Eastmont Parks: Fill & Download for Free

Ahh my home town - No matter how bad it gets, or how de-industrialized it may become and therefore fall further into blight, It’s home and there’s a special place in my heart for the Gem City! Understandably so, however, you should know where to visit and where to avoid…TL;DR: Most areas are pretty depressed, but city center, and most suburbs are OK - Most residential areas around the city center are pretty high-crime and the suburbs are all varying levels of niceness.If your concern is areas of crime, The following tool might help you decide:Dayton, OH crime rates and statisticsThere’s also a kind of “known good/bad list that every Daytonian (save for those who live in the worse areas) agrees on - Save for gentrification, local revitalization efforts, etc. Here are a run down of my known areas of town and which are nice/not nice/used to be nice/are nice:Downtown - Resurging with higher-end housing, and not a bad place to go at any time as long as you’re not looking to do much. Not “UNSAFE” per se, but most of these areas are not generally anywhere you would be uncomfortable during the day. The northern side of downtown (closer to Monument, the ballpark,or even Courthouse Square) are generally nicer public areas. South and West downtown can get a littler seedier.North - Old North Dayton is a deteriorating area that used to be a nice set of neighborhoods full of immigrant ethnic influence. Nowadays suburban sprawl and affordability have turned this into a pretty run down, rough neighborhood where robberys are common based on the family I have there and their experiences. Old Troy, Valley St, Leo St, Keowee, etc make for some rough outlines to this area… The former site of the Dayton Metro Housing Authority’s “Parkside Homes” projects around the McCooks region of OND is particularly blighted, as it was LITERALLY a ghetto for decades, and now is run amok with prostitution, hourly motels, and trucking depots (those last two propagate the first one IMHO).A little further up Keowee, known as North Dixie above the Great Miami River, is the Dixie Drive/Northridge region - This area is less run down but full of buy-here-pay-here car lots, some semi-suburban, but deteriorating neightborhoods behind the business lines, and a few select delicacies like the strip joint The Living Room as well as several less than savory local businesses, intermingled with long-time running staples of Dayton culture (I’m talking about YOU, Marions Piazza North Dixie!! - Make the trip and check out a MARIONS while you’re in Dayton!) The area offers a drive-in theatre,Going west of there, you’re going to head up North Main St (SR48) and Salem Ave (SR49) out of downtown… They sort of depart in waning parallel to the NW out of downtown and they go through similar transitions as they travel outward to their respective suburbs… between them for a good run of this first stretch is first the beautiful and significantly valuable Dayton Art Institute (one of the city’s crown jewels!) - Behind this complex of architectural beauty, including the Masonic Temple and the Greek Orthodox Church, all three creating a beautiful artistic shoreline for the river as it meanders across downtown. Behind them is the Grandview area, This include an older neighborhood(s) of homes and Grandview Hospital. One of the city’s GSW specialists :0Further north between Main and Salem is the Five Oaks neighborhood. This is a beautiful neighborhood of tudor-style homes, small parks and playgrounds, and its hallmark feature? Barricades on random blocks to prevent drive-off drug deals and shootings. Looking at parts of this neighborhood by day you’d never know you were in what was (in the 90s when I was growing up) one of the worst communities in the city! In my grandparent’s day it was high society and full of doctors and lawyer’s residences!On up the SR48/North Main corridor, there’s the Hillcrest area - Parts of it are “OK” but are mainly large once-suburban blocks of communities where crime and burglary are constantly on the rise, more and more homes are boarded up and businesses in the main corridors are constantly replaced by check cashing centers, Vapor/Smoke Shops, and the occasional pawn shop - This is also what is reflectant of the SR49 experience, except the Salem Ave business strip is disrupted by Good Samaritan Hospital and a few more abandoned/repurposed shopping centers and big-box retailers, some for lease (I’m sure a bargain) and some now houses of worship for questionable denominations. Further up, the Precious Blood and Maria Joseph center (former convent in Northwest Dayton) divide this area of town from the Trotwood suburbs (more on the suburbs if you would like to know more about the out-burbs of greater Dayton).SR48 becomes more desolate before it gets nicer. On up 48/Main you’ll encounter the Riverdale/Forest Park which is mostly repurposed chain restaurants, abandoned/available/repurposed retail centers, and empty lots where Forest Park Plaza once stood (I grew up 2 blocks from here in a decidedly different time). In the old days the area west of SR48 was a community built off of Philadelphia Dr which was full of beautiful larger homes and a prominent community. Its even home to a semi-famous mansion: Owned by the Jesse and Caryl D Philips foundation now… Known as the Philips Mansion locally. This area runs north to the Shiloh area, where things get marginally nicer north of the Riverdale region, into Randolph Township (Now incorporated into the Village of Clayton) and on to Englewood, which is a mid-income suburban community to the north, but east of Trotwood.Further east, the Old North Dayton area moves up toward Wright-Patterson AFB, but first passes through the Harshmanville area, between the City of Riverside and East Dayton… This is again a very low-middle income area where affordability is having its impact coupled with a lack of industry that would fuel income growth and gentrification. Not a BAD area, but the castoff of Air Force properties that are now subsidized apartment developments have driven some problems into the area. In the crime map above, you’ll see a dark blue/low crime area over the base - But around it a much higher crime rate… That's the Harshman area - The base itself is well policed and obviously secure so crimes are minimal, but the surrounding areas seem to make up for it.Riverside - This is now an incorporated suburb itself but too close to, and between “fingers”, of northeastern Dayton not to be included. This was formerly Mad River Township and runs along the Mad River as it leaves Dayton and heads to Huber Heights (a NE suburb of Dayton with similar middle income opportunity and even LESS industry driving incomes). I’d rate Riverside similarly to other parts of Riverdale or Hillcrest or Harshmanville. Depressed but not dangerous.East Dayton - From Harshmanville across the US35 corridor out to Beavercreek (a nice suburb, more on that later) and south to Kettering and Sugarcreek Twp, bordered by central Dayton to the west, has a large area, mostly composed of smaller, postwar and pre-war communities with some large, some small housing developments and lots of small, simple, but again, VERY middle-income business districts. There are rougher areas, but there are parts of East Dayton that can be QUITE NICE, particularly in areas bordering the Kettering and Oakwood suburbs - Most of this community is called Belmont, but there are other nicer (not newer or extravagant but low-crime) sub-communities in the Hearthstone and Eastmont.South Dayton - Heading south we have Kettering and Oakwood - Not much of South Dayton to speak of really - As soon as you hit the southern ends of Eastmont and Belmont in Dayton’s east side, you are in Kettering or Oakwood. Oakwood is the suburban-type community in Dayton’s south side, roughly bordered by The University of Dayton to the east and north, Patterson/Kettering Boulevard to the West, Patterson Road to the East (Belmonts border) and Dorothy Lane to the south (Kettering border). Growing up in Dayton Oakwood was one of the nicest communities you could live in. Its a McMansion community on its north end from the halcyon days of the National Cash Register company’s headquarters being in Dayton (adjacent to Oakwood’s lines) from its inception by John Patterson in the 19th century until the early 2000s when the company relocated to a tax shelter agreement in GA. (Daytons industrial losses are many and reflect the fact that VERY few areas are in fact “nice”…). John Patterson’s homestead is actually a museum and event venue there. Its a beautiful place for a small wedding - I’ve been to a few there.There are also a number of blocks of Oakwood to the south toward Kettering and Belmont that are similar in architecture and layout to East Dayton (Likely at some point there was less delineation between them AND the Belmont community) but the city of Oakwood has been strategic in maintaining good schools, park-like street landscapes, and lots of actual PARKS in the open spaces between home and business blocks. Due to the economic prosperity zones of inner-Dayton being limited, Oakwood is sort of a bastion of finer living, as is reflected by the sheer number of well-maintained and restored historic homes and landscapes. This is where you'll find a number of city employees, most of the few remaining white-collar folks that haven’t fled to the outer suburbs, etc. Living near the Dayton metro still, I find myself still enjoying visits to the Starbucks on SR48 here, or a shopping trip at the ultra-posh Dorothy Lane Market.Further to the west, Miami Township borders the outer suburbs of Moraine, West Carrollton, and the west side of Dayton. This is a small area of unincorporated land that is VERY industrialized and was home to much of General Motors operation with both the Truck and Bus group (where the TrailBlazer, Blazer, GMC Jimmy, Envoy, and Oldsmobile Bravada were made as well as some S-Series pickups, and a bunch of Yellow Buses. This was also the home of the Frigidaire Plant in Dayton several decades ago when Frigidaire was an actual company and not a licensed brand, and was wholly owned by the General Motors company. (Dads first job was wiping out new refrigerators as they came off the line at Frigidaire - Grandpa retired from GM Truck and Bus as a Tool Mechanic. These rust belt towns! What a sad story they are today. Just north of this area is UD Arena (the furthest west part of UDs campus, which comprises most of southern Dayton-proper) and Carillon Park - Named for the beautiful Deeds Carillon bell tower that adorns its center. This is actually a beautiful, scenic part of Dayton, with the Great Miami River flowing through and views of the rolling green hills of the tower park and the Dayton skyline - Which is more significant than most cities of her size.West Dayton - Several sub-communities make up this area, but there’s a large area, mostly west and southwest of town that’s industrial/residential mixed but highly dense residential with similar “row houses” to Old North Dayton’s, with similar decay. Demographically, its considered that African Americans comprise more of west Dayton than east, but Dayton is generally very diverse, but depressed in its lack of industry so there are limited areas of West Dayton that are any nicer than east. The only difference, while East Dayton is bordered by suburbs completely, West Dayton tends to fade-off rurally to the west, borders West Carrollton to the south, and Trotwood to the north. Much less development or population in the far west regions, due to the fact that Dayton’s only freeway by-pass, I-675, is only an Eastward bypass, and it wasn’t until 1997 that a free-way grade limited access highway connected US35 downtown to the upper-west-side of Dayton allowing access outside of secondary roads to the far reaches of the west side and Trotwood (The connector is an Alt-route SR49 connector that connects US35’s secondary terminus to SR49 in Trotwood with only several traffic signals, multi-lane access, and higher speed limits. This was likely too little, too late for West Dayton, as development had largely happened in suburbs east and south of town where today’s economic affluency is still concentrated.(Full disclosure, I live in Lebanon, which is considered a Dayton/Cincinnati Corridor city, south of Centerville which is an outer-Dayton suburb. I am a perpetuator of the sprawl I complain about!)