Posted Mar 13, 2019, 5:48 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Apr 2017
Posts: 2,337
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Great photos! Your commentary about the blandness of Columbus is something that people from Cleveland and Cincinnati have been saying for years. Cbus has made GREAT strides in recent years, and the High Street corridor from Downtown to Ohio State's campus (roughly 3 miles) is probably the most vibrant continuous stretch of urbanity in the entire midwest outside of Chicago. German Village is sleepy but cute, and there are some great residential neighborhoods in the city and nearby suburbs like Bexley and Upper Arlington.
That said, Columbus still feels like a very generic, soulless city to me. Part of this might be because it's become a city of transplants, mostly from little melted down towns from across Ohio. I also think the unrelenting flatness of Columbus contributes to the feeling you've described. It's flat as a pancake and doesn't have a large body of water to orient around, unlike the other 2 C's in Ohio. The city also revolves around OSU a surprising amount for the size of the city, and sometimes feels like a college town that accidentally became a big city. It lacks much of the traditional culture and legacy institutions that one can find in Cleveland and Cincinnati, though that is improving a bit with the expansion of their small art museum, new veterans museum, COSI, great zoo, etc. It's also interesting to see no pictures of the capitol building in this thread...it's quite ugly as far as capitol buildings go. Having a grand capitol building ala Madison or Austin would be cool and would help the imageability of Cbus, but that is what it is. Columbus is young and the population is pretty open minded and liberal for the most part. They have a large gay population (one of the biggest Pride parades in the country), a large Somali population (second behind Minneapolis, I think), growing Hispanic and Asian communities, and the fact that it's kind of a blank slate is appealing to a lot of people. Cincinnati has character in spades, but can be insular and hard to break in, as locals can be kind of stand-offish and skeptical of outsiders. Columbus doesn't have any of that baggage, and that's a good thing. I think Cbus will develop more of its own vibe and culture in coming years, as its urban neighborhoods have a chance to get more established and lived in. The futre is bright for Columbus, I think! Thanks for sharing your photos!
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