Now, I don't have a 9 to 5 job. I left my job at NCR two years ago to start my own business. Things are going okay, but there has been slowing due to the economy. Others around me aren't doing to good. My brother is unemployed. He drove a truck for a company that hauled construction materials. One of my oldest friends has been laid off from the GM plant I mentioned earlier. He still hasn't found work. My mother lost her job with a mortgage company after the housing bubble popped. In a strange twist, they rehired her. Now she processes foreclosures for the same company. My girlfriend is in danger of losing her job. Many of her friends are former coworkers that were recently let go when her company outsourced much of their work. My Dad still works for NCR. His fate is uncertain with the company's plans to move to Atlanta. He has two years until retirement. The jobs are gone. Some were lost due to outsourcing to cheaper labor sources overseas. Some are functionally obsolete, as they made products no longer used, like mechanical cash registers. Little has come into Dayton to replace them.

Now, I don't know what the solution is. I live in a city full of factory workers with no factories. There's been various proposals, works projects, green technology, job training, and that's all good. I'm not here to say one remedy will work better than another, I just want to show you all what the typical midwestern city looks like, to remind you why it's called the rust belt. Remember, this is a real town, my town. People live here. And many of them are running out of options.

Let's start the tour with NCR. This vacant land is the former site of the National Cash Register Company's main factory. Most of the world's cash registers were made here until the 1970s, when the factory complex was closed down and demolished. Many thousands of people were employed here. The land cannot be redeveloped because it is soaked with machine oil and heavy metals. The NCR world headquarters building, soon to be vacant, is to the southwest, near Old River Park.

The recently closed GM plant is here.. It closed in December. It was still open when these pictures were taken. The vacant land and most of the parking lots around it on either side of the railroad tracks used to be additional factory buildings. The debris strewn concrete area to the left of the tracks is the most recent demolition, a plant that made automobile radiators. In the picture, the white line with lines coming out of it to the left are the roof beams and support columns of the remaining strip of what was a very large building, the last bit of it along the tracks still standing in the photo. Now there is nothing on this lot.

This building on First Street was the first Delco plant. Here's a ground view of this massive building. The first electric starters for automobiles were manufactured here. The first car to have an electric starter was GM's LaSalle. Every other car at the time was started by a crank which protruded out the front, below the radiator. Later the building was used by General Motor's Frigidaire Division to build refrigerators. Currently, it is the home to Mendelson's Liquidation Outlet, a curious indoor junkyard that has been selling off Dayton's surplus industrial infrastructure, at rock bottom prices, for more than half a century. At one time, you could buy assembly line robots, nuts and bolts, pneumatic tools, forklifts, you name it. As the manufacturing base has dried up, Mendelson's inventory of industrial items has shrunken and they are now a leading seller of used store fixtures and restaurant equipment, as retail is following the manufacturing jobs out of the area. The ballfield across the street in the Google Maps view was built on the site of more Delco/GM buildings. Up the street a couple blocks is this, more vacant GM buildings, currently being demolished. There were easily a couple of dozen GM plants operating in Dayton and the surrounding communities at one time. Now there are none.

These long concrete slabs were the platforms of Dayton's train station. The parking lots to the north were where the station building itself stood. The last scheduled passenger train stopped in Dayton in 1979. It was an Amtrak train. The track it left town on now abruptly ends in a field near the suburb of Trotwood. It used to continue to Chicago by way of Fort Wayne, IN.

This is the Dayton Arcade. The Dayton Arcade is a beautiful and elegant Victorian-Era shopping complex in the center of downtown Dayton and one of my favorite buildings of all time. It features a large, impressive domed-glass skylight which is visible in the satellite photo. Interior photos can be viewed here. It is currently vacant, for sale, and closed to the public.

At 1127 West Third Street, there is a vacant lot, where once existed the Wright Brothers cycle shop. The first airplane was built here. Currently this vacant lot is surrounded by decaying neighborhood. The building itself has been disassembled and relocated to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, proving that it wasn't just jobs that the auto industry took from Dayton. Currently, the lot and surrounding properties are being incorporated into a collection of historical sites managed by the National Park Service. However, I'm not sure how many tourists will come to see a vacant lot.

Hundreds of houses were demolished to build this highway. Neighborhoods were cut in half and neighbors were sepearated and displaced. I was in Canada recently and was amazed at how all the major highways went around the urban centers instead of through them. That seems like a much better system. Virtually no one was displaced when Canada built their highways, and to add lanes, only cheap farmland needs to be purchased. In Dayton, US 35 divides north from south, and I-75 divides east from west.

And there it is, Dayton, Ohio, a typical rust belt post-industrial city. When manufacturing left, nothing filled the void. And here we are.

What now?

EDIT: It appears I made the rec list! Cool, thanks! As a bonus, I found this great photo of the NCR factory complex as it appeared in its heyday: