Dayton again, undoubtedly, will showits resilience

I left Dayton 42 years ago, and since then I have lived around the world, but I still consider it my hometown. The city remains in my mind as a place that basked in the realization of America’s postwar boom and then endured and survived difficult down times, a symbol of grit, a beacon of perseverance. It’s perhaps the ultimate Rust Belt factory city that hasn’t tried to scrape away all of its rust.

So the shooting early last Sunday morning that killed nine people and injured dozens (the gunman was also killed by police) is particularly painful for those of us who love Dayton — yet another difficulty for the city to endure.

Perhaps most piercing is that the shooting occurred in the Oregon District, which has come to be known as the soul of a city that has lost much of its population over the last few decades. The Oregon District, sprinkled with quaint 19th-century homes and brick streets, is a charming hodgepodge of coffee shops, art galleries, nightclubs and specialty stores.

The district borders on some more blighted areas of abandoned homes and businesses — it’s an evolving map of Dayton’s highs and lows. Mansions built by wealthy industrialists more than a century ago are now dream homes that would cost millions of dollars in other cities. Not far away, young couples have bought starter homes — fixer-uppers that may be next door to an abandoned house waiting to be scooped up — that are a third of the price of those with manicured lawns and somewhat sterile charm in the nearby suburbs of Oakwood and Kettering.

The Oregon District evokes the faded grandeur of Dayton in its manufacturing heyday from the 1880s to the 1940s, before the suburbs came calling.

This epicenter of Dayton reflects the ethnic and economic diversity of the city with its restaurants and nightclubs, such as Ned Peppers, near where the lone gunman, who was carrying a .223-caliber gun with a high-capacity magazine, opened fire. He has been identified as Connor Betts, 24, though his motive is still unknown. But less than 24 hours after a shooting in El Paso in which the suspect may have posted online an anti-immigration manifesto, the Dayton killings are even more chilling. My hometown, long a destination for people seeking a better life, has seen a steady influx of immigrants in recent years.

Dayton has also had the recent distinction of being among the worst-hit Ameri

Perhapsmost piercing is that the shooting occurred in theOregonDistrict, which has come to be known as the soul of a city that has lostmuch of its population over the last fewdecades.

can cities in the opioid crisis, yet it has bounced back with a series of successful initiatives. It got some national attention recently when businesses and residents united against a march by the Ku Klux Klan in May. And a nearly flat population decline after years of a serious population exodus has given the city a sense of pride.

It’s that kind of hope I remember from the Dayton of my youth, when it was a postwar boomtown with factories that not only hummed but virtually rattled. The city flourished mostly on the power of National Cash Register, which built nearly every rock-solid steel cash register on Earth starting in the 1880s.

Dayton has always been known as a city of invention and individualism. The Wright brothers are from here — Daytonians say they only went to North Carolina to test their airplanes because that state had better wind — and the bicycle shop where they began their love of machinery and movement is re-created at the Wright Brothers National Museum in Carillon Historical Park. I’ve always thought the city’s most resilient example of survival is the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, one of the oldest black dance companies in America, established in 1968 by a young black woman who was secretly taught dance by two white sisters in then-segregated Dayton.

The city of my youth, Dayton in its prime, was built on the hopes of the tens of thousands of people who fled Appalachia after World War II for the unionized factories of National Cash Register, General Motors, Frigidaire and Chrysler. My parents were among them, and I think of them as almost refugees from the hills of Kentucky, who moved to Dayton in the 1950s from the sprawling homesteads of tobacco country for bigger lives in smaller houses. The coal mines and tobacco farms of Kentucky could never promise what Dayton could.

My family left the area when I was 14 for the sunshine and opportunity of New Mexico in the late ’70s. We were part of a mass exodus as NCR and the other big local employers laid off thousands of workers and block after block of factories were leveled or abandoned.

But I’ve still claimed Dayton as my spiritual home because of that life-altering postwar promise that came true for my parents. As the city has evolved, it’s become more racially diverse, and neighborhoods like the Oregon District have provided promise to new generations of refugees from all over the world, if not all across rural Ohio and even still the back roads of Appalachia.

The city has always struck me as the embodiment of what separates my middle-class life now from Depression-era Appalachia that would have defined my parents’ future. It was a shining city on the hill. Dayton has to be that again for the future. I’ve visited many times over the last 40-plus years and felt the pull of a city that needs immigrants — maybe even those of us who left — to pull it toward the future. It needs places like the Oregon District to bring us all together. Economic downturns, the opioid crises and gunmen can’t take that away.

David Belcher is an editorand writer for theNewYorkTimes.