Yesterday, someone asked me if I missed Columbus. I said that I missed certain people, and that I supposed I missed the city, too. “What places do you miss?” she asked. I immediately thought of several, but before I named them, I realized that most of them weren’t there anymore.
Every city carries within it all the ghost versions of itself. These ghost cities are not simply the city as it was in the past, but the city as it was imagined, lived in, shot through with fantasy by its inhabitants. Each urbanite hews from the vast surface of brick and concrete a personal geography, within which certain bars, cafes, benches, parks, restaurants, stretches of sidewalk, loom large in their mental map, while others, though objectively larger, shrink into insignificance, or disappear altogether—a Mercator projection of the mind and heart. We contact the city with our feet, absorb its vibrations and dirty, tasty energy through our soles, those flesh planes that gather nerves connected to all of our internal organs. As much as through breath, this is how the city gets inside us, how we can carry it elsewhere, and then feel the sensation of what we call “missing it.”
But time is not a line, and space is not a flat rectangle. Missing the city is not a matter of recalling what is no longer before us; it is the incongruity between the city’s absence outside our body, and its presence inside our body. The absence and the presence combine to constitute a haunting, a ghost city.
There was a time when campus was more crime-ridden, a darker, dilapidated, diverse, and ever-changing wonderland. The sushi joint Bento Go-Go (is it even called that anymore? What is it…Midway?) used to be Insomnia, a café like none that exist now. There were blue spike-mohawked punks playing chess to the right, and a Kendo black belt, who was also one of my running buddies, a fixture of the rave scene, working on a screenplay to the left, and every kind of person in between. Insomnia burned down—or burned up, since it was underground—and I knew more than a few people who suspected it was arson, that the jagged beauty I saw and lived and loved there was inconsistent with the veneer that real estate developers and Ohio State wanted to create all along High Street. In order to do so, they needed to remove the rough edges, the darkness, the grime, the uncategorizable spaces, the places I miss.
Who knows how it actually burned, whether it was the kind of corporate-sponsored arson that burned down the Bronx and helped give birth to hip hop (see Jeff Chang’s dazzling chapter on this in Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop), or simply a bad electrical connection, a coffee pot left on, a cigarette dropped in a trashcan. Perhaps we’ll never know. What we do know is that the facades all along High Street have been face-lifted or torn down altogether, that campus has been turned into a mall, and that all the bad things that happened to young people back in the grimy days, especially to young women, still happen today, though the settings are sanitized, newly sheetrocked and brightly painted, a chain store boomtown of glass and fake stainless steel.
The mallification happened beyond campus as well, so that even the jazz club 5:01, where I relished seeing the inimitable Carlos Fisher play his live drum and bass sets, couldn’t survive the South-Beach-inspired night life zone plopped down on Front Street. The Short North now has an Anthropologie; Betty’s and Rigsby’s are gone; the Kroger on King Avenue is now a nice place to shop; and the long-gone style oasis that was Avalon has gone through so many replacements, I can’t remember if the last time I passed by there it was a cell phone store, a hookah spot, a vaping bar, or some combination of the three.
Such combination businesses are not uncommon in my home city—just south of the Avalon building is a Wash ‘n’ Tan, and several blocks north, near my old apartment on Duncan, is the Dirty Dungarees, a laundromat with a bar in it. I once bought a DVD from a video rental/pool and hot tub supply store. None of these combination businesses are especially important to me, but they did form the periphery of those locales that occupied so much territory in my personalized mental map of the city. And they were consistently funky, strange in a way that complimented the places I visited often, like Higher Ground, where glowstick kids bought their UFO pants and psychedelic glass, where I went to get tickets to shows not shackled to Ticketmaster.
But Higher Ground is gone. Rag-O-Rama remade itself from high quality, low-priced second-hand to overpriced “vintage” and moved up to Clintonville. The shoe salon where we pounced on discounted Pumas and Royal Elastics, with its towering trans cashier in purple zebra leggings and black patent leather platforms, closed well over a decade ago, and now persists only in memory, only in our feet. But perhaps in our lungs, too. Did you know that much of the rubber on our shoes back then came from the Amazonian rain forest? That all things are actually, materially connected? That when we walked and danced on the sandpaper surface of the concrete, we left a little bit of our soles behind? That those thinnest of scraped-off layers mingled with the dust? That the dust is picked up by wind and then breathed into our bodies, where it is sifted through our lungs and gets into our blood? Did you know that the ghost city is actually in my veins?