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Citizen Journalist: Reviving north central Columbia: The decade’s sleeper story

Mike Martin is a Columbia resident and science journalist, Mike.martin@weeklyscientist.com.

One hopeful story has quietly dominated the Columbia skyline for the past decade: the gradual rebirth of the North Central Village, a series of interconnected neighborhoods roughly bounded by Broadway and the Business Loop, College Avenue and Providence.

Just 20 years ago, three kinds of houses dotted this one-time victim of racial segregation and inner-city despair: abandoned houses, drug houses and flophouses.

Now, after the slow inward migration of urban pioneers, a heavy dose of civic activism and a surge of historic preservation, the North Central Village is humming with new life, a new sense of purpose and hope for better times ahead.

Darwin’s vision

When Columbia Mayor Darwin Hindman leaves office next year, he’ll be remembered for a vision many say has helped define this community: green space preservation with more parks; adaptive reuse with the MKT rail to trail; and sustainable living via a low-car, walk-and -peddle lifestyle.

If it were possible, I’d nominate four couples to take Darwin’s place, people who’ve continued his vision but in a different way and where it was needed most — our lagging central city.

John and Vicki Ott have systematically restored more than a dozen historic but lifeless buildings from the downtown District to the southern end of the North Central Village, most recently the enormous Berry Warehouse.

Mark and Lotta Timberlake took old, rust-speckled warehouses in the North Central Village and with Orr Street Studios showed Columbia the true meaning of adaptive reuse.

Tom and Linda Atkins, among the earliest North Central business pioneers, restored a four-story shoe/propeller factory on Wilkes Boulevard, which now houses more than a dozen thriving businesses, including the Atkins Corporation.

And Brian and Joy Pape, the most pioneering of the group, tackled Columbia’s second-largest successfully completed historic preservation project next to the Atkins shoe factory building: the falling-down Diggs meat-packing warehouse, which started life as a mule barn in the center of the North Central Village and will shortly house the Woodruff and Sweitzer ad agency.

All of this reminds of Darwin’s vision: preservation, this time historic; adaptive reuse, this time with old buildings; and sustainable living, this time with the city’s first “green roof,” which Pape perched atop his now LEED-certified mule barn.

Public paradox

A powerful nod to private enterprise, the village renaissance is a public sector paradox.

Despite all the concern about crime and the social ills inner city decay breeds, local government has invested few real dollars in north central Columbia beyond those the federal government provides under the Community Development Block Grant program.

A one-person neighborhood response team that borrows from other city departments has certainly helped. But the team is chronically under-funded because they, too, rely almost solely on block grants, or fixed sums that don’t come from city coffers.

The one opportunity City Hall has had to invest real money in the neighborhood — restoring the dilapidated but notably historic Heibel-March store — started 15 years ago and remains inexplicably stalled to this day.

The city government only recently installed proper sidewalks and drainage, and it did so because block grants were available.

When Pape got his whopping property tax bill for his mostly empty building this year, the message was clear and unfortunate: Despite the private sector’s neighborhood-transforming improvements, the public sector doesn’t get it — and doesn’t want to.

That’s too bad, because in ignoring neighborhood revitalization and penalizing transformative risk, our public servants lag their nationwide peers in recognizing that surroundings matter, especially in dense urban settings.

We are the change

Nearly eight years ago, I started buying small old houses in the North Central Village — and only in the North Central Village. I saw the positive handwriting, writ large across the brick face of Columbia College, the Village’s most prominent corporate neighbor, and across the faces of residents who’ve helped make the transformation work.

Back then, most of the business pioneers hadn’t arrived. But hope was in the air. Longtime Village homeowners such as Don Choate, Betty Cook Rottmann, Lenore Danziger and Susan Taylor Glasgow were tirelessly upbeat.

There’s a change coming we can believe in, they said. And it isn’t Barack Obama, the government or any political party.

The change we can believe in, it turns out, is us.