In March I made a quick trip to Columbus. Here are the pictures.
Columbus is my personal mental tipping point for a "good city". It has a sort of OK but not great downtown, and a collection of pretty good central city neighborhoods. It's far from the best, but just as far from the worst. Other cities that are as good or better than Columbus, I think of as good cities. Other cities that are not as good as Columbus, I think of as bad / overly suburban ones.
Anyway, we started
Downtown, in a parking garage that gave us this view of Columbus' new(ish?) park, Columbus Commons.
I appreciate the idea. I think it may take a few more years for the Commons to reach its potential.
Ohio's weird, dome-less state capitol. With, I think, some Occupy tents. Oh, and isn't that skyscraper the city's tallest?
Nice details on this building. And you have to like blue glass.
Columbus' main north-south road is High Street, and its main east-west road is Broad Street. They meet at this intersection.
I was there on a weekend and I'm sure the pedestrian traffic is a lot heavier during the week. Nonetheless I thought the Times Square treatment was a little overboard for the location. The scale of the buildings isn't right for this, IMO.
Not sure what building this is from, but it's pretty.
My family lived in the suburbs of Columbus when I was between 2 and 8 years old. We used to go to a great children's museum called COSI that was located in this building. The museum has since relocated, and now the county government owns the building.
That children's museum was right across the street from the original Wendy's restaurant. When I was a kid, we would go to the museum and than have dinner at the original Wendy's. At some point between then and now, the building was torn down and replaced by a god-damned parking lot. I believe my reaction upon seeing this was "are you fucking kidding me?!"
The parking lot appears to be owned by the Catholic church's cathedral for Columbus, which is across the street a half block over. Normally I am a big fan of cathedrals, but screw these guys.
This is Broad Street, near the Wendy's/old COSI/cathedral, looking back towards the center of downtown.
Love this building, so much.
But of course, Columbus' best building is its famous deco skyscraper, Leveque Tower. Definitely one of the best skyscrapers anywhere.
The Scioto River (pronounced
sigh-oh-tuh) runs through downtown. It's a nice river, wide enough to be pretty and have some shipping, but narrow enough to bridge and cross easily. Good place for a city.
There are a series of parks and such along the waterfront.
Is that... yes it is. Santa Maria reproduction. Why not.
More waterfront. This part is nice, except it had dumb piped-in music. I hate that. It is never a good addition outdoors.
The large white building in the previous picture is Ohio's Supreme Court. I *think* this picture is also from that building, but there's a chance it's from Leveque Tower.
Looking across the river. Google Maps tells me that's a high school.
Columbus' central library. It's a Carnegie library, and looks almost identical to DC's old central library (also a Carnegie).
When DC outgrew our old Carnegie central library, we abandoned it (it's now a local city history museum). Columbus smartly expanded theirs. In this picture you can see the expansion, which blends pretty well for a mid-20th Century building.
OK. Let's leave downtown and hit the neighborhoods. We spent most of our time in the
Short North, which is along High Street between downtown and Ohio State University.
I like the overhead things.
There's a really cool urban design feature on High Street. I-670 runs depressed in a trench perpendicular to High Street, between Short North and downtown. High Street crosses over I-670. To avoid making pedestrians cross a loud and uncomfortable highway overpass, and to stitch together the neighborhoods north and south of the highway, they built a "cap" above the highway, and lined each side of High Street with shops. Thus, as a pedestrian you never know you're crossing a highway.
This is what it looks like from the sidewalk.
But walk behind the building and you can see the highway passing underneath.
The building is pretty detailed, which is nice. The material is not quite right, unfortunately. Still, overall a great addition to the neighborhood.
I am not sure, but based on its location I suspect that this pleasant little square used to be a highway exit from I-670 on to High Street.
We also went to German Village.
But we didn't stay there long.
It's my custom to include a lot of
Transit/Transportation pictures when I visit cities. Columbus has very limited transit, but there were still some interesting things.
Columbus doesn't have any rail. It doesn't even have Amtrak. Absolutely zilch. Like any city, it does have some buses.
The only concession to rapid transit I saw anywhere was a stretch of bus lane in front of the state capitol in downtown. This appears to be where most of Columbus' buses come together, and is as much of a "transit station" as seems to exist anywhere in the city.
It's lined with super-sized bus stops, but I don't see any extra amenities except that the shelter is bigger than normal.
Columbus once had at least two large train stations. Union Station was the bigger, but is no longer standing. This mural shows what Union Station looked like (the High Street cap of I-670 was designed to look similar).
The other station was Toledo & Ohio Central Station, which is still standing but isn't used as a train station anymore. Here it is.
Here's some background.
Despite the lack of good transit, Columbus does have some other interesting things going on regarding transportation.
Their street design is pretty progressive, including use of sidewalk bioswales to improve water runoff. Basically, stormwater flows from the street into this little basin, and is used to grow the landscaping. It never reaches the sewer.
Bicycles are treated pretty well in Columbus. There are a fair number of bike lanes, and even covered parking.
I even ran across a bike box and green-painted bike lane. Very progressive.
This picture from Considerbiking.org. All other pictures in this thread are from me.
That's about it. Goodbye.
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