When the gutterpunks are away scouring High Street for drugs and change, broken malt liquor bottles cover the front steps of the empty apartment building at High and 12th Avenue.The building isn’t exactly the picture of quality, with boarded-up windows and pigeons living in rotted wood. As a central gathering place for the gruff, odd-haired panhandlers who dominate High, the corner was an obvious place for Campus Partners’ special brand of “urban revitalization.” Down the street they squeezed out Big Fun, whose only sin was having the misfortune of being wedged between two unsuccessful businesses. The cartoony mural with Elvis, Pee-Wee Herman and Godzilla is all that remains as construction slowly envelops the former pop culture emporium.In its place will be Urban Outfitters, a store specializing in bundling subculture in an aestheticized, price-inflated package. But the people at Urban Outfitters are minor league thought-Nazis compared to the business Partners prodded into taking over the corner.Blockbuster Video will open late this year on the ground floor of the now vacant building, owned by Buckeye Real Estate. Above it will be nine luxury apartments aimed at graduate students.Blockbuster is owned by Viacom, the entertainment megalith. Viacom rules over that bastion of corporate-style subversion, MTV, the movie studio which brought us “Titanic” and the T.V. studio responsible for “Rugrats.”The video chain practices a “family friendly” policy of not carrying NC-17 and unrated films. Don’t look for Playboy videos at Blockbuster, and if you do stumble on a copy of “Showgirls” expect to get a cut-up, watered down version.Blockbuster either stifles or spurs free expression when they enter a market. In some conservative markets, competing video stores have pulled their adult sections in fear of the negative comparison. In more liberal places, independent stores have thrived by carrying alternative and adult films the chain won’t touch.That’s the case on north campus, where a Blockbuster, Hollywood Video and North Campus Video battle for customers in two blocks of turf. Hollywood Video doesn’t play that family-friendly game, and with lower prices and longer rentals have showed up Blockbuster.So has North Campus, which touts its “legendary adult section” along with the best foreign, cult and gay sections around. But the central campus Blockbuster won’t have nearby competition, so east side students will have a decidedly biased video source.The first few chapters have been written; this summer look for the complete story of Campus Partners’ battle to suck the life out of High. The big plan is set to come out soon, and rumors of its contents have been a mix of the surprisingly positive and depressingly predictable. Some good ideas are being considered, like expanding the branch library and putting in parks. An independent movie theater with more provocative films and less of a parking hell than the Lennox 24 might actually be reality.But buzzwords like “market potential” and “destination retailer” are also being thrown around, which are code words for Les Wexner owned stores plowing over pretty much every bar between 12th and 5th Avenues. Minority businesses have been dismissed as an impossibility.Until the plan is more than dark murmurs, Blockbuster and Urban Outfitters are the only indicators of its tone. Poorly promoted and thus poorly attended forums are the only indicators of the amount of student input in the plan.Not exactly an optimist to begin with, what I’ve seen so far has soured my mood even further. Campus Partners seems fixated on packing as many cash cows in the least amount of space possible at the expense of local color. The march of the chains has begun, and independent businesses don’t have the deep pockets to compete.Before the plan is cemented, allow us one real opportunity at contributing student input. Campus Partners needs to have a forum on campus which students know about and where our opinions are considered.The head of the Union’s speakers board has promised space would be available there for the forum. The campus radio station would broadcast it and provide equipment. The only thing needed is Campus Partners to commit, and more importantly to listen.Only student voices can redirect Campus Partners from the money-lined path they appear to have chosen.
Nathan Crabbe is a junior from Akron who puts his bets on Jessica Weeks tearing J P. Valentine’s head off. He invites readers to check out the uncensored version of last week’s column at http://kbux.ohio-state.edu.
