trying diminish Obama, attacking his character and competency, to tarnish his charisma, and the Obama campaign pushing economic issues to make the economy seem in decline (technically it is slightly growing, even if losing jobs), trying to turn key 5 their way.

This is quite close; turn one key a different way and the results change.

I think if the GOP can turn key 13 their way by successfully questioning Obama’s ability and character McCain will win.

Daytonology "Special Comment" on Urban Schools

At first I was suspicious of the YSU study, thinking it was a way of rationalizing low performance, part of the political push-back to discredit performance testing coming from education community, (like the author of the YSU study, but also including teachers unions and such).

Sure, on can apply an adjustment factor to say that urban school districts don’t really suck, considering their circumstances. But the national ACT and SAT tests don’t make these adjustments. Graduates coming out of underperforming, disadvantaged districts also score, on average, below the state averages for ACT and SAT (but, in Dayton’s case, not significantly below).

Yet what I see, using the states’ own “Economic Disadvantaged Students” percentage, and also by median income, is indeed a correlation with low performance, which is exactly what the YSU study says (though there are some outliers in both categories, namely the Columbus and Canton city districts).

And this correlation trumps things like student/teacher ratio, which is also a point made in the YSU study, that other variables don’t correlate.
The comments at the DDN education blog, as well this post at “Polishing the Gem City” talk to this , giving anecdotal evidence how socioeconomic factors might play. Addressing the root causes of lower performance is beyond the scope government, let alone education. How does one improve the “life experience index”, increasing median incomes, lowering child poverty, and reducing the number of single working parents, which might lead to higher proficiency scores?

This would require draconian, politically impossible measures.

Maybe education for disadvantaged students needs to be rethought. Not just adjusting the test scores, which is just a mathematical or statistical adjustment compensating for social and economic factors, but an actual structural or methodological reform on how education happens for disadvantaged students .

What that would be I have no idea

More Urban School District Comparisons

Revisiting the urban school situation, but this time looking at median income and test scores.

In the last post we looked at economic disadvantage and how performance compared. Here we will look at median income, which is supposed to have a high correlation with poor performance. Laying out the urban districts by median income, highest on the left and lowest on the right.


Then the performance index score. One can see the three of the lowest income districts have low performance index cores, with the exception of Canton. All districts are below the state average.

One notes that Dayton scores at the bottom, but lower income districts do score slghtly higher.

The SAT and ACT scores are usually not available to the public at district level from the test administrators themselves, so the state putting these up, even if they are averages, is quite a find. SAT and ACT are administered nationwide, and are generally accepted by colleges and universities as a factor in determining admissions, so pretty important to college-bound graduates from urban Ohio.

For center city districts in Ohio, the favored test is the ACT, with very few taking the SAT. The exception is Cincinnati, where 40% of the graduates take the SAT.

Two charts, showing ACT and SAT scores for center city districts in the 8 largest Ohio metros, and the % of seniors taking each test. I also provide the statewide average


Note that that the mean score for a district is somewhat related to the number of students taking the test, particularly for the SAT.

For example, if one just looks at the mean score, one could say Youngstown students are better prepared as they scored a mean 1002 on the SAT, compared to Cincinnati’s’ 944 But only 2% of Youngstown students take the SAT, vs. over 43.4% for Cincy.

The ACT might be a better comparison between districts as there are substantial numbers of high school grads taking this test.

Other Comparisons: Student/Teacher Ratio and Discipline

It’s said that having fewer students per teacher will improve performance. It’s not clear if this was a variable that the YSU study looked at, but one can see it doesn’t really correlate to test results (on the previous post).

Dayton has one of the lower student/teacher ratios, yet it’s performance on the proficiency tests is also low, which gives even more credence to the weight of socioeconomic factors determining school performance.

And, just for grins, discipline. Not sure what this means nowadays, but when yer humble host was in school in Kentucky and Chicago, it meant corporal punishment, detention, and if you were really bad suspension and expulsion (though in Louisville they sent you to a special school, if you didn’t drop out).


Looking at discipline rates (incidents per 100 pupils) for the center city districts, one can see that Dayton is a real outlier, having the lowest discipline rate by far, even for low median income districts.

I will be looking at school funding/expenditures and teachers pay later, when discussion on the school levy heats up)

Dayton & Disadvantaged Ohio Urban Schools

The perennial topic of public education took a new turn with a recent article on a Youngstown State University study making a close correlation between the state academic ratings and socioeconomic measures. Dayton blogs have picked up the issue, with a running discussion at DMM and a good post (with comments) at Esrati.

The study noted that performance correlates with the following:

1. Median income

2. Children in poverty

3. Children coming from single-parent households.

…with a particularly close correlation with median income.

This information is not readily available by district for the amateur researcher. The state report card site, however, has data sets on economic disadvantage, giving a % of students classified as economically disadvantaged by district and school (though I didn’t see an obvious link to a definition of “economically disadvantaged” at the state board of ed website).

Ranking the city districts by % economically disadvantaged Dayton does rank near the bottom, but the Columbus city district, surprisingly, has nearly all its students in this category.



For state performance rankings there is a noticeable break after Akron, with the three of the four most disadvantaged districts ranking well below other Ohio urban systems. Columbus, again, is the outlier.

Taking a closer look at actual proficiency test results by district, for the 4 most disadvantaged districts for the 11th grade test:



Youngstown and Dayton bring up the bottom in all categories, with Dayton scoring below Youngtown in nearly all areas being tested. Columbus, which has more disadvantaged students (according to the state), actually has higher proficiency scores.

For the test near the end of elementary school, the scores are similar, but would include students who might eventually drop out during high school, so are probably lower since the less motivated students are still in school. All these are well below the state standard, and Dayton is lowest, as befits its high disadvantaged number.


One can ask what Columbus is doing “right”, given its relatively high test scores combined with high % of disadvantaged students, or is there some reporting error? Aside from Columbus, one can certainly see the correlation between disadvantage and performance.

The end result is graduation and maybe college. Dayton actually has a high graduation rate vis a vis the other three high-disadvantage districts.



One of the allegations is that the state tests are invalid, though what’s’ being tested seems pretty routine; basic skills like math, reading, and writing, and the application of those skills in science and social sciences. Interestingly it’s not just the state who tests in Ohio. The SAT and ACT are administered here, with the ACT being the favored test for the four disadvantaged urban districts.

Mean ACT scores with the % taking the test for the most recent year available at the state website. I also provide the Ohio statewide average for comparison.


So college bound seniors are not doing too terrible from these districts (Dayton seniors testing only 4 points off the state average) , though theremight to be a diluting effect, where more students taking the test reduces a district mean.

Next, a look at some other comparisons in per pupil funding and expenditure (relevant in considering the upcoming levy), student/teacher ratios, and discipline.