The Ohio State University District: A Neighborhood History

emilyfoster@sbcglobal.net.

Introduction

THE UNIVERSITY DISTRICT

A CENTURY OF CHANGE AND CHALLENGE

This book grew out of two oral history projects. The first one, in the 1970s, focused on a handful of elderly neighbors who shared memories of life in the University District (UD) at the beginning of the twentieth century. It resulted in a much-viewed slide show called Lest We Forget (since expanded and preserved as Where Town Meets Gown on DVD). The second project was a collaboration between the University District Organization’s archive committee (History Shared, History Saved) and the Ohio State University Center for Folklore Studies. Students in the university’s oral history classes interviewed more than one hundred people who lived and/or worked in the neighborhoods around The Ohio State University. The stories in this book come from both of those collections. Other neighbors added more stories, and a few are from the public record.

As a collection, they describe more than a century of life in Ohio’s most densely populated urban area, the University District adjoining Ohio State. With more than fifty-seven thousand students on its Columbus campus, Ohio State is often referred to as a city within a city. The sprawling University District that grew up on three sides of the university includes areas with differing demographics, histories and architectural styles. But they have one thing in common: each is affected by its proximity to the university.

South of campus, the UD extends to Fifth Avenue and includes the stately brick homes on Dennison Place (the Circles), the Peach District just north of that, the eclectic NECKO area in the western half and the working-class Weinland Park to the east of High Street. The contrast between the east, just now undergoing major redevelopment, and the already-gentrified western portion paints a clear picture of the socioeconomic diversity of the UD. Directly east of campus is the core student neighborhood, where many fraternity and sorority houses and multiparty rentals occupy what were once upper-middle-class residences. North of Lane Avenue, the Tuttle Park area west of High Street extending to the Olentangy River includes the Pavey developments on High and the neighborhood around West Patterson and West Oakland described by Ann Silverio in her memoir.

The University District is bounded by the Olentangy River, the Conrail tracks, Glen Echo Ravine and Fifth Avenue. From the UDO archive.

The UD has more designated historic neighborhoods than any other area of Columbus. Two of them, Indianola Forest and Iuka Ravine, both developed in the teens of the twentieth century, lie east of campus. The shady ravine with mature trees, brick streets and stone bridges has been a favorite walking and gawking place for generations. It still is lined with many large owner-occupied homes. The Northwood Park historic district north of campus features mainly Foursquare brick houses with big front porches and prides itself on its attractive street-corner flowerpots. Glen Echo, the farthest north neighborhood in the UD, is a cozy place of Arts and Crafts bungalows and frame houses, bordered by the Glen Echo Ravine that curves east down to High Street.

Once a distinct town, Old North Columbus still has what looks like a downtown shopping strip on both sides of High Street south of Dodridge. This area has been recognized by the city with arches over the street. At its northern border, originally the end of the streetcar line, Olentangy Park lay along the Olentangy River, where families enjoyed boating, picnicking, swimming in a large pool and riding Loop-the-Loop and Shoot-the-Chutes. Our stories recall days at the park as well as the eccentric lives of James Dusenbury, one of Olentangy Park’s owners, and his family, who lived in Indianola Forest.

The northern reaches of the University District include a historic neighborhood known as Glen Echo, which is made up of Arts and Crafts houses with boulevard gardens. From the collection of Bob Singleton.

The University District is the location of Franklin County’s oldest house, the log cabin built in 1804 by David Beers. It was moved from its original location farther north off High Street to where it now stands on East Norwich Avenue. Early settlers and farmers, who left their names on streets such as Neil, Medary, Woodruff and others, long predated the suburbanization of the University District reflected in these pages.

Ohio State opened in 1870 on what was then the Neil farm by the Olentangy River north of Columbus proper. By the time our stories begin at the turn of the twentieth century, the campus was still a sylvan setting in a rapidly developing suburb. As streetcar neighborhoods sprang up south and east of the university, they surrounded a campus that was largely unbuilt.

For people who lived nearby, Ohio State was a sort of public park. Storytellers remember idyllic picnics and rambles among the wildflowers in the University Woods and drinking fresh water from a spring that feeds Mirror Lake. In the Ohio State University Monthly for July 1922, the area around the lake was called the Hollow. The all-female Browning Dramatic Society, founded in 1882, performed Shakespeare plays annually before commencement in the natural amphitheater in the Hollow. It is now called the Browning Amphitheater by Mirror Lake.

If Ohio State is a city within a city, it was a small town in the early years of the twentieth century. Lucille Rapp, who graduated in 1925, said there were only about ten thousand students when she was enrolled there. When Cora Evans was at Ohio State in the early years of the century, President William Oxley Thompson lived in a house at Fifteenth and High where Mershon Auditorium stands today.

Many Ohio State faculty members naturally gravitated to the rapidly developing neighborhoods adjacent to campus. Some left their names on campus buildings. The Arps family lived at 216 East Lane Avenue. The McCrackens lived at 8 West Woodruff, not far from the Woodruff family. The McPhersons lived at 198 East Sixteenth Avenue, and the Rightmires lived on Nineteenth Avenue on the alley just west of Summit Street. McPherson was a professor of chemistry, and George Washington Rightmire was dean of the College of Law and, briefly, president of the university. Fifteenth Avenue was the site of the homes of James E. Hagerty (professor of economics and sociology) at 94 East Fifteenth and Samuel C. Derby (professor of Latin language and literature) across the street at 93 East Fifteenth.

The undeveloped area along West Woodruff Avenue east of Neil was known as the University Woods, where neighbors walked and picked wildflowers. From the Ohio State University archive.

In the late ’20s, the Charles C. McCrackens at 172 East Lane housed a young Mississippi soprano and Ohio State student, Ruby Elzy, who later became famous for creating the role of Serena in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Charles Sumner Plumb at 1980 Indianola was a pioneer in animal husbandry and taught at Ohio State from 1902 to 1939. Homer C. Price, dean of the College of Agriculture, built a house at 1986 Indianola. The Rosser Bohannans—he was professor of mathematics—lived at 1857 Indianola. Carl E. Steeb, secretary to the board of trustees and bursar, and his wife lived in stately splendor at 1956 Iuka.

Architect and professor Charles St. John Chubb built 237 East Seventeenth in 1915; his wife, Mary Bohannon Chubb, was remembered by Cora Evans as one of the first ladies on the campus and an exceptional dramatic talent. After Mary Chubb died in 1961, the county purchased the house, which served for a time in the 1970s as the Open Door Clinic.

For these faculty neighbors and their families, the campus was the source of regular entertainment, including weekly Maids’ Night Out dinners at the faculty club on the second floor of Bricker Hall until the new faculty club building opened on the Oval in 1939. Concerts and other entertainment were available at the chapel-auditorium in old University Hall. A 1910 Makio reports that twilight concerts were given on the first Friday in each month from October to April, inclusive. The best musical talent in the country is secured for these concerts. One headlined baritone Oley Speaks, a local boy who became a successful performer and wrote the popular songs Sylvia and On the Road to Mandalay.

Designed and built by Ohio State architecture professor Charles St. John Chubb, this house at 237 East Seventeenth later became the Open Door free clinic. From the UDO archive.

The summer term featured a lecture series by faculty on subjects of popular and general interest that was free and open to the public. In 1909, Professor Hagerty lectured on the Social Life of the Kentucky Mountaineers, Professor Frank Sanborn of industrial arts on the Boy Problem and Professor McPherson on the Question of Pure Foods.

Strollers, the university student acting troupe, also used University Hall. In the 1929 season, audiences enjoyed a lively Scarlet Mask performance of Oceans of Love with student actor Milton Caniff. According to the Makio, Caniff cavorts about the stage [and] improvises at will. Of course, Caniff went on to much greater fame as the cartoonist who created Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. The auditorium disappeared when the old University Hall was demolished in 1971.

Mershon Auditorium, which opened in 1958, has attracted the community to world-class performances from the likes of dancers Mikhail Baryshnikov and Savion Glover, acclaimed classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz (see Lee Brown’s story about his mad rush to this concert) and even the Grateful Dead in 1976. Many people can remember the marathon five-hour performance of Phillip Glass’s Music in 12 Parts in the late 1980s. Staggering out near midnight, provost Myles Brand brought laughs when he cried, Encore, encore! The auditorium also entertained the public for years with travelogues about exotic places that middle-class Americans were just beginning to visit as tourists.

When the Drake Union opened in 1972–73, the Thurber Theater featured Jabberwock by Ohio State alum Jerome Lawrence and his collaborator, Robert E. Lee, who drew on the writings of another alum, James Thurber. The Thurber Theater and the smaller Stadium II have drawn off-campus audiences to numerous ambitious productions of works not often performed outside an academic environment.

Few student arts groups made as big an impression on the cultural life of Columbus as the Ohio State University Dance Company, which has always had a strong community following. Before there was a professional dance company in the city, the crowds flocked to these top-notch university performances.

During the 1970s, the Ohio Union was home to the Creative Arts Program, where lifelong learners could sign up for non-degree classes for a small fee. The offerings were as eclectic and alternative as the members of the public who enjoyed them.

Hardly a week goes by without an event, an exhibition or an activity available to the larger community. Buckeye sporting events go without saying. Ever since the very first football players butted padded heads on a field at Woodruff and High, Ohio State has been mad about football. Well, except for some. As Harriet Hedrick remembered, even though her family in their home on West Norwich Avenue could hear the cheers from the field on High Street, they never went to the games.

Today the ’Shoe, built in 1922, packs in more than one hundred thousand fans on fall Saturdays. The stadium has also provided a unique venue for acts that attract fans by the tens of thousands, such as Pink Floyd in 1988 and 1994 (said to be the city’s biggest ever concert), Genesis in 1992, Elton John and Billy Joel in 1994, U2 and the Rolling Stones in 1997 and Metallica in 2003.

Members of the public who don’t shell out for tickets can enjoy the all-brass marching band in rehearsal before games. At popular skull sessions, the seating is first come, first served. We include stories about neighbors who walk to the skull sessions, hear the big concerts from their porches and earn some pocket money selling homemade buckeye necklaces to fans.

In the arts, Ohio State has always drawn top exhibiters and performers. The Wexner Center for the Arts, in an attractive building designed by architect Peter Eisenman, not only shows contemporary art by