Dayton Culture

Dayton’s cultural identity is bound up with engineering, and with two things that came out of its Black community.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Born in Dayton in 1872 to parents who had been enslaved, Dunbar became the first African American poet to achieve national standing, publishing six collections before his death at 33. He was a schoolfriend of Orville Wright, who printed his newspaper; his house is preserved as it was, with his books and his bicycle.

Dayton funk

In the 1970s the city produced an improbable concentration of funk bands — the Ohio Players, Zapp, Lakeside, Slave, Heatwave, Faze-O — several of them from the same high schools. Dayton has a fair claim to be the funk capital of that decade, and a downtown walk of fame marks it.

Aviation as identity

The Wright inheritance is not treated as a museum subject here; it is the city’s self-image, and the air force base makes it a working one.

Art and music

The Dayton Art Institute, a professional orchestra and ballet, and the Victoria Theatre downtown.

Museums as civic project

The Dayton Art Institute was built in 1930 with money from Julia Shaw Patterson Carnell and given to the city, and the air force museum grew from a collection of engineering samples kept on the base from 1923. Both reflect a local habit of institution-building that outlasted the companies that funded it.

Writing

Erma Bombeck, whose syndicated column on suburban family life ran for three decades and was written from a Dayton kitchen table, is commemorated by a biennial writers’ workshop at the University of Dayton that has become one of the better-known humour writing events in the country.