We had encountered other moments of symbolism during our reporting over the last year: the broken clock in the main intersection of Allentown, which the mayor commissioned to repair as a sign that “Allentown is coming back!” Or the comment by Joe Max Higgins, the leader of an economic development team in the other Columbus (Mississippi) that when the helicopters—something that flies—came off the assembly line, that "people started walking upright a little bit." Would the dying Buckeye symbolize something dire, I wondered?

To skip to the end of the story, I need not have worried. What we heard in Columbus over the next several days were institutional-scale stories of building, creativity, cooperation, and solid investment in the city’s future. Here are short versions of a few smaller personal-scale stories. All together, they start to tell the emerging narrative of Columbus.

The people, organizations, and ideas reshaping the country

Read More

First, food trucks. I met Laura Lee at her truck, Ajumama (it means “ma’am” in Korean), which was parked on a lot next to the indoor-outdoor Seventh Son Brewing Co. near north Columbus. It was a Friday early afternoon, perfect for a late lunch with a little local beer, I rationalized. Lee cooked up one of the family recipes she adapted from her Korean mom’s collection: pajeon, a green onion pancake, followed by hodduck, a sweet pancake with brown sugar, cinnamon, and walnuts. Lee says she’s a stickler for ingredients, making her own kimchi and personal pancake mixes from scratch. They have earned her a bunch of awards and trophies, which sit on a shelf next to the order window.

Lee is part of the wave of young people finding their way or returning to Columbus. She had headed west to culinary school in Phoenix, then farther west to work as a sous chef in San Diego, where she found that Californians didn’t appreciate her experimental creations. She missed Columbus, and like many others of her generation, was looking away from the classic L.A., SF, NYC, and D.C. and toward smaller cities like Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Columbus.

Several things have been working for Lee in Columbus, including a vibrant start-up food truck culture and an open-door attitude from the city. Last spring, the city eased up on licensing and parking rules and regulations for food trucks. This past summer, they created a new city-government position pluckily named “small business concierge" to cut through the red tape and provide some business advice for getting small ventures like Laura Lee’s up and running quickly and successfully.

Leaving Ajumama behind, I headed for the top of High Street in the Short North, famously loaded with restaurants, shops, art galleries, and boutiques. Walking the length of the street, I stopped in as many as places as I could, starting with one named Co+Op. It is so edgy that I’m not sure how to describe it. Is it an art gallery? A fashion-forward clothing boutique? A vintage clothier? A consignment shop? Yes. I think it is all of these. There was art on the walls, some old luggage and paraphernalia, a rack of newly-designed clothes, some old clothes. Food trucks sometimes park in their lot out front.

The current manager, Kait Cutler, described the atmosphere of Columbus that draws many of her generation back. After 6 years of corporate life in Chicago, she said, she wanted to “pull back a little” and find a way to engage her creative side. Creative: if there were a word cloud hanging over the city of Columbus, creative would be in the biggest font, right alongside collaborate. John Tierney wrote about both: the expanse of creative efforts in Columbus here; and the net of public- private collaboration in Columbus here. Collaboration is so ingrained in the culture of Columbus that the word itself has evolved: “We collab a lot with Mouton,” said Cutler, about Co+Op and its relationship with the wine bar and restaurant, Mouton, across the street.