Stadium’s decay difficult to watch
Promises to redevelop Cooper fall flat
The drone’s-eye images by Dispatch videographer Doral Chenoweth (at http:// bit.ly/2hGHKLj) are a gut punch to anyone with fond memories of good times in Cooper Stadium, former home to the Columbus Clippers baseball team and before that the Jets and the Redbirds.
The crumbling parking lot and neglected exterior of the empty ballpark are sad enough, but the drone camera revealed what passers-by don’t see: weeds reclaiming the infield and beginning to obscure the baseline seats; windows of the press box broken and covered in graffiti; remaining seats broken and hanging loose.
For people living in nearby Franklinton, what used to be a source of summer jobs and a place for an inexpensive family night out is just one more eyesore, in a sea of cracked concrete and asphalt that now serves only as a neighborhood cut-through.
It’s a very visible unfulfilled promise. When Franklin County commissioners built Huntington Park and moved the Clippers to the Arena District in 2009, they promised Franklinton that the old stadium wouldn’t sit empty. After initially finding no takers, they sold the 46-acre site to Arshot Investment.
It was supposed to be bustling by now as the Sports Pavilion and Automotive Research Complex — it would have a half-mile racetrack, research facilities and some other attractions.
Five years after those plans were announced, though, nothing has happened. The idea appears dead. When The Dispatch tried to find out about the project earlier this year, developer William Schottenstein didn’t return a reporter’s calls; Franklin County commissioners had little to say.
Building Huntington Park was by no means a mistake; the ballpark is considered one of the nation’s best places to watch baseball, Clippers attendance is better, and it’s still affordable. But this has been a bad deal for the Clippers’ former neighborhood.
City and county leaders should employ every available tool at their disposal to encourage redevelopment.
The 10-year, 75 percent property-tax abatement the city granted to Arshot, valued at about $2.5 million, pales in comparison to richer deals offered by the city involving properties nowhere near as in need of the boost.
Cooper Stadium isn’t the only site in dire need of redevelopment. The area around Westland Mall has seen little benefit from development of the Hollywood Casino on the site of the former Fisher Guide auto plant. That stretch of W. Broad Street continues to be empty of commerce — even as the city offers a 10-year, 100 percent property-tax abatement worth $68 million to a developer of high-income housing near Easton, a thriving area that presumably doesn’t need a subsidy from taxpayers to attract development.
A few miles south of Easton, what was once a retail mecca along Brice Road is now acres and acres of asphalt and weeds.
Reviving such areas isn’t easy; it took more than a decade, and the onetime boost of relocating state and local government agencies, to rebuild and repopulate the barren Northland Mall site.
But revitalizing barren swaths requires a spark, including some salesmanship and infrastructure investment commitments from elected officials. As Columbus booms in many outward directions, city and county leaders have a commitment to keep in its struggling areas.