A Historical Guidebook to Old Columbus. Bob Hunter
president. His successful campaign had started in earnest on February 21, 1840, when a large, noisy, excited crowd of his supporters demonstrated for him at the corner of Broad and High in the pouring rain, after which the Whig Party’s Ohio convention was held on Statehouse Square. Thousands converged on Columbus and attended a parade in Harrison’s honor. The highest estimate was that 25,000 participated. Columbus had a population of just over 6,000 at the time.
37. 55 East State Street—This location just east of the Ohio Theatre actually has a more extensive and in some ways more impressive theater history than its neighbor. John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, once appeared on the stage of a theater that stood here. The 1,500-seat Dramatic Temple opened on this site in 1855 and burned within a year. Another playhouse called the Columbus Theater was opened on the site by John Ellsler in 1857 and was remodeled and opened as Ellsler’s Athenaeum in 1863. Ellsler was a friend and business associate of Booth and brieffly came under suspicion after Lincoln’s assassination because the two men had shared a Pennsylvania cabin the previous summer to hatch plans for the development of an oil field on the property. Ellsler’s theater eventually closed, and in 1871, William Neil bought it, remodeled it, and opened it as Neil’s Athenaeum. He sold it two years later. In 1879, 300 seats were added and it became the Grand Opera House. A fire caused extensive damage in 1887, but it was reopened in 1892 with a new façade. A six-story building, which supposedly surrounded the old theater, was built sometime in the intervening years before 1900; the Grand Theater, later the RKO Grand, was the first in Columbus to show talking pictures. On January 23, 1927, Don Juan, the first partial talkie, was shown at the Grand. Almost a year later, the first all-talkie, Al Jolson’s Jazz Singer, played there to Columbus audiences. The building was destroyed by fire on June 15, 1934, and sixteen months later a completely new RKO Grand Theater opened there. The State Restaurant occupied the second loor of this building, and in 1938 or 1939 a young singer from Steubenville named Dino Crocetti, who had been hired by local band leader Ernie McKay, was heard twice daily from this spot on local radio station WCOL. Word of his talent eventually reached Cleveland, where he was hired by another bandleader in 1940 and changed his name to Dean Martin. Eddie Frecker’s was another small restaurant on the ground floor of this building; Frecker’s later became the big name in ice cream in Columbus. The theater was closed on May 13, 1969 and on January 8, 1970, while the building was being torn down, a cutting torch set it afire one final time.
38. 39 East State Street—The old City Hall building rose on this spot, the current site of the Ohio Theatre, in 1869 and was completed in 1872. The 140-foot-high Gothic building was one of the city’s most prominent landmarks. The US post office, a Columbus Public Library reading room, and the city’s board of trade occupied the first ffloor, city council chambers and meeting rooms were on the second ffloor, and the third ffloor consisted of a public auditorium that could seat three thousand persons. A ball was held in the honor of former president Ulysses S. Grant and his wife on their visit here in 1879. The building was destroyed by fire on the night of January 21, 1921; humorist James Thurber covered the fire as a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch. The site stood vacant until Loew’s and United Artists’ Ohio Theatre opened on March 17, 1928. The Divine Woman, starring Greta Garbo and Lara Hanson, was the first movie shown there. Over the years, many prominent show business stars have appeared on the Ohio’s stage, including Jean Harlow, Jack Benny, Judy Garland, Buddy Ebsen, Milton Berle, Martha Raye, Ted Lewis, and Laurel and Hardy. In 1969, the theater nearly met the wrecker’s ball when Loew’s closed it and sold the building to a local development company. There were rumors that Governor James Rhodes wanted the site for a new state office tower, which was eventually built on the other side of Statehouse Square. In the efort to save the building, the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts (CAPA) was born, and several prominent local companies provided the financial support to save it. The building was restored to its original appearance during the 1970s, and in 1977 it was recognized as the “official theater for the state of Ohio” by the 112th General Assembly. To mark its fiftieth anniversary, a Jubilee Gala Performance took place on October 21, 1978. Bob Hope hosted Bob Hope’s All-Star Tribute to the Ohio Theatre, which also starred Ginger Rogers and Vic Damone and was videotaped and shown on the NBC television network on December 3. President Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty, unveiled a bronze plaque outside the theater designating it as a national historic landmark; they then joined other celebrities including Ohio Senator and Mrs. John Glenn, Ohio actress Lillian Gish, and Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes inside for the show.
40. Southwest corner of High and State Streets—Harvey D. Little’s two-story brick dry goods store was located at this site in the early years of the city’s settlement. Samuel Barr built the first three-story building in Columbus here, and David W. Deshler ran a store in this building from 1830 to 1836. The Clinton Bank took over the building and occupied it until it was torn down in 1863. The Exchange National Bank building took its place.
3 East Broad Street
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