Flytown, Goodale Park and the Short North: the neighborhood that was cleared, and the ones that were kept

Flytown was the ground west of Goodale Park in Columbus, and a Franklin County Historical Society marker says it was subdivided into city lots in 1865 and annexed to the city in 1880 in order to obtain water, light and power. In 1950 the Census Bureau put about 53 percent of the dwelling units reporting in the census tract drawn over it in the category it printed as no private bath or dilapidated, against about 18 percent for the city as a whole. The city then inspected the neighborhood building by building, and its own annual report for 1956 described the Goodale program as the clearance of 50 acres of land and the relocation of 753 families. This page follows the water and the waste through that history in the documents' own words, and then through the ground beside it that was kept.

Last updated September 2026 · Figures are the Census Bureau's, the City of Columbus's own reports of 1954, 1956, 1968 and 1995, and the National Park Service's, read September 2026 · No prices on this page; the Estimate Builder carries those · Part of the knowledge base

What the record calls Flytown

A marker on West Goodale Street was erected in 1961 by the Franklin County Historical Society. It reads, in its own words, "In 1865 the district of Columbus known as Flytown was subdivided into city lots." The Historical Marker Database records that the marker was moved two blocks east in 2000, when Interstate 670 was widened.

The name is folklore, and the marker says so itself. It describes a wool works arriving on Spruce Street with no houses for its employees, and then hedges: it is said the houses flew up overnight, and that the name was coined from it. WOSU Public Media quotes the historian Arnett Howard giving the same explanation and notes that other theories circulate, so it is printed here as their account, not as a fact.

The marker names the industry that came: an iron foundry established in 1870, then the United States Pipe and Foundry Company, the Columbus Forge and Iron Company and the Commercial Paste Company in 1900, and the Franklin Lumber and Furniture Company in 1901. It says those plants employed immigrant workmen, and lists them, in the words cast on it in 1961, as "Germans, Irish, Negroes, Italians, Swedes, Jewish, Greeks, Hungarians and others."

Where Flytown began and ended is not settled, because it had no legal boundary. WOSU Public Media runs it from Dennison Avenue to the Olentangy River between Goodale Street and Spruce Street. The Columbus Metropolitan Library, describing a 1956 aerial photograph of the renewal project area, gives the Hocking Valley railroad, First Avenue, Neil Avenue and Spruce Street; the same library's index of a 1996 newspaper article gives railroad tracks, the Olentangy River, Buttles Avenue and High Street. All three are printed because they disagree.

Goodale Park, and the acreage of the gift

Two documents put the gift at forty acres: a description of Columbus written in 1854 and reprinted in the volume of the city's annual reports for 1956, and the National Register nomination for the Near Northside Historic District, whose statement of significance says Dr. Lincoln Goodale "donated a forty-acre tract of land to the city" for use as a public park in 1851. The Columbus Recreation and Parks Department's page today says 44 acres. Forty is printed here as the better attested figure, with the parks department's beside it. The nomination adds that the park was not landscaped or developed until the 1870s.

Water, light and power came with annexation

The marker carries the one water date found for this ground. It says industry did not locate in Flytown at first because the necessary facilities were lacking, and that "In order to obtain water, light and power," the district was annexed to the city in 1880. WOSU Public Media says the same in its own words, that until its annexation in 1880 residents had no running water or electricity, though its story quotes the same plaque elsewhere.

That date looks like a contradiction of the city's boundary record, and the city's own report resolves it. The City of Columbus's 1995 history of Italian Village says the area annexed in 1862 was bounded "on the west, by what was then, a partially completed Dennison Avenue," which is the eastern edge of the ground later called Flytown. Those two dates are eighteen years apart.

No document read here records what a house there had instead, address by address. What is recorded is a photograph: a color slide made for the Columbus Slum Clearance and Rehabilitation Commission in 1954, titled Alley in Flytown, which the Columbus Metropolitan Library describes as showing a red brick home that "appears to have an outhouse attached to it." Its own caption reads "Typical alley dwelling in Goodale. 1954." That is one alley in one year. The city's mains and sewers are on the pages about where Columbus water comes from and the sewers, then and now.

The Godman Guild, and a bath open daily

The Godman Guild settlement house was founded in Flytown in 1898 by Anna B. Keagle, a high school and Sunday school teacher in the neighborhood, and its building on West Goodale Street opened in 1900; the Ohio History Connection and WOSU Public Media agree on both dates.

A photograph in the Guild's collection, held by the Columbus Metropolitan Library, shows a crowd of women and children on the front steps under a painted board reading GODMAN GUILD HOUSE, with a hand lettered board beside the doorway. The library's own description of it reads: "The sign on the door reads 'Bath open daily'." The Ohio History Connection describes a second Guild photograph whose sign advertises "a free public library, free kindergarten, public baths and a district nurse."

What the 1950 census measured on this ground

The Census Bureau published tract figures for Columbus in a bulletin of October 1952. Its Table 3 reports condition and plumbing together, under a panel headed CONDITION AND PLUMBING FACILITIES, so its categories are "No private bath or dilapidated" and "No running water or dilapidated": a unit falls into one either for want of the fixture or for the condition of the building, and the table does not separate the two.

A tract is not a neighborhood. On the bulletin's own map, census tract 32 is bounded by the Olentangy River on the west, Dennison Avenue on the east and First Avenue on the north; the bulletin prints no written boundary description, only the map. That is the solid block west of Goodale Park that the city's 1954 report maps as its Goodale study area.

In tract 32 the Census Bureau put 682 of the 1,281 dwelling units reporting, about 53 percent, in "No private bath or dilapidated," and 335 of the same 1,281, about 26 percent, in "No running water or dilapidated." For the city of Columbus as a whole it put 19,458 of the 108,286 units reporting, about 18 percent, in the first category and 5,764, about 5 percent, in the second. Tract 32's share is about three times the city's in the first and about five times it in the second, which is arithmetic on the table's own counts. No document read here ranks the tracts against one another. The city's 1940 count is on the page about the King-Lincoln District.

Those tracts are the ground now called Flytown, Victorian Village and Italian Village, and every share in the table stands above the city's 18 percent. Tract 34 is small, 390 dwelling units in all, and its share rests on the 372 that reported.

The housing was old when it was counted. In the year built panel of the same table, which the bulletin marks as based on a 20 percent sample, the Census Bureau put 980 of tract 32's 1,105 units reporting at 1919 or earlier, and printed its mark for none in the 1940 or later line.

Table 1 of the same bulletin counts the people rather than the units. For 1950 it gives tract 32 a total population of 4,813, of whom it records 2,307 as white, including 256 foreign born, and 2,506 as nonwhite, of whom 2,502 are in the row the table labels Negro. Those are the table's own categories and counts.

The survey, and the clearance

What happened next is documented by the city about itself. The City of Columbus began inspecting the neighborhood building by building in July 1952, when its Health, Fire and Building Departments started a blight survey of the Goodale area, and the physical inspection of each structure was finished that October. The survey report was issued in April 1953 and, in the words of the city's Urban Redevelopment Authority, "Shows 684 buildings violate city code."

That authority's progress report of 1954 carries the survey's own statistics for the Goodale area: 85 percent of the structures had six or more serious violations of the building, fire or health regulations, or were dilapidated, and 692 had defective wiring. Under headings of its own the report counted 384 structures, 602 dwelling units and 511 families on the ground it proposed to rebuild, and projected 80 structures holding 1,008 dwelling units in their place. It never says whether that ground and the surveyed ground are the same, so this page does not reconcile the counts.

That report is also what ties the census figures to the project: its map of blighted areas identifies the city's study areas by 1950 census tract, naming "Census Tracts 22, 23, 24, 29, 30, 31 and 32," so three of the tracts in the table above are tracts the city itself named. The plan for Goodale was completed in June 1954. The report quotes Section 5 of Columbus City Ordinance No. 756-53, which required each redevelopment plan to include "plans with respect to the relocation of families displaced" from the project.

By 1956 the work sat with the city's Slum Clearance and Rehabilitation Department, and the City of Columbus's annual report for that year describes the Goodale program in one line: "Clearance of 50 acres of land, relocation of 753 families." The same report's highlights for the year record the opening of a family relocation office in Goodale on July 16, the passage in September of what it calls a "slum clearance bond issue by 74.8 percent," the start in October of demolition of houses in the path of the Goodale Expressway, and, in December, that the first demolition area had been cleared and "55 families living in its path were relocated."

No document opened for this page gives a total of families or people displaced across the life of the project: the 753 families are the program as it stood in 1956, and the 55 families are what that year's report records as actually relocated from the expressway path. Figures that circulate elsewhere were found in no document read here.

The expressway, and what replaced Flytown

A photograph in the Columbus Metropolitan Library's collections, dated October 10, 1958, shows the Goodale leg of the expressway under construction in the Flytown neighborhood area. By 1968 the city's Division of Urban Renewal was reporting on the finished work: redevelopment of the Goodale Urban Renewal Project had begun in 1961, "Nine out of ten buildings were found to be substandard," and "Thurber Village, which covers an area of 122 Acres, has replaced Flytown." The road is still the divider: the National Park Service's documentation for the Short North says Interstate 670 "runs parallel with and under Goodale" and "forms a sharp divider between Downtown and the Short North."

The parts that were kept

There is no National Register historic district called Victorian Village and none called Italian Village: a query of the National Park Service's own district data for Franklin County returns 40 districts, and neither name is among them. The ground west of High Street was listed instead on June 4, 1980 as the Near Northside Historic District, and the Park Service's own Short North documentation says Victorian Village is "included in Near Northside H.D., NR."

That nomination describes an area of "approximately 70 square blocks" northwest of downtown, on approximately 500 acres, whose development "generally occurred between 1870-1920."

The districts that carry those two names are the city's own. The City of Columbus says the Victorian Village Commission and the Victorian Village Historic District were "established by Ordinance # 1788-73 in 1973," and the Italian Village Commission and the Italian Village Historic District by "Ordinance # 1579-73 in 1973." Neither commission page prints its district's boundaries, so whether an address is inside one is a question for the city rather than for a neighborhood name.

What those commissions review is stated plainly in the city's 1995 report on Italian Village, which calls the neighborhood "one of eighteen historic districts in the city of Columbus" overseen by an architectural review commission, and says all exterior alterations, demolitions and new construction "must be reviewed and approved by The Italian Village Commission." The commission pages cite Columbus City Code chapters 3116 and 3119 and describe the same requirement as a Certificate of Appropriateness. What the guidelines say beyond that could not be read for this page, and the same question for another neighborhood is on the page about German Village.

The same 1995 report says that after the Second World War many larger single family homes in Italian Village were "converted into, multiple family dwellings," with the comma the scan prints, and that "By the 1960's, the physical condition of the Italian Village area continued to deteriorate."

The Short North

The Short North Historic District is a four block stretch of North High Street between Poplar Street and Warren Street, listed on the National Register on April 19, 1990 as part of a Short North multiple property submission.

The corridor that carries the name is bounded differently by different publishers. The National Park Service's 1990 documentation calls it North High Street "between Goodale Street on the south and King Avenue on the north." The City of Columbus's 1995 report runs it from Goodale Street north to Eleventh Avenue. Both are printed because the two documents disagree. Where the name itself came from, none of them says, and this page does not supply an explanation they do not give.

What a remodel there meets today

Nothing here measures what a bathroom on this ground is like now. A house inside one of the city's historic districts answers to that district's commission for exterior work, and to the rules of whichever building department covers that address. The subjects a remodel here runs into are set out elsewhere: the permit a Columbus bathroom remodel needs, the plumbing code the work is held to, lead paint and asbestos in a pre-1978 bathroom, the supply pipe eras, the floors and subfloors by era, the sewer lateral and the house drains, and the Census record of the Ohio bathroom.

Sources

Every figure, date and quotation on this page comes from one of these documents, read on the date given. Where two of them disagree, the page says so.

• Columbus Metropolitan Library, Columbus Memory, photograph by the Columbus Dispatch, Flytown Historical Marker, the inscription page of the Dispatch photograph of the Franklin County Historical Society marker (Columbus Memory dispatch/23842), January 20, 1980; read September 2026.
• The Historical Marker Database, Flytown, marker 42202, Columbus, Franklin County, Ohio, undated; read September 2026.
• WOSU Public Media, Curious Cbus: What Happened To Flytown And Union Station?, December 15, 2017; read September 2026.
• Columbus Metropolitan Library, Columbus Memory, Aerial View of Goodale Area Renewal Project, photograph made for the Columbus Slum Clearance and Rehabilitation Commission (item p16802coll28/245950), 1956; read September 2026.
• Columbus Metropolitan Library, Index abstract of a Call and Post article on Flytown, collection p16802coll35, item 215845, 1996; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Annual Reports, City of Columbus, Ohio, 1956, Slum Clearance and Rehabilitation Department, printed pages 33 to 35, and the city manual bound with them, 1957; read September 2026.
• National Park Service, nomination held by the National Archives, National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination Form, Near Northside Historic District, Columbus (reference 80003001), 1980; read September 2026.
• Columbus Recreation and Parks Department, Goodale Park, undated; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Department of Trade and Development, Italian Village reinvestment area report and action plan, History of Italian Village section, 1995; read September 2026.
• Columbus Metropolitan Library, Columbus Memory, Alley in Flytown, photograph made for the Columbus Slum Clearance and Rehabilitation Commission (item p16802coll28/245956), 1954; read September 2026.
• Ohio History Connection, OhioPix, Godman Guild main entrance, image AV148_B01F01_01, undated; read September 2026.
• Columbus Metropolitan Library, Columbus Memory, Godman Guild House, Godman Guild Audiovisual Collection, item african/24508, undated; read September 2026.
• United States Census Bureau, 1950 Census of Population, Volume III, Census Tract Statistics, Chapter 13, Columbus, Ohio and Adjacent Area: Table 1, Table 3 and the tract map, October 1952; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Urban Redevelopment Authority, Urban Redevelopment in Columbus: A Progress Report, 1954; read September 2026.
• Columbus Metropolitan Library, Columbus Memory, Goodale Expressway Construction, photograph by Matthew Mosbacher Sr., item memory/79501, October 10, 1958; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Division of Urban Renewal, Department of Development, Report to the people of Columbus, the Thurber Village and Goodale Urban Renewal Project spread, 1968; read September 2026.
• National Park Service, form held by the National Archives, National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form, Short North Multiple Property Area, Columbus (reference 64500487), 1990; read September 2026.
• National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places spatial data, nrhp_locations map service, historic district layer, Franklin County, Ohio, undated; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Building and Zoning Services, Victorian Village Commission, undated; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Building and Zoning Services, Italian Village Commission, undated; read September 2026.
• National Park Service, nomination held by the National Archives, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Short North Historic District, Columbus (reference 90000583), 1990; read September 2026.

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