Just Deserts
In the middle of the pandemic, 7010 Lambton Park Road in New Albany sold for $4.3 million dollars. As far as I can tell it was bought by no one from no one; from LJHB LLC to the 7010 Lambton Park Road Real Estate Trust. The property backs onto one galactic arm of the New Albany Country Club, shielded, but not too shielded, from the fairway by a thin bumper of trees. The entry drive snakes toward a keycarded entry gate, in front of which is touchingly, hopefully, a little black metal mailbox.
Understand first of all that the town of New Albany is utterly surrounded with white fences. It is white fences to the point where when you see a white fence elsewhere you seem to be in New Albany. They are white fences, after the model of split rail fences, and from the road they give the impression of an unbroken chain of stud ranches. Instead of pasturage, they fence off long bumpy lawns, and somewhere behind those bumps, some big brick houses. And inside these brick manses, the master class are sleeping with their chins on their chests, dreaming of putting greens, untroubled ponds, lollipop topiary by a gravel walk. Or that is my dream, since my nose is only ever as it were up against the glass; I can only see those fences, and fences, and fences, the long grassy berms they sit atop, here and there a white oak solid in the wind.
After a certain point, power can take on the appearance of floating free from its surroundings. It expands like a thought bubble in a cartoon, blocking out all the context; given enough time, it would expand into the cloudy terrain of heaven, featureless but for St. Peter’s pearly gate. In New Albany, reclaimed from the farms on the periphery of the city by the local corps of barons, a safe space for the rich was laid out in the 1980s; not contented with the airtight garages of middle class dreaming, malls and roller rinks and themed restaurants, they unfolded their fenced yards to the sky.
Since very few of us long to be imprisoned, the landscape quality of dreaming always has a leakiness to it. Driving through the periphery, you are frequently exposed to the lures of others’ dreams, water slides mounting up behind the trees. So far, the proprietors of such places do not throw up walls with jagged glass set into the coping, but settle for cameras, for rental security agents, but most of all, sheer space, tracts of space no one would bother going across; moats of low grass wide enough to forget what was on the other side. More gas money, more time on the bus, more space in which to be spotted and clocked. Winding up the drive on your way to the country club, or the zoo for the matter, you have plenty of time to consider: should I have come here at all? Or, if your money is already good, you can relax into that same space of doubt from the other end – surely I am still part of the city, part of society, and I have never had to pass through a wall, and there was only a teenager in a visor at the checkpoint, nothing at all too fearsome. And on the ski slope, the golf course, the semi-public hiking trail, the space goes on winding, and winding within itself, winding into the lore of traversing it, intestines packed into a cavity for matter to find its way through.
The prison has always been by Columbus’ side. Sullivant starts his town with stocks and a humble jail, and the proprietors are on the hook from the first to build a penitentiary sized for the new state. The first State House was built by convict labor, hidden behind a fence in the central square, dressing stones from Lucas Sullivant’s quarry. Driven back and forth to the penitentiary conveniently close at hand, they worked in exchange for the time shaved off from their sentences. This noble edifice, its columns wooden beams painted in imitation of marble, managed to burn down less than 40 years later. This happened while a new State House, again built by convicts, was slowly rising next to it, behind a new whitewashed fence. Above this fence, you could see a series of elms swaying. They had been painstakingly extracted from nearby forests and replanted as “noble mementos of the past.”
The first execution in Columbus – the first formal one, at least – is not carried out until 1844, where two penitentiary inmates were killed for misdeeds committed in jail. One, a black woman named Esther Foster, had killed a fellow woman prisoner with a shovel; the other, a white man named William Clark, had killed a guard with an axe during an escape attempt. “Mostly for reasons of economy,” local historian Ed Lentz says, “they were hanged together on gallows erected along the Scioto riverfront. A huge, noisy, and rather drunken crowd gathered to watch.” A horse in the crowd was sufficiently excited to rear up and trample an unfortunate bystander, Mr. Sullivan Sweet. Afterward, the middle class demanded to be spared such sights, and further executions were removed to the penitentiary yard. This was not an adequate solution, since bored people climbed on surrounding roofs to look in, just as though they were looking from their condos into Wrigley Field.
Give the people what they want, or at least halfway. As the 19th century wore on, visitors, here as elsewhere, were invited into the penitentiary, paying to see discipline at work. What they saw in the yard was oddly close to a Victorian park, complete with a military review – corps of inmates being drilled by their overseers on a lawn fringed with shade trees, ringed with bedding and showy elephant ears, before being marched back to their cells.
The Pickaway Correctional Center, a growth from the little hamlet of Orient, has long since succeeded the old State Penitentiary downtown. Half an hour away from the center of town, it can sprawl in every direction, eating up the farmland, growing itself an academy for prison guards, growing around the graveyard of the insane asylum it supplanted. You know the ratio of space between the baseball diamond of the exercise yard on one hand, and the tracts of lawn spreading out beyond it, gate after gate, extra time for aiming a searchlight and a rifle. Do I need to tell you what is there to meet you at the gates of the prison? White rail fences, framing the entry drive.