DAYTON, Ohio — Some locals are looking forward to the end of the 70th NATO Parliamentary Assembly and the fencing blocking the nearly 70 acres of downtown Dayton coming down.
“It’s impacting us a great deal,” Verlie Parish said. “We can’t have transportation come and pick us up at the building.”
That’s because feet from his front door sits a wall of metal fencing.
“Make you feel like you’re locked up,” he said. “Which technically, we are.”
Parish lives at Biltmore Towers, a senior living community on the corner of North Main and East First, and right smack dab on the border of the restricted area for NATO village.
“They told us cancel our doctor’s appointments, cancel medication deliver and cancel Meals on Wheels for a week,” he said.
And while he said he was warned about the inconvenience, sometimes things just pop up, which makes getting prescriptions or other needs extra difficult for Parish, who uses a wheelchair.
His hometown is playing host to the NATO conference as a nod to the Dayton Accords signed in 1995 to end the Bosnian War.
“I think that’s a good thing, you know, just celebrating that 30-year anniversary,” Parish said. “I think that’s cool. You know, I really do. It’s just this isn’t cool, you know?“
The fencing stops just blocks from the 2nd Street Market, where small businesses like Lucy’s Pastry Palace prepared for a boost in business from the hundreds of NATO visitors.
“Just to make sure when they come here, they don’t get disappointed,” Dragan Cerovcevic said while manning his wife’s bake shop. “So we did bake some more. Actually, my wife is home baking.”
He said the market hoped to attract some attention from the delegations by offering gift cards to the first 25 guests who showed their NATO badges, but by the end of Friday, there were no takers.
“Not even one yet,” Cerovcevic said. “I just spoke to the management. They said not even one person. I’m sure that was kind of disappointing.”
He was born and raised in Yugoslavia and remembers the Bosnian War first-hand, moving to Dayton five years ago to be closer to grandkids.
“When I came here, I remembered the Dayton Accords,” he said. “I remembered everything about it. I was actually almost living through it, through the news and everything else. But, I when I came to Dayton, it was when back on my mind.
Thankful for the peace the city helped bring.
“It was really nice to see that actually, they stopped the war,” Cerovcevic said. “So they were not fighting, not killing each other. So that was a good thing that happened.”
As he stays optimistic about what the future holds for his family and their business.
“We never give up hope,” he said. “I mean, that’s one thing that nobody can take away from us, right?“