And, on this same block was Dayton’s first gay bar, 24 W Second Street. The buildings are on the lower left hand corner.
Looking at a map of the block that had the Atlas Hotel and Ratterman Apartments. One can easily see this world of downtown apartments and single room occupancies giving cover to a gay demimonde. The most famous was the Arcade, but there were others, like these two on the Courthouse Square block (Atlas Hotel and Ratterman Apartments). Note, though, that a lot of these roomers were single woman, as there was a big rooming house or hotel for single Catholic country girls come to work in the city, in that quadrant northwest of Main Street.īut there were a lot of apartments and perhaps residential hotels downtown. What’s remarkable about this map is the concentrations, not mention it may not be counting one room and studio apartments, which would up the single population even further.Ī close-up with some references. Perhaps Dayton’s first "gayborhood (though it was shared by a lot of other folks). One can also see the SRO/roomer world as the gay habitat in John Rechy’s City of Night, recounting his days as an itinerant hustler.įor Dayton, the 1933 housing study helpfully identifies Dayton’s “Rooming House District” as the “1st Ward”’ AKA downtown and environs. The book also has a section on “Hobosexuality”, discussing how this single society gave some cover for homosexuals.Ī collection of character studies on Chicagos’ “Hobohemia” mentions gay, transvestite and lesbian establishments as part of Chicago’s Towertown, near Bughouse Square. Unattached men of whatever sexual orientation where considered deviant, as discussed in Todd DePastino’s “ Citizen Hobo (which discusses the moralistic tut-tutting about “Hotel Society” as well as the intinerant world). The landscaping in these pix is somewhat sparse, but by the 1920s and 30s it was probably much more lushĬooper Park might have been equivilant to Bughouse Square and Pershing Square as it (and the levee) was in an area of rooming houses and small apartments and cheap hotels, the other side of downtown Dayton. No supposition here as there is documenation of tis as a place of assignation.Ĭooper Park appeared in a collection of coming-out stories, where one of his authors mentioned his first encounter was arranged here, with a local educator (either a principle or school board member). It even made it to the internet era in the 1990s as there was the Levee BBS as an early online meeting & hook-up place for Datyon gay menĪnother cruising spot was Cooper Park. The Levee was a long-lasting institution for those wanting male/male sex. Older gay men tell me their first sexual encounters were sometimes in these old houses, by then turned into apartments In Ohio pioneer gay writer Edmund White mentions the old, pre-urban renewal Fountain Square as gay cruising spot and pick-up place in his early semi-autobigoraphical fictionĪnd for Dayton, it might have been this tree shaded promenade, which might have been more a meeting place rather than a sex space.Īnother thing that leads me to think this was the orginal Levee is that nearby Robert Boulevard was a place of residence for gay men. For the US it used to be ‘the rocks” on Lake Michigan and Bughouse Square in Chicago and Pershing Square in LA. Outdoor cruising spots have been pretty common in gay history: famous ones were Hempstead Heath in London, the Siegesaule (Victory Column) in the Berlin Tiergarten, and the square in front of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. This would be the levee wrapping around downtown from Wilkinson Street to the west and south down to 4th or 5th. …which appears in the New Dayton Illustrated I say this because the levee was the cruising spot in modern times, but not actually on the levee, which makes me think that this is a name carried down from an earlier location that’s long gone. I do suspect, and this is just speculation, that the levee was a place of assignation, a cruising spot. Unfortunately the records don’t list particulars for those cases. I don’t know if there were saloons or halls that catered to gays back before prohibition, but I do know that in the police records there was one or two arrests per year for ‘impersonating a female”.
Daytonology was visiting Sacramento during Pride Month, so a belated Gay Pride thread for Dayton, doing some Gay History (and, yes, there is such a thing)