Overall there is not a whole lot that remains intact in the “Midtown” area of Dayton located immediately south of the Central Business District.
The immense footprint of US-35 hollowed out much of the neighborhood and the commercial buildings on Main, Warren and other streets, which I explored in my article about the nice business structures demolished at Main and Franklin in just the last decade.
Here the west of Main was traditionally a center of industrial development located near Union Station. Some of the most prominent structures, like the Gothic Medieval “Longworth Castle” steam plant razed in 2005, are long gone.
Others, like the former Terminal Storage “Ice House” building that was reborn as “Dayton Frozen Solutions” as recently as 2018, still stands but awaits its demolition by Chaminade-Julienne HS.
There are, however, a couple of old buildings remaining in a relatively unlikely spot, the scrap yards of A&B Iron and Metal.
In the photo below you can see the building at the NW corner of Longworth and Washington
And compare to the same view from the early 1900s.
In those days the facility was The People’s Fuel Co, which extended to both sides of Washington Street.
They had the largest goal yards in Dayton, at the time “situated right along the Pennsylvania railroad and equipped with every modern device for the economical and efficient handling of fuel.”
The coal yards were “filled at all times with the best of coal from the country’s leading mines, and the famous Koppers Miami Coke (seen on the sign in the picture), which is being used more and more by careful households and by industries.”
Individuals could place an order and a driver would swiftly weigh and load the coal onto his truck and deliver it to their home, depositing it directly into their coal bins at a time when it was common to simply dump it on the street (DDN 5/10/30).
The company dates back to 1886 when Mr. W. P. Rice entered the coal mining business, and it entered the retail side of the business years later in 1915 with Rice and his three sons at the helm. (DDN 10/10/24)
The single-story office building in the images above at the NW corner can be seen on the following map. Note the many homes that were located immediately east of Longworth.
The two-story building found today at the SW corner of Longworth and Washington appears to have been built later than this map, as the building footprints have changed:
It can be seen in this 1955 map:
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