Downtown Columbus Blog Central

Columbus is a smart, young city, which is good news for downtown.  People in their 20s and 30s are very entrepreneurial, and they gravitate toward downtown and the central city in high numbers.  They will surely leave their mark in the next several years.

Nowhere is the strength of this demographic more evident than in the Columbus blogging world.  Whatever the city lacks in good physical space, it makes up in good cyber space.  Witness columbusunderground.com.

Now we have a new blog by Leigh Householder called “downtown snob, a blog about life well inside the Columbus city limits.”  Here is a woman who truly understands a city.  She feels smug about walking on downtown sidewalks and thinks the Wonderbread Factory in the Short North is sensuous.  She aspires to simple pleasures in the public realm and understands that shared space is the essence of a city experience.

In her most recent blog, she challenges downtowners to score how well they know “Columbus’ ultimate downtown cool kid” Walker Evans.  I thought about claiming to be Walker’s lover, but settled on taking the test and scoring a miserable 3.

I have two wishes for 2009 to share in this blog.  The second of my two wishes is for the retail cluster at Main and Third to draw lots of customers.  It is the most extensive retail cluster in an otherwise lackluster downtown and will soon include 15 diverse businesses.

This area has three key blocks: South Third from Rich to Main; Main from Third to Fourth; and Fourth from Main to Rich.  Within this block are three clothing stores (Cj Daniels, T Jazz and Romanoff’s Tuxedo Classics), Zettler Hardware, two salons (Chez D’or and Jacob Neal), Graham Office Supply, Hawk Galleries, Flowers on Orchard Lane, Abeto Tailors, and Grisimer Tires.  The Little Palace, a wonderful “hole in the wall” is located here, and Liz Lessner is opening a new restaurant, Dirty Franks.

Outbound commuters provide a huge untapped consumer market for this area.  Unfortunately, on-street parking is prohibited during rush hour.   This problem is a fatal one for retail and brings me to the first of my two wishes: that the City eliminate its ban on rush-hour parking so retailers have a fighting chance to succeed.

I wish downtown looked as good as it did 50 years ago.  Downtown may now have a more impressive skyline and an NHL arena, but it had a whole lot more happening on its streets in 1958.

Broad and High never closed.  The Deshler Hotel had a 24-hour, street-level Rexall Drug Store.  A block and a half north on High Street at Long stood a seven-story J.C. Penney and six-story Union Department Store (now the Lofts at 106 and Southeast Mental Health, respectively).  Downtown had hundreds of street-level retail stores, and thousands of people filled the sidewalks daily.

The Greyhound Bus Depot site held the Central Market, an anchor for a Market District that included butchers, fish markets, and other grocers that stretched for a full block in each direction.  The Columbus Transit Company carried four times as many people as its successor, COTA.  Downtown had very few surface parking lots.  Nearly 30,000 people lived there.

To paraphrase James Howard Kuntsler, America then had a collective stroke and traded downtown for Polaris Parkway.

On Sunday, I talked to a woman at a baby shower who lives in Westgate, a beautiful neighborhood in the Hilltop.  Westgate has been “discovered” by many gen-X-age professionals and has seen an impressive influx of investment.

Jackie Barton and I lamented the absence of retail services or even a neighborhood coffee house or pub along West Broad Street.  Westgate is not the only neighborhood in Columbus with significant discretionary income and few or no walkable places to spend it.

Are High Street, Campus, Clintonville and Grandview Avenue the only traditional retails strips Columbus residents can support?  Sections of Parsons Avenue have been struggling for years to establish a sustainable cluster, and other strips have barely a pulse.  Downtown has some embryonic clusters.

When and where should the next wave of independent retail business land?  Does Columbus have the entrepreneurial talent to replicate the Short North?

Dear Legislators:

Fifty years of public infrastructure investments and tax policy that reward unsustainable development at low densities is enough!  Stop bleeding your cities to subsidize cornfield construction.

People may want to live or open a business someplace with new roads, schools, sewers, water lines, sidewalks, gas lines, electric lines, parks and other services, but they should not expect someone else to pay for that privilege.  Likewise, if someone wants to build a big box store or live on a half acre or larger piece of property in a sprawling community, they should pay the full cost of delivering mail, distributing utilities, maintaining roadways, and other elevated expenses.

For all you fiscal conservatives entering the Statehouse, be smarter about how you dole out money.  There is a connection between how you spend money and land use.  Not seeing that connection is like not seeing the connection between sexual intercourse and pregnancy.  And the child support payments are a whole lot more expensive.

Things for which I am grateful this Thanksgiving.

1. The Short North, for offering residents as many amenities within walking distance as virtually any neighborhood in the country. Walking to the movies, North Market, High Street stores, or an NHL game is so much more satisfying than driving. Without the Short North, many people would not stay in Columbus.
2. Downtown-area residents, for being as smart and diverse as any comparable area in the United States.  You can actually live among people in Columbus who are not offended by crabgrass or same-sex couples kissing in public.
3. COTA, taxicabs, and car rental agencies, for offering transportation alternatives good enough so that you can easily live in the pre-1950 boundaries of Columbus without a personal vehicle, as long as you work there as well.
4. Don Casto, for giving us Broad & High.
5. Nationwide Insurance for giving us the Arena District.

What have I missed?

I grew up in Galion, OH, which then had a population of 13,000, in the 1950s and 1960s.  Downtown Galion offered everything a person needed in life.  It had a J.C. Penney, a Sears, two “dime” stores, independent hardware stores, a couple of IGAs, a bowling alley, a movie theatre, and a whole host of other independent retail stores, all located within walking distance of most residents.

The owners of the local stores ran the local United Way campaigns and supported Little League baseball teams and other community institutions.  Money spent on retail goods stayed in the community.  Customers rewarded their local stores with loyalty.

Consumer ethics seemed to disappear in the rush to shopping malls and big box stores.  People now chase prices or labels to the farthest corners of the region, no matter what their impact on the environment, wages, and their own communities.

Some consumer ethics remain.  The gay community, for example, shows remarkable loyalty to gay-owned businesses.  If retail businesses are to emerge in downtown Columbus, they could use some of that loyalty.

Anyone in search of a city could find one during the weekend of November 1!  On Friday, October 31, John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger held a rally at Nationwide Arena.  Just up High Street, one could spot Sarah Palin - actually several Sarah Palins of various genders - at the Short North HighBall Halloween Masquerade.

Saturday was no less intense.  The Blue Jackets hosted the Chicago Blackhawks at Nationwide Arena while the Short North hosted Gallery Hop.  Columbus could have used light rail to move the 30,000 or so visitors in and out of the area.

Speaking of mass transit, many COTA buses were standing room only on Sunday when people descended on Capitol Square to hear Barack Obama.  Seemingly, two or three bicycles were attached to every light post and street tree for many blocks around the Square.

The crowds made parking impossible, but nobody needed a car.  All weekend, taxicabs cruised downtown, the Arena District, and Short North.

For three days, one could see the future of Columbus.

The Short North has done it again.  Last weekend, it produced the HighBall Halloween Masquerade on High, a smashing success.  Like many of the successes in the Short North, it defied conventional wisdom, threw protocol to the wind, and thumbed its nose at the establishment.

We could all take a cue from the Short North.  What makes this neighborhood special is the opportunity it gives thousands of people to buy property, open a business, create an event, and make a statement.  Ironically, this bastion of liberals and free spirits is the place where free enterprise truly expresses itself in central Ohio.

Take a look at the things we care about in this community and many are authentic, grass roots, Columbus-based efforts that have happened incrementally over many years and through the effort of many people.  They are the antithesis of top-down decision-making, and they are the things we are most proud of.

I am sad to see that Giant Eagle might move from its current Victorian Village location at Buttles and Neil to a new location at Vine and Neil.  The move apparently allows Giant Eagle to increase its store size from large to huge in the never ending trend to make everything a big box store.

To the auto-addicted shopper, this move of four blocks might look insignificant.  But anyone who walks, bicycles or takes the bus to the grocery knows that this proposed location is a hostile place, wedged among a freeway, freeway ramp and busy streets.  And it is just far enough away from Victorian Village to make walking impractical.

Big box stores are incredibly anti-urban.  Their whole premise is to draw motorists from as big a geographical area as possible.  They require oceans of parking, which precludes integrating them into commercial strips like the Short North.  And they tend to be “category killers,” which makes walkable competitors unlikely.