Ohio State welcomes mixed-use center on High Street

Students, retailers, and office tenants have begun moving into a $130 million mixed-use project known as South Campus Gateway, on High Street next to the Ohio State University campus in Columbus. The 7.5-acre development, spearheaded by a nonprofit community redevelopment organization called Campus Partners, is an attempt to reverse deterioration in Columbus’s University District and to create a lively new place where students, faculty, staff, and the public will find movies, restaurants, and America’s second-largest campus bookstore (after the Harvard Coop). Elkus Manfredi Architects of Boston, chief architects on the project, designed 26 flats and rowhouses so that they line two edges of a five-story, 1,200-space parking garage, preventing the garage from making the streets dull. David Manfredi, principal, said the 26 units that back up to the parking garage are generally 32 feet deep, with windowless bathrooms and kitchens at the rear and with bedrooms and living spaces at the front, where natural illumination is available. Their configuration resembles that of apartments in buildings where units are organized along both sides of a central corridor. Another 158 apartments occupy the upper stories of two other buildings, above street-level shops and restaurants. All the housing in South Campus Gateway is rental, marketed mainly to graduate students, law students, and faculty members. “It’s expensive housing to build, but it’s an important part of the project,” said Stephen A. Sterrett, community relations director of Campus Partners. “We’re not going to make money off the housing. We hope it breaks even.” Ohio State and the city established Campus Partners in 1995 in response to what the organization describes as “decades of deterioration and disinvestment in the University District.” The City Council designated the project area — about two miles north of the center of downtown — as blighted, and threatened to use eminent domain to obtain about 5 of the approximately 31 properties that were needed. All the owners eventually settled out of court, Sterrett said. The housing that was taken consisted of student rental apartments, some of them unoccupied, he noted. After a community planning process, Goody Clancy Associates of Boston produced detailed plans aimed at creating an active center on High Street that would be a catalyst to further development in the University District. David Dixon, head of planning and urban design at Goody Clancy, pointed out that are no interior atriums or other significant spaces inside the new buildings, which began opening in August. “Everything orients to the street, there are multiple entries, multiple uses spilling onto the street.” Barnes & Noble is managing the 50,000 sq. ft. university bookstore, which occupies two floors in one of the buildings. An eight-screen theater operated by Drexel Theatres Group, featuring art, foreign, and independent films, anchors the project’s 230,000 square feet of retail and entertainment space. The university will occupy 70,000 of the 88,000 square feet of office space. Campus Partners received $35 million in federal New Markets Tax Credits to help finance the retail portion of the project. Jones Lang LaSalle served as development management adviser. u