Columbus Audio Tours

Columbus was an invented city, platted in 1812 as the new Ohio state capital on land nobody especially wanted, at the junction of the Scioto and Olentangy rivers on terrain so flat the state legislature selected it precisely because it wasn't already anyone's preference. It grew steadily and then rapidly, driven by Ohio State University (one of the largest in the country by enrollment), state government, and eventually a diverse economy that included finance, education, health care, and retail headquarters. Limited Brands, which became L Brands, built a fashion empire here. Nationwide Insurance has anchored the insurance industry in Columbus for decades.

The Short North arts district along North High Street began gentrifying in the 1980s when gay bars and galleries moved into a stretch of Victorian storefronts that everyone else had written off.

It worked slowly and then explosively, and now the Short North is one of the genuinely good urban neighborhoods in the Midwest, with locally-owned restaurants, art galleries, independent boutiques, and a density of life that Columbus's sprawl makes you forget is possible. German Village, just south of downtown, is a meticulously preserved 19th-century German-immigrant neighborhood of red brick cottages and tree-lined streets where the buildings and the street layout have barely changed since 1880.