Platting Northridge

Northridge is really a collection of separate developments. Almost all of them were platted before 1930. So what appears as a generic postwar suburban strip dates from an earlier era.


19th Century Land Subdivision & Ownership

The pre-history of Northridge was as farmland, without much in the way of villages. There were features from the turnpike era, such as a toll house at the intersection of the New Troy and Frederick Pike and the “Four Mile House”, which apparently was a coaching inn or perhaps a place to change horses for stagecoaches. Recall that this turnpike was in competition with the canal and the “Old Troy Pike” for northbound traffic (at least before the railroad).

The only notable aspect of this landscape were the farms owned by a Roma band. Roma or Rom is the proper name for gypsy, and this was the land apparently owned or associated with the Dayton gypsies, who came to America from England, not eastern or central Europe. Their story can be found here: When Dayton Was Home to the Gypsies




An interesting feature of property division are the small farms along what is today Needmore Road the ownership of what later became Deweese Parkway and Triangle Park by a member of the Mead family.

Not too much change by 1895, which is about six years before the interurban line came through. One should note that Ebenezer church, which became a place name for the Fredrick & New Troy Pike intersection, is a rare 19th survivor: the church still stands.

And the road that was later to become Ridge Avenue appears, connecting New Troy Pike to Main Street what was then the northern suburbs of Dayton.

20th Century Developments.

1901-1914

The interurban railroad came through this area in 1901 and apparently sparked some suburbanization, because by 1910 in 1923 a local rural school district was organized for Harrison Township between the Stillwater and Great Miami, the Ebenezer district, taking its name from the crossroad settlement.

By 1915 the first subdivisions or property speculations appear. These probably were driven by the interurban making commuting possible so would be the true “interurban suburbs”.

Neff Park: on both side of New Troy Pike

Fieldston: (or Fieldstone) a small plat on the south side of Ridge Avenue

Garden City: In multiple sections north and south of the Neff Park plats. The first section developed was the southern property, followed by multiple sections to the north.

S.H. Site Company: Associated with Garden City, this was perhaps land held in speculation.

One can also see the channel realignment of the Great Miami, eliminating a an oxbow.


1920

Land development and speculation accelerates going into the Roaring 20s. One would like to know when the New Troy Pike was paved, as this would be an impetus to development, perhaps more signifigant than the interurban due the increase in auto ownership. Also, by 1920, New Troy Pike had become part of the cross-country Dixie Highway.

Ome Gardens & the Ensley Plat: Along the river to is the big Ome Gardens plat (a portion which would be later replatted as Embury Park). At the intersection of Wagner Ford Road and New Troy was the Ensley Plat.

East Riverdale: A portion of Neff Park was renamed (replatted?) as East Riverdale.

Needmore: The first Needmore plat is on the south side of Needmore Road.

Brenner Realty Company: One of the old Roma farms is aquired by the Brenner Realty Company, who also owned the property on the northeast corner of Needmore and New Troy Pike. J.W. Brenner shown as owning property along the south side of Needmore, too, directly east of the Needmore plat. This land might have been just a farm at the time, not yet a speculation.


In 1920 the name Deweese first appears: RW Deweese owning a quarter section at the bend of Ridge Avenue, west of Neff Park.

Mid 1920s

The heyday of subdivision activity in Northridge.

Harrison Terrace: Another 19th century Roma farm subdivided. This was probably the northernmost plat, aside from ribbon development, before hitting Murlin Heights.

Dixie Heights: The Brenner Realty speculation, platted and named after the Dixie Highway. One wonder if by this time it was the automobile driving development since the plat is named after a highway.

Needmore addition: the Brenner property at the intersection of Needmore and Dixie Highway becomes an expansion of the Neemore tract.

Woodland Hills: The big Funk property on a quarter section east of the upper Garden City plats is platted as Woodland Hills. This is really two plats; Woodland Hills and, more in the valley, Woodland Hills Park. This division is actually quite evident today in the street plan.

Fieldston addition: A part of the Deweese property at the bend in Ridge Avenue west of Neff Park, is subdivided.

Fieldston Downs: Farmland south of Garden City between Dixie and Ridge is subdivided. This property had remained mostly intact since the 19th century.

Ensley Executors: Apparently to settle the estate of a dead farmer? The last Ensley property gets subdivided. Refer to the first map in this series and note that this family held extensive landholdings in the 19th century. This parcel was the last of those.



Wrapping up the Roaring 20s: Platted by 1930

Northridge was mostly platted-out by the onset of the Depression. There were a few plats added before the Crash.

Outing Park: This was the Brenner property east of Needmore, on the south side of Needmore Road. One can guess at the name. Perhaps to take an outing into the country to a picnic grove or some such place. Or perhaps an outing to look at lots in the new plats surrounding Dayton, like this one.

Brenner Realty Plat: Brenner acquired the last former Roma farm and platted it. Though the plat map doesn’t show a name this was eventually recorded as the Home Site plat (the name in the auditors’ records).

Jensvold Plat: A small plat east of the eastern part of Neff Park, off Maple Grove Avenue.

Eagles Park: Not a plat, but apparently a picnic grove or some other recreation area run by the Fraternal Order of Eagles, at the intersection of Wagner Ford and Dixie Highway/New Troy Pike.




There were some very small one street plats west of Dixie/New Troy, but they are not shown here. Most of the development seemed to be east of Dixie/New Troy north of the Neff Park developments at Ridge Avenue.

Property Fragmentation and Ribbon Development

We’ve seen property in certain areas was already fairly fragmented before suburbanization started. The process just accelerated with the advent of the interurban and later the automobile.

To illustrate here is the 1920 map of Northridge, in two sections, with the 1895 property lines drawn over in yellow. One can see how ribbon subdivision along Dixie Highway/New Troy Pike was already occurring via small parcels being sudivided further into large house lots. This was occuring on the side roads, too.

Land ownership and subdivision was becoming finer grained, perhaps due to splitting up property for speculation, or for early versions of hobby farms.


The Situation in 1930: Plats to Streets

The obvious plats and land in speculation shaded in yellow on this early1930s property ownership map, illustrating the mix of plats, smallholdings and ribbon development that characterized the area, as “first draft” of the automobile suburbia that was to dominate after depression and war.

There was no new development here until Marianne Country Estates of the 1940s (we’ll see that later). One notes that “Stop Eight” had become a place name by this time.


From around the same time as the property ownership map comes this street map. This was probably the first street map to show Northridge in full, yet not the place name just yet. Northridge was named in the early 1930s, as a contest for school kids to rename the Ebenezer school district. The members of the district voted on the name at a mass meeting

To some degree these were ghost subdivisions during the Depression, particularly in the northernmost plats, due to the collapse of homebuilding. Build-out happened after 1939, with the wartime boom and postwar suburban expansion.


The interurban ceased operations in 1932, a fitting coda for this era. The known interurban stops are shown as red circles. There is a missing one since there were seven north of the river.

We’ll take a brief look at the interurban next.

(a note on viewing the maps: to view detail mouse over the map and click, and the maps will enlarge. To go back to the blog hit your browsers 'back' button)

Dayton & Suburban Crime: Looking at the FBI Report

Recent exchanges on the Esrati blog comments comparing city vs. suburban crime piques interest as to the question.

Generalizations that the city has just as much crime as the suburbs was challenged via a comparison from Sperlings Best Places, which itself was supposedly derived from the FBI unified crime reports. The FBI report for Ohio (not all cities are shown) for 2007 is here.

So let's go to the source. First off, when surfing into the FBI site there is a big fat warning statement about doing comparisons. A good point is that one police department might be more aggressive than another, and crime does go unreported. Demographs and the nature of the jurisdiction also plays into the picture.

With that in mind lets go ahead an compare anyway. But not Dayton to it's suburbs. Let's do an apples to apples comparison of Dayton to other big cities in Ohio: The three Cs plus Akron, Toledo, and Youngstown.

The way this was done was very simple. Divide the population by number of crimes reported. So higher numbers mean crimes are fewer per person, or rarer and lower numbers means crimes are more common.

As one can see Dayton has a lower number, indicating a higher density of property crimes. In fact it is in worse shape than some larger cities for this crime category.

Next, looking at violent crime, Dayton is more in the middle. Cleveland is the worst in this category.
Suburban Crime

The FBI stats do not show all localities. For example places like Trotwood, Moraine, Clayton, and Springboro are missing from the crime report. But there are enough suburbs shown to provide a glimpse of patterns of property crime (the FBI report breaks this down to some detail, to burglery, larceny, auto theft, etc).



Dayton is thrown in as a benchmark and to prove that it still has a higher property crime density than all the suburban jurisdictions shown. But it is interesting to see Beavercreek not being especially free of this type of crime, ranking in between Englewood and Huber Heights.

The worst suburbs for property crime (by this measure) are Xenia, Riverside, Miamisburg, Fairborn, and West Carollton. The best, or the ones with the lowest density of property crime are Germantown, New Lebanon, Bellbrook, Sugarcreek Township and German Township.

It's nice to see Germantown and German Township on this list as low crime areas as it confirms a hunch yer humble host had about these places as great (and safe) places to live.

Transportation Routes North

Setting out a framework for "North": the development of the Vandalia/Butler Twp/Northridge area as a transportation corridor into and out from Dayton. What will be shown is ground transportation, but the airport will be acknowleged, too.


Early Improvements

The first transportation routes were the rivers, via canoe, and perhaps some indian trails or old pioneer roads. The first improved transportation was the canal extension north, duing the early 1830s, and the turnpike construction, also during the 1830s. Most of this was on a north-south orientation. There were two turnpikes to Troy, the one shown here and one to the east of the Great Miami running through todays Huber Heights, once known as the Staunton Road (after the first Miami County seat).

The exception to the north-south orientation was the famous National Road, heading east-west, as an early long-distance road crossing state lines. The early turnpikes didn't extend beyond country villages or the county seat




The Railroad Era

The 185os was the boom era in railroad construction. The first (and only) railroad north was chartered in 1851 as the Dayton & Michigan, but construction was delayed, with the line being finished first in 1859. Shortly therafter it was leased in perpetuity by the Cincinnati, Hamilton, & Dayton (the second railroad to enter Dayton) and CH&D itself was aquired by the Baltimore & Ohio in 1917 (eventually to become the CSX).

This line had only two stations in the area, both well away from the city, so no commuter traffic developed. The line was also distant from the turnpikes, so two stations served the two turnpike villages: Tadmor for Vandalia and Johnsons Station for Chambersburg.


Interurban Interlude

The interurban was a railroad of sorts, but was powered by electricity rather than steam, and interurban lines were usually short haul regional railroads. They differed at first from streetcars as the equipment was more similar to convetional railroad cars. Dayton was a major center for interurban lines, which radiated out from the city, connecting up with lines extending from other places (like Lima, Toledo and Indianapolis).

The line running north, The Dayton & Troy, opened in 1901 and eventually connected through Lima to Toledo. The interurban was the first impetus to suburban development as it permitted quick and frequent service into Dayton and, unlike the mainline railroad, had frequent stops, which are shown here.

The eighth stop gave its name to a local road and the collection of suburban plats that grew up around the stops is known today as Northridge.



Not shown on the map was the "local" commuter service that ended in a loop at Chambersburg, which was given the more suburban sounding name of Murlin Heights.

The First Automobile Routes

Interurbans overlapped with automobiles. As auto ownership took off in the 'teens and especially the 'twenties interurban use declined and eventually the Dayton & Troy closed in 1932 (after a bridge collapse that cost too much to fix).

Paved roads facilated auto travel, as did the first long-distance highways. The first cross country highways were named highways, like the Lincoln Highway. The named highway through Dayton was the eastern leg of the Dixie Highway, intended to connect Florida and the South with the Midwest. The Dixie Highway route followed the Troy Pike into Dayton (which was renamed Dixie Drive).

After the mid 1920s the numbered cross-country US Highways came into being, with US 25 supplanting the Dixie Highway and the old National Road becoming US 40. The US Highways was the first cross-country highway system.






During this era air travel was becoming viable. A private flying field was established on the flatlands northwest of Vandalia in 1928-1929. This early airport apparently was not too busy, as Dayton made it into Ripley's Believe it Or Not: "The Birthplace of Aviation doesn't have a municiple airport".

The field was transferred to the city of Dayton in 1934-1936. WPA airfield pavement improvements in the 1930s led to the first scheduled passenger air service starting in 1936 with three daily flights from the predecessor of TWA.

Limited Access

During WWII the improved airfield was expanded and converted to military use, and a defense plant was constrcucted to the east, across US 25. This probably drove the demand for a easier way to get to Vandalia, bypassing the congested Northridge area. The result was the 'super-highway', Dayton's first limited access divided highway. The "super" did have at-grade intersections, so it wasn't a true grade seperated expressway like we know today. It was probably like OH 4 beyond Huffman Dam, with at-grade crossovers and frontage roads.

The "super" apparently dead-ended at US 40 (allowing cross-country traffic to drop into the city from that highway). On the Dayton side it ended at a traffic circle, which was probably one of the very few in the Midwest on a major highway.




The Interstate Era

Though it looks a bit isolated, the super-highway might have been part of a larger plan. During the war there was planning for a national system of expressways, which was the forerunner of the interstate system. So the planners of the 1940s might have been thinking ahead when they set the alignment of this highway.

By 1957 the interstate highway act was passed and the system was under construction. The old "super" was connected north to Toledo and Detroit and south (during the 1960s) into downtown Dayton and named I-75. A new freeway, I-70, was built paralleling National Road. The intersection was a classic cloverleaf interchange.

An unusual feature of I-75 was that the old "super-highway" remained a quasi-expressway after the the completion of the northern and southern extensions, with dangerous at-grade intersections (with and without stoplights) between the cloverleaf and the the traffic circle exit. This was only corrected in the early 1970s, say 1970-71-72, when full grade seperation was achieved.

In 1974 the old US 25 designation north of Cincinnati was retired.

Interurban Suburbia and Suburbanizing Industry

Coming up: A look at development from the interurban era in Northridge and the expansion of industrial Dayton north along I-75 after 1970.

Peachtree City Today: The Golf Cart Community

Peachtree City was planned for 80,000, but this was revised later to about 50,000-40,000, which means it is around the same size planned for Newfields.

Today's street map looks pretty generically suburban...at first.

(the purple is available industrial/office land).

The zoning and plat map tells a different story, showing how the periphery is zoned as large lot housing, whith higher density subdivisions and multifamily in the center. And the open space system winds through the development following creeks and watecourses. One greenway seperaates the housing from the industrial park, as in the original plan.
Greenways are nice, but whats even nicer is that they function as transportation corridors, being the route of a paved pathwy system spidering through Peachtree City.
(color coding on the map show various neighborhood "villages).

A close-up of one "village" showing the path system in red, and the path system drawn over an aerial of the same area; what appears to be a generic (albeit considerably better planned) suburban landscape from the air has a secondary transporation system linking subdivisions, condo complexes, schools, and shopping....

...meaning one is not tied to the car. In Peachtree City the alternative transport is not the bike (though these probably exist, too) but the golf cart.

The path system is really a network of cart paths, some with grade seperation.
And the carts are used for more than just golf. Two pix showing dedicated golf cart parking at a restaurant....
....and a school. Presumably one can also take a cart shopping or to work.

This might sound corny, but golf carts are actuallly a green/sustainable way of doing personal transport. Golf carts eliminate the need for a car for short trips and errands, thus reducing air pollution and traffic congestion. Golf carts also solve some of the passenger/hauling issues that one would have with a bike.




You have to wonder why more suburbs aren't built this way, since the Peachtree City model is such an appealing...and sucessfull...concept.

Peachtree City: "Suburban Living at its Finest"

The NCR move brings three Georgia places to our attention.

1. Columbus, the small industrial city 100 miles south of Atlanta on the Alabama line

2. Duluth, in suburban Gwinnett County, northwest of Altanta

3. Peachtree City, southwest of Altanta

Peachtree City is the most interesting, as it's a rare example of a sucessfull attempt at creating a new town.

Why a sucess? Perhaps the location. The land was bought because of all the areas around Atlanta in the 1950s Fayette County land was the cheapest. But the site was also close to Hartsfield airport during an era when Atlanta was developing into a major regional air hub.



So an easy commute for people and business needing to be close to the airport. The obvious ones would be pilots and others directly connected to aviation, but also a good location for what NCR wants to put here, which is a training center and customer service operations.

Suburban Living at its Finest

This was the title of a section in the 1957 prospectus for Peachtree City. And this would be very fine indeed as this was one of the first mixed-use planned postwar suburban communities. The only two predecessors that come to mind are Park Forest, south of Chicago and Lakewood, near Long Beach, California. Niether of these approach Peachtree City in sophistication.

And, at 1957, this scheme is well before the iconic 1960s-era new communities of Columbia, Reston, and Irvine. Yet it was not developed or planned by outsiders, nor was it subsidized by the government (as in the later new towns). Peachtree City was a totally home-grown private sector project by Georgia developers and designers (with some site planning contributions from an emigre German-Swiss designer working for a golf-course desgn firm).

A quick look at the overview (north to the right) shows a commercial and office center clustered around a lake, with residential areas (in yellow) strung out to the south, seperated by belts of open space along creeks and watercourses and with little convenience shopping areas.

An industrial park is arranged around a railroad and highway, but seperated from the residential areas by more greenbelts.


A close-up of, perhaps, Phase I, showing how generous open space belts and corridors seperate the various land-use functions, but also how things sort of cluster around the lake and highway.

A birds eye view of the proposed town center on the lake, and some residential areas, also showing the start of the industrial and office park at the upper part of the image.
This rendering is rather fetching. One notes that this plan has a church as the centerpiece of the composition on the lake, perhaps a nod to the more observant regional religous culture of Dixie. The retail (?) along the lake are a loose interpretation of the Sarasota School of modernism (the South did have a little-known regional take on modern design).


Interesting to see a forerunner of Reston's Lake Anne Village, proposed 9 years earlier in the exurbs of Atlanta.

And, finally, the industrial park. One notes here the mix of grade seperated railroad and highway access, what we might call"multi-modal logistics" today. Back then railroads where still in the carload freight business (vs the bulk hauling they do today), puling boxcars up to factories on industrial sidings.

A private airport is proposed at the upper right hand corner.




Peachtree City, Dayton, and Failure to Execute.

Dayton could have had a Peachtree City in Don Hubers' failed Newfields project. In fact there are a lot of parallels, especially the open space system, the mixed-use concept, and the choice of a site in an area with lower property values but still somewhat close to the city.

The difference was, of course, a mix of timing and economic capacity. Newfields came online during an era of economic difficulty and regional stagnation. Peachtree City was at the edge of a booming metropolitan area, near an airport that was becoming a major US air hub for both domestic and international travel.

Next, Daytonlogy will take a quick look at modern Peachtree City.

Dragging Down Dayton for Political Gain

Ellen Belcher penned a very prophetic column just before the NCR announcment:

Dragging Down Dayton Gets the Region Nowhere

This passage was particularly good:

Here’s the thing, though. The animus toward Dayton — covert and overt, conscious and unconscious — is poisonous.

Is anybody better off if — borrowing from the Rush Limbaugh school of politics — Dayton fails?

Ned Hill, an urban affairs professor at Cleveland State University, said that sourness about cities isn’t “just self-defeating. It’s self-fulfilling.

And one can see how this sour poison is working in the NCR argument. It's an excuse for various people with political axes to grind to attack the Democrats and the left in general and Rhine McLin in particular. So one has politically motivated Dayton bashing becuase its important for certain political agendas to drag down Dayton.

This is the case for any bad news on about Dayton. Is it raining today? It's that damn Mayor McHats fault. Dayton has gloomy winters? Rhine McLin should resign posthaste.

There are probably issues with McLins' leadership and Dayton governance. In fact this blog is critical of Rashad Young, the city manager who serves at the pleasure of the mayor and city commission. Yet the undercurrent of the critque is dominated by right wing ideology and a very thinly veiled racism. In fact racism is apparently a bigger deal here than people want to admit, and is behind the high degree of bile and venom to the anti-Dayton/anti-McLin remarks.

Of course if a white male Republican, say another Mike Turner, was mayor, or if a bunch of conservative Republicans controlled the city commission you'd hear nary a word. The reason why is the political agenda would be to minimize urban socioeconomic problems because the goal would be to make the conservatives look good.

And one would see attacks from the left and the Democrats, the way presumably anti-Perdue people posting on Atlanta-centric forums are minmizing NCR's economic impact or questioning if it was really worth the money Perdue paid them to move

So political obsession and partisanship screws up peoples minds, leading to a sort of low dishonesty.

Dayton was identified over a decade ago by urban affairs expert David Rusk as a city beyond the point of no return, so problems have been around for a long time now, beyond the ability of Republican Mike Turner or Democrat Rhine McLin to addresss in any substantive way.

And a problematic Dayton is due to the people who live there...and here...as it's due to the suburbanites anti-urban, racist, classist and fearful attitudeds toward the city. This has led suburbanites to essentially cede the city to the underclass, which is white trash as much as it's black ghetto.

The result is the city is a socioeconomic bantustan, a behavorial sink ruled by a minority woman, who then becomes the target of potshots by suburbanites who helped create and enforce the conditions of economic & social exclusion, the consequences of which become ammunition for the ongoing dragging down of Dayton.

This place is really sick, and perhaps Nuti saw that after he became CEO of NCR, saying 'no thanks' to the bad karma that is Dayton and Vicinity.

NCR

..is gone.

Symbolic, perhaps, of the end of Dayton's 20th century "company town" era. The final shutdown of Moraine Assembly was, too. NCR and GM, via Delco, later Delphi, dominated Dayton by their sheer scale and, in the case of NCR, the domineering figure of John Patterson.

Maybe not such a healthy thing, even though it brought a lot of jobs here in the 20th century.

Those jobs started to disappear in a very big way with the NCR manufacturing shutdown of the early 1970s, where up to 20,0oo jobs were eliminated. That was the start of 30 years of industrial shrinkage. NCR was the first mover, kicking off the era of decline, and now it's finally leaving for good.

It's tough to put lipstick on this pig.

One can say that its only 1,300 jobs. But these were fairly well-paying jobs that contributed city income tax to a cash-stripped municiple govenemnt. The larger impact was NCRs contribution to arts an charities, where the hurt will be felt by people without any connections to NCR and who don't live in the city. The DDN reports that NCR was the top contributor to the CultureWorks fundraising campaign for performing arts organizations. This is a big hit since the performing arts in this city hurting (witness the impending demise of the Dayton Ballet).

There is a lot of speculation why as well as the official story. These are all available by reading the Dayton Daily News or Atlanta Journal-Constition sites, or the local Buisness Journal sites.

It was probably not just the $60M offered by Georgia, though. The basic argument of lower taxes, lower personell costs, and a larger labor pool and air connections probably were deciders.

Executive Level Economic Development

One can read the various comments at the DDN site and Dayton Most Metro and Esrati and pick up how its all Rhine McLins fault. If one reads how this deal went down one notes the mayors of Atlanta, Duluth, Peachtree City, and the county officials for Gwinnett County (Duluth) were not involved. This was a deal done by the Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue and his economic develoment staff working directly with NCR CEO Nutti and his people. Local governements were apparently out of the picture.

The equivilant thing in Ohio would have been for Strickland to make this a priority working directly with NCR. No evidence this was happening and it might not have made a difference if Strickland did try something if Nuttis' mind was made up.

Reinventing Dayton

We are finally seeing the end of chapter in the economic life of Dayton. One constant in the economic history of this city is the constant reinvention of the local economy, almost a textbook case of Schumpeters creative destruction played out over time in a regional economy. Looking at the larger firms left here, only one, Reynolds & Reynolds, goes back to the 19th century. The other large IT firm, Lexis-Nexis, started as spinoff from R&D related to defense logistics and IT.

Interestingly enough this feature of local economic history was noted by a socialist, Joseph F. Sharts, in his Biography of Dayton. Sharts tells how entire industries rose and then faded away due to changes in the underlying economic forces. A process that is playing out into our time.

So we are closing the book on an era, which is now properly the subject of history.