West Side

By 1900 Dayton’s West Side was a thriving neighborhood of working-class homes and small businesses, with some residents commuting to downtown Dayton by streetcar. Wilbur and Orville Wright lived and worked in this community, walking between their home on Hawthorne Street and their print shop in the Hoover Block, where at Wright and Wright, Job Printers on the second floor, they printed local circulars and published their own papers and newsletter, including the West Side News and Snap Shots. In 1892 the Wrights began a bicycle shop on West Third Street, and over the next 20 years in various West Side shops they designed and built bicycles and then airplanes. Even after building a grand home in nearby Oakwood, Orville still went daily to work in his West Side laboratory. Paul Laurence Dunbar achieved international fame as a poet, author, lyricist, and powerful reader of verse, set one novel and several short stories in fictional Ohio towns that resembled Dayton, returned to Dayton in 1903, purchased a comfortable brick home on the West Side, and died there of tuberculosis at age 33.

Dayton, Ohio · United States