For the past several years, I’ve been running Dayton Vistas, a website and social media project dedicated to the history, architecture, and urban redevelopment stories of Dayton, Ohio.
That started as a way to share my research from my book Lost Dayton, Ohio, but it grew into a deeper look into the city and its buildings through short and longform videos, a podcast, and more.
Along the way, people would reach out and ask: do you do this for other cities?
My answer was always “not yet.” But the question stayed with me.
I’m a librarian by profession, which means I’m wired to find connections, dig into archives, and follow a research thread wherever it leads.
I’ve spent years leading walking tours of downtown Dayton, standing on street corners explaining what used to be there and what replaced it — and watching people’s faces change when they realize how much history is hiding in plain sight around them. That moment of recognition, when something familiar suddenly becomes new again, never gets old to me.
What I’ve come to understand through all of that is that Dayton’s story isn’t unique. Every American city has its version of the neighborhood that was cleared for a highway. Every city has the theater that didn’t survive the 1970s, the department store that anchored downtown for a century before it didn’t, the industrial building that sat empty for decades until someone figured out what to do with it. And every city has the places that somehow survived, the businesses and buildings that outlasted everything around them and still show up every day.
I started Lost Urban Vistas because I wanted to find those stories beyond Dayton. Not just to catalog loss, but to understand patterns — how American cities grew, how they were remade, often in ways that are still not fully reckoned with, and how some of them are finding their way forward.
I’m genuinely curious about the differences and the similarities: why some cities preserved their architectural heritage and others didn’t, what survives in unexpected places, what gets lost even when people tried to save it.
I don’t have all the answers. But I have a librarian’s instinct for research, a walker’s eye for what’s still standing, and years of practice telling these stories in a way that, I hope, makes them matter to people who never thought they cared about urban history.
This is the next chapter of that project. I’m glad you’re here!
— Andrew Walsh
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