Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio's Arena District. The opening of the arena in 2000 has lead to a boom in activity surrounding the arena in the realms of entertainment options as well as commercial and residential space.
When Lexington Mayor Jim Gray set out to sell the city on plans for Rupp Arena and the Lexington Center’s convention space, he used Columbus, Ohio, as a banner example of what a well-programmed arena and right-sized convention center with a relationship to the street, a plaza and mixed-use surroundings can do for a city.
Now as plans to renovate Rupp and the convention center are on indefinite hold, we as a city should look to Columbus again.
In May of 1997, voters in Franklin County, Ohio, shot down plans to build a soccer-specific stadium and an arena a few blocks north and west of Columbus’ core business district around the Ohio Statehouse.
“We realized we couldn’t very well go back to the public, although there was an increasing view we should have those two facilities,” former Columbus Mayor Greg Lashutka told Business Lexington of the days immediately following the defeat of a three-year, half-cent sales tax to build the two sports facilities.
Building a new plan after public rejection
“We let a couple days go by, made some strategic calls to key folks,” he said about how he used his seat as mayor to come up with a Plan B after telling voters in the buildup to the ill-fated ballot measure that there was “no Plan B.”
Lashutka’s Plan B involved some of the major business leaders in Columbus: Dimon McPherson, then CEO of Nationwide Insurance; the late John H. McConnell, then CEO of Worthington Industries; and an iconic name in professional sports ownership, Lamar Hunt, who as owner and founder of the Kansas City Chiefs brokered the merger between the NFL and the AFL.
Hunt, owner of Columbus’ Major League Soccer franchise, the Columbus Crew, worked out a deal to build his own soccer specific stadium — the first such stadium in the United States — on the grounds of the Ohio State Fair adjacent to I-71, and McPherson promised his company would build an arena on the same site as the one voters refused to publicly finance for a team owned by McConnell if city property adjacent to the site was sold to Nationwide for development.
“We needed a sophisticated developer to make it work,” Lashutka said. “We had looked at a number of options over the years, and the conclusion was we the city could contribute the property we owned,” he said of a 20-acre parcel that had housed the Ohio State Penitentiary and had become a hot button in the city for the municipality to first gain ownership of the property from the state and then to develop it in a meaningful way for the benefit of downtown.
“That location [for the arena] … required the city land and I think in a very strong and bipartisan way, everyone was comfortable with that,” Lashutka said of the decision to sell the land to the developers at market value.
“We upgraded the quality of the arena by Nationwide developing it,” he said. “What took place might have benefited with a soccer-specific arena, but actually the successor plan, which ultimately relocated our Triple-A baseball stadium fairly contiguous to the arena, was even better because you had more event days in the summer and that complemented the event days in the fall, the winter and the spring for hockey with other activities.”
In 2007, seven years after the opening of the arena, it was announced the Columbus Clippers, a Triple-A minor league baseball team, would move from their aging facility on the city’s west side to a new stadium in the shadows of the arena in the already burgeoning district that sported more than bars and restaurants. High-density residences were constructed around the arena as were professional offices.
The relocation of the baseball team “gave pretty significant economic expectations to restaurants that we needed to be in the area and with the baseball number of event days far exceeding the soccer event days. I think we ended up better than we were when we had the proposal at the beginning,” he said.
Town-gown struggles
In the early stages of Plan A, Lashutka had hoped to sign the Ohio State University on as a tenant of the downtown arena, but that would not come to pass as the school chose to break ground on its own arena a year before the public vote on the downtown facility.
Nearly 20 years later, Lashutka was noticeably guarded when discussing his negotiations with the university.
“We tried hard, and I think Ohio State probably felt they had to go it alone for a lot of reasons that were in their best interests. We always felt if there was a way to combine it, that would be great, but it never was an appropriate meeting of the minds,” he said before discussing the two eventual arenas’ proximity to campus. “When you look at where the current [Ohio State] arena is and go from South Campus and take a radius, it’s equal distance from where the Nationwide Arena is right from South Campus.”
Lashutka, who left the mayor’s office on New Year’s Day of 2000, said it wasn’t until E. Gordon Gee took over as president at Ohio State in 2007 before relations between the university and city began to improve. Unsaid was that 2007 marked Gee’s second tenure at the school; he served in the same role from 1990-98, during all but two years of Lashutka’s eight as mayor.
“There was a growing sense that the city of Columbus was growing bigger than the university, and we valued the university, it was an important part of Columbus, but we really had been the home of Fortune 500 companies, had been the fastest growing city in Ohio, the largest city in Ohio both in geography and population,” Lashutka said.
“Ohio State has always wanted to be, I think, a powerful if not the singular focus for interests here in Columbus, and they still are in many respects. Football is the Holy Grail and the Blue Jackets [Columbus’ NHL team] and Ohio State basketball have increased in many ways as well. But we’ve grown well beyond that into a city that has many diverse things including the arts with a rich mix that is attractive to people we’re trying to recruit in to work at various companies,” said Lashutka, who also served as a captain of the 1965 Ohio State football team.
An arena as a catalyst
But the result of the Arena District and its ancillary benefits, Lashutka said, made the struggle to make the idea become reality worth it. The arena was constructed across from the then newly expanded convention center, and just a couple of blocks from the Short North neighborhood that has grown in popularity and density since the Arena District’s appearance on the scene.
Lashutka said he figured increased development in the shadows of the arena and other areas around downtown would follow. But “we didn’t think it would happen as quickly as it did, and we didn’t think it would be as well received. But by and large, the downturn economically that happened in the ‘90s and in 2008 caused a little bit of a problem for the Capitol Square businesses, because some of the corporate operations were looking at places to relocate and outside of downtown. That became popular not only in Columbus, but in other parts of America. That doesn’t do anything to help your city core because you need critical mass, and business critical mass is one thing, but then you want to have the chance to develop grocery stores, pockets of restaurants; that requires downtown living.”
The arena, he said, proved to be the catalyst.
“A standalone facility other than the arena doesn’t do the trick for collateral development, and when you combine it as we did with a baseball stadium, that’s a powerful economic development tool, so you have mixed-use going on, residential, the commercial, the restaurants, the offices. Indeed many of the offices that used to be around the Capitol Square have relocated to the Arena District because it is a good quality of life for the people that work there,” he said.
“Without an anchor like an arena, and now combined with the [baseball] stadium, it has resuscitated a downtown renaissance that was struggling as most downtowns since the exodus of major department stores and other more traditional anchors downtown,” Lashutka said.
The eventual Plan A and success of the subsequent Plan B took Ohio State into account, even though the death of Plan A had some Buckeye fingerprints on it, according to Lashutka.
“[The district’s success] never would have occurred unless we really chased in a responsible way — not just political rhetoric, but in a responsible way — a meaningfulness that didn’t conflict with Ohio State. Hockey didn’t, and neither did soccer, but it also required Ohio State, which I must give credit too, growing beyond their provincialism in the first election, where it got rejected,” Lashutka said of the 1997 vote.
“I think we did it right,’ he said. “It was painful, it wasn’t easy. When people put aside some provincial self-centered outlook and looked at what’s in the greater good, it worked out well for us, and we are reaping the benefit now.”