By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer

West End Community Council President Dale Mallory (left) and Omar Childress walk along Dayton Street. (Michael E. Keating photos) | ZOOM |

From a distance, a place like Cincinnati's West End might seem like hell on earth.

Monday, a 17-year-old girl, holding a baby in her arms, was shot to death. She was riding in a car, in broad daylight. Last week, an undercover police officer was stabbed and another man was beaten to death on the street.

All in one troubled part of town.

But for some, this is home.

For Dale Mallory, president of the West End Community Council, it is the place where his parents and grandparents lived, work-ed, raised families, went to church, mourned death and celebrated life.

"It is the only home I have ever known," said Mr. Mallory, standing on a corner at Dayton and Baymiller streets. A block away in one direction is the house he was raised in, a block in the other direction is the house he now owns.

"It is home, and it is worth saving."

Youngsters gather at Dayton Street and Freeman Avenue in the West End on Tuesday after school. | ZOOM |

From the brick Civil War-era house he restored on the 900 block of Dayton Street, the heart of the West End's historic district, Mr. Mallory has launched a crusade to push the criminals out of the neighborhood and spark the kind of development he hopes will restore the neighborhood to a glory it has not seen in more than 100 years.

He is, perhaps, the man destined to do it, given his family's history in the neighborhood. His father, former Ohio House Majority Leader William Mallory Sr., lives just down the street; so, too, does his brother, state Sen. Mark Mallory.

Mr. Mallory remembers a time, not so long ago, when the West End was a neighborhood that had different problems. Bulldozers pushed aside whole streets of homes to make way for low-income projects and displaced neighbors.

Still, it was a place where people felt safe.

"Right down there, down by that white Cadillac, that's where I was hit by a car when I was a kid," Mr. Mallory said, pointing down Baymiller Street. "I was in the hospital from May to July. Had to learn to walk again.

"I was hit by a car; and that was my fault because I walked out in the street. But I would never have been shot in the street. I was never scared."

William Mallory Sr., who was a young legislator in 1969 when he moved his family from Park Town cooperative housing at the other end of Linn Street to Dayton Street, has been in the neighborhood since the late 1920s.

"There was violence when I was a kid," the elder Mr. Mallory said. "But I've never seen anything like this."

But to understand what is happening in the West End now, William Mallory said, "you must understand what has happened in the past."

Perhaps no other neighborhood in Cincinnati has undergone as dramatic and, often, traumatic series of changes as the West End.

The West End was, in the mid-to-late 19th century, the home of many of the city's elite, and a center of social and sporting life.

Dayton Street, with its blocks of stately Victorian homes dripping in gingerbread trimmings, was known as Millionaires' Row. But, even then, amid the opulence, was a reminder that the West End, close by the Mill Creek, had a grittier side as well - the houses' wrought-iron fences and gates, many of them still there, were installed mainly to keep the hogs being driven up the street to nearby slaughterhouses from wandering into the wealthy folks' yards.

By the early 1960s, the rich were long gone from Dayton Street and many of the old houses had fallen into disrepair. In 1964, three blocks of old homes on Dayton Street were declared a historic district to prevent their demolition. The Miami Purchase Association ended up buying many of them, rehabbing some and selling the rest to those who wanted to restore the old homes.

But unlike Dayton Street, which fell on hard times and rose again, most of the West End just kept falling.

The change came around the turn of the 20th century.

Overcrowded houses bunched too closely together gave way to flats and tenements owned by absentee landlords. By 1900, most of the neighborhood's middle-class families were gone - off to Price Hill, mostly - and the West End degenerated into an urban slum.

In the early 20th century, it became the stopping-off point for thousands of African-Americans who came from the South in search of factory jobs. By 1925, 80 percent of the city's blacks lived there.

Starting in the 1930s, block after block of dilapidated housing the West End east of Union Terminal was razed to make way for the Laurel Homes and Lincoln Court subsidized housing projects. But only about 10 percent of the West End families displaced by the construction met the income and employment qualifications to live there.

In the 1950s, more land was cleared for housing projects and another 27,000 people - nearly all of them black - were displaced with nowhere to go, creating tension and frustration among black Cincinnatians that many say has never faded.

"The story of the West End is that every time the people here have tried to organize themselves and put the social structure in place to have a real neighborhood, they get dispersed," William Mallory said.

The result has been a neighborhood where the people have, over the decades, been forced to leave.

In 1960, the West End had about 42,000 residents. Now, there are about 10,500, most of them poor and black.

Even Dayton Street, with its rows of restored 19th-century houses, is dotted with buildings that are boarded up, their lots strewn with litter.

"There used to be big families living here in homes they took care of, yards they mowed, sidewalks they'd sweep,'' Dale Mallory said. "Now, you have a lot of absentee landlords not taking care of properties. You have people moving in and out of the neighborhood all the time. What we need here is some stability."

But Dale Mallory knows that the developers won't come until the crime problem is solved.

That is why the West End Community Council is trying to get $10,000 from the city to pay for private security patrols in the neighborhood.

"You see these kids hanging out on streets corners doing stuff they shouldn't be doing and you hear them yell, `Po-po' as a warning when they spot a police officer coming," he said. "But if we have a private security guard right here on this corner, there won't be time to yell `Po-po.' Po-po will be there."