What Do People Do All Day?
The last stump was ground out of the middle of the road, and a sense of the everyday had finally been established in Columbus. All the work done to fill ponds, to pave streets, to establish regular rail, made for a life where you could reasonably estimate your movements on a timetable. Stores were regularly restocked from goods coming up from New Orleans via Chillicothe, and a steady stream of new reinforcements came west to settle via the National Road. A broad initial range of approaches to time, from out-and-out loafing to frantic wood-chopping, converged into rhythm, moving across the loom of the settlement in regular clacking.
Rather than form tight villages, the farmers here had moored their homes in their fields, stranding themselves on little estates. But the immediate edges of the city took a more sociable form. We get a sense from the accounts of the time of this street life, of idlers and hustlers, beggars and swaggerers, stepping round fallen crates at the market, long lines of horses hitched in the streets. They would congregate around the Statehouse to make political bodies, or stamp down the main thoroughfares in parades.
At the first Columbus land auction, two German immigrants bought in; more soon arrived, settling on the less favorable downstream lots to the south of the center. A sociologist writing in 1921 describes the area as having “the typical German village structure, built close up to the sidewalk, with garden space and chicken house in the rear. Many of the alleys are lined with small residences. Frequently the owner of a fine home will have a small building on the rear of his lot occupied by a tenant family. The shops, churches, and other public places of this district are owned and operated by Germans, and the German language is used almost exclusively.” In 2024, it bears mentioning that Ohio lasted a hundred years with a growing immigrant group, fleeing utter trouble at home, thriving unassimilated at its very heart.
The more that adult humans are the sole measure of a space, and architecture is uniformly sized for them, the more boring it gets to be for those same adult humans to occupy; the end state of this tendency ending up in flat floorplates linked by elevators. Throughout the ring of the oldest extant neighborhoods around downtown, you instead feel yourself surrounded with small perches, once intended for pigs, turnip patches, sub-tenants of several species, all parceled out cheek-by-jowl by each other. To have to accommodate trees and garden plants, or dogs, or hummingbirds, to meet things halfway, is to enrich the human experience into zootopia, to constantly feel charm in the form of a slight impedance.
What does charm consist of? Among other things, the ability to persuade wealthy people of the 21st century to live in the footprints of the working class of the 19th century. The Germans’ tight mesh of cottages has today proven ripe for pied-à-terres for bored New Albanyites and executives grudgingly commuting from Chicago. Most sense of urban disorder here has been neatly resolved through gentrification – no one is lingering on the porch, no pigs are there to be tripped over, and most of the slim outdoor patches have been redone with slate stepping-stones, hostas, and Japanese maples. People appear dutifully in Schiller Park, and here and there in sparse family groups on the sidewalks around it, around a stroller struggling over one elm root or another.
People do not only move through space as inquiring spirits, transparent eyeballs; they are real impediments, and so they make space between themselves. They condense space as they move together in loose formation; they inflect how that space feels, now focusing it, and now making it scatter. Today, you are only going to find this in Columbus by walking up High Street.
For whole blocks at a time, you might see urban, urbane, things happen there. Professional friends in a slowly advancing line; window-washers angling their squeegees to let them pass; UPS men with rolling carts hustling over the curb. An improbable number of pub crawls, matched a pink shirt, or a green shirt, or a blue shirt, or a Santa hat, perched on embarrassing pedal contraptions. Around them, in a huff: a car encrusted with plastic toys, a Cybertruck, a three-wheeler with neon undercarriage. By the convention center on a Saturday, cheerleaders and wrestlers, shepherded in from the suburbs by their chaperones. See how slowly these visitors move across a crosswalk, or hurry across it in a panic; how closely they cluster for comfort as they approach the challenge of a stop sign on foot. Like children atop one another’s shoulders in a trenchcoat, they add up to an improbably big and awkward person. They stop in a knot in the middle of the sidewalk, comparing phones; they scrutinize the legalese of the parking restrictions. And then that knot passes, and you tack around the panhandler, the jogger; there’s a van parked in front of the curb cut, and a panicked man trying to get the side panel to roll open; and a man is vaping outside the art-glass gallery, and does he belong to that property? Is he meant to be there?
When we talk about crowds, we tend to flip between the cloud and the particle – either the great mass acting as one, or the coincidence of many individuals, each acting on their own behalf. But to be in the midst of a crowd is also halfway between those two: to be in a landscape, with areas that are congested, points that stay stock-still, and sparse regions. It is clearings and glades and copses, pools and riffles, all dilating and shutting like pores in skin. As if we were in a stream, everything flows together, more than the sum of their imperatives – the water falling to level, the water boatmen skimming the top, the mayflies drinking, the bass leaping to catch the mayflies.
In Columbus, this stream has dried to one thin channel, north to south, with shrinking pools to one side and another; and the creatures inside looking ever more warily at one another.