Ohio Cities and their suburbs

Dayton To Columbus Map Link  

There is an article about Dayton Ohio in the Columbus Dispatch series about Ohio's big cities today.  It was kind of trip down memory lane for me.  I lived in Dayton Ohio in the late 80's for about three or four years.  Not a lifetime...Dayton was different than anyplace I lived. Not bad different.  Just different.  Face it every city is unique.... it is all so darn local. I moved to Dayton from Akron Ohio...  Since college I'd lived in Green Bay Wisconsin and Rockford Illinois too.  College in Madison Wisconsin and growing up in a small industrial city in southeastern Wisconsin, near Milwaukee was my whole world.   

If you aren't familiar with the cities in my litany, all but Madison Wisconsin are industrial cities.  All these mid-western cities were or are primarily manufacturing centers, Akron was rubber, Green Bay was paper, Rockford was fasteners (I think Rockford  was at one time the screw capital of the world?) The town I grew up in had foundries.

Dayton is and was auto parts manufacturing.  National Cash Register had been a huge employer in Dayton, but I remember my husbands boss taking us by the abandoned NCR manufacturing buildings the first weekend  I was in the Dayton area.  The NCR buildings must have been razed shortly after because I don't remember them, except for that night but today's Columbus Dispatch reminded me of that sight:

"As recently as the 1970s, Dayton enjoyed boom times, with factories rolling out auto parts and appliances by the thousand. National Cash Register, the city's largest single employer, had blocks of stately office and manufacturing buildings lining a broad boulevard leading into the more affluent suburbs."

Dayton's boom was over by the mid to late 80's.... but Dayton was still an industrial city.  Dayton and Columbus are an hour, maybe y an hour and a half apart from the north outer-belt of Columbus to Dayton's south suburbs...  yet in some ways Dayton and Columbus are a lot more distant than Dayton is to the other industrial cities in Northern Ohio.  There are things about Green Bay Wisconsin, Rockford Illinois and my hometown that are closer to Dayton Ohio than Columbus. Not worse, not better,  just different.  

Actually I did not live in Dayton, I lived in West Carrollton, a suburb of Dayton.  West Carrollton is a nice little town, it is industrial, it was not at that time one of the upscale Dayton suburbs and the little starter house we bought there cost us under 60K the late 80's. When we moved fromWest Carrollton to Columbus it was different.  We were moving from a small suburban yet industrial community to the city of Columbus.  Not downtown Columbus or even an urban neighborhood... but it is the city of Columbus.

The Columbus Dispatch article is just a little sketch of what Dayton Ohio is like for it's readers in Columbus Ohio... It reminded me of the up and down boom and bust economy, the history of what the city has been, a little about urban renewal since I've lived there, a little bit about the problems that city has....

Today's article is  part of the Columbus Dispatch series about the seven biggest cities in the state of Ohio.  Yesterday the Columbus Dispatch article was about Cleveland. I learned things about Cleveland.  I believe the local paper will be telling us in Columbus about Cincinnati, Toledo, Akron and Youngstown yet in this series.

I wrote more about the Columbus Dispatch installment about on ColumbusBestBlog.com today, in Ohio Big Cities Burbs.  Not a critique of the article or the city of Dayton, not about solutions for Dayton just a little bit about my experience having lived in both areas.... and more about the question about whether Ohio's big cities are worth saving.