TY - JOUR
AU - Manovich, Ellen L
AB - Abstract This article examines the relationships between Ohio State University and the surrounding urban University District neighborhoods in Columbus, Ohio, between 1920–2015. A mythic chronology of “rise and fall” marks university and community memory and conversations about the district, past and present. Interrogating the demographic, architectural, and historic underpinnings of this contested chronology, I explore the differences between Ohio State’s discourse and neighborhood activists’ and residents’ conceptions of neighborhood change and various aspects of a golden-age myth. In particular, I focus upon the interplay between demography, imagery, and memory or between population changes, architectural changes, and various actors’ perceptions and memories of such changes. Significant moments in the twentieth-century interactions between the neighborhoods and the university, especially contested urban renewal, suggest a complex set of relationships between a large urban land-grant institution and its neighboring urban area. Rise and Fall on Maynard Avenue In the spring of 2009, an elderly white man sat on his porch on E. Maynard Avenue in the University District1 in Columbus, Ohio, and lamented the decline of his street and neighborhood with the rise of the adjacent Ohio State University and its enrollment of thousands of students. The man explained that when he and his wife had purchased their home in 1960, the entire block had been homeowners. As he tacked up a “For Sale” sign in his front yard, he said he was now the last homeowner and speculated that his home would soon be rented to Ohio State students. The students, the man said, had moved north from the central University District neighborhoods over the course of his time in the neighborhood, replacing homeowners and families one by one on Maynard Avenue.2 On the contrary, city directory records show that when this man moved into his house on Maynard Avenue in 1960, he became one of only two homeowners on his block.3 Census and city directory records of homeownership changes do not document a rise and fall of homeownership on this street. Yet “rise and fall”—a master narrative in urban history and experience—frames how homeowners and others remember the history not only of Maynard Avenue but also of the larger University District. More than just a false memory, this man’s misunderstanding reveals an ongoing sense of decline that Ohio State stakeholders and some neighborhood actors constructed, contested, and maintained in order to justify urban renewal, redevelopment, and university expansion in the postwar period. Table 1 Homeownership versus renting, Maynard Avenue,2 1940–1991.3 Year Owners Renters Total Number % Number % 1940 67 31 149 69 216 1950 102 48 109 52 211 1960 95 45 114 55 209 1970 79 39 122 61 201 1980 70 37 118 63 188 19911 75 44 95 56 170 Year Owners Renters Total Number % Number % 1940 67 31 149 69 216 1950 102 48 109 52 211 1960 95 45 114 55 209 1970 79 39 122 61 201 1980 70 37 118 63 188 19911 75 44 95 56 170 1 The 1990 City Directory was not available for Columbus, OH. The 1991 Polk’s directory is used in its place. 2 Maynard Avenue between High Street and the railroad tracks, which includes eight city blocks. 3 For comparability, only data available from Polk’s directories are included here. Polk’s did not include homeownership figures prior to 1940 or after 1991. Throughout this essay, Polk’s figures, the best source for street-level figures, are augmented with Census data on homeownership. Table 1 Homeownership versus renting, Maynard Avenue,2 1940–1991.3 Year Owners Renters Total Number % Number % 1940 67 31 149 69 216 1950 102 48 109 52 211 1960 95 45 114 55 209 1970 79 39 122 61 201 1980 70 37 118 63 188 19911 75 44 95 56 170 Year Owners Renters Total Number % Number % 1940 67 31 149 69 216 1950 102 48 109 52 211 1960 95 45 114 55 209 1970 79 39 122 61 201 1980 70 37 118 63 188 19911 75 44 95 56 170 1 The 1990 City Directory was not available for Columbus, OH. The 1991 Polk’s directory is used in its place. 2 Maynard Avenue between High Street and the railroad tracks, which includes eight city blocks. 3 For comparability, only data available from Polk’s directories are included here. Polk’s did not include homeownership figures prior to 1940 or after 1991. Throughout this essay, Polk’s figures, the best source for street-level figures, are augmented with Census data on homeownership. In doing so, Ohio State planners ignored the dubious legacy of its own effects and positioned Ohio State as a neutral savior qua developer. In response, active neighborhood residents emphasized Ohio State’s negative effects on neighborhood demography, mainly on homeownership rates, age, and the living arrangements of residents. Together, these competing narratives of neighborhood change in the University District obscured the working-class and urban histories of the district, as well as the complexities of university-community relationships in Columbus, in order to illustrate a decline from a suburban ideal. By folding Ohio State’s broad impacts on the district into an abstract and expansive category of midcentury “urban decline,” the framework conveniently obliterated the contentious conversations about Ohio State’s role in the district after World War II. Changes like these in Columbus were part of broader national trends that occurred in many cities that experienced university expansion and associated urban renewal programs and neighborhood changes after World War II. Margaret Pugh O’Mara’s analysis of “the government-university relationship that emerged as a result of Cold War politics” and “transformed the ‘outside game’ of land management and economic development in the communities in which these institutions were located” positions these relationships as a transformative force in twentieth- and twenty-first-century political, federal, and metropolitan development.4 Drawing on local and comparative case studies, urban scholars LaDale Winling, Michael Carriere, and Stefan Bradley have built upon her work by examining the effects of Cold War campus planning at universities across the country.5 Throughout the United States, university and neighborhood actors reshaped university districts using the urban renewal federal policy tools of this moment. Most of the work on university development and urban renewal in the postwar period has focused on private institutions that found themselves situated in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods with minority residents. Prominent examples include Penn in West Philadelphia, Columbia in Morningside Heights, and Yale in New Haven.6 The University of Chicago’s Hyde Park expansion story offers a different angle but still involves a private institution in an African-American neighborhood.7 Notably, these institutions were located in sections of these cities that city planners and officials had already targeted for urban renewal due to racial and economic characteristics. They were also cases in which students resided on campus or in different neighborhoods, making the boundary “between campus and community” a hard, often even quasi-militarized one.8 The case in Columbus was very different. Ohio State and the University District offer the story of a large public institution in a diverse but predominantly white neighborhood with working-class as well as upper-middle-class sections—what the neighborhood organization currently bills as an “eclectic mix.”9 Both Ohio State and neighborhood activists referred to the institution’s land grant status to alternatively justify expansion and protest it.10 This was and is a neighborhood with many student residents, in which the “place” of students as residents and urban actors figured prominently in debates about neighborhood/university relationships. The interrelated development of the neighborhood and the university meant a blurrier boundary between campus and the surrounding neighborhoods—as recently as 2010, undergraduate students living in the neighborhoods around campus have been known to refer to their residences as “on campus.”11 Ohio State, like other universities that sponsored urban renewal projects, asserted that it was fighting a war on blight. Yet in contrast to many of these other examples, Ohio State used urban renewal to expand into a relatively wealthier, nonminority, and less transient section of its surrounding neighborhood. In fact, when it began the project, Ohio State planners were uncertain about whether they could even qualify the area for renewal under Section 112 of the Urban Renewal Act. Like other universities, Ohio State encountered broad neighborhood resistance to its development. However, unlike other examples in which residents often argued (rightfully) against a designation of blight or pointed out the racial biases inflecting that designation, in the case of Columbus, residents agreed with Ohio State’s assertion of neighborhood blight and decline. These residents, however, turned the discourse on its head, accusing Ohio State of causing or precipitating the decline and, in turn, of attempting to benefit from these conditions for development purposes. A close look at Ohio State and the University District gives urban renewal in university neighborhoods a social historical dimension, one that builds on work already done on the political, planning, and policy elements of university growth and expansion. Residents, university officials, and city planners disputed the social and demographic definitions of neighborhood decline, blight, and renewal. In the University District, a set of neighborhoods characterized by changing and diverse social dynamics, living arrangements, socioeconomic statuses, and races, these definitions proved particularly malleable. My first section examines the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century patterns of development in the district, as well as contemporary recollections of this period, remembered as the golden age of the district. In the body of the piece, I turn to the postwar period, especially the 1950s–1970s, decades marked by intensified change and conflicts over Ohio State’s growth, including its controversial urban renewal project for dormitory building and the off-campus effects of increased numbers of student renters. Finally, I move to a more recent period: the early 1990s to the present. I suggest that university initiatives in this period strategically deployed myths of both earlier periods in order to direct development and justify escalated university involvement in the neighborhoods. The Site and the Streets: Columbus’ University District Columbus, Ohio, is a major metropolitan area in the twenty-first-century United States; the fifteenth largest incorporated place in the country and the most populous city in Ohio, its population was 835,957 in 2014.12 Given Columbus’ historical and contemporary size and its economic and institutional importance, it is surprisingly understudied, often overshadowed by historically larger Cleveland and Cincinnati.13 Columbus has never experienced a population decline, and it has “continu[ed] to defy the story line of decline and stagnation of the Midwest’s large urban centers,” as the Columbus Dispatch proudly noted.14 While Columbus boosters take pride in its defiance of these patterns, the history of the University District nevertheless continues to be framed as one of rise and then decline. Within Columbus, the University District is a generic name for as many as thirteen distinct neighborhoods surrounding Ohio State.15 It is as difficult to talk about the University District in Columbus, Ohio, as a single neighborhood as it is to discuss its neighboring institution, Ohio State, as “one university.”16 Within these neighborhoods defined by planners and the District’s organization, informal names and designations also exist.17 Figure 1 View largeDownload slide Official map of University District neighborhoods from 2016. This map shows the various neighborhoods within the broader University District. It is worth noting that these more informal designations have changed over time. The one constant has been the association of the larger area to Ohio State, whether in the current umbrella name The University District or in earlier references to the University Community and the University Area. Source: Courtesy of the University District Organization (UDO). Figure 1 View largeDownload slide Official map of University District neighborhoods from 2016. This map shows the various neighborhoods within the broader University District. It is worth noting that these more informal designations have changed over time. The one constant has been the association of the larger area to Ohio State, whether in the current umbrella name The University District or in earlier references to the University Community and the University Area. Source: Courtesy of the University District Organization (UDO). Historically a mostly white mixed-income neighborhood with many residents connected in some way to the neighboring institution, the University District is located outside the original bounds of Columbus (and thus, the center-city), but it is not one of Columbus’ many early unincorporated suburbs. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) redline map of Columbus provides an orientation to the context of the University District just before Ohio State’s most intensive expansion.18 Streetcar suburbs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, by the 1930s, most of the sections that now comprise the University District had been marked as “C” or “Definitely Declining” by HOLC mapmakers.19 The twentieth-century University District was a tenuous middle-ground neighborhood, one which reorients us to the many postwar American neighborhoods that fell between the extremes of suburban affluence and urban distress. The University District’s identity has been influenced as much by this positioning as by its institutional neighbor. Table 2 Changes in the University District and Columbus, 1920–2010.2 University District City of Columbus Neighborhoods (all neighborhoods) 1920 1970 2010 1920 1970 2010 Tenure (%) Owners 44 20 18 32 53 56 Renters 56 80 82 61 47 40 Race1(%) White 97 n/a 81 90 88 70 Black 2 n/a 8 10 11 21 Hispanic n/a n/a 4 n/a n/a n/a Asian n/a n/a 6 n/a n/a 4 Other 1 n/a 2 n/a 1 5 Population Aged 15–29 (%) 27 54 83 27 25 25 University District City of Columbus Neighborhoods (all neighborhoods) 1920 1970 2010 1920 1970 2010 Tenure (%) Owners 44 20 18 32 53 56 Renters 56 80 82 61 47 40 Race1(%) White 97 n/a 81 90 88 70 Black 2 n/a 8 10 11 21 Hispanic n/a n/a 4 n/a n/a n/a Asian n/a n/a 6 n/a n/a 4 Other 1 n/a 2 n/a 1 5 Population Aged 15–29 (%) 27 54 83 27 25 25 1 Race unavailable for 1970 University District. It was not included in the report that provided the source for the other 1970 data, and the 1970 Census did not provide a way to identify neighborhoods. 2 1920 data comes from original analysis done by the author on the complete count 1920 Census, available from the Minnesota Population Center, IPUMS-USA. Data from 1970 derived from Franklin County totals via the online data analysis system from the Minnesota Population Center (Steven Ruggles, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Josiah Grover, and Matthew Sobek. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 6.0 [Machine-readable database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015.) 2010 figures from: City of Columbus, The University District Plan, “Demographics,” 28 accessed via <https://www.columbus.gov/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=75849> Table 2 Changes in the University District and Columbus, 1920–2010.2 University District City of Columbus Neighborhoods (all neighborhoods) 1920 1970 2010 1920 1970 2010 Tenure (%) Owners 44 20 18 32 53 56 Renters 56 80 82 61 47 40 Race1(%) White 97 n/a 81 90 88 70 Black 2 n/a 8 10 11 21 Hispanic n/a n/a 4 n/a n/a n/a Asian n/a n/a 6 n/a n/a 4 Other 1 n/a 2 n/a 1 5 Population Aged 15–29 (%) 27 54 83 27 25 25 University District City of Columbus Neighborhoods (all neighborhoods) 1920 1970 2010 1920 1970 2010 Tenure (%) Owners 44 20 18 32 53 56 Renters 56 80 82 61 47 40 Race1(%) White 97 n/a 81 90 88 70 Black 2 n/a 8 10 11 21 Hispanic n/a n/a 4 n/a n/a n/a Asian n/a n/a 6 n/a n/a 4 Other 1 n/a 2 n/a 1 5 Population Aged 15–29 (%) 27 54 83 27 25 25 1 Race unavailable for 1970 University District. It was not included in the report that provided the source for the other 1970 data, and the 1970 Census did not provide a way to identify neighborhoods. 2 1920 data comes from original analysis done by the author on the complete count 1920 Census, available from the Minnesota Population Center, IPUMS-USA. Data from 1970 derived from Franklin County totals via the online data analysis system from the Minnesota Population Center (Steven Ruggles, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Josiah Grover, and Matthew Sobek. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 6.0 [Machine-readable database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015.) 2010 figures from: City of Columbus, The University District Plan, “Demographics,” 28 accessed via <https://www.columbus.gov/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=75849> Map 1 View largeDownload slide HOLC Map of Columbus, with a box indicating the University District (north of the downtown, the north, east, and west of the white campus area.) Source: Federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) Maps (“Redlining Maps”) for Ohio Cities (Ohio State University Libraries). Map 1 View largeDownload slide HOLC Map of Columbus, with a box indicating the University District (north of the downtown, the north, east, and west of the white campus area.) Source: Federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) Maps (“Redlining Maps”) for Ohio Cities (Ohio State University Libraries). According to the 2010 Census, the 43,986 residents of the University District were predominantly white (81 percent), with eight percent African-American, six percent Asian, four percent Hispanic, and two percent identifying as two or more races. The University District in 2010 was also a young neighborhood: 83 percent of its residents were 15–29 years old. It was a district of renters: 82 percent of its fourteen thousand households were renting.20 That these percentages matched up is telling of the University District’s most visible demographic group: young, white, college students renting in the neighborhoods.21 From the nonstudent neighborhood residents’ point of view, the growth of that demographic—despite these other residents’ attempts to stem it—ended a so-called golden age. From the university’s point of view, the growth of this demographic provided a positive replacement for the demographic lost after a golden age—an alternative to other patterns of neighborhood change, especially racial, experienced during the national urban crisis. Both points of view draw upon the idea of a golden age produced out of contentious post-WWII conversations about the future of the district, as well as the extent of OSU’s development. Close examination of four selected samples, as well as archival documents and plans related to the entire district, call into question both points of view.22 “A Beautiful Columbus Suburb?” The University District, 1900–1945 When the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College, later Ohio State University, opened in 1873 as a Morrill Act land-grant institution, founders situated its campus on farmland two miles north of the city limits of Columbus.23 Over the next fifty years, both the city and the campus grew quickly. By 1912, real estate advertisements characterized the neighborhoods around the university as a “thickly populated urban district.”24 Maps from the 1870s show the college and only a few farms in the area, but by 1910, the city’s grid pattern stretched northward and around the campus on three sides.25 For most of its existence, Ohio State University has been an urban campus surrounded by quickly changing and densely populated city neighborhoods. Yet the University District’s mythic chronology paints the early twentieth century University District as a suburban and pastoral ideal and the era as a golden age about which contemporary actors and residents wax nostalgic.26 Examples of the rise and fall mythology of the University District abound today. In a recently published commemorative pictorial history of the district, a photograph labeled “the quiet before the storm” has a caption that reads: “In 1897, West Frambes Avenue seemed residential but pastoral, even though Granville Frambes, a Union Civil War hero, had sold his large farm to the fledgling college across the street a few years earlier. To the right of the picture . . . young couples strolled in the woods known for an abundance of violets.”27 The modifier “residential but pastoral” reverberates in other contemporary memories of the prewar University District. The image of young couples strolling amid violets contrasts sharply with present-day University District imagery of “grittiness,” “filth,” and “Pottersville.”28 My use of the term golden age in fact comes from this book’s chosen phrasing. In a chapter entitled “Neighborhoods Rising,” the authors state: “If there was a golden age for every city, every town, every neighborhood, it would seem that the first and second decades of the 20th century would be the university neighborhood’s time.”29 This pastoral portrayal of the neighborhoods’ “rising” obscures the urban, working-class, and industrial aspects of the district even at this earlier period. The focus on the flower beds and shrubbery evokes a suburban or pastoral ideal, one that early twentieth century housing advertisements also portray.30 As recollected in contemporary accounts, the University District’s early twentieth century golden age was marked by a group of connected characteristics: homeownership, low population density, well-kept single-family homes, and families as residents of these homes. Yet historical evidence from four sample streets in the district undermines the remembered hegemony of each of these characteristics, examined in turn. Homeownership is the lynchpin of the golden-age myth and recurs as a goal in contemporary discussions of the neighborhood’s future. Homeownership existed in the University District during the first few decades of the twentieth century; some blocks were almost entirely owner-occupied, others were mostly renter-occupied, and still others contained a mix of renters and owners. However, it was neither common nor characteristic of the district, as the myth portrays. In fact, the opposite is true. According to homeownership data, the University District as a whole was never a “region of home-owners” if that tag implies that a majority of household heads owned their homes.31 On the four sample streets in 1940, 30 percent of the household heads were homeowners, a figure lower than national and state averages.32 A few unusual streets were almost entirely owner-occupied in this period and later transitioned to entirely renter-occupied streets. The dramatic changes on these unusual, streets skewed the aggregate data. Like most prewar urban neighborhoods, the University District was a region of renters, even during its pre-WWII golden age. Though it has never been typical of the district, homeownership in the University District historically has been considered a desirable goal by some. A 1938 advertisement for a home on “E. Maynard near 4th St” urges potential buyers to “own your own home at lower cost” and notes that “this is not a ‘fancy’ home, but is well-constructed, with large airy rooms and a nice yard and porch for the kiddies.”33 The ad targeted families and homeowners. City directory data from the street show that if an owner did purchase this home, he or she would have been one of only a few owners on his or her block. In the two blocks of E. Maynard between Glenmawr and the railroad tracks, the area around the intersection of Maynard and 4th, there were eight homeowners and 33 renters in 1940. In other words, the advertisement urged ownership in an area less than 20 percent owner-occupied two years later. Yet there are various layers of the advertisement’s possible contexts—the goals of local builders, national patterns of homeownership promotion after the Great Depression, and Maynard Avenue’s (and the University District’s) demographic patterns. These contexts show how an advertisement might not reveal what the district actually was in this period but what some parties wanted it to be or thought it should become. In the prewar period, then, as in the contemporary period, a vocal minority of stakeholders promoted the district as an idyllic suburb unconnected to its growing institutional neighbor. Related to homeownership, low density is another oft-referenced element of the golden age. In recollections of the district as a beautiful suburb, ideal imagery centers on the idea of single families occupying single-family homes. In the mythic chronology, the University District’s population increased when student enrollments at Ohio State grew. Unrelated student renters filled University District homes and replaced the single families who had previously owned and occupied them. It is difficult to obtain exact population for the district either then or now; highly transient areas suffer from undercounts by most measures. However, a comparison of prewar Census counts and city directories further discounts any notion of single-family homeownership and reveals higher population densities than single family owner-occupancy suggests. In many cases, an entry that appeared in the city directory as a single-family home occupied by a homeowner appeared in the Census as a primary household with additional households or unrelated individuals residing in the same structure. For example, Charles Schwab, a machinist, lived at 489 Maynard with his wife. A homeowner, he shows up in the 1930 Census, but so does George Taylor, with his wife and his infant son, who rented at the same address. Properties cannot easily be classified as owner-occupied or renter-occupied; some were both renter and owner-occupied. Just as streets contained a mix of renters and owners, many individual properties were occupied by multiple families or household heads.34 While the golden-age myth characterizes the first half of the twentieth century as a time of high homeownership and single-family occupancy, neither trend predominated in this period. The related architectural dimension of the myth suggests that most prewar housing units were what Fisher called the “sturdy” single family homes contrasted with the apartments and multibuildings constructed in the 1960s and 1970s, which one contemporary resident called “all those godawful apartments.” Indeed, before stricter code enforcement was effected in the early 1970s, numerous multifamily apartments were built in the 1960s and early 1970s and intended as off-campus housing for Ohio State students. In community myth and memory, these two general “types” of housing receive the most architectural attention. This focus suggests that flimsy, high-density student housing replaced the sturdy single-family properties of the early twentieth century as a University District of families who owned these homes—and tended their gardens—“declined” into a district of student renters and transients packed together in poorly built “cinder-block” apartments and boarding houses.35 By building type, most University District housing was prewar multifamily housing, whether rowhomes intended as apartments or bigger single family houses occupied as boarding houses or shared by multiple families. This narrative overlooks the fact that a great deal of the housing stock in the University District—then and now—is neither large single family homes nor sixties and seventies apartments. Although it varies by section, the oldest extant housing stock in the University District neighborhoods includes significant numbers of multifamily buildings, especially brick row homes and brick and frame duplexes. Many of these structures date from the early twentieth century, the same time from which many of the district’s single-family houses date. Indeed, prewar advertisements emphasize the affordability and modest size of the area housing stock: “Another charm of Indianola is that its beauty is the result of the cooperation of many families of modest means . . . There is no house in the community that could be called a mansion.”36 This ad’s message contrasts sharply with contemporary recollections of “large and even ostentatious mansions.”37 In fact, the University District has the architectural characteristics of a “region of renters.”38 Not only do contemporary stakeholders paint the picture of a golden age of prewar single-family housing stock that they contrast with postwar multifamily buildings, but they also lament the conversion of large single-family prewar structures into multifamily buildings. According to the mythic narrative of change, after WWII, unscrupulous landlords subdivided former single-family homes into multiple apartments in order to house more students during the postwar enrollment increases. These types of conversions certainly occurred. Yet evidence shows that they did not begin after WWII. Rather, many of the larger single family properties were also attractive to prewar rooming-house operators; to OSU fraternities, sororities, and special interest groups; and to landlords who later “chopped up” the larger dwellings into smaller student apartments. Conversion of buildings from original uses and subdivision of structures was a prewar as well as a postwar trend. By style of dwelling, the University District seems to have long been a district of housing—and people—in flux. While it is true that after WWII particular demands for student housing led to architectural modifications of some structures, the golden age narrative sees this change as a disruption rather than a continuation of a longer pattern. In fact, both before and after WWII, the variety and diversity of University District housing styles and stock led to and abetted a variety of uses, densities, and inhabitants. Accordingly, the story of twentieth century change in the University District is not as simple as a shift from homeowners to renters or from single to multifamily dwellings. Related to the question of their housing, one especially important dimension of the golden-age myth concerns the place of students in the University District. When collective remembrances include student residents in the golden age at all, they understate their presence in the district prior to WWII and the huge enrollment increases at Ohio State due to the GI Bill. Yet Ohio State had no dormitories on campus until the late 1920s (for women) and the late 1930s (for men).39 While some students commuted from outside the area, many students also lived in the University District during the prewar period. In the early twentieth century, Ohio State officials worried about the impacts of the urban, off-campus environment upon student residents, and in doing so, they echoed larger Progressive concerns about urban life. A 1923 petition by the Dean of Women for student dormitories contains a complaint often made about the contemporary University District: “The growth of the University has involved allowing students to live in too-crowded and substandard conditions. A major problem is that houses are advertised as suitable when they are not.”40 Census records reveal that students lived on every sample street in the earliest years of the twentieth century, even in areas remembered as having no student presence. Unusually restrictive deeds from the same era reflected not a stable, well-established suburb but an urban area in flux. In the Indianola-Summit plat, all transactions bore restrictions instilled by the area’s original platter, William Neil. A 1913 deed from trustee Henry Neil to Margaret and Alice Poulton provides one of the earliest available examples of the stock language used for all Indianola-Summit transactions of that decade and referred to with a shortened phrase in subsequent years’ transactions. Although the deed does not include the kinds of racial restrictions that were common during this era, its restrictions prohibited a variety of industrial uses and enacted similar setback and cost of construction provisions used elsewhere for early zoning.41 These restrictions reflected Columbus’ place nationally as a stronghold of Prohibition and the early University District’s elites’ possible positions as members of the anti-immigrant coalition backing Prohibition.42 In their detail and specificity, the restrictions on industrial uses hint at a University District threatened by industrial development. The “obnoxious uses” referred to in deed restrictions centered upon worries about industrial and commercial development rather than the neighboring university’s expansion and encroachment.43 Over the course of the twentieth century, deindustrialization eliminated the likelihood of factory development in the University District. In the prewar district, residents debated best land-uses and took actions to block perceived obnoxious ones. Postwar and contemporary popular memories and narratives of a pre-WWII neighborhood golden age assume that the prewar district was a bucolic suburb, when in fact it was an urbanizing, industrializing neighborhood wary of surrounding brickyards and factories. University District deeds may have lacked racial restrictions, but these restrictions blanketed surrounding inner-ring suburbs. For example, every suburban mortgage approved by one of the largest banks in the region at that time, the Columbus Citizens Trust and Savings Bank, specifically prohibited grantees to rent or sell their homes to blacks. Focusing on private sector real estate development during the 1920s, P. B. Stach described how developers speculated on real estate and platted racially restrictive neighborhoods in what later became the city of Columbus through annexation.44 HOLC real estate appraisal maps show that most sections of the University District were rated as “declining” in 1936, with some sections rated “still desirable.”45 No sections of the University District received a rating of “A,” but, notably, none received a “D” or “redlined” rating. The ring of redlined sections around the south and eastern University District suggests a neighborhood struggling to maintain an aspirational “suburban” identity in the midst of the rapid real suburban development and facing the real possibilities of population shifts from Columbus’ black population hemmed into the center city neighborhoods farther to the south of the district. From its earliest days, then, the University District housed students as well as groups of families, mostly renters, in a variety of architectural styles. The prewar University District resembled today’s University District. The narrative of a golden age and subsequent “decline” obscures these continuities and falsely positions certain demographic and architectural characteristics as predominant when they were not. Was the early twentieth-century University District ever a “beautiful Columbus suburb” except in advertising? Perhaps some saw it that way or hoped it might become one, but just as many viewed it as part of a complex and congested urban landscape, one that bore the same traits and ills others attacked as part of mid-century decline. Only a few blocks of a few streets—and these only for a few years—experienced the particular set of characteristics that supposedly comprised the district-wide ideal. The disjuncture between remembered characteristics—the myth of an early twentieth suburban golden age—and the reality of the urban district is more than an accident of memory or a nostalgic lament; it is the product of postwar interactions and conflicts between Ohio State and the University District neighbors. Universities including Ohio State illustrated and acted upon the idea or sense of urban crisis in Columbus and across the United States in order to achieve growth. Such maneuverings at the local and federal levels created new developments such as dormitories but also new community discourses of neighborhood decline. “Its Current Decline and Decay”: Crises in the University District, 1945–1975 In 1974, when Ohio State President Harold Enarson wrote to Columbus mayor Tom Moody, “we must now face a decision to make a substantial dollar resource commitment to the University community or to let it drift along in its current decline and decay,” he not only echoed a sentiment expressed as early as the 1950s but he also foreshadowed one that continues today.46 While contemporary actors and residents remember the prewar University District as a golden age, they recall the turn-of-the-century and mid-century decades as a crisis. This sense of urgency over “decline and decay” has marked University District rhetoric for so long that it has become an implicit feature of the district. Yet in the middle of the twentieth century, this discourse of decline first emerged and then escalated as community and university actors contested the characteristics of the district’s decline. This escalation in Columbus occurred as part of national conversations about urban blight and decline, as scholars such as Robert Beauregard, Jon Teaford, and Robert Fogelson have traced.47 This discourse of decline emerged in the University District when Ohio State planners and stakeholders had a financial interest in proving that the neighborhoods surrounding the quickly growing campus were “blighted” in order to gain access to federal funds for campus expansion. Between 1945 and 1975, different actors framed “decline” differently. Many sections of the University District did not experience significant changes during this period, but rather a continuation of longer patterns. As the University grew and expanded—along with its impact upon the surrounding neighborhoods—the escalating sense of an urban crisis crystallized into a declension narrative that also created the golden-age mythology. According to the narrative of University District decline, after WWII, student residents moved en masse into the neighborhoods as Ohio State enrollments rose. In doing so, they disturbed the families associated with the prewar golden age and changed the neighborhoods’ suburban character. As a result of this movement, homeownership rates plummeted as renting replaced owning. Landlords “chopped up” grand single family homes and built additions to accommodate as many students as possible as density rose. Crime increased as young renters supposedly cared less about their environment.48 Unrelated individuals lived together in squalor and drank, smoked, and rioted in the streets during Vietnam War protests and the student movement.49 Ohio State University, previously part of the University District family, walled itself off as a “closed corporation” and razed once-thriving city streets through urban renewal.50 Thus, as people remember it today, the University District was almost entirely unrecognizable from its prewar golden age by 1980. While elements of this fall did appear on certain blocks of some streets, the University District overall supposedly declined from an ideal that never really existed in the terms it is remembered today. A product of disagreements over decline, this mythology provided an ideal golden age to which various sides in the conflicts referred in order to protest or promote development. Among university staff, a discourse of crisis and decline escalated after WWII when soldiers returned home and enrollments grew as a result of the GI Bill.51 Long held worries about the effects of the off-campus environment on student life merged with the vastly increasing numbers of students taking up residence off campus to mark a moment and a discourse of simultaneous panic and possibility. Bolstered by increased federal funding for campus improvements and tuition, campus planners and student services staff dreamed about new and expanded student residences and campus recreation and playing fields. At the same time, they framed their hopes with dire predictions about the dangers of urban, off-campus living and the inadequacy of off-campus housing stock. Writing in a 1957 annual report, Assistant Dean of Men and Director of Off-Campus Housing A. E. Hittepole expressed concern about the numbers of young, unsupervised men living in off-campus apartments and wrote, “There has been a trend during the past year for boys to go into apartments that are unsupervised, and many times very poor places for them to live. We again recommend that serious consideration be given to prohibit single men from living in apartments.”52 Hittepole had a solution for the problem of unsupervised young renters in the University District: university dormitories.53 Hittepole’s worries and sentiment were nothing new; before WWII, student services staff had been just as concerned about off-campus student living conditions.54 What was different in the postwar period was the ability of the university to act upon these concerns and begin dormitory-building campus expansion projects. The 1959 passage of Section 112 of Federal Urban Renewal Act gave university actors across the US the ability to envision replacing perceived urban blight or decay with expanded university campuses.55 Through this federal urban renewal funding, available to partnerships between cities and universities, such coalitions targeted “substandard” areas adjacent to campuses for university-sponsored renewal. These notions of blight, decline, crisis, and possibility were not unique to the postwar University District nor to the city of Columbus. Ohio State officials and neighborhood activists joined a national conversation about the fate of the center city, a discussion that centered on urban planning and urban renewal as solutions to an emerging sense of crisis. University actors also joined a network of urban universities concerned about campus planning, urban development, and the possibilities of postwar federal funding for higher education and urban land acquisition.56 Operating in these contexts through its Office of Campus Planning, Ohio State University spearheaded an urban renewal project in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This project, the North Dorms urban renewal project, extended the northern boundary of the campus by declaring blighted and razing several University District blocks. Campus planners acquired the land and replaced the residential streets with on-campus student dormitories.57 While Ohio State planners contemplated campus expansion in almost every direction in this period, their ability to enact expansion depended upon access to federal urban renewal funds, and this need limited their options to areas that could meet the federal criteria for urban renewal. These criteria were not clear-cut.58At the local level, city officials, planners, and developers could first select an area for renewal and then assemble the proof of its eligibility; in Colin Gordon’s words, they could “blight the way.”59 Even so, in July of 1960, Ohio State University campus planner James Clark worried in a private memo that the urban neighborhoods east of Ohio State’s campus might not be “blighted enough” to qualify for a federal urban renewal project. The area’s eligibility depended, Clark noted, upon whether the area needed to be “20 or 50 percent substandard.”60 The parcel of land eventually selected for the North Dorms project was hardly the worst in the district at this moment of time. Its proximity to the campus and planners’ ability to survey it in such a way as to measure sufficient blight qualified the parcel for urban renewal. Importantly, its location fit with planners’ long-term hopes to expand the main campus northward. From the vantage points of vocal neighbors, some of whom were among the wealthiest and least transient in the district—the homeowners with gardens remembered so vividly in the golden-age myth—the designation of blight stung. Neighborhood residents contested the planners’ conclusions. One resident published a political cartoon that portrayed campus planners spraying a can of “Instant Blight” over the neighborhood to qualify it for urban renewal (Figure 2).61 Resident Charles Pavey implored the Ohio State Board of Trustees to consider the urban renewal project an ethical breach: “This is, I am sorry to say, patently dishonest. This is not a blighted area and it is not a slum and . . . it hardly sets a good example for the University itself to adopt a philosophy that the end justifies the means.”62 Another resident, identified only as Mrs. D. A. wrote a letter to the editor of the neighborhood newspaper The Booster questioning the legality of OSU’s renewal as well as pointing out the human costs to her displaced neighbors: My only question . . . is why are people’s property rights violated in the guise of “urban renewal?” . . . I can only feel grief when I think of several of my neighbors (on Lane Avenue—campus area) who lived in their particular homes for 20–30 years, and had beautiful homes—houses that couldn’t be duplicated. . . . One dear neighbor who lost his wife (during the four years of proceedings) almost lost his sanity at being “put out” of his own home.63 Figure 2 View largeDownload slide “Instant Blight.” This neighborhood political cartoon shows a master planner’s spray can of “Instant Blight” and includes the caption: “Tsk! Tsk! Look at the condition of that housing.” Source. The Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning: Office of (RG 10/6/26), “Urban Renewal: Projects: OSU North: News Clippings: 1961-1965.” Clipping from The Herald and the Booster, 10/15/1964. Figure 2 View largeDownload slide “Instant Blight.” This neighborhood political cartoon shows a master planner’s spray can of “Instant Blight” and includes the caption: “Tsk! Tsk! Look at the condition of that housing.” Source. The Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning: Office of (RG 10/6/26), “Urban Renewal: Projects: OSU North: News Clippings: 1961-1965.” Clipping from The Herald and the Booster, 10/15/1964. A year later, a neighborhood newspaper editorial letter complained, “By means of rigged inspections, any area can be declared substandard and ready for the bulldozer.”64 From the perspectives of neighbors in other sections of the district, the North Dorms project was a dangerous example of the expansive and unwieldy power of Ohio State as an institutional neighbor. The project left most University District streets physically intact and demolished only a few blocks of a few streets; but as community responses reveal, it had a much broader symbolic and psychological effect. In addition to frustration over communication breakdowns, fears of subterfuge on the part of Ohio State prompted suspicion and dissent among University District residents and landlords as the North Dorms project took shape and was executed.65 The 1962–65 fight over Harold Zieg’s Lane Terrace apartment building epitomized community-university relations during the project. Several years before news of the North Dorms project became public, Zieg, a developer, had constructed the apartment building on the site eventually chosen for renewal. For Ohio State planners, the apartment was a problem because it was situated on land planned as open green space around the dormitories. It could not be declared “substandard” for urban renewal (because it was newly built) and could not be demolished with the justification of the need for more student housing (because it already housed student renters).66 The building’s possible (and eventual) destruction was a rallying point for larger neighborhood protests of the project as residents attacked the inconsistencies they identified surrounding Ohio State’s plans for the building. Ohio State officials and planners’ handling of the Zieg case reveals how Ohio State attempted to distance the university from the Zieg case specifically and from the urban renewal process more generally, leading to accusations of secrecy and collusion. Though the university worked closely with city officials in what both parties referred to as a “gentleman’s agreement,” Ohio State public relations material about these issues routinely cast all responsibility for the project upon the city of Columbus.67 Planners and administrators deeply involved in the urban renewal process and influential at local, state, and federal levels distanced themselves from the outcry. They blamed instead the city government, which purchased the land for the project, and the federal government, which sponsored the urban renewal process. In a memo, OSU head planner John Herrick explained the official position to a coworker who was corresponding with Zieg: “since it is the city and not the University that acquires and clears the land in an urban renewal project, the decision on the Zieg property will be made in City Hall,” and “we are asking our Board of Trustees to say that they will buy from the city whatever land the city decides to acquire and clear.” He concluded: “You were truthful in what you said to Mr. Zieg. . . . We have not and do not propose to take Mr. Zieg’s apartment, but if the city should acquire and clear the property we should of course buy it when it is made available for resale.”68 This sequence of events was exactly what happened, and the Herrick’s technical reasoning rankled neighbors who promised that the “ghost” of Zieg Terrrace would continue to haunt Ohio State planning and expansion efforts. In this way, University District and Columbus residents also developed images of the university’s role in the “decline,” a discourse rooted in the North Dorms urban renewal proceedings. Residents contrasted former “symbiotic” relationships in a prewar golden age with this new imagery, even though there is no historical evidence that Ohio State and the University District had a particular prewar symbiosis; in fact, as early as the 1910s, sociologist Roderick McKenzie found that West 9th Avenue, at the southwestern edge of the University District, organized responses to perceived outside threats: “The street has persistently acted as a unit to keep its western vista over the university farm free from obstruction.”69 Though it is unclear whether the residents of W. 9th organized to prevent university buildings from blocking their vista or to fight other, noninstitutional development, it is likely that both types of development were concerns for the residents who engaged in what McKenzie termed “cooperative action in fighting the intrusion of objectionable structures.”70 Suggestive of cooperation as a fallen ideal, reactions to the North Dorms urban renewal project included the image of the university as an aggressive taker of land. An OSU proposal in the late 1960s to use urban renewal credits in the southwestern University District never succeeded.71 Noting opposition by a neighborhood organization, SCAA (South Campus Area Association), OSU planner Jean Hansford wrote, “The major problem is citizen participation and cooperation because the last attempt in this area was killed by accusations of ‘land-grabbing,’ and the like.”72 The echoes of an unsuccessful restraining order against the North Dorms urban renewal project reverberated with each new project or plan proposed by Ohio State. According to a quotation from the suit’s attorney in the Columbus Dispatch, the 1964 lawsuit alleged that “the area in the OSU North project is not blighted but . . . the renewal project is a subterfuge or conspiracy to obtain the land for OSU.” 73 As the neighborhood residents’ unsuccessful contention mounted, it captured community and city attention; even for those unaffected directly, the project symbolized a new set of tense relationships between Ohio State and the district and, for neighbors, the threat of more expansion. While comparatively few streets were directly affected by the North Dorms project, other changes at Ohio State affected its relationship with its neighbors. As Ohio State expanded physically, its numbers of employees also swelled, and it became more difficult for residents to know whom to contact with their opposition and questions. Mid-century residents suggested images of Ohio State as a “closed corporation” and a “soundproof wall.”74 Ohio State’s inward focus did nothing do dissuade residents of these images. For example, in 1964, one OSU official commented to a campus planner: “property acquisition is troublesome, but we have the larger problem of how we house students.”75 From understatement of community issues to denial that the neighborhoods adjacent to campus were more than grounds for expansion and student housing, Ohio State’s public relations in this period were fraught with tension. Neighborhood residents and organizations acted to curb these threats to protect stability and to restore a perceived prewar golden age. They formed a neighborhood association, the University Community Association (UCA), in the 1950s.76 Alarmed by some of the changes occurring in the neighborhoods around them, the UCA organized as an umbrella organization that brought together various university district constituencies. UCA defined the university community for perhaps the first time officially as “bounded on the north by Glen Echo ravine, on the south by 11th Ave., on the west by the Olentangy River, and on the east by the New York Central railroad.”77 The UCA gave geographic limits to what others had nebulously called the university community in Columbus. Its formation came at a time when Ohio State planners were questioning whether the area counted as an actual, cohesive residential community. In fact, when an outside planning company was commissioned to conduct a study of Ohio State’s current relationship with its neighborhoods, an OSU campus planner scrawled a comment in the margin next to a discussion of the neighborhood: “is this a real neighborhood?”78 The formation of UCA, which named, delineated, and unified the area, represented a counter-assertion by some neighborhood residents that they were, in fact, a “real neighborhood.”79 Neighborhood and university stakeholders also contested neighborhood conditions and planning possibilities in this period. Ohio State planners offered explanations of decline that justified and framed as natural and inevitable their own actions in the urban renewal project. OSU planners cited architectural change and increased density in the neighborhoods as evidence of “blight.” For Ohio State planners and the outside planners they contracted, development decisions made by Ohio State would direct the future of the neighborhood. Their 1960 plan equated the University District neighborhoods’ fate with Ohio State’s expansion needs, promoting “development and redevelopment of the neighborhoods toward a continually improving University and residential environment.”80 Yet other neighborhood residents involved in the UCA and a larger umbrella group, the University District Organization (UDO), pointed out what they perceived as the detrimental effects of the aggressively expansive neighboring institution; they tied substandard housing conditions to university growth and policy.81 University District residents and neighborhood organizations at the time identified Ohio State’s possible expansion as a blighting factor in the neighborhood. They noted the problem that “OSU affected more land than it owns [but] worked only within its property lines and did not care about the neighborhoods or the institution’s impact upon the neighborhoods.”82 They offered an alternative vision of university development held in check by neighborhood needs.83 These active residents attempted to work within Ohio State’s rhetorical framework: in this case, the crisis of the city. Residents blamed lack of city building regulations, increased high-density construction, decreased homeownership, student riots, rising parking and trash problems, and increasingly high general neighborhood instability as different negative characteristics of blight. The convergence of their concerns with Ohio State planners’ use of blight to justify renewal secured the periods’ pivotal place in contemporary discourse as a “breaking point” or period of “decline,” even when the details of that “decline” are in fact contested. “Lest We Forget”: Alternative Visions of University District Past and Futures A decade after the completion of the North Dorms urban renewal project, neighborhood residents had consolidated their hopes for the neighborhood, and their opposition to perceived negative effects of Ohio State, in a narrative focused on a golden age before OSU’s dramatic postwar growth. Their narrative contrasted with OSU’s own story: its portrayal of having saved and improved a blighted area. Neighborhood leaders in the UDO developed a community presentation that epitomized this alternative focus: a slide show covering University District history from 1800–1925. They called the presentation “Lest We Forget.” Featuring reminisces from elderly residents, the presentation conveyed a history centered around pioneers, log cabins, local commerce, and transportation. Lucille Rapp, who lived in the home her father purchased in 1911, epitomized the positive attributes writers of the script implored its contemporary audience not to forget. Rapp said, “My father bought the house on Lane Avenue for many reasons—he thought that the University would not let this part of the city go down and because Lane Avenue was such a quiet, residential street.” This short reminiscence bundled long-term owner-occupancy, symbiotic university-neighborhood relationships, and the suburban ideal of a quiet street in a perfect example of the golden age that long-term owners such as Rapp and others wanted to restore. Rapp went on to underscore her hope that more neighbors fitting that ideal would move to the neighborhood: “Now in the last few years, we have had an influx of the younger couples who are buying up the homes and I look out and I see the type of people I used to see around here and they are good neighbors and they are good people to have.”84 Written by elite and longer term neighborhood residents active in the University District Organization, the presentation transcript mentioned the university only fleetingly and counted it as one of numerous factors (from developers, streetcars, and annexation) affecting the area’s composition and change. In a large sense, the writers of the transcript were able to achieve this effect by ending their history in 1925, twenty years before the GI Bill accelerated Ohio State’s growth. The accompanying slides focused on horse-drawn transportation, gardens, and elite architecture in marked contrast to its contemporary contexts: a time of the rapid expansion of multifamily housing and automobiles across the district. “Lest We Forget” offered more than a nostalgic look at the early University District, even as it focused on themes and tropes (the corner store, wildflowers, and horse drawn vehicles) common in similar rose-tinted memories. It represented an alternative social history of the University District, one that decentered the university’s influence from the area’s past. Downplaying university impacts, the presentation’s transcript included the following summary of neighborhood and university relationships: It attracted some lovely homes because of its location at the entrance to the university. . . . Many of the residents of Indianola were associated with the university. The deans’ homes were in the neighborhood as well as the homes of faculty and staff. The bond between campus and community was strong. For many of the residents, the university was a source of social activities.85 The neighborhood residents involved spearheaded this presentation a decade after Ohio State’s North Dorms urban renewal project, as Ohio State planners and administrators continued to plan campus expansion. The slide presentation debuted in 1979, at the end of the three decades of Ohio State’s most aggressive campus expansion and property acquisition.86 It premiered in the context of increased tensions and unrest on and off-campus, six years after the University District Organization surveyed its members and summarized the feelings toward OSU in a report about the community that directly contrasted with the sentiment in “Lest We Forget”: About half of those who saw it as a bad influence felt that University was a sort of uncommitted and uncoordinated giant that has taken minimum responsibility in relation to its overwhelming; impact on the community and with which it is extremely hard for community people to communicate, i.e., it is hard to find the person who can make a decision and get the body to move. Others saw the University in an unfavorable light because of student marches and property destruction or because they believe it responsible for bringing drugs into the community or keeping rents high.87 These active neighborhood residents perceived OSU as a negative influence both when its physical expansion drove out residents they saw as desirable (families) and when its actions and growth directly and indirectly drove demographic change (students and low-income or transient renters) and architectural conversions (single family to multifamily homes). Active residents attempted to counter these trends both by implying a historic ideal (owner-occupied single family homes and cooperative relationships with OSU) as well as by pursuing policies such as historic district designation and restrictive zoning.88 At the same time, Ohio State and the city of Columbus initiated conversations with urban universities and cities across the country about how to counter urban blight and to answer the broader question of “what a university neighborhood should be.”89 For both the university and the neighborhood, the postwar moment seemed to provide the chance to redirect urban development around the campus by contrasting a national conversation about an uncertain urban future with the myth of a stable, golden-age past. As neighborhood stakeholders and university actors debated the direction of university growth and neighborhood change, both groups painted the prewar period as a golden age to justify alternative ends. Partners for Urban Redevelopment?: OSU and the University District since 1995 When university and neighborhood stakeholders described the history of the University District and Ohio State’s involvement, they described not only a golden age and a decline but also a period of renewal, reinvestment, and revitalization beginning in the mid-1990s and continuing to the present. According to this continuation of the mythic chronology, in 1994, the murder of an OSU student near High Street became the rallying point behind a “renewed” university interest in the University District neighborhoods after decades of urban neglect of the district by both the city and the university.90 Portraying the university as a kind of “sleeping giant” suddenly alerted to the problems in the neighborhoods and their possible effects on students and Ohio State’s image, Ohio State officials took action to save the declining neighborhoods and reverse the deterioration.91 Citing the traits associated with the golden age as renewal objectives, they marshaled university and private resources toward such ends. As a part of these efforts, Ohio State launched a heavily publicized community partnership campaign. OSU’s president, Gordon Gee, announced, “This neighborhood is the front door to the Columbus campus. Its problems are, therefore, our problems.”92 University representatives traveled to Temple University in Philadelphia, Columbia University in New York City, the University of Chicago, St. Louis University, and Marquette University in Milwaukee to discuss models for university-led urban redevelopment. Like Ohio State’s midcentury urban renewal involvements, its early 1990s community partnerships impulse was not an isolated local activity. Embracing their part in a national trend of university-neighborhood “engagement,” the OSU actors discussed and debated best practices and strategies and hoped to become a national model.93 Among the results of this ramped-up involvement was the creation of Campus Partners, a university-affiliated urban redevelopment organization, and the building of the South Campus Gateway, an “off-campus” mixed commercial and residential development owned by Ohio State through Campus Partners.94 The South Campus Gateway was a $150 million redevelopment project that Ohio State spearheaded in the early 2000s as part of a longer effort to “save” the southern University District, which it called its south campus area, including the Weinland Park neighborhood, the only subsection of the contemporary or historic University District to house predominantly African-American and low-income residents.95 A 2010 article in the business magazine Columbus C.E.O. glorified the transformation: “Today, the decaying buildings that once marked that troublesome stretch of North High Street are gone, replaced by shiny new restaurants, apartments, office space and retail stores.”96 Yet some neighborhood residents in the adjacent low-income and subsidized housing experienced the change differently. In 2009, one reflected on the lack of financial benefit to neighborhood residents from the development and mentioned fears that his neighbors would be displaced: “there’s nobody from this area working at Gateway. If nobody from the area gets jobs, then redevelopment is not a financial boon. . . . I don’t have a problem with folks with money. I have a problem when that means that others have to leave.”97 Another neighborhood resident echoed his concerns about displacement and the price of gentrification for her daughters and herself.98 Indeed, participants and observers noted that in many ways, the collaborative process leading to Campus Partners was a failure.99 Some neighbors viewed the new partnership and its projects—particularly the capstone “Gateway” development—with skepticism, disapproval, and anger. As David Dixon wrote: “Campus Partners and its planners were accused of trying to define the future of the university district for its residents, rather than with them.”100 Their viewpoints echoed those of the neighbors responding to OSU’s heavy-handed urban renewal and expansion planning in the 1950s and 1960s. Especially according to university discourse, the planning and public relations processes in the two periods were very different and took place in separate sections of the University District. However, they shared undeniable similarities: neighborhood streets acquired by the university, housing demolished, and negative responses from neighborhood residents who perceived dishonesty and misuse of power on the part of the university forces. Reflecting on the creation of Campus Partners, Gordon Gee noted that: “it’s there to build community, build partnerships, build belief that a university is not this isolated area that does not care for its community, those sorts of unofficial stories. . . . Now all that (bad) stuff is gone. You write the narrative as you’re going.”101 Gee’s recollection epitomized Ohio State’s interpretations of its own historical involvement in the neighborhoods, in the midcentury and in the late twentieth century: a narrative, whether of decline or renewal, formulated to serve the university’s interests at the time. Yet the unofficial stories have persisted in spite of university efforts to write a new narrative of partnership. Conclusion: The Limits of a Golden Age The narrator of a 2011 documentary about the University District in Columbus, Ohio, juxtaposed two scenes to illustrate relationships between Ohio State University and the neighborhoods around it. In the first scene, set in the present, an elderly woman, nameless for fear of retribution, complained about her neighborhood and said, “it’s not good. . . . It’s noisy, vulgar, and I don’t want to leave my house, but I don’t know what I’m going to do.”102 In the second scene, the narrator described a very different environment. In doing so, he contrasted the present with the past, but he mixed his tenses in order to make his point. He said, “The 1900s usher in a golden age for the University District. Innovative leaders and residents collaborated on improvements in education, government, the arts and other disciplines. That’s what a University is for. It was the one that attracted the best intellects of the time.”103 This blurred division of “then” and “now” has characterized University District discourse since the mid-twentieth century in discussions and debates about the area. Similarly, a recently published community photographic history drew contrasts between “symbiotic relationships between the neighborhoods and educational, industrial, and business systems that were located in the district” in the early twentieth century and later “decades of difficult times” beginning in the 1960s.104 Commentators ranging from documentary narrators to past and present residents to university stakeholders have invested in a narrative that paints the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a kind of golden age from which the neighborhood declined or fell over the course of the twentieth century. Importantly, most of the activities and initiatives of Ohio State since this moment in the mid-1990s have been aimed at the restoration of a golden-age notion of the neighborhood, an ideal that never existed and that has important implications for low-income renters in the district today. By framing the “decay” chronology in a way that downplays Ohio State’s mid-century impact, Ohio State erased its own role in the neighborhood changes in that period. When commentators today refer to the “golden days” of the University District, they illustrate a common recollection based upon the selective memories of certain people and upon historical experiences of particular blocks and streets in the district. Just as the man on Maynard Avenue assumed a trend on his street that never existed, other residents and stakeholders elide the complicated historical experiences of the district. When contemporary journalists ask: “What’s a nice city like this doing with a district like that?” and “How (did the) streets of fine homes became city’s most hectic area?” they oversimplify a complex chronology. As the example above shows, one narrative came to stand out as the story of the community and the university’s role within it. This is a narrative of rise, fall, and the possibility of renewal. It is a narrative that has galvanized support from diverse stakeholders at cross purposes in the past and today—university officials, city planners, and long-term neighborhood resident activists.105 Today, these stakeholders seem to be invested in seeing the imagined and idealized University District of the past as a model for its future. Examined closely, it is a model that represents only a selective, partial story of the University District’s tumultuous past, and as a model, it limits future development to the restorations of a false ideal. Importantly, it silences the many mid-century conflicts that debated the future of the neighborhood and elides past voices of dissent as well as alternative histories of the neighborhoods. Footnotes Thanks to Harvey J. Graff for his support of every stage of this project. Research and writing were funded by the Ohio State University’s Undergraduate Research Office Summer Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the University of Minnesota Population Center and University of Minnesota Graduate School. 1 For descriptions of the neighborhoods written for marketing purposes, see The University District Organization. “The University District,” www.theuniversitydistrict.org. 2 Author’s interview with anonymous homeowner on Maynard Avenue in Spring 2009. I came upon this man as I walked up and down various streets in the University District searching for streets that appeared (to a casual pedestrian observer) to have been impacted in visible ways by the presence of Ohio State. In other words, I was searching for streets that seemed to prove the University District’s mythic chronology as I understood it before my analysis disrupted it. Though I found the name of the man in county records based on his address and his successful sale of his home, he moved before I could obtain permission to use his name or story as more than an anonymous anecdote. 3 R. L. Polk & Co. Polk’s Columbus (Franklin County, Ohio) City Directory, 1960: Containing an Alphabetical Directory of Business Concerns and Private Citizens, a Directory of Householders, Occupants of Office Buildings and Other Business Places: Including a Complete Street and Avenue Guide: Also Yellow Pages, with a Special Advertising Section and a Complete Classified List, Including a Manufacturers’Department. (Columbus, 1960). See also Table 1 for homeownership statistics on Maynard Avenue from 1940-1999. 4 Margaret Pugh O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton, 2005). 5 Stefan Bradley explores conflicts and collaborations between black Columbia students and Harlem residents in Harlemvs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s (Urbana, 2009). Judith Rodin’s The University & Urban Revival: Out of the Ivory Tower and into the Streets (Philadelphia, 2007) discusses the University of Pennsylvania’s past and contemporary involvement in surrounding West Philadelphia neighborhoods. LaDale Winling, “Students and the Second Ghetto: Federal Legislation, Urban Politics and Campus Planning at the University of Chicago.” Journal of Planning History 10, no. 1 (2011): 59–86. 6 Ibid. On Yale, see Mandi Isaacs Jackson. Model City Blues: Urban Space and Organized Resistance in New Haven (Philadelphia, 2008). 7 LaDale Winling. “Students and the Second Ghetto: Federal Legislation, Urban Politics, and Campus Planning at the University of Chicago,” 10, no. 1 Journal of Planning History (2011). 8 Ohio State’s utilization of Cold War rhetoric was part of a national pattern. Both public and private institutions deployed the terms and tools of the urban crisis to justify their expansion. For example, examining Columbia University in New York, Michael Carriere notes: “Drawing upon the language of Cold War anticommunism, the university . . . undertook such a self-proclaimed ‘war on blight’ in an attempt to ‘liberate’ the surrounding community from the horrors of urban decay.” Michael Carriere, “Fighting the War against Blight: Columbia University, Morningside Heights, Inc., and Counterinsurgent Urban Renewal,” Journal of Planning History 10 (2011): 5–9. 9 University District Organization, “Just the Facts,” <http://www.universitydistrict.org/facts/> accessed August 20, 2016. 10 Carved out of state land to serve a public good, land-grant institutions held a core mission that scholar George McDowell has called a “social contract.” Mark Nemec, Ivory Towers and Nationalist Minds (Ann Arbor, 2006). 11 Author’s conversations with undergraduate students, 2009–2010. 12 US Census Bureau, Population Division, Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for Incorporated Places of 50,000 or More, Ranked by July 1, 2014 Population: April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2014, May 2015. 13 A handful of scholars have examined Columbus as a case study, including Eric Monkennen, The Dangerous Class: Crime and Poverty in Columbus, Ohio, 1860–1885 (Cambridge, 1975); Roderick McKenzie, The Neighborhood: A Study of Local life in the City of Columbus, Ohio, (Chicago, 1921), 354; and Patricia Stach, “Deed Restriction and Subdivision Development in Columbus, Ohio, 1900–1970,” Journal of Urban History 15 (1988): 42–68. 14 Bill Bush, “Franklin County’s Population Growth Leads Ohio,” The Columbus Dispatch, March 15, 2013. 15 For a discussion of metropolitan Columbus in the context of national urban development (including annexation and zoning), suburbanization, and planning, see Diane Burgess, Planning for the Private Interest: Land Use Controls and Residential Patterns in Columbus, Ohio, 1900–1970 (Columbus, 1994). 16 In his fall 2007 speech to the OSU Faculty Council, University president Gordon Gee said, “First, let us forge one Ohio State University. Let us begin to think of ourselves as the university, not a collection of colleges hitched to a heating plant, or a detachment of departments connected by corridors.” Italics and underlined statement are from written speech. E. Gordon Gee, “It Is About Time . . . and Change,” Faculty Council Address, 4 October 2007. <http://president.osu.edu/speeches/fac_100407.php> Within the official boundaries of the University District, there are numerous “neighborhoods” or “districts,” some self-defined, some recognized by state or national historic designation, and others named by bodies other than their residents. (See Figure 1. Source: The University District, <www.theuniversitydistrict.org> [accessed 14 December 2014]). 17 For example, I have never heard a student refer to the “predominantly student neighborhood” or “student core neighborhood” as such. These designations are used by university and neighborhood associations to refer to the area just east of High Street (and between Eleventh and Lane or Norwich Avenues) characterized by a high percentage of student renters. The students themselves, however, are more likely to say that they live “east of High.” 18 See Map 1. (Source: Federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) Maps (“Redlining Maps”) for Ohio Cities (Ohio State University Libraries). 19 Other scholars have well documented the prejudices of HOLC insurers against specific groups and uses. See Kristen B. Crossney and David W. Bartelt, “Residential Security, Risk, and Race: The Home Owner’s Loan Corporation and Mortgage Access in Two Cities,” Urban Geography 8 (2005): 707–36; Amy E. Hillier, “Residential Security Maps and Neighborhood Appraisals: The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the Case of Philadelphia,” Social Science History 29 (Summer 2005): 2007–33; Kenneth T. Jackson, “Race, Ethnicity, and Real Estate Appraisal: The Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration,” Journal of Urban History 6 (1980): 419–52. 20 See Table 2 for a comparison of University District demographics in 1920, 1970, and 2010. 21 Students have always been an important demographic group in the University District, as have other affiliates of Ohio State (faculty and staff). Asking who (else) lived in the University District is not a simple question, nor are demographics easy to calculate when the boundaries of the University District have crossed Census tracts and enumeration districts. 22 These four selected sample streets, Maynard, Frambes, 15th, and 11th, all form part of the largest section of the University District, the neighborhoods east of High Street. None of the four streets’ historical experiences appear to deviate from the generally accepted community memory of the University District’s past, and they were originally chosen for this study because they seemed, in fact, to best epitomize it. 23 Raimund E. Goerler, The Ohio State University: An Illustrated History (Columbus, 2011). 24 For example, a 1912 Columbus Dispatch article (as advertisement) entitled, “What Nature and Man Have Done for Indianola” contains the subheading: “Forest Trees and Surveyors Made Foundation for Beautiful Columbus Suburb.” Despite the reference to the University District as a suburb, this article also emphases the urban character of the district: “The roughness of the land, together with their appreciation of their beauty, led the original owners to spare the old forest trees, which added another characteristic feature, exceptional indeed in a thickly populated urban district . . . The thrushes and woodpeckers still return to their old haunts in spite of the encircling city.” Columbus Dispatch, Local, September 22, 1912. 25 “Columbus, OH” [maps], The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, 1867–1970 (OhioLINK Digital Resource Commons), <http://sanborn.ohioweblibrary.org.oh0063.oplin.org/> accessed December 15, 2014. 26 See, for example, selected reminiscences in Emily Foster, The Ohio State University District: A Neighborhood History (Charlotte, 2014); see also Doreen N. Uhas Sauer and Stuart J. Koblentz on behalf of the University District Organization, The Ohio State University Neighborhoods (Charleston, 2009). 27 Doreen N. Uhas Sauer and Stuart J. Koblentz on behalf of the University District Organization, The Ohio State University Neighborhoods (Charleston, 2009), 30. 28 Ann Fisher, “University District’s Old Times Preserved,” Commentary, Columbus Dispatch, March 7, 2008. Improved aesthetics are often listed as contemporary priorities for the University District, and trash collection is a frequent topic. In a 1994 newspaper article, City Councilman Matt Habash lists priorities for OSU and the University District and includes planting nine hundred trees, increasing trash storage container capacity, increasing bulk pickup, increasing street sweeping, and increasing enforcement of environmental laws. Alan Miller, “Habash has plan for OSU” Columbus Dispatch, May 13, 1994. These are not new topics. A 1973 document prepared by the newly formed University District Organization contains an extensive “Community Maintenance and Sanitation” section, which suggests more trash cans, a “community code of maintenance,” and spring clean-up days. An example of its rhetoric is the hope to “effect changes in the overall appearance of the community. Such physical improvements might affect attitudes insofar as people take pride in an attractive community while a trashy, deteriorating environment is treated in a trashy way.” “Profile of the University Community Part III” prepared by the University District Organization in April 1973. The Ohio State University Archives, Harold L. Enarson Papers (RG 3/j/43/5), “University District Organization: April 1973.” The preferred citation format for Ohio State University archival sources deviates somewhat from Chicago Style archival footnote formats. Wherever I use Ohio State archival sources, in this note and in following notes, I use the OSU Archives preferred citation. 29 Doreen N. Uhas Sauer and Stuart J. Koblentz on behalf of the University District Organization, The Ohio State University Neighborhoods (Charleston, 2009), 41. 30 “What Nature and Man Have Done for Indianola,” Columbus Dispatch, Local, September 22, 1912. 31 Ibid. The article calls the area a “region of homeowners.” 32 Figures taken from street-level analysis of R. L. Polk & Co. Polk’s Columbus (Franklin County, Ohio) City Directory, 1940. (Columbus, 1940). US Census Bureau, “Historical Census of Housing Tables: Homeownership,” Census of Housing, http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/owner.html. 33 “Houses for Sale,” source unknown, September 29, 1938. Microfilm copy provided to author by neighborhood resident. 34 Census forms from 1910–1930 on the selected streets reveal numerous cases in which multiple families lived in apparent single-family dwellings. 35 “All those godawful apartments,” was the characterization offered by one long-term resident I interviewed about the (in this case, architectural) effect of Ohio State upon her neighborhood. Author’s Interview with Dianne Efsic, September 2010. 36 “What Nature and Man Have Done for Indianola,” Columbus Dispatch, Local, September 22, 1912. 37 Sauer and Koblentz, The Ohio State University Neighborhoods, 25. 38 The Ohio Historic Inventory Form for 132 E. Maynard Avenue, which describes the frame property’s extant area as “a neighborhood of similar sized generally non-descript houses.” 39 Limited on-campus housing was available in the late nineteenth century, but greater numbers of buildings for men and women did not occur until the 1920s–30s when students and staff lobbied the university to construct more dormitories. Goerler, The Ohio State University: An Illustrated History and Eugene Wiles, The Housing Facilities of Men Students at Ohio State University, Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University (Master’s thesis), 1936. 40 Thomas C. Sawyer, History of the Student Personnel Administration: 1873–1970, 13. The Ohio State Centennial Histories, Office of Student Affairs, Part I, Chapter 1, 1970. 41 Deed of Sale from Henry Neil Trustee to Margaret and Alice Poulton, 14 November 1913 (Recorded December 12, 1913), Franklin County, Ohio, County Recorder’s Office, Columbus, OH. 42 Daniel Okrent, Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York, 2010). 43 Deed of Sale from the Chas. F. Johnson Realty, Co. to J. M. Stoughton, August 8, 1917 (Recorded August 15, 1917), Franklin County, Ohio, County Recorder’s Office, Columbus, OH. 44 P. B. Stach, “Deed Restrictions and Subdivision Development in Columbus, OH, 1900–1970,” Journal of Urban History 15 (1988): 42–68. 45 See Columbus redline map (no section descriptions available) in Folder, “Columbus,” Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, Records Relating to the City Survey File, 1935–1940, Box 1: “Ohio.” RG 195. National Archives and Records Administration College Park. 46 The Ohio State University Archives, Harold L. Enarson Papers (RG 3/j/43/6), “University District Organization (UDO): Correspondence (Incl. Plans): 1973–74, 1976.” 47 Robert Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of US Cities (Cambridge, 1993). Robert Fogelson, Downtown America (New Haven, 2003); Jon Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940–1985 (Baltimore, 1990). 48 Between 1900–1950, as average age of marriage decreased, the number of young, single people living alone also decreased, but after 1950, as age of marriage increased, more individuals lived outside of primary households before marriage. Steven Ruggles, “The Demography of the Unrelated Individual, 1900–1950,” Demography 25 (1988): 521–36. 49 Newspaper articles in the student and city paper published photographs and captions that portrayed the University District as a kind of war zone during moments of student unrest. Headlines from clippings saved by one neighbor screamed: “Violence, Gas, Fire Bombs,” The Ohio State Lantern, May 1, 1970; “Persons Involved in Area Rioting Arrested on a Variety of Charges,” Columbus Dispatch, 6 November 6, 1971; Bonnie Schwartz, “Student Rioters Battle Police,” The Ohio State Lantern, April 30, 1970. 50 The Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning: Office Of (RG 10/6/054-V.F.), “Community Relationships: The Ohio State University (Report): 1979,” Accession 183/90. 51 On the GI Bill’s effects on university enrollment, see Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin, The GI Bill: The New Deal for Veterans (New York, 2009). 52 The Ohio State University Archives, University Housing: Office Of (RG 6/M/1), “Dean of Men’s Office: Annual Reports: 1957–1958.” June 1957 annual report by A. E. Hittepole (Assistant Dean of Men, director of Off-Campus Housing for Men). 53 Ibid. 54 At the dawn of the twentieth century, Ohio State Board of Trustees secretary Alexis Cope bragged to a reporter at a hotel in a Washington DC that Ohio State did not face the difficulties of hazing like some other universities did at that time. He proudly attributed this nonissue to the fact that Ohio State lacked on-campus dormitories. Cope said, “At our university, the students board wherever they please in the city and only come in contact in class. Although the dormitory system may have its advantages, we are convinced that better order and discipline can be maintained without it.” “Men Met in the Hotel Lobbies,” The Washington Post, Jan. 19, 1901, 6. 55 O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge, 78. 56 Universities functioned as “influential public forces” in a variety of urban renewal efforts at this time, not only campus expansion projects. Hilary Moss et al., “Assessing the impact of the Inner Belt: MIT, Highways, and Housing in Cambridge, Massachusetts,” Journal of Urban History, 40 (2014): 1054–78. 57 See The Ohio State University Archive, Campus Planning: Office Of (RG 10/6/26), “Urban Renewal: OSU North: 1960–61”; The Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning: Office of (RG 10/6/26), “Urban Renewal: Projects: OSU North: Improvements: 1964–66.” 58 B. D. Robick, Blight: The Development of a Contested Concept (Unpublished Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University, 2011). ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 399. Retrieved from http://login.ezproxy.lib.umn.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/864740266?accountid=14586. In this unpublished dissertation, Robick focuses upon the transformation of the scope of the term: from one narrowly used by planners to “a wider array of ideas defined by individual interests.” Colin Gordon compares contemporary use of the term to its historical development in Colin Gordon, “Blighting the Way: Urban Renewal, Economic Development, and the Elusive Definition of Blight,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 31 (2004): 305–37 59 Ibid. 60 The Ohio State University Archive, Campus Planning: Office Of (RG 10/6/26), “Urban Renewal: OSU North: 1960–61.” James Clark, “Re: Urban renewal.” Filed memo. 61 This political cartoon shows a master planner’s spray can of “Instant Blight” and includes the caption: “Tsk! Tsk! Look at the condition of that housing.” The Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning: Office Of (RG 10/6/26), “Urban Renewal: Projects: OSU North: News Clippings: 1961–1965.” Clipping from The Herald and the Booster, October 15, 1964. 62 The Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning: Office Of (RG 10/6/26), “Urban Renewal: Projects: OSU North: Improvements: 1964–66.” Letter from Charles Pavey to the Board of Trustees of OSU (June 1964). 63 Letter to the editor from “Mrs. D. A.,” The Herald and the Booster, March 31, 1965. “Urban Renewal is More Federal Control.” The Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning: Office of (RG 10/6/26), “Urban Renewal: Projects: OSU North: News Clippings: 1961–1965.” 64 The Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning: Office Of (RG 10/6/26), “Urban Renewal: Projects: OSU North: Improvements: 1964–66.” “Letters to the Editor: There’s More to the Renewal Story.” Booster (8/12/1965). Letter by Arthur Young (W. 8th Avenue) 65 See, for example, a letter sent from Eileen Ryan Jones to Columbus Mayor M. E. Sensenbrenner about Ryan’s suspicion of the Columbus Planning Commission and OSU Office of Campus Planning’s University District preliminary plan (May 1964). The Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning: Office Of (RG 10/6/11), “City Planning Commission and University District Study: 1960–1964 (Folder 2 of 3).” 66 A true urgency about student housing permeates the public and private rhetoric and writing of OSU actors about this project. For example, in 1964, one OSU official commented to a campus planner: “property acquisition is troublesome, but we have the larger problem of how we house students.” The Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning: Office Of (RG 10/6/26), “Urban Renewal: OSU North: 1964–1966.” Letter from Gordon Carson to James Clark (February 1964) about the schedule of building for the north dorms that urges expedition of building. 67 A letter from M. E. Sensenbrenner (Mayor, City of Columbus) and Patrick Phelan (Director, Department of Urban Renewal, City of Columbus) to Novice Fawcett (OSU President) and John Herrick (Executive Director of Campus Planning). The letter iterates a “gentleman’s agreement” between the city and the university, promises that the pooling credits will be used in the University District, and that the city “will take full account of the fact that these credits would not exist except for the past and continuing capital improvements program of the University. The letter includes other platitudes directed toward the University by the City. (February 1965) 68 A letter to Gordon Carson (Office of Business and Finance) from John Herrick from May 1962. The letter is in response to questions about the Zieg apartment on N. High Street and its inclusion in the urban renewal plan. He writes, “This apartment was specifically excluded from acquisition in the development plan,” The Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning, Office Of (RG 10/26), “Urban Renewal: OSU North: 1962.” 69 Roderick McKenzie, The Neighborhood: A Study of Local life in the City of Columbus, Ohio (Chicago, 1921), 354. 70 Ibid. 71 For more information on the Homestead urban renewal proposal, see The Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning: Office Of (RG 10/6/26), “Urban Renewal: Projects: Area South of Campus: 1962, 1966–68, 1970.” 72 Ibid., a memorandum written by Jean Hansford (November 1968). 73 Ibid., “OSU North Restrainer is Slated.” Columbus Dispatch (7/12/1964). 74 The Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning: Office of (RG 10/6/054-V.F.), “Community Relationships: The Ohio State University (Report): 1979,” Accession 183/90. 75 Letter from Gordon Carson to James Clark (February 1964) about the schedule of building for the north dorms. The Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning: Office of (RG 10/6/26), “Urban Renewal: OSU North: 1964–1966.” 76 Phone interview conducted by the author with Rev. David McCoy, January 2015. 77 UCA bulletin, the Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning: Office of (RG 10/6/25), “University Community Association (UCA): 1964.” 78 Review of the University District study from July 1964 entitled, “Analysis of Proposal to Connect Indianola, Summit and North Fourth Street into a Single, 2-way, Semi-limited Access Arterial Street.” Annotated by James Clark (August 1964). The Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning: Office Of (RG 10/6/11), “City Planning Commission and University District Study: 1960–1964 (Folder 2 of 3).” (Emphasis added.) 79 A broader organization followed on the heels of the UCA in response to the growing complexities of urban development and renewal, the University District Organization (UDO), which formed in the 1960s “an organization of organizations.” Phone interview conducted by the author with Rev. David McCoy, January 2015. 80 The Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning: Office Of (RG 10/6/11), “City Planning Commission and University District Study: 1960–1964 (Folder 1 of 3.)” 81 Ibid. 82 The Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning: Office Of (RG 10/6/054-V.F.), “Community Relationships: The Ohio State University (Report): 1979,” Accession 183/90. 83 Indeed, the consultants who surveyed neighborhood residents emphasized that OSU officials were working with a population of people who were not adversarial but rather hopeful. In a summary of his study, consultant Ira Fink wrote: “Unlike some universities I am aware of, I did not encounter an attitude among the community that they felt betrayed by the University. What seemed to be the problem instead was something that is perhaps more elusive: that is a sense that OSU could do more to be a neighbor in its neighborhood.” The Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning: Office Of (RG 10/6/054-V.F.), “Community Relationships: The Ohio State University (Report): 1979,” Accession 183/90. 84 LEST WE FORGET, Folder: “Lest We Forget Transcript and Pamphlet, 1979,” 10, Ohio State Historical Archives. 85 LEST WE FORGET, Folder: “Lest We Forget Transcript and Pamphlet, 1979,” 8–9, Ohio State Historical Archives. 86 John Herrick, “Campus Expansion-North” and “Campus Expansion-South,” John H. Herrick Archives, The Knowledge Bank, The Ohio State University, < http://hdl.handle.net/1811/38441 > (accessed February 25, 2017). 87 University District Organization, “Profile of the University Community Part III” pg 258, April 1973. The Ohio State University Archives, Harold L. Enarson Papers (RG 3/j/43/5). 88 See the efforts documented in: The Ohio State University Archives, Harold L. Enarson Papers (RG 3/j/15/15), “Columbus Near Northside Historical District: Historic Designation for Old Student Union: 1967–1978.” 89 The Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning: Office of (RG 10/6/15), “Correspondence: Campus Long-Range Planning Programs from Other Universities and Colleges: 1958–1961.” Columbus Directory of City Planning Harold Buchanon wrote to his counterparts in Atlanta (Georgia Tech), Berkeley (University of California), Cambridge (Harvard and MIT), Evanston (Northwestern), Knoxville (University of Tennessee), Los Angeles (UCLA), Minneapolis (University of Minnesota), Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania), Seattle (University of Washington), and Tucson (University of Arizona). Summary of Pertinent Statements Received from a University-Housing Questionnaire.” Written by Harold Buchanon (Director, City Planning Commission, Columbus) in February 1963. The Ohio State University Archives, Campus Planning: Office Of (RG 10/6/11), “City Planning Commission and University District Study: 1960–1964 (Folder 1 of 3.)” 90 For an example of this explanation, see Terry Pristin, “Commercial Real Estate: Improving the Neighborhood at Ohio State,” The New York Times, April 30, 2003 and Jennifer Wray, “Beyond Gateway: Cleaning Up Campus,” Columbus C.E.O., November 2010, 12–15. On another prominent narrative of town-gown relations shifting after violence off-campus, see Danny Serna, “Murder Revitalized Town-Gown Relations,” Yale Daily News, February 17, 2011. 91 This is a historically discordant trope given the myriad ways in which Ohio State’s activities and interactions affected surrounding neighborhoods in the years before 1994. Ohio State actors have framed these 1990s-onward initiatives with a discourse about the public good and saving the adjacent neighborhoods from blight. See Steven Gregory, “The Radiant University: Space, Urban Redevelopment, and the Public Good,” City and Society 25, 1 (2013): 47–69 on how Columbia University adopted similar discourses in the same period to use eminent domain in Morningside Heights. For a discussion of the neoliberal politics of Ohio State’s early twentieth century development and the university as entrepreneurial subject (with a focus on the South Campus Gateway development), see Sayoni Bose, “Universities and the Redevelopment Politics of the Neoliberal City.” Urban Studies 52 (2014), 2616–32. 92 Ohio State University Press Release, “Ohio State to Support Improvement Plan for University Area,” (1-21-1994). The Ohio State University Archives, Information File on University Area Improvement Task Force. Alan Miller, “OSU Seeks Answers on Crime,” Columbus Dispatch, (4/5/1994), The Ohio State University Archives, Information File on University Area Improvement Task Force; Ohio State University Press Release, “Task Force to Hold Public Forums on University Area Improvements,” (4/15/1994), The Ohio State University Archives, Information File on University Area Improvement Task Force. 93 On the trend of institutional community engagement, see David J. Maurasse, Beyond the Campus: How Colleges and Universities Form Partnerships with Their Communities (New York, 2001); Bruce Behringer, ed., Pursuing Opportunities through Partnerships: Higher Education and Communities (Morgantown, 2004); and Mary Jane Brukardt et al., eds., Creating a New Kind of University: Institutionalizing Community-University Engagement (Bolton, 2006). See also Henry G. Cisneros’ call for such engagement in Henry G. Cisneros, “The University and the Urban Challenge,” (Washington, 1995). 94 See Alan Miller, “Corporation to Be Set up to Improve Life in OSU Area,” Columbus Dispatch, June 3, 1994. The Task Force’s recommendations included ‘improvements in public and social services in neighborhood,” “comprehensive planning for the area,” “early impact actions by the university and the city to establish a commitment to work together,” and “community action programs led by the redevelopment corporation.” 95 Jeff Long, “Can South Campus Be Saved? The City and OSU Tackle Mission Impossible,” clipping in the News Digest from the Other Paper (February 4, 1994), Information File on University Area Improvement Task Force, OSU Archives, 9. See also David Dixon, “Campus Partners and The Ohio State University: Transforming a Failing Commercial District,” Places, 1 (2005): 46–49. 96 Jennifer Wray, “Cleaning Up Campus,” Columbus C.E.O, November 2010. 97 Interview conducted by the author with Weinland Park activist and social worker Robert Caldwell, July 2009, Columbus, OH. 98 Interview conducted by the author with Weinland Park resident Leonette Lyles, July 2009. Columbus, OH. 99 Golden Jackson and R. B. Meyers, “Challenges of Institutional Outreach: A COPC Example,” Cityscape, 5 (2000): 125–40. 100 David Dixon, “Campus Partners and The Ohio State University: Transforming a Failing Commercial District,” Places 1 (2005): 46–49. 101 Michael Rishell, “Becoming the University: Early Presidential Discourses of Gordon Gee,” unpublished dissertation, (Michigan State University, 2011) 65–66. 102 Sam Hendren, “Columbus Neighborhoods Documentary Profiles University District,” 10/6/2011, <http://wosu.org/2012/news/2011/10/06/columbus-neighborhoods-documentary-profiles-university-district > (accessed January 13, 2014). See also: Jonathan Putman, Mary Rathke, Kelli Trinoskey, and Brent Davis, Columbus Neighborhoods, Documentary (2011; Columbus, OH: WOSU-TV), Television. 103 Ibid. 104 Doreen N. Uhas Sauer and Stuart J. Koblentz on behalf of the University District Organization, The Ohio State University Neighborhoods (Charleston, 2009). 105 Tim Doulin, “OSU-Area Group Studies Home-Ownership Incentives,” Columbus Dispatch, March 6, 1992. From The Ohio State University Archives, “Information File on University District.” See also the recent series in the Ohio State Lantern (OSU student newspaper) about the University District as a “disposable neighborhood.” One article from that series quotes University Area Commission president Ian McConnell, who stated, “The lack of identity in the predominantly student populated core area reduces a student’s sense of place in the community, allowing for lower standards, which in turn leads to a decline in quality of life across the district.” In the same article, Campus Partners staff member Steve Sterrett calls the student neighborhood “a place you could come and people didn’t care didn’t care too much about graffiti, it just was the way it was.” Dan McKeever, “State of the District: In Search of an Identity: ‘A Disposable Neighborhood,’” The Lantern: The Student Voice of the Ohio State University, May 26, 2009. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. 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TI - “Time and Change Will Surely Show”: Contested Urban Development in Ohio State’s University District, 1920–2015
JF - Journal of Social History
DO - 10.1093/jsh/shx040
DA - 2017-07-21
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/time-and-change-will-surely-show-contested-urban-development-in-ohio-hab0LMEPRl
SP - 1
EP - 1099
VL - Advance Article
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
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