Three hundred city blocks, 2.8 square miles and more than 43,000 people. Some people live in the University District only for a school year or two. Others call it home for a lifetime. They run businesses. They raise children. They watch the college kids come and go. They adjust to the noise level. They make peace, as much as they can, with the sight of discarded beer cans strewn across front lawns. It’s worth it, they say. So they stay.
The University District is one of the most historic and vibrant communities in Columbus and stretches from the Glen Echo Ravine in the north to Fifth Avenue in the south, from the Olentangy River in the west to the ConRail railroad tracks in the east.
Not originally part of the city of Columbus, the University District developed around Ohio State. The creation of the streetcar further developed the district and, just after World War II, the area quadrupled with the return of thousands of veterans.
But numbers and dates don’t tell the story of this neighborhood. That story is better told through its long-time residents, through the eyes of those who stay. Here are some of their stories.
Michael Day and Bob Hipp
Tucked away in the heart of Olde North Columbus sits a cluster of homes and residents that defy University District resident stereotypes. Elsewhere, lawns may occasionally be littered with remnants from weekend parties. Here, residents are seeing the first irises of the season begin to burst in their well-tended gardens.
In 1996, when Michael Day was shopping for a new home, he could have moved into a new house in the suburbs, but on a gut instinct Day purchased a house with a funky brick pattern, an address etched in stain glass over the door and an extensive history to turn into his home in the historic Oakland Avenue neighborhood.
“There was something about the house that told me this is the right place to be,” Day said.
Slowly but surely, Day and his partner, Bob Hipp, have been renovating their house and discovering parts of its assorted past. A recent kitchen renovation uncovered an old pass-through embedded in brick walls. A weathered wooden door leading from the entrance into the dining area was once layered with mismatched locks, a reminder of the house’s days as student apartments.
“What keeps me here is that it’s not suburbia,” Day said.
The low sound of church bells from Holy Name Church wake the couple in the morning and the clashing sounds of local student bands serve as their dinner music.
“It’s things like that that make my Saturday hop,” Day said.
Although the tightly knit neighborhood is a sanctuary of stability in an ever-changing sea of rental properties, the street experiences its share of campus-related cacophony. Both Day and Hipp cite the first few games of the football season as the most tumultuous time to live in the neighborhood, with alumni and non-University District residents treating their neighborhood “like a playground,” Day said.
The block is full of families and retirees, but few undergraduates, and the residents seem to like it that way.
“There’s that fear of the block going downhill,” Day said, regarding the possibility of more undergraduates joining the neighborhood. “It’s a nice balance right now.”
GILES CLEMENT/FOR THE LANTERNDianne and Ed Efsic stand in front of their 100-year-old home on Indianola Avenue, near Iuka Ravine. The couple have owned the home since 1967 and enjoy the diversity and excitement in the district.Dianne and Ed Efsic
Clad in one brown shoe and one blue shoe, Ed Efsic was quick to explain that he was wearing “braces” and not suspenders.
Why was he wearing shoes of different colors?
“Well it’s not because I’m an idiot,” Efsic said. “It’s because one of each color wore out for whatever reason, anyways. So these are still good.”
Ed and Dianne Efsic moved into their 100-year-old house on Indianola Avenue near Iuka Ravine in 1967, and when they moved to Texas in 1982, their kids lived in the house while attending OSU. Soon after their children graduated, they moved back in.
It’s not the noise of college students that bothers Ed.
“They’re quiet and I don’t mind the noise so much, it’s just the trail of debris that follows them. If they cleaned up after themselves, I wouldn’t mind so much,” Ed said. “For the most part, from Sunday through Thursday afternoon, it’s not a bad neighborhood.”
Dianne disagreed.
“It’s not a bad neighborhood weekend nights too,” she said.
Diane sees the positive side of living among college students. It’s livelier, she said.
“Kingwood was boring, where we lived in Texas,” she said. “God that was boring.”
The Efsics originally moved into the University District because they didn’t want to live and raise their children in a boring, homogenous place. Dianne wanted a mixed neighborhood.
“I didn’t want everybody to be like me,” Dianne said. “I wanted the kids to be exposed to different cultures, different kinds of people.”
Out of everywhere in Columbus the best choice seemed to be the University District, with its “old people, young people, fat people, skinny people, brown people, white people, black people, rich people, poor people, and in-between people,” she said.
“There’s just all kinds of people that live here,” Ed added. “Chip down the street is a professor in anatomy at the medical college and he’s also a world-famous magician. There’s interesting people around this neighborhood. We just quietly go about our business.”
Bentley Allen, Charlie Fredrick, Laura Anglim
Many campus apartments become a shell, a place to hold parties, to sleep at night, to store containers of ramen noodles and frozen pizza. For others, a house becomes a home, a joining of friends and roommates who each tolerate the quirks and eccentricities of the others. But for Charlie Fredrick, Bentley Allen and Laura Anglim, their house has become a place of open dialogue, personal growth and community activism.
Originally dubbed “The Free the Planet House” because of their connection with the OSU organization, the original house members, including Allen and Fredrick, decided to turn the house into a community.
“We have the intention of sharing food, space and the responsibilities of the house and doing things for the house. There’s an intention behind it,” Anglim said. “That kind of thing might happen in any other house on some level. But there’s not the intention.”
After a trip abroad, Anglim returned to a house that had taken on a life of its own. Rather than just living with roommates and friends, she returned to an environment complete with a 64-page house handbook declaring the goals for the community-oriented house.
In such a tightly woven community, concessions have to be made. Everything from shopping for groceries to decorating the walls requires a communal decision. While some aspects were hard to get used to, now everyone is so aware of each other that they change without even thinking about it. Even sleeping patterns became communal when one roommate was having a stressful week and sleeping poorly.
“Things that would be unreasonable requests in another context, like, ‘Would you please adapt to my sleep schedule,’ I don’t remember any backlash to that proposition,” Allen said. “It’s just natural that I would totally rearrange the structure of my day for the betterment of one of the members of the house.”
Caring like that includes supporting the other housemates as they embark upon social and political outreach projects. Fredrick’s monthly gathering, Hootenanny for
Hell-raisers, brings hundreds of local activists into their home to discuss radical politics.
The creed of the house has become so intrinsic to its residents that they no longer consider themselves individuals sharing space, but members of a group contributing to a common good.
“The house itself is an entity and you’re a part of that,” Anglim said. “The house will keep going, all of the ideas that formed it will keep going without your presence.”
Catherine Girves
Inside a darkened church, Catherine Girves’ tiny office is bursting with life. Dozens of seedlings line windows dressed in lime-green checked café-curtains. Volunteers lounge on mismatched sofas and weathered wooden chairs. Buckets of recycling and worms writhing in compost sit near the door.
In the middle of it all, Girves is chatting away on her iPhone, typing on a clunky refurbished computer.
As the director of the University Area Enrichment Association, Girves does not fit the stuffy image her job title conjures up. Instead, she exudes an earthy, approachable nature in her cotton T-shirt and improvised tablecloth-turned-skirt attire that she whipped together after a mishap with Kampuchea tea, which, by her own admission, tastes wonderful and smells awful.
A 27-year resident of the University District, Girves’ came to the neighborhood as a student in 1982 and never left.
“I always thought I would move,” she said. “After I got pregnant with my first kid, I started looking for somewhere else to live. It turns out the University District is a great place to raise kids.
“When I was growing up, grown-ups were parents. My kids had grown-ups who came out and played.”
Her son learned to ride a two-wheeler to the applause of neighboring undergraduates, dubbed “the bike friends,” who later taught him to play chess. Her daughter would bake cookies with graduate students who needed a break from the overwhelming onslaught of reading that comes with finals week.
During early summer, when college students moved into and out of apartments and dorms, her children went on dumpster-diving missions to collect clubhouse furniture.
On weekends, Girves took her children to watch live installations at The Wexner Center for the Arts or to hear a Noble Prize-winning astrophysicist speak at Hitchcock Hall.
Today, Girves is dedicated to promoting diversity throughout the University District, encouraging experiences like the ones she and her children had.
But she is up against enormous odds; 94.9% of homes in the district are occupied by renters. That means few chances for undergraduate students to applaud bike riding 5-year-olds, to learn to make crab-apple jelly from the retiree next door and to form neighborhood alliances with locals who are familiar with the less-than-desirable practices of a landlord.
“If you want a quiet, pastoral neighborhood, then this is not for you,” Girves said. “But the people that choose to stay are generous and appreciate diversity. It’s what makes it the best neighborhood in the city of Columbus.”
Claire Racine and Catrina Otonoga can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].
