If you’re coming from Columbus’s south side and driving up High Street, which is the city’s main north-south axis, you see an impressive array of attractive skyscrapers, many of them headquarters to huge national corporations such as Nationwide Insurance and a large number of other big companies. The state capital building and the new Columbus Commons park are within a couple of blocks, too.

But just downhill and across the Scioto River from that prosperous, thriving, vibrant city center—not even a quarter-mile to the west—sits the most deprived and destitute part of town, a neighborhood known as Franklinton. It’s an interesting (but not all that uncommon) geographic paradox: the poorest part of the city has the best, close-up views of its imposing skyline.

Franklinton is the site of the first settlement in Columbus, established in 1797. In fact, it’s the site of the first community of settlers in the whole central-Ohio region. It goes way, way back.

Unfortunately, those early settlers built their community on the wrong side of the Scioto River—the west side, which turns out to be a floodplain. Fast-forward over time, and you get—mirabile dictu!—floods. A horrific flood in 1913 submerged the area under 22 feet of water, killed 93 people, and left 20,000 homeless in the area. Nearly five decades later, in 1959, another flood rendered 10,000 people homeless.

For decades, the Franklinton area was tagged with the derogatory nickname “The Bottoms,” because it is below river level and because it long has been home to those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder.

It wasn’t until 1983 that the city and the Federal Emergency Management Agency officially declared the area a floodplain, essentially stopping all building and development in this part of Columbus, which lies directly below and across the river from the center of the city.

In 1993, the city of Columbus and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers started a joint city/federal project to build a floodwall along a seven-mile stretch of the Scioto River, protecting Franklinton from future floods. It took eleven years and $129 million, but the floodwall’s completion was surely the most important single step toward the revitalization and redevelopment of the Franklinton community, because it’s now possible to get flood insurance and construction permits there.

Today, the neighborhood’s thumb-like peninsula, around which the Scioto River bends, separating Franklinton from the heart of the city's prosperous business district, is home to the $130-million Center of Science and Industry (COSI), an educational and cultural resource in the city, and a riverfront amphitheater opened by the city’s Recreation and Parks Department.