The last post of the year as New Years Eve will be spent in Kentucky.

299 posts. 24.8 posts per month. There’s a lot there, but I’m not going to do a greatest hits because they are all great (IMHO of course).

There were some odd moments, like my attempt to do a series on Sacramento as an experiment with “remote blogging” (conclusion: you have to be there to really do urbanist blogging on a place).

This was a year when people were obessed with politics. About as close as I came to serious political blogging was when I did that stuff on Mike Turner as a favor for Esrati (since he was one of the few here doing urban affairs blogging). True to form that stuff was got me the most links elsewhere on the net and the most comments. Hmph.

It’s laughable to see how popular Turner is with the creative class types. The other interesting thing to happen here was the Creative Class initiative, which I didn’t really blog on too much as its sort of an insider thing and they have their own internet presence.

Compare and contrast:

Louisville: Re-elects John Yarmuth, ex libertarian/GOPer, and former pot-smoking editor/publisher of the local indy weekly paper.

Dayton: Re-elects Mike Turner: lawyer, homophobe, developer tool and military industrial complex suck-up.

So what city do you guess might be ever-so-slightly more hip, tolerant and creative-classy than the other? That’s why I’m skeptical of this concept re Dayton. But I wish them well.

Which brings up this Daytonologys recurring I Luv Louavull theme, where I posit Louisville as an example for Daytonians to follow, the evil opposite of Dayton, the Anti-Dayton. (though I am starting to see Portland, Oregon as the Anti-Dayton).

My last post on this thread at Urban Ohio is that I blog on Dayton pretending it’s Louisville. I guess that is sort of psycho, but it means I look at Dayton through the eyes of a Louisvillian (well, OK, I am a native of Chicago).

So perhaps this blog is just a grand, intentional misreading as well as a sort of “lookee here!” thing.

Anyway, off to Louisville for New Years and the next post will be about

…continue reading the article The End of 2008

. If you know the city well you know where these are at

In this case it looks like someone tried to paint over earlier smaller tags (circled..blue paint on the plywood)…but then the taggers decided to do the top floor

(you can click on these to enlarge for all the gory detail)

Another case of the building owner trying to keep up with the taggers. Looks like the owners cleaned some stuff off the old store window

Good luck trying to clean that limestone water table. Note the tags on the next door building at the edge of the pix. There are tags in the alley between the buildings and all along this wall

When yr going to vandalize a house via tagging, just go for broke, huh? (Nice touch with those attention flags)

Dayton Pride. The owner doesn’t see fit to clean that stone top so why not screw it up even more with tags

I decided not to take pix of the tipped-over trash cans down the street a few blocks as that would be a bit much,

…continue reading the article Tagging East Dayton

I read in today’s New York Times of the passing of Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, a prominent Chicago Rabbi who I once met, if only briefly, but it reminded me of both the power of ideas and the power of conversation.

For those interested in the details, the obit can be found here (registration required):

Rabbi Wolf’s obituary

I worked for several years at the faculty club (The “Quadrangle Club”) at the University of Chicago. There are, indeed, several stories about this place, from meeting famous people (Nadine Gordimer, John Kenneth Galbraith, Angela Davis, Arnaldo Momigliano, Elmo Zumwalt, among others), kids at a bar mitzvah entertaining themselves by throwing rocks at passing cars, walking into the club one morning when it seemed to be hosting every African-American woman in Illinois (and possibly Indiana) over 6’3″, and many others, some amusing, some disturbing.

I worked weekends, and mostly tried to ignore people and read. Mostly I read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and sometimes I got on a roll, really getting into the text (sometimes in the German, sometimes not) and thinking about stuff really hard. I was trying to write a dissertation on this thing, and I had a good job that paid me (minimally), allowed me to read a lot, fed me lunch, and gave me an opportunity to flirt with the waitresses and the occasional faculty wife. (To no avail, in all cases, except one: another story.)

One early afternoon, I was poring over the Transcendental Aesthetic, where Kant discusses his ideas about space and time (or, these days, space-time). Hard stuff, and some of the material I find most (the following is a pun for Kantians and Kantian hangers-on) counterintuitive.

At the counter, a guy yells at me “What are you reading?” I tell him, figuring he’s some clown (in spite of the fact that this club really didn’t really attract many clowns). He nods, and then says “Ask me any question, any question at all; I can answer it.”

So I took him up on it, and asked him how the thinking self, which imposes temporal conditions for sensible impressions to be received (the form of intuition of time), discovers that it is in time, and how it situates itself within that time. (The beauty of the University of Chicago is that one can say such things without feeling self-conscious, the only fear being whether the question is well-posed or not.)

He nodded again, said it was a hard question, and couldn’t answer it. (The latter being a fairly unusual answer to hear at the University.) But—and it was clear this was important—he told me to write his friend Steven Schwarzschild, a philosopher at Washington University (St. Louis) and send him both the guy’s regards and my question.

We chatted a bit more, and he left. He told me his name was Jack Wolf, and that he was a Rabbi on the North side. We had a very pleasant conversation, and I took his advice and wrote Schwarzschild, who quickly replied with a very long and detailed letter, very helpful, and which also helped me discover the whole exciting world of Marburg neo-Kantians, specifically Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. (Soon after Schwarzschild wrote, I wrote him back, he responded, and then died, relatively young. A couple of years later, I began a correspondence with another outstanding scholar, J. Michael Young, who wrote back and then, within weeks, died. also at a relatively young age. I started to think I had certain epistolary powers that I should only use for good.)

Rabbi Wolf invited me to come talk with him sometime, and, of course, I didn’t. In spite of his friendliness (and what I discovered our compatible politics and, maybe, philosophical orientations), I was a bit intimidated and, naturally, a bit lazy. I regret very much not having done so; I’ve thought back many times about our encounter, and realize that this was someone I could learn a great deal from, both in terms of pure intellectual engagement, but also in terms of the mysterious region where ideas and reality interact.

Off and on, I’ve read a good bit by and about the Marburg neo-Kantians. Hermann Cohen is, to my mind, underrated, while his student Ernst Cassirer (no slouch, to be sure) is much better known. I’ve thought about pursuing that material in a more systematic, rigorous and scholarly way, but the Germans, French and Italians are all over it, and the whole laziness factor interferes. But I’ve learned much from them, and I owe it all to a ten minute conversation with Jack Wolf.

I learned one other thing, from that conversation and from the many times I’ve reflected upon it: the meaning, and importance, of one of the great words English has borrowed from Yiddish:

Mensch.

Rabbi Wolf was a Mensch.

Requiescat in

…continue reading the article A Conversation Remembered

The boycott Dayton concept seems silly or extreme, but it’s actually pretty easy to do. The average person is already doing it, but uninentionally.

Why would one need or want to go into town? I can only think of a few reasons: jury duty, legal issues, or some form of specialized entertainment.

Culture vultures have to come downtown for the “SOB” & theatre. A somewhat different audience comes downtown for Broadway road shows and Cityfolk stuff. Then there are the sports fans for Dragons games.

People who are live/original music fans would have to come into town as the big club concentration is in the Oregon, bleeding into downtown a bit. This is mostly a singles/couples/young adult thing, with some older folks depending on the music and venue.

A subset of the music/culture vulture scene are the Cityfolk and Celtic festivals (for a more general audience) plus the Dave Hall Plaza music festivals, which are narrowcasting to certain music niche markets.

Relevant only to yer humble host are the gay bars, which is a very specialized form of nightlife.

Suburban geneological hobbyists would be using the downtown library to do their research (I use it for history stuff, but I notice folks using it mostly for geneology research).

Beyond this, for the average person with a family, who doesn’t go to the SOB or out to listen to bands, or aren’t into minor league sports, they are most likely going to be staying at home, or close to home, with little reason to go into town. They aren’t really boycotting Dayton, there’s just nothing there for them, or nothing they can’t get closer to home.

So there is no reason to travel into Dayton, boycott or no

…continue reading the article Boycott Dayton? Not Much of a Sacrifice.

This infrequently updated blog/website has been around since this fall, but has not recievedvery much mention.

There is a thread parented by yer humble host over at Urban Ohio which has some interesting discussion, but nary a word from the other local bloggers.

Probably because they don’t want to touch it.

On one level you can get mad.
On another you can see the blog owner working out some personal grief over the loss of his son, and this is how he’s doing it. It is a tragic tale; the son was a star athelete in Bellbrook, and was apparently a contractor, too, while living out in Colorado. Apparently the son got mixed up in drugs, and was killed by two drug dealers. The full story is at the site, including DDN and City Paper coverage.

You can read the full concept at the linked page, but here’s an excerpt:

You will never get the right answer unless you ask the right question?

“The question is what should Dayton’s Civic Leaders do about all the dysfunctional families in Dayton, Ohio that produce one addict & co-dependent after another that end up being criminals that victimize law biding tax paying citizens & innocent children & the elderly that have no choice.

“They are going to have to figure out how to get these people into organized programs of recovery or crime & violence will continue to escalate & end up here in the suburbs.

He has a point. Crime & violence certainly did end up in the suburbs, specifically the Dorothy Lane Wal-Mart parking lot before Christmas, where someone was shot during a stick-up.

Makes sense that predators go were the prey is, and Dayton is too damn poor to provide much picken’s for the bad guys. Yet this is just an assumption. One would like to see some hard data as to where the perps of suburban crime live (in many cases like family disturbances and such, probably in the suburbs, too).

What you’d do if find the residences for felony suspects and map them out to see if they are indeed coming out from Dayton (assuming this is public record).

But that’s just verifying (or disproving) the Boycott Dayton hypothoses, and doesn’t solve the high crime rate problem, which has been with us since the

…continue reading the article Boycott Dayton

Since downtown is going to be in the news in 2009 a few posts on that place.

This neat aerial was from an old planning study, showing downtown as it was around 1950. You can mouse over and click on it to enlarge.

What lasted down to our era? The survivors are outlined in yellow.

Note that things were built since 1950 but were later torn down (Patterson School seen under construction here, and the Lazarus parking garages, for example). I don’t show those, just the things that survived from 1950 (sometimes heavily altered).

Usually people black out what was torn down when showing these kinds of changes. Since so much was removed, I thought it better to black out the survivors. Whats remains visible in the pix is the ghost city, the city of memory for a certain generation of Daytonians.

Mapping out the survivors in a black plan. No block is intact, but the Arcade block & Merchants Row on E. Third appear as a fairly consistent pre-1950 streetscape. It’s interesting that Main Street disappears here, indicating that building along this street was substantially replaced or removed after 1950

Next, what was built since 1950, and there was a alot. It might be interesting to do this as a time series to investigate building subsitution during the postwar era. And it was just replacing buildings; parking lots were replaced by buildings, too.

Mapping out the post 1950 building via a quasi black plan. Here parking structures are noted in blue. It would be interesting to map out the sum floorplate of these; there is a lot of parking here.
The big urban renewal efforts of Dave Hall Plaza/Midtown Mart and Courthouse Square are pretty visible, and 2nd Street from Jefferson to Wilkinson is almost all new (only the Hulman Buiding/Liberty Bank survives from 1950).

Putting it all together, its interesting seeing the pattern, with Main still being eroded by ill-concieved architectural and planning set-pieces, while Ludlow remains more “street-like”.

Fourth and Ludlow, Ludlow & 2nd, and Main and First seems to be the most intact intersections with actual buildings on all four corners, without a parking lot or plaza
or setback on a fourth corner.

Finally, what went away. These buildings were removed since 1950, either for a new building or for parking.

As one can see downtown Dayton is fairly “new”.

One thing to consider is open space and parking. Downtown Dayton always seemed so “open”, and it might be interesting to investigate this a bit more using this aeriel, since just a cursory inspection reveals that this was the case even back

…continue reading the article Downtown: Surviors, Replacements, & the Ghost City