How Dayton's First Fortunes Built a Boulevard of Mansions and Lost All But One: West First

The finest street in Dayton, Ohio was once a boulevard of mansions. Today one house is left standing on it, and it just sold for eighty two thousand dollars. West First Street was Dayton's Park Avenue, where the city's founding fortunes built their homes in the eighteen hundreds, the merchants and the manufacturers and the men whose names still sit on Dayton institutions. Today that stretch is office towers, a hotel, a parking garage, and one old brick house. This is how a whole boulevard of mansions came down to a single survivor. It runs from the founding families who built the street, through the Great Dayton Flood of nineteen thirteen that drove the wealthy out of downtown for good, and the four decades of demolition that followed, one mansion traded for a parking lot or a gas station at a time. We follow Robert Steele, the father of Dayton's public schools, and what happened to his house and to the school that carried his name, and we end on the last mansion standing on West First and what it sold for in twenty twenty five. If you know downtown Dayton, or you have driven past that lone old house on West First and wondered how it survived, this is the whole story of the street around it. WATCH NEXT → How Columbus's Old Money Built a Village of Mansions and Then Walled Itself In: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bu-ojLcj5o SUBSCRIBE → https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvl5qAsaN6y5XKRcDk3cQYg?sub_confirmation=1 If your family is from Dayton, do you remember any of these First Street houses before they came down? Tell me below. CHAPTERS: added after render (needs the finished video's timestamps) Historical and informational only. Locations are real; some footage is illustrative. #Dayton #OhioHistory #DaytonOhio