German Village, the privy and the sewer: how the South Side's brick houses got their bathrooms

German Village is the brick neighborhood on the south side of downtown Columbus, and the 1974 National Register nomination that listed it describes 233 acres, over 1800 structures and more than 3,000 residents. The earliest of those houses were built before the city had either water mains or sewers, on lots the same nomination puts at typically 30 feet by 90 feet, with a well and a waste vault sharing one small yard. This page follows what changed and when: the sewer that had drained the South End's wells by June 1870, the water let into the city's pipes in March 1871, the sewer drawings photographed under these streets in 1902, the intercepting sewer shaft sunk at a Schiller Park corner in 1929, what the 1950 census counted in the two tracts covering the district, and what a change to the outside of one of these houses meets today. Every date and figure here comes from a public document, and the sentence carrying it names the document.

Last updated September 2026 · Figures are the National Register nomination's, the Census Bureau's, the City of Columbus's and an 1892 history's, read September 2026 · No prices on this page; the Estimate Builder carries those · Part of the knowledge base

The district and its buildings

German Village lies immediately south of downtown Columbus. The National Register of Historic Places nomination prepared for it in 1974 describes a district whose boundaries encompass 233 acres, over 1800 structures and more than 3,000 residents. The American Planning Association, which named the neighborhood a Great Neighborhood in 2011, gives its edges as Livingston Avenue to the north, Nursery Lane to the south, Pearl Street to the west and Lathrop, Grant, Jaeger and Blackberry to the east, and the nomination's metes and bounds run the same edges. In the southern part is the park both of them size at 23 acres, known now as Schiller Park.

The settlement is older than the neighborhood's usual shorthand. The 1974 nomination says German immigrants began settlement in Columbus in 1812 but did not reach significant numbers until after 1830, and that the bulk of the German population made their homes in McGown's Addition on the south side. The German Village Society spells the name McGowan and says a Revolutionary War veteran of that name had claimed 328 acres by 1802. By 1890, the nomination says, there were about 7,000 Germans in south Columbus; it defines the word no further and names no census table.

The two main publishers do not agree on when the houses went up, and the disagreement is worth printing whole. The German Village Society says the area was initially platted in 1814 in Columbus's South End and developed primarily between 1840 and 1914. The 1974 nomination instead enters 1820 to 1900 in its Specific Dates field.

The nomination is specific about the buildings and the ground under them. The earliest houses it describes are one-story and one-and-a-half-story brick single or double homes on limestone foundations, simple, small buildings averaging 18 feet wide and 32 feet long. The lot size, it says, is typically 30 feet by 90 feet, with houses built close to the property line and facing the street. The larger two-story hip-roofed brick houses it dates to the 1860s and 1870s. Almost every question about where a bathroom, a stack or a vent can go here is a question about a lot 30 feet wide. Where Ohio's building brick and paving brick were made is on the page about what Ohio made for houses.

A well in the yard, a vault beside it

What those houses had when they were new is set down in Alfred Lee's 1892 history of Columbus, in a chapter by Edward Orton, State Geologist. The city went for many years without water works or sewerage, Orton wrote, and each household derived its water supply from its own wells. All the forms of waste, he says in the same passage, were disposed of in vaults and cesspools sunk in the same lot on which the well was located. On a lot 30 feet wide, the water and the waste were a few paces apart.

The same history measures how little pipe there was to change that. As of April 1854, it reports, Columbus had 30 public cisterns and was drained by underground sewers; Lee gives 12,600 feet for that date in one place and 12,500 feet in another, which is why this page prints the range rather than choosing one. Under two and a half miles of sewer, for a city, is a beginning and not a system.

What Columbus later did about vaults is on the page about indoor plumbing in Ohio, which carries the city health officer's rule of 1890 and the section of the Columbus City Health Code that still treats a disused pit privy as a hazard. No source opened for this page gives a date on which Columbus abolished privy vaults, so none is stated here.

June 1870: the sewer that drained the wells

The first thing a sewer did on the South Side was take the water out of the wells. Lee's history quotes a June 1870 account of the big sewer at the South End: water, it says, has disappeared from all except those sunk below the sewer line, some thirty feet below the surface. The same passage records that the Fourth Street sewer near the City Park, which is today's Schiller Park, had recently been constructed and had fallen in for about four hundred feet.

The dates sit in the same chapter. The Fourth Street sewer, Lee writes, was four feet in diameter, ran 1,168 feet from Spring Street to Linn Alley, and was completed in August 1870. The city engineer's report for the year ended April 8, 1872, printed in the same history, lists main sewers in Fourth Street, South Public Lane, Center Alley, Oak Street, Cherry Street, Broad Street, Mound Street and West Street.

One of those names has since changed, and the change decides how the list reads. Lee records a renaming ordinance pending in September 1872 under which South Public Lane became Livingston Avenue and East Public Lane became Parsons Avenue, so a main sewer of about 1872 lay on the district's northern edge. Lee is reporting a pending ordinance as a newspaper described it, not the enacted text, and not every rename in it took: the same list turns Sycamore Street into Noble Street, and Sycamore Street still runs through German Village.

Orton's chapter states the design decision that governs the South Side to this day. Columbus, he wrote in 1892, is irrevocably committed to the combined system, meaning one pipe carrying both sewage and storm water. That system, including the brick combined sewer of 1900 that collapsed under German Village in May 2026, is the subject of the page on the Columbus sewers, then and now.

March 1871: water in the pipes

City water arrived within a year of that sewer. Lee's history says the water was let into the pipes of the new Columbus water works on March 6, 1871. Five miles of pipe had been laid when the water was first let in, about seventy miles more went down during the following season, and 736 permits were taken out in the first year, a permit here being a connection taken out by a property owner.

Set beside each other, Lee's figures say about seventy-five miles of main in the street, the sum of his two pipe figures, and 736 connections in a year. A pipe under the pavement is not a bathroom in the house.

The South Side sat at the edge of a later change too. Lee says the Alum Creek pumping station's engines were first put in motion on May 6, 1891, and that water was furnished from that station to the eastern portion of the city as far west as Grant Avenue, one of the streets the 1974 nomination names on the district's eastern boundary. Where Columbus water comes from now is on the page about the Columbus water supply.

1902 and 1929: the work photographed here

Two sets of images in the Columbus Metropolitan Library's Columbus Memory collection record sewer work inside the district. The first is a set of 34 glass plate negatives dated 1902, in the library's German Village Society Collection, which the catalog says document the installation of sewers in Columbus and the plans for their construction. Two plates photograph engineering drawings labeled Manhole and Siphon at Third and Beck St. and Overflow Weir at Sycamore St. near Fifth, both inside German Village; a third is headed Various Details of Central Relief Sewer Sept. 1902. An overflow weir is a combined-sewer fitting, which fits the system Orton described ten years earlier.

The second is a single photograph dated August 7, 1929 by the photographer Dean L. Rager, showing a shaft site enclosure at the northwest corner of Deshler Avenue and Jaeger Street, with a sign saying the street was closed for sewer construction. The typed note on the back names the job: Alum Creek Intercepting Sewer, Section 1, shaft No. 5. That corner is an entrance to Schiller Park, inside the district.

Sewer work reached these streets in stages: 1870, 1902 and 1929 are the dated ones in these records, and no survey of what lies under any one street was opened for this page. Who owns the lateral out to the public pipe is on the page about sewer laterals and house drains.

What the 1950 census counted here

The Census Bureau printed housing figures tract by tract. For Columbus the 1950 bulletin could be read for this page and the 1940 one could not: the only full-view copy located refused every request made to it. The 1950 figures carry two cautions.

The first is the category. No private bath or dilapidated is one combined column in that table, not two: it does not separate a unit lacking a private bath from one the enumerator recorded as dilapidated, and nothing below is a count of bathrooms. The second is the geography. Most of the district, as the 1974 nomination bounds it, falls inside census tracts 52 and 57, but neither tract is the district: the bulletin's map draws both running west of High Street to the Scioto River, and the district's southern edge crosses into a third.

The percentages are worked from the table's own counts of units reporting, and the two tracts were not alike, which is why both are printed. In tract 52, between Livingston Avenue and Sycamore Street, 677 of the 1,913 reporting units fell in that combined category, about 35.4 percent, close to twice the city share. In tract 57, from Sycamore Street south to Deshler Avenue, 422 of 2,121 did, about 19.9 percent, barely above it. Any sentence giving German Village one high share for 1950 would be wrong for one of its two tracts.

The bulletin also says 1950 tract boundaries match the 1940 tracts of corresponding number except for a listed set; tract 52 is absent from that list and tract 57 is in it, so the northern strip can be compared across the two censuses and the southern one cannot. The statewide series is on the page about bathrooms per house by decade.

The historic district: its dates and its rules

Two years here are easy to run together and should not be. The 1974 nomination says that in July 1960 the city gave official recognition by declaring German Village a historic district and establishing the German Village Commission, and the City of Columbus says both were established by Ordinance number 976-60 and 1221-60 in 1960. A narrower step followed: the German Village Society's timeline and the American Planning Association each date the Commission's design review authority over exterior changes to 1963, the year the nomination says official boundaries encompassing 233 acres were set. The two years date two different things.

The restoration behind those ordinances began with one person. The nomination says it began with Frank Fetch, who had restored four homes by 1959, and that the German Village Society was formed in January 1960; the Society's history page says Fetch and his father-in-law bought and restored a cottage on Wall Street in 1959, while its timeline page says 1949 in one paragraph and 1959 in another. German Village was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on December 30, 1974: the nomination file, reference number 74001490, carries that stamp and the 1980 amendment form says the district was listed in 1974, while the Society's timeline page says 1975. A boundary increase covering 11 acres at the northeast corner was documented in 1980, and no source opened for this page reconciles that with the nomination's 233 acres, so no current acreage is given here.

The superlative usually attached to the neighborhood belongs to one publisher. The American Planning Association, naming German Village a Great Neighborhood in 2011, calls it "the largest, privately funded historic district in the U.S." and gives no measure, no ranking method and no date for the comparison. The 1974 nomination makes no national claim: it says the restoration was accomplished entirely through private funds and calls the area architecturally and historically one of the most important nineteenth century areas in Columbus.

The rules that apply now are a City of Columbus process. The City says the German Village Commission is seven mayoral appointees who serve without compensation and that it issues certificates of appropriateness for exterior alterations at properties inside the district, acting under Columbus City Code chapters 3116 and 3119 and the German Village District Guidelines. Section 3116.04 of that code says no person shall construct, reconstruct, alter, change the exterior color of or demolish any structure or architectural feature in a district without first applying for a certificate of appropriateness and obtaining either that certificate or a clearance. Section 3116.05 lets the historic preservation officer issue a clearance where no architectural feature is involved, which is the route interior-only work takes. That is this city and this district; another municipality may differ.

The German Village Guidelines say they provide the basis on which the Commission decides proposals for all exterior work in the historic district. On additions they say an addition should be set well back from the principal facade of a historic structure, typically in excess of halfway, and should not substantially alter the existing streetscape from any public vantage point, with views from other public rights of way, alleys included, considered too. An addition without a connector should be shorter than the historic building, lower in overall height and with a lower roof peak. Garages and outbuildings should be located toward the rear of the property, detached from the residence with access from alleys. The version read for this page is headed as recommended by the Commission for adoption on September 11, 2007, while the City says the guidelines were adopted in 1989.

What the guidelines do not contain is worth stating, because it is often assumed. The document says nothing about a privy, a cistern, a well, plumbing or a bathroom, and the word rear appears in it for garages, outbuildings, dormers, skylights, porches and the connector that joins an addition to the house, never for a bathroom. No source opened for this page supports the familiar claim that a German Village bathroom is typically a later addition under a rear roof, so this page does not make it.

What a bathroom project here meets today

A bathroom project here meets the same rules as any other Columbus bathroom, with the Commission's certificate on top for anything that changes the outside. The city permit question is on the bathroom remodel permit page; the code and the inspector are on the Ohio plumbing code page; a house of this age raises the lead paint and asbestos page; the water pipe is on the supply pipes by era page; and what is under the floor is on the floors and subfloors page.

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.

• National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Inventory - Nomination Form, German Village, Columbus, Franklin County, Ohio, reference number 74001490, 1974; read September 2026.
• American Planning Association, German Village: Columbus, Ohio, Great Places in America, Great Neighborhoods, 2011; read September 2026.
• German Village Society, History, undated; read September 2026.
• German Village Society, German Village Timeline, undated; read September 2026.
• Alfred E. Lee, History of the City of Columbus, Capital of Ohio, volume 1, Chapter XXXIII, Geology and Geography, by Edward Orton, pages 690 to 693, 1892; read September 2026.
• Alfred E. Lee, History of the City of Columbus, Capital of Ohio, volume 2, Chapter XXXIII, Streets, Sewers and Parks, pages 521 to 531; Water Supply, pages 542 to 544, 1892; read September 2026.
• Columbus Metropolitan Library, Columbus Memory, German Village Society Collection, sewer installation glass plate negatives, 1902 (SC_Druen_001 to SC_Druen_034), 1902; read September 2026.
• Columbus Metropolitan Library, Columbus Memory, View of Schiller Park at the corner of Deshler Avenue and Jaeger Street, photograph, item 57350, August 7, 1929; read September 2026.
• United States Census Bureau, 1950 Census of Population, Volume III, Census Tract Statistics, Chapter 13, Columbus, Ohio and Adjacent Area (Series P-D13), Table 3, 1952; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, German Village Commission, read at a snapshot of May 27, 2024; read September 2026.
• National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Inventory - Nomination Form, German Village (Amendment), Columbus, Ohio, reference number 80002998, 1980; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Code of Ordinances, Columbus City Code 3116.04, Certificate required, and 3116.05, credited to Ordinance 1352-93; read September 2026.
• German Village Commission, published by the German Village Society, German Village Guidelines: Preservation and Redevelopment, September 11, 2007; read September 2026.

Common questions