For as long as I’ve lived here, Columbus, Ohio has wrestled with its cultural identity.
For one thing, our arts and entertainment establishments don’t have the breadth of history that those in Cincinnati or Cleveland do. We don’t have, say, an Alan Freed to help us claim relevance on the national landscape, a Marge Schott to bring us infamy or quite as many philanthropists dumping money into our fine arts institutions.
We’ve suffered through extended bouts of pro sports team envy, taken our lesser, successful pro sports teams for granted and either adored or felt dogged by the permeating culture of our Big 10 football team. We’ve trained a telescope on Austin, Texas — another massive-university capital city with big-time college sports — and tried to glean something about how it manages to be the kind of magnet for creative individuals and companies that we would like to be.
Columbus has yet to embrace its inner funkiness or the more colorful points in its history. It also has an unfortunate tendency to reject or replace the authentic in favor of things that are marketing-driven… but that seems to be a plague everywhere in this economy, and these are rants for another day.
What we do have is a city that lacks some of the built-in charm of those with a more cohesive skyline and compact borders, but is extremely livable in many respects. A lot of development has gone into our parks and bikeways, resources like our library system are top-notch and our warm months are packed with free, worthwhile cultural events. These days, there is also an extraordinary amount of interest in and conversation about how the urban center can, could or should develop.
Looking back through my files to the days when local alternative weekly newspapers did things like print 1,000+ word pieces that weren’t even the cover story, I recently unearthed an interview I did with James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere. A passionate and somewhat accidental civic guru, he visited Columbus in 1995 to rap us upside our collective head about suburban blight and the potential of our urban community. He was working on his sequel, Home From Nowhere, which included sections about Columbus as a representation of both the best and worst of the urban American landscape.
It’s interesting to look back and see what he thought of the city then. I think his books, and this interview have been a reference point in terms of how I look at Columbus ever since. His observations about various neighborhoods and structures were prescient.
What seems dated about the story, though, is that it has a lot of language about the Internet’s potential as a greater isolator. It seems funny, given the fact that in 2009, it’s really thanks to web sites like Columbus Underground that there is something closer to the New Urbanist movement that Kunstler was hoping for in existence today.
Read “Suburbia Bites” here.
