"Time and Change Will Surely Show": Contested Urban Development in Ohio State's University District, 1920–2015

This article examines the relationships between Ohio State University and the surrounding urban University District neighborhoods in Columbus, Ohio, between 1920–2015. A mythic chronology of "rise and fall" marks university and community memory and conversations about the district, past and present. Interrogating the demographic, architectural, and historic underpinnings of this contested chronology, I explore the differences between Ohio State's discourse and neighborhood activists' and residents' conceptions of neighborhood change and various aspects of a golden-age myth. In particular, I focus upon the interplay between demography, imagery, and memory or between population changes, architectural changes, and various actors' perceptions and memories of such changes. Significant moments in the twentieth-century interactions between the neighborhoods and the university, especially contested urban renewal, suggest a complex set of relationships between a large urban land-grant institution and its neighboring urban area.