Some past predictions were on target
Columbus leaders embarked on a grand plan in 1908 to remake the city’s center. They would create a public promenade that would start at the Statehouse and span the Scioto River, and it would remove blighted areas. Two office buildings would flank the promenade. That never happened, of course. The commission proposing the plan had a grand vision of what the center of the city should become, part of the “City Beautiful” movement that was sweeping the country then. It was a blueprint to create more park space.
The plan also suggested this: “The sewage system in congested districts should be divided into two distinct schemes — one to carry storm waters and one to carry house drainage.”
It’s not as sexy as a Washington Mall-like park downtown, but that one happened. Columbus is now spending $2.5 billion to separate storm-water and sewage lines. Think of the money that could have been saved if the city had embarked on that program years earlier — before it was ordered by the state to do it.
In 1931, famed Dispatch cartoonist Billy Ireland imagined a future in which newspapers were delivered statewide via helicopter. In his vision, Trinity Episcopal Church broadcast sermons via radio from a beacon on its steeple, and multitiered streets separated cars from pedestrians, much like the elevated streets in downtown Chicago.
Some of Ireland’s vision came to pass. A Capitol Square parking garage stood next to the Dispatch building at 34 S. 3rd St. in his illustration of what he thought 1991 would look like, and the city’s first multi-level parking garage was built on East Long Street in 1953. A multi-story video board hung from Ireland’s drawing of the Dispatch building, correctly predicting similar boards that now adorn several Downtown buildings.
Later, in the 1960s, other predictions were made in the Dispatch Sunday Magazine as to what life would be like here in the 21st Century.
“Columbus citizens in the year 2000 may be voting in elections by means of electronic equipment that will tabulate their votes in a central office as fast as they push the buttons in the voting booth, making total results available instantly after the polls close.”
If only the machines worked that fast.
Some of the other admittedly unusual forecasts in the magazine:
Mind-reading will be possible with electronic gadgets.
Clothes will be cleaned by sound waves while hanging in the closet.
Downtown will be served by a two-level network of streets, with pedestrians on moving sidewalks on the upper level, and vehicular traffic on the lower level.
But other predictions have come to pass.
The civic center will be greatly expanded along the river, and high-rise apartment buildings will overlook the waterway both above and below the Downtown business district.
Close-in residential developments will fill in the bare spots.
High-rise apartments will grace the gray areas on the fringes of the central business district.
Express buses and monorails will link the Downtown area to giant parking lots near expressway interchanges. Well, the bus and parking-lot parts came true.
And it was predicted that the Ohio Penitentiary on Spring Street would be long gone, “with a transportation center or a public office building complex at the site.” The Pen is gone, and the Arena District is there.
Don’t forget how we get around. Prognosticators didn’t predict flying cars, but they thought we’d have a speedy ride between Columbus, Cincinnati and Cleveland.
“By 2000, (Columbus Area Chamber of Commerce President Kline Roberts) thinks Ohio’s big cities will be drawn more closely together by high-speed trains, hover craft that can skim over land and water, or some other form of rapid transportation that will whisk people from Columbus to Cleveland in 30 minutes or less, thus increasing the interchange of social life, entertainment and business.”
Fifty years later, we don’t have high-speed trains between Ohio’s Big Three. Gov. John Kasich killed a plan for much-slower trains. But now we’re talking about making super-fast trips in pods that could travel inside a “hyperloop” tube at speeds of more than 700 mph — to Chicago and Pittsburgh instead.