On July 9, 1927, a Saturday night 94 years ago, Lamar’s Hudson Theater, 369 E Hudson, opened.

“Columbus’ newest and finest neighborhood theater” kicked off its 45 years as a theater with 1927’s “It Girl” Clara Bow in her hit Rough House Rosie.

The theater showed Hollywood’s finest until the mid-60s. TV killed the neighborhood movie theater business but the Hudson hung on a few years longer as The New Hudson, a porn house. Afterwards, it became a storefront church for a decade or so. The building sat empty for the past 20 years, slowly decaying.
Looking forward to the Hudson’s new life as Lovebird's—a performance venue and event space--if the bureaucrats downtown can get their act together.

United Dairy Farmers at 12th and High, 5:20 AM. Open 24-7-365, serving the unhoused seeking a hot coffee and a warm place to drink it, house partiers stocking up on beer and snacks, Christmas morning shoppers in need of eggnog, sorority girls having an ice cream on a hot day, and everybody in-between, the University District's 3 UDF's play a big role in the life our community.

Here we go again. Two more High St fixtures--the former Cousin's Army-Navy Store (open since 1970) and Lucky's Stout House (since about 2005)--coming down to make way for another indistiguishable, unremarkable, timber-framed, vaguely Post Modern, 6-story box with retail vacancies on the ground floor. Lucky's last call was July 17.

The first Ohio State University Medical Center (brown brick) in ruins. After 104 years, the 1917 hospital was demolished July 15 and 16, 2021 to make way for the University's new Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Center. University--like the city--has never been one to let history get in the way of the bright, new, and shiny. Hamilton Hall and part of Starling-Loving Hall will be preserved and modernized.

The Stube, 1479 N High, opened in 1968 and is one of the longest-lived campus bars still standing. The well-worn furnishings and the dark, windowless interior make it one the the community's premier dive bars.

This carefully curated 30-year-old CD jukebox is the crown jewel of The Stube, 1479 N High. It even has the soundtrcak from the 1980 Flash Gordon movie!!

Student Move-Out, 2021.

Statue of The Buckeye Bullet, legendary Jesse Owens, at Jesse Owens Memorial Stadium, 2450 Fred Taylor Drive. 85 years ago this summer he won four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics. adelivering a rebuke to Hitler and becoming a national hero.

Monarch butterfly Sunday breakfasting on a globe thistle. This gal loves the globe thistles so much she's been hanging around the garden for days. Once abundant, habitat loss, climate change, and pesticides have devastated their population. Monarch numbers are now just a fifth of what they were 25 years ago. In another 20 years, they may be extinct.

Exhibition of mural art from last summer's civil rights protests at Wexner Center. America's largest civil rights protests have garnered lots of symbolic gestures such as this but few concrete results. Here in Columbus, the powers-that-be removed the statue of Christopher Columbus and set up a long-demanded civilian review board but refused to cut any police programs like the bloated helicopter division or the aquisition of military hardware and actually raised police pay 14% in the new contract.

Makes me furious. Wreckless. Irresponsible. Ridiculous. A small band of healthcare workers staging a lunchtime anti-vaccine requirement protest in front of Rhodes Hall on August 11. As cases explode again thanks to the highly contagious Delta variant of COVID… how?

Bright yellow, late August, ox-eyed sunflowers, blossoming to the delight of the bees in one of Wenland Park's community gardens.

Student move-in 2021 started this week. Despite a fourth wave of COVID surging, the university plans to resume in-person classes with indoor mask mandates and regular testing of the unvaccinated. The university is strongly encouraging vaccinations but is unable to mandate them due to interference by anti-vax Republican crazies in the Statehouse.