A Historical Guidebook to Old Columbus. Bob Hunter

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      A window on East Broad Street’s heyday as a symbol of wealth and high society can be found as near as eBay. For a few bucks, a curious time traveler can go to the Internet auction site and pick up an old postcard showing an idyllic tree-shaded scene of early twentieth-century opulence, of twin carriage lanes flanked by yawning elm trees on each side of an unpaved avenue lined with grand mansions.

      The postcards ofer no explanation, and none is really needed. To see one of the views is detail enough. The people who lived on this street weren’t worried about the high cost of the fine carriages seen in some of those photos or the wages of their domestic help. They were Columbus entrepreneurs and power brokers, business titans and philanthropists, and the 120-foot-wide street, the widest in the city’s original plat, was the New Albany of its day.

      The Columbus Club at the southeast corner of Fourth and Broad Streets is a bricks-and-mortar reminder to a twenty-first-century voyeur of just what a grand avenue Broad Street once was. That proud, stately mansion stands there amidst the traffic and noise, surrounded by an iron fence and small, neatly manicured lawn, like the lonely survivor of a nuclear war.

      The rest of the current street bears little resemblance to the old days. Progress has long since jackhammered the two median strips that once divided the street into three parts: twenty-foot-wide carriage lanes on the north and south sides and a forty-five-foot-wide section in the center that would eventually carry cars and commercial vehicles.

      There weren’t many of the latter, though. Garbage wagons weren’t permitted on Broad—the rich residents didn’t want them there—and east–west streetcar lines to Franklin Park and other points east ran on Long and Oak Streets to keep them of Broad. This wasn’t only because of upper-class snootiness. The early streetlights that lined Broad burned gas, and the lamps had gauzelike mantles that could be shaken of by an earthquake of activity in the street. Regardless of whether that was really the reason to keep everyday life from infringing on the lifestyles of those privileged to live on the magnificent boulevard, it was a good excuse, anyway.

      The first elegant homes stood in the block opposite Statehouse Square, although most of them surrendered to the march of progress very early. In 1829, attorney William Doherty built a house at 68 East Broad, where the Rhodes State Office Tower now stands. Remembered as the first house with stone steps in the city, it somehow survived into the twentieth century. Joseph Ridgway, whose plow factory and foundry was the city’s first successful manufacturing establishment in 1822, had a home at 50 East Broad. In 1859, William Deshler, who had a small two-story house two blocks to the east, built a mansion at the northwest corner of Third and Broad Streets that stood until 1922, after most of its contemporaries had been replaced by parking lots and office towers.

      The vision of transforming Broad from plank road to grand tree-lined avenue came to Deshler after he saw similar streets in a visit to Havana, Cuba, in 1857. He ofered to buy trees for the street if the city provided the land for median strips on each side, and the city complied. By 1870, a double row of elms and sugar maples lined the street, and more wealthy citizens began building homes there.

      Several mansions had already paved the way. Peletiah Webster Huntington, founder of the bank that still bears his name, had a fine old home at 141 East Broad that stood on the site of the current PNC Bank building. Ohio canal builder and state legislator Alfred Kelley built a sandstone Greek Revival mansion at 282 East Broad between 1836 and 1838 on 18 acres that later became the site of the Christopher Inn.

      In 1855, Columbus Gas Company president William Platt built a mansion for himself and his wife, Fanny, sister of future president Rutherford B. Hayes, on a 3-acre plot at the northeast corner of Cleveland Avenue and Broad, and Columbus Art School founder Francis Sessions had a square brick mansion on the site of what is now the Columbus Museum of Art.

      In 1860, Baldwyn Gwynne erected a mansion at the southwest corner of Broad and Fourth Streets that became Miss Phelps English and Classical School, a school for girls of wealth and social position, in 1885. In 1864, financier and railroad contractor Benjamin E. Smith built the house that would become the Columbus Club with individually wrapped bricks from Philadelphia.

      The mansions gradually crept east all the way to Franklin Park, as many of the largest, most luxurious homes went up in the 1880s and 1890s. Clinton D. Firestone, president of the Columbus Buggy Company, built a handsome home trimmed in red terra-cotta, at 580 East Broad. The towered Frederick Schumacher house, made of attractive green stone, became a landmark at 750 East Broad. Several Ohio governors made their homes in various mansions along Broad Street while in office; included in their august company was 1920 Democratic presidential nominee James M. Cox, who lived at 840 East Broad six years before he lost the presidential election to Warren G. Harding. Eventually, most of the city’s prominent families—Hanna, Wolfe, Pace, Jones, McCune, Bentley, Warner, Lindenberg, Bricker, Johnson, Merkle, Powell, Hoster, Orr, Pirrung, Monypeny, Campbell, and many more—had elegant, impressive homes on the street and a lifestyle to match.

      The spacious dining rooms in these mansions were built for formal dinner parties for twelve or more visitors, and engraved invitations were often extended ten days beforehand. Lavish lunches prepared by the households’ private chefs were common, and many of the homes contained second- or third-ffloor ballrooms for grand parties. Carriage houses stood on the grounds of most of the mansions, many with servants’ quarters on the upper ffloor.

      The wives and daughters of some of the early business titans became community leaders in their own right, founding and playing prominent roles in local charitable organizations including the Columbus Female Benevolent Society, the Capital Area Humane Society, the Columbus Home for the Aged, the Friends Rescue Mission, and the Columbus Tuberculosis Society. Others were deeply involved in cultural activities such as the art gallery or the symphony orchestra.

      In the April 1888, issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Deshler Welch called Broad “one of the most beautiful thoroughfares to be found in an American city. It extends for a distance of several miles, and in the summer time the four rows of shade trees form a bower of foliage.” He contrasted Broad Street’s “rural beauty” with “the cold uninteresting style of a Fifth Avenue residence.”

      Alas, it was a diferent time. The median strips were removed in the 1920s. The stately elms that gave the street a certain pastoral elegance eventually fell victim to Dutch elm disease, and the families who once made their homes there gradually removed to the ever-growing suburbs, first to Marble Clif and nearby Bexley and then to newer suburbs in places such as Upper Arlington, Dublin, and most recently, New Albany.

      There are still business titans and rich, successful entrepreneurs these days, but many of the stately old mansions that once created a showplace for the city are gone and the high society that once lived on East Broad Street isn’t quite so high. Wealth was only part of what made East Broad Street what is was. It was a special time in the nation’s history, a place where a growing city took us and a particular state of mind.

      It’s still a nice place to visit, even if we have to do it with photographs, postcards, imagination, and memories.

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      1. 136 East Broad Street—The Esther Institute, a girls’ boarding school, opened here in a rectangular three-story building on September 29, 1853. Agnes W. Beecher, a relative of author Harriet Beecher Stowe, was the principal. The school had originated the year before in a private home on Rich Street under the name of the Columbus СКАЧАТЬ