Dayton, Ohio
The eerily familiar and famously obscure city of Dayton is located in Montgomery County, Ohio, United States. The home town of the Wright Brothers is located about 50 miles north of the most anal, law and order, racist and intolerant city in the nation; Cincinnati. Therefore, Dayton is the most don't give a shit, lawless, racist city in the nation.
The 2000 survey had the Dayton population down to about 169,000 and projects a much lower population for 2010. Since the 1970s this “City of a Thousand Factories” has seen its people fleeing the epicenter of a deteriorating rust belt like rats from a sinking ship. The metropolitan area has 10 times the population of the city and is growing from those fleeing. Dayton officials remain flabbergasted by this phenomena, in spite of the great legacy that “Dayton is the hometown of the Wright Brothers, damn it.”
Even though Dayton boasts an extraordinarily impressive geographic location at the intersections of two of America’s main highways; I-70 and I-75, Dayton remains an economic wasteland avoided by fortune 500 businesses like a leprosy riddled whore from Chernobyl.
Dayton’s holds its association with aviation as its badge of honor and boasts Wright Patterson Air Force Base. Although the Air Force Base is not actually located in the city and can not count toward its population, residents delight in having their homes strafed, and tooth fillings knocked loose by huge C-5 Galaxy aircraft loaded with fully armed M1 Abrams Tanks that repeatedly practice take offs and landings with student pilots at the helm.
Few significant accomplishments have befallen the city since 1903, when the Wright Brothers took to flight, with the exception of Dayton being recognized as the venereal disease capitol of the United States in the 1970s and being home to Larry Flynt's, original pre-Hustler Magazine tabloid.
One recent significant accomplishment that Dayton claims was being home to the Dayton Peace Accords which brought and end to war in Bosnia. This event really didn't take place in Dayton but at the Air Force Base, and is located just a few miles away from Mound Laboratories that manufactured tritium triggers for nuclear weapons, or “peace keepers.”
History[edit]
Dayton was founded in 1796 on the banks of the Great Miami River which currently has a body of water about equal to the Los Angeles River but with more corpses found on an annual basis.
The city was incorporated in 1805 because lawyers needed something to do since there were few Native Americans left to “make treaties” with.
The Erie Canal opened in 1829 and German Catholic Puritans from Cincinnati began visiting Dayton to enjoy its already flourishing population of prostitutes.
Paul Lawrence Dunbar, an African American of slave decent, published a lovely book of poems in 1892. This was a major accomplishment that absolutely nobody noticed at the time. In fact, outside of Dayton nobody has heard of Dunbar. Today, Dayton has recognized, and honors Dunbar by dedicating one of the city's most blighted urban neighborhoods to his memory and has spent many millions of dollars to make sure it stays that way forever.
In 1903 Orville and Wilbur Wright designed and built the first successful powered aircraft in Dayton but took their invention to the windiest spot in the U.S. for its virgin flight. Therefore, Daytonians have a raging hard on for Kitty Hawk North Carolina and rebuke their “first in flight” license plates with furious loathing as “Dayton is the hometown of the Wright Brothers, damn it.”
In 1913 a miracle occurred. The Great Dayton Flood annihilated a huge portion of the city and suburbs began arising from the disaster. To make sure it would never happen again, the Miami Conservancy District was formed. They employed brilliant engineers who designed a series of dams so mighty that the city would not flood again. These magnificent dams also reduced the only reason the city was founded in the first place, a viable river system, to a series of creeks. City residents now hail the trickling excuse of a river and worship the legacy of the Great Flood to biblical proportions.
The Great Migration took place from the 1940s to around 1960 when Dayton was beseeched by tens of thousands of Kentuckians who “ran out of gas on the way to Detroit” seeking big dollar union jobs working in auto factories. Some refugee briers, who, unable to obtain one of those many factory jobs because they were too fucking stupid, became union delegates, prostitutes, or opened up a pizza parlor. This was Dayton’s economic heyday with hundreds of thousands of jobs in the city and pollution heavy in the stagnant Miami Valley air.
Dayton residency thrived until the 1970s when school busing cursed the highly segregated city. The City of Dayton, in an attempt to stop the bleeding of residents from heading to the suburbs, enacted a law that remained on the books until 2009 called; The Residency Rule. It required all city employees to live in the city limits. It was finally found unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court after many legal battles that the city fought valiantly with tax payer money. Today, practically all industry has disappeared from Dayton but it still enjoys living in the shadow of mighty crumbling factory buildings and of course its great legacy that “Dayton is the hometown of the Wright Brothers, damn it.”
Nicknames[edit]
Dayton's main nickname is the "Gem City". The origin of the name is not really known but it appears to stem either from a well-known racehorse named "Gem" that hailed from Dayton, or a renown syphilitic transvestite named Jim whose name became misspelled by a Dayton Daily News reporter, who are well known for misquoting everyone. One source appears to be an 1845 article in the Cincinnati Daily Chronicle newspaper, by an author which read; "In a small bend of the Great Miami River, with canals on the east and south, it can be fairly said, without infringing on the rights of others, that Dayton is the gem of all our interior towns. It possesses wealth, refinement, enterprise, and a beautiful country, beautifully developed." This Cincinnati author was know to frequent Dayton prostitutes and rumored to have been a regular customer of the aforementioned Jim.
Decorum of this publication prohibits listing of other city nicknames.
Political Structure[edit]
The Democratic Party is the only party in the City of Dayton. Antagonistically, in most Dayton suburbs Republicans hold majority.
Unlike other American cities, Dayton adopted a City Commission form of government that other cites have abandoned as experimental abject failure but Dayton continues to embrace it like a suckling to a sows teat. The mayor is merely the chairperson of the commission and has one vote on the commission just like the other commissioners. These are part-time jobs so this leaves running City Hall to the City Manager and hired minions whose pledge to self serving bureaucracy and the sanctity of their unnecessary jobs second to none. In addition, the city has adapted and financially supports a system of neighborhood politicians to insure the status quo. These are called Priority Boards. They assure zero neighborhood and economic development and they are a fertile breading ground for a new batch of City Commissioners to maintain the legacy that “Dayton is the hometown of the Wright Brothers, damn it.”
Food[edit]
Dayton residents only eat shitty local pizza and occasionally eat a vile concoction known as Cincinnati Chili. Nothing else is consumed except massive quantities of Mountain Dew soda pop.
Urban Design and Architecture[edit]
In accordance with Wright Brothers worship and the Great Dayton Flood, the city of Dayton likes to call itself “The City of Engineers.” Therefore, unlike many Midwestern U.S. cities of its age, Dayton has very broad and straight one-way downtown streets that are incredibly sterile and as whimsical as an economics lecture by Ben Stein. Gracing the streets of Dayton, are predominately vacant industrial buildings designed and constructed during the more prosperous era of 1920’s. See photos of early post WWII Berlin for reference. Mixed with these structures is the staid cast in place concrete architecture of Sinclair Community College that receives incredible tax subsides and takes up 50% of downtown. As a tribute to Dayton's heritage, the college insists the future of employment is massage therapy and it remains one of the most popular disciplines offered. The downtown skyline from I-75 reveals the county building and county jail near the college that features the identical concrete architecture welcoming all to the Gem City.
Whereas, it may be argued that Dayton has extremely few buildings of architectural significance, it does not think so. The City of Dayton possesses an ardent “Landmarks Commission” who've been appointed to maintain Dayton's great legacy of prostitutes and the Wright Brothers. The Landmarks Commission, has, upon insistence from the city's Priority Boards, designated a large percentage of city neighborhoods “historical districts.” Daytonians rejoice that these historical districts help maintain the high values of these 900 square foot crack whore flop houses.
The undisputed crowning jewel of Dayton architecture is the Arcade. The affluent 3rd street facade of this Flemish design is reminiscent of the red light district of Amsterdam and boasts a magnificent skylight dome to remind residents of the greatness of the Wright Brothers ability to escape the city, if only for a little while. Like most every other building in downtown Dayton, it is totally vacant.
Economy[edit]
Dayton enjoys many tourist dollars from Cincinnati residents who venture up to enjoy the nation's longest strip of go-go bars, pawn shops, and hotel rooms that rent by the hour. They are totally unavailable in puritan Cincinnati who also prohibits the sale of Hustler magazine which is, thankfully a boon for Dayton because all other industry is long gone.