Something I think about from time to time is how High Street functions as such a main artery of Columbus, and aside from a few other small portions of other streets (a few blocks of Front, Gay, Main), we really don’t have anything that ranks as a close second place to it.
One area that I think could become a really nice secondary north-south “corridor” through Downtown would be Grant Avenue. It runs from The Columbus State Community College down to German Village and crosses the paths of the Columbus College of Art & Design, The Columbus Metropolitan Library, Grant Hospital, Franklin University,
Sure, you will see some people milling around the hospital a bit, and you’ll see some students going from classrooms to cars at their respective schools, but really you don’t see as much life on this street as you should considering the institutions that call Grant Avenue home.
What I propose is a push for connecting the neighborhood visually with streetscaping (more sidewalk greenspace, bike racks, “you are here” kiosks, installation art, etc) and push for new commercial and residential development along the strip. There’s a few condo projects that can be found around the library and quite a few apartments as well, but surprisingly none of this is really considered as student housing. An attempt should be made to bring these three schools together to erect several residential towers aimed affordably at their student population somewhere on the north end of Grant. This demographic would serve as the fuel to ignite the need for commercial services along the corridor including restaurants, bars, coffee shops, art galleries and more. A high-rise hotel or two should be considered for the area as well.
This area has been branded as “The Discovery District” but not too many people know much about this brand, and the ones who do think it’s a joke since there’s not much of a focus for what this area is supposed to me. I say we give the students housing and let it grow organically into a nice new downtown neighborhood.
There was a recent study that determined that Columbus State alone pumps over $700 million into the local economy. Wouldn’t it be nice if more of that money was focused downtown by keeping some of the student population around longer before and after classes?
I was just thinking about this, but on the opposite direction of High.
Front St. has some great things lined up for itself. There’s the 2-way conversion, RiverSouth developments, the new courthouse, Gay St. opening up through to Civic Center, a possible freeway cap, the next phase of the Lazarus redevelopment, and all of this sits 1/2 block away from the Scioto Mile redevelopment. Additionally, the 70/71 split conversion should take some of the traffic load off of Front St. by using those collector/distributors rather than just dumping all of the traffic on Front at Livingston.
My philosophy is that you’ve got to follow the public dollars to find the next hot area. It currently seems to be Gay St….before that it was the Arena/Short North (to some extent it still is)…and before that it was the Brewery District.
I also forgot to mention that you’re way ahead of the curve on this. It doesn’t seem like development of this area is on the collective radar of our city leaders or adminstrators at those colleges.
I wouldn’t say these types of developments aren’t on the radars of our city leaders and officials… it’s just not on their lips yet.
I like the Grant Avenue Corridor idea. It would be a public-like mini campus, linking the school, library and the Museum of Art (well, almost).
Once this other north-south corridor is complete, a natural civic response would be to use one or two east-west corridors to link it to High Street.
As the links and corridors grow, we’d beging seeing pedestrian circulation, which, of course is what brings about street-level business.
This discussion makes me want to dust off an old copy of Sim City.
Senaca Hotel at the corner of Broad and Grant is currently being converted into affordable studio apartments aimed at students. The same developer will also be converting the former Deaf School into apartments.
I’ve heard about both of those projects, but I’ve never seen prices. “Affordable” is a relative term.
Anyway, I’d like to see more of this in that area. How many units are in the Seneca building? 50? I don’t think we’ll see much of a “neighborhood” start to form unless we have at least 2000 units of student housing around there.
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[...] I’ve always thought that Grant Avenue would make a great development corridor. There’s always so much focus on High Street, but Grant has a lot of existing [...]