Broadway and Downtown Columbia, College Town, Farmers Market, and the Beat of Mid-Missouri

Broadway is the spine of downtown Columbia, running east from the campus toward the commercial heart of the city. On any weekday morning the sidewalks fill with students and professors and the full human range of a small city that has been built around the idea of learning for nearly two centuries. The coffee shops and bookstores and music venues along Broadway and the adjacent streets make up an ecology that is partly college-town universal and partly particular to Columbia.

The Columbia Farmers Market, held at the Columbia Agriculture Park, draws producers from across Boone County and the surrounding region. Mid-Missouri's agricultural base shows up in the produce and the meat and the bread, the particular varieties of what grows well in Missouri river-bottom soil and what the farmers in this valley have been raising since the Booneslick settlers first turned the ground. Columbia has a reputation as a very livable small city, a reputation built partly on the university's cultural infrastructure and partly on the city's own character: a network of trails, a downtown that remained economically viable through decades when downtowns elsewhere emptied out, a strong local music and arts scene fed by the constant rotation of students who want to play and an audience that is always ready to listen.

The city is not without its contradictions. The same institutions that make Columbia distinctive also make housing expensive relative to local incomes outside the university. The history of the Sharp End and the nineteen twenty-three lynching sit underneath the friendly college-town surface.

Columbia is, like all places that take their past seriously, a layered thing. The best version of it holds both the beauty and the difficulty in the same hand.