Andy's Column
September 21, 2001
Quite a little break between articles. Since my last column I've had the opportunity to visit the Capitol Manufacturing plant, as well as look up some great information on the "Under Downtown Columbus" exploration rumor. It turns out that when they resurfaced the downtown streets in 1989 the Ohio Historical Society went along because they were interested in what would be found under the pavement. According to the Dispatch article I read, before there were fire hydrants, the city used underground cisterns, and when these were abandoned they were often used as garbage dumps. A garbage dump might not sound very appetizing, but it's a safe bet that all the old fried chicken and vomit have been washed away by the years, leaving mainly just the solid stuff. So there could be some artifacts down there.
About Capitol Manufacturing--it was a really impressive building. Rookie from Illicit Ohio and I hit it in August and managed to get through about three-fourths of it by hopping onto a roof and crawling through a window. One building was so carefully sealed that we just couldn't get in. They really don't want people in there.
I would venture to say that there hasn't been any significant exploration of Capitol since at least the 1980's. Sure, some people have probably gotten in, but we found old-style malt liquor bottles standing next to makeshift beds, as if the homeless people had just left them. There was graffiti from 1973--shortly after the plant was closed--and there was plenty of water and the other disgusting debris you'd expect in an old abandoned factory. Another interesting feature was the giant hole in the ceiling of the main room.
As Halloween approaches, the amount of press my other site, Forgotten Ohio, of which this is really just a reorganization, has gotten has increased. I was contacted by a publisher about some of the old Columbus sites, and interviewed for an October piece in the Lifestyles section of the Washington Post. Pretty amazing--that even outdoes Channel Ten News. The surge of traffic might just shut my damn page down if I'm not careful, so hopefully I'll have a dot-com by then.
I'm sure all this crap about my site is really fascinating, so I'll just move back into the exploration thing. I tried to get into the abandoned school near Sullivant Avenue and Route 315, but it was sealed up tighter than (insert joke here). Steel all over the windows, riveted on there tight. Even COUP!, the Elvis Presley of local graffiti artists, couldn't get high enough to make his tag really visible--he had to settle for the first floor exterior. So did I. And I seriously about broke my ankle as I was jogging back to the car across the back field.
There's an interesting place you might want to check out behind Cooper Stadium--I'm not sure if it really qualifies as abandoned, but it's certainly bizarre. For a long time there was this entire complex of abandoned apartments back there, all surrounded by razorwire fences, but sometime in the last three years or so they demolished every one. Now all that's left is the land where the apartment buildings once stood, surrounded by the same fence. There are sidewalks, lamp posts, fire hydrants--everything you'd see in any apartment complex, just minus all the apartments. I feel bad for missing the boat on that one, but I might still take some photos for the site anyway.
That about does it for this time. New updates will come sooner than they did this last time.
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