This year I’ve led a few different walking tours of Downtown Dayton, including for Preservation Dayton’s tour series and for the Downtown Dayton Art in the City event in August.
But last week I put together a very different type of downtown tour: a photo tour from around 1900 that I created as a video for my YouTube channel.
In the video I covered a variety of buildings, from early office towers to simpler commercial blocks and even some homes and industry, that were all mixed together in the downtown area around the turn of the century.
I dug into the history of the structures, and also showed current views of the same locations so you can see what still stands today (like the Dayton Arcade) and what is long gone (like Union Station). I even mapped the locations in the video so you can keep track of the route as we head through downtown from the north to the south.
You can take a look at the video below, and I hope you enjoy it!