Columbus Discovery Guide

Columbus is Ohio’s capital, its largest city, and the one that has been growing while the others shrank.

It is a young city — Ohio State University has around 60,000 students on one campus, among the largest in the country — and that shapes the food, the music and the general willingness to try things.

German Village, just south of downtown, is a preserved district of brick cottages and slate roofs on brick streets, saved from demolition in the 1960s and now one of the largest privately funded historic restorations in the United States.

The Short North arts district, the Scioto Mile riverfront and the North Market give the centre a walkable core, and the Columbus Museum of Art and the Wexner Center are both genuinely good.

German Village

Thirty-odd blocks of nineteenth-century brick cottages, wrought iron and brick-paved streets, with Schiller Park at the centre. The Book Loft, a bookshop of 32 rooms in a pre-Civil-War building, is on the main street, and the beer gardens are the original kind.

Short North

High Street north of downtown, under lit arches that recall the ones the city was known for a century ago: galleries, restaurants and bars, with a Gallery Hop on the first Saturday of the month.

Downtown and the river

The Ohio Statehouse, a severe Greek Revival building with no dome, free to tour; the Scioto Mile parks along the restored river; and the Columbus Museum of Art.

Ohio State

The Oval, the Wexner Center for the Arts by Peter Eisenman, and a stadium that holds over 100,000 people.

Elsewhere

The Franklin Park Conservatory, the zoo, which is among the best in the country, and the North Market for lunch.

Columbus is a test-market city, a government town and a college town at once, and it behaves like all three.

The test market

For decades Columbus has been used by food and retail companies to trial products, on the basis that its demographics closely track the national average. Residents are well aware of it and rather enjoy the status, and it means new things appear here first.

Young and growing

The median age is low, the student population is enormous, and unlike most of Ohio the city has grown steadily for fifty years — it is now the state’s largest and among the fastest-growing in the Midwest.

Football

Ohio State football is not a pastime here but the organising principle of autumn. On a home Saturday the population of the city effectively doubles, everyone wears scarlet and grey, and the rivalry with Michigan is discussed in terms usually reserved for warfare.

Open

The city has a large and long-established LGBTQ community and one of the bigger Pride events in the Midwest, alongside a substantial Somali population, the second largest in the United States.

Spend across the neighbourhoods. The Short North, German Village, Franklinton and Olde Towne East all have independent businesses, and Columbus’s growth has been uneven — the east and south sides see far less of it.

North Market has traded since 1876 and its stalls are small independent businesses; it is the single easiest place to put money into local hands.

The Scioto was narrowed and its floodwalls removed in the 2010s to restore a functioning river channel and park — a genuine piece of ecological restoration in the middle of a city, and worth using rather than driving past.

Franklinton, the oldest settlement here, is being redeveloped after decades of flooding and poverty; visit the galleries, and know the context.

Game days fill the city; book accommodation early or avoid them.

May, September and October are the best months: warm, dry and comfortable, with the university in session and the city at its liveliest.

Late July and early August brings the Columbus Arts Festival period and the state fair, one of the largest in the country.

June to August is hot and humid, with regular thunderstorms; the riverfront and the patios are the compensation.

Autumn Saturdays are dominated by home football games — extraordinary to witness and impossible to book a room for.

December to February is cold and grey with modest snow, and the city is quieter when the students leave.

April is unpredictable and is also when severe weather season begins.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Relative cost across the city

Columbus is inexpensive by American standards, with the significant exception of home football weekends, when hotel rates multiply and availability disappears for fifty miles. Sales tax is added at the till and tipping of 18 to 20 per cent is expected.