A Lost Building at 1014/1016 W Third St

Sometimes when I’m doing research on a particular Dayton site I come across something totally unrelated that piques my interest.

And rather than consider it an unwelcome distraction or use it as an opportunity to go completely down a rabbit hole and forget what I was doing, I’ll often set aside a little time to explore it either then or at a future date. (Although the rabbit hole thing does happen at times of course!) This article is the result of one of those minor detours.

West Third Street in Wright Dunbar is one of the best-preserved business districts in Dayton, but there are a few gaps from buildings that were lost over the years.

The most prominent building no longer standing is the Wright Brothers’ Cycle Shop where they first worked on their airplane (1127 West Third Street), which was moved to Greenfield Village in Dearborn, MI.

Most of the other losses, however, lack this type of significance and thus little is known about them or what exactly they looked like. One of these was located at 1014/1016 West Third.

In this case, however, there is an image of the building in an 1888 advertisement listing it for sale, which I came across while researching something else:

As stated in the ad you can see this was a mixed-use building with retail on the ground floor and apartments above. As of the 1920s, 1014 W Third St. was the site of the West Side Real Estate Co., which is interesting given that the building next door, 1024 W Third, is being used as a real estate office today.

We can also check old maps to see details of lost buildings as well as how they related to the rest of the blocks they stood on. The map below shows the 1014/16 building circled alongside what stood nearby.

And here we can see the 1000 block of West Third as it looks today, with the gaps in between the structures that do survive.

Just across the street from here, the Gem City Ice Cream Building, another structure with Wright Brothers connections, was recently demolished, but the site is planned to become new three-story brick townhomes.