The Short North and the Gayborhood That Survived Itself

The stretch of High Street north of downtown and south of the Ohio State campus was, by the nineteen seventies, one of the more declined urban corridors in Columbus. Cheap rents attracted artists. Artists attracted bars and galleries. The bars attracted a community that had been effectively pushed out of most of the city.

The Short North became Columbus's gay neighborhood through the late nineteen seventies and early eighties. The concentration of bars, cheap housing, and relative tolerance on that stretch of High Street made it a gathering place for LGBTQ Columbusites at a moment when the national political climate was becoming more hostile, not less. The Moral Majority was organizing. The AIDS crisis was beginning.

In nineteen eighty-one a group of Columbus gay activists who had marched against the Moral Majority reconvened at someone's living room and formed what became Stonewall Columbus. The first Pride march in Columbus stepped off in nineteen eighty-two with around two hundred people. A lesbian bar called Summit Station, believed to be the longest-running lesbian bar in Ohio history, operated from nineteen eighty until sometime in two thousand seven or two thousand eight. Its exact closing date is not in the public record.

What happened to the Short North over the following decades was what happens to urban districts that become destinations: prices rose, the original residents were priced out, the neighborhood gentrified. The bars changed. The galleries became upscale. The stretch of High Street that had been the city's gayborhood became a brunch district.

Stonewall Columbus received an Ohio Historical Marker in twenty twenty-five, formally recognizing a history that the neighborhood it anchored had already moved on from.