Chess In The Woods
The city of Columbus is launched by the competitive bid of four enterprising settlers, who frame to the state legislature a plan to lay out and build a new state capital, complete with state house and penitentiary. To make good on their promise, the proprietors bring in the surveyor Joel Wright. These are his bold thoughts: to make a regular grid of streets, and shift the whole thing twelve degrees counterclockwise, presumably to have the north axis follow a Native American trail along a dry ridge.
If we were to compare this vision to that of sort of development team who would offer to build you a new capital today, there is little in the way of concepts, claims, slogans, and renderings. These proprietors did not indulge in any ideas of a perfected city. There was no William Penn, Colonel Oglethorpe, or Joseph Smith among them, looking to make a more perfect situation through wide avenues and shady plazas. Instead, the way to begin was simply to do as had been long since been done for the colonies of the Europeans, the rough grid surveyed “square” and spreading out from a cross roads, with a civic square left mostly empty somewhere at center. The subdivisions of the square are the rewards of the proprietors, who have first pick of lots for land speculation.
Present-day Columbus having been so vigorously sorted out, it’s startling to see in the records of the 19th century just how long the settlers took to wrest it from the forest. Local historian William T. Martin, writing in 1858 and often courtly in his descriptions of colonial inconveniences, calls the Columbus-Granville road a “continuous mud hole,” and relays that “Both proprietors and settlers were too much occupied with their own individual and immediate interests to attend much to the clearing off of the streets and alleys; and for several years the streets remained so much impeded by stumps, logs and brush that teamsters were compelled to make very crooked tracks in winding their way through them.” As the stout hardwood cover of oak, hickory, maple, and beech trees was cut down, it was digested into fuel, burned length by length to keep the state house warm. The frustrations of the process seem to have been taken out on the local animals. At the public bathhouse, a black bear was made to pump water chained to a treadmill; a hapless bald eagle was chained up and displayed at Schiller Park.
In the intermediate stops of drawing the proprietors’ chessboard in clear lots and passable roads, you have descriptions of a landscape that with an odd charm to the present-day observer. In fair weather, children would repair to State and Fourth to swim, and in frozen, would skate at Broad and Third; at Town and Washington they would pick blackberries. For a prank, they would gather hackberries and sprinkle them on the walks of the school; the dry berries would pop like caps, startling the unsuspecting teachers. We’d like to know what these anomalies in urban space looked like – but the pictures we have of the time are of markets, taverns, country estates garlanded with trees scavenged from the forest. In their zeal to improve their properties, the settlers miraculously zeroed in on every aspect that made the place particular and set about removing them.
A photograph from the city’s 1908 plan shows an empty lot in Franklinton in a direct line from the State House, from this point of view of shining teapot on a hill. I’m sorry, it isn’t an empty lot; it is full. It is full of pieces of carts; one reading “HOT WATER HEATING – PHONE 1201,” another up on two wheels, a jack, and what looks to be a barrel; a flat bed here, a wheel there. Further in the back, a buggy canted up at a perilous 30 degree angle. A large collection of pipe segments, two or so feet long each, stood up and waiting. Three trees off in the corner, at different stages of being hacked to bits. Loose stones and cobbles, with what looks like an orphaned curb snaking back to indicate what might have been meant for an alley. The lot backs up to the Scioto River; on the other side, a sodden warehouse gives a back to the stage. Where you might expect the setback of a house, instead a mysterious railing. In front of that railing, a boy in a cap, standing still. The caption: “PRESENT CHARACTER OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD THROUGH WHICH A WIDE APPROACH TO THE CAPITOL SHOULD BE BUILT.”
At various times throughout the 20th century, the city, or its fathers, thought to issue plans to redefine itself for itself, to dictate where it would go. They serve at this point mostly for a historian to read barometer readings from the record; they show at given points what was acceptable and desirable. It could be debated that, despite never actually attaining their goals, these documents served to at least articulate goals; though the goals are often so commonsensical, so reflective of the zeitgeist particularly and settler logic generally, that it is hard to imagine they did not already float coincidentally and simultaneously in the heads of each framer.
Take for instance the block of courthouses studded along the left bank of the Scioto. At the time of the 1908 plan, the hope was that Greco-Roman wedding cakes, set neatly on tablecloths of lawn, would ennoble every little depot of the United States; and so the planners of Columbus duly urged this, and inveighed against the clutter of the existing conditions.
You see traces of this push here today in a deserted plaza, framed on one side by a vacant office tower and on the other by the Ohio Supreme Court. The plaza is mostly filled by a reflecting pool, and the reflecting pool mostly filled by a giant chrome gavel. The signature public spaces of Columbus repeat this gesture, clearing out clutter and replacing it with a few big objects laid on center. At the Field of Corn, in a suburban office park, they have changed out a cornfield for giant concrete ears of corn. And downtown at Topiary Park, they have subbed in yew topiaries of bourgeois for the bourgeois themselves.