Sundi Corner walks onto a porch while knocking on front doors of houses located on 22nd street in the Linden neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio on April 25, 2018. Corner, a resident of Linden, is organizing a community clean-up day to improve her neighborhood. [ Brooke LaValley / Dispatch ]

Through promises and peril, Linden seeks a path to success

A week ago, Linden residents were cleaning up trash and litter along Billiter Boulevard, a known dumping ground in that Columbus neighborhood.

Sundi Corner, a local real-estate agent who is putting together a new grass-roots organization, Linden Direct, led the cleanup effort.

The idea came when Corner, a South Linden resident, and about 10 others met last month at the Northern Lights branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library to discuss issues facing their community and how to address them.

"We are homeowners. We care. Our properties should compare to Clintonville," Corner said. The prosperous Clintonville neighborhood is less than a mile from North Linden, on the other side of Interstate 71.

Advocates acknowledge that Linden has problems. Populations of North and South Linden combined have dropped by a third since 1960. The closing of a Linden Kroger store in early February was the most recent blow to the area, which has struggled with poverty, crime, blight, disinvestment, misperceptions and empty promises.

But some residents, including Corner, are not giving up on Linden. They're investing in businesses, beginning new neighborhood groups, and cleaning up trash. Some are immigrants and refugees from Somalia, West Africa and the Dominican Republic who have found affordable housing there, and now are helping to stabilize Linden's population.

Sundi Corner walks onto a porch while knocking on front doors of houses located on 22nd street in the Linden neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio on April 25, 2018. Corner, a resident of Linden, is organizing a community clean-up day to improve her neighborhood. [ Brooke LaValley / Dispatch ]

This week, The Dispatch kicks off a yearlong, monthly series about Linden, telling the stories of people who live there and exploring the many challenges facing a neighborhood long trying to make a comeback.

Columbus Mayor Andrew J. Ginther has pledged a concentrated effort to rebuild and re-energize two long-struggling areas: the Hilltop and Linden.

He has mentioned commitments by the city's business community, including a $500,000 donation by Huntington Bank for small-business loans to help revitalize the Cleveland Avenue commercial corridor through Linden, and the city's new $20 million recreation center and park there.

But Ginther acknowledges that neighborhood residents have to be involved in Linden's renaissance.

"This cannot be done by City Hall, cannot be done by the private sector," Ginther said. "It has to be a community effort."

Linden leaders and residents have seen earlier efforts fall short. Some say they feel they've been abandoned.

"I think they have lost faith in the city," said Linden restaurateur Kwodwo Ababio, a Chicago native who has operated his New Harvest Cafe at Cleveland and Arlington avenues for more than a decade.

Owner Kwodwo Ababio poses for a photo in the front doorway of the New Harvest Cafe and Urban Arts Center in the Linden neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio on April 25, 2018. Ababio, originally from Chicago, has lived in Columbus for 18 years. He owns the restaurant, which specializes in Soul Food and includes decorations about the community of Linden. [ Brooke LaValley / Dispatch ]

"The City Council, the mayor, give things to Linden," said Tracy Broaddus, a former Ohio State track athlete, neighborhood activist and one-time Columbus school board candidate who grew up in Linden. "Will it empower Linden?"

Linden's struggles

"This shopping mall is going down," North Linden resident Ann Clifton said as she looked at the empty Kroger from her car in the parking lot of the Northern Lights Shopping Center.

"This Kroger is a great loss," added her daughter, Sharon Lowery, who said customers knew the workers there. "It had been here for everyone in the area."

Sharon Lowery stands in front of the former Kroger in the Northern Lights area of Linden. Brooke LaValley/Dispatch

The shuttering of the Kroger at 3353 Cleveland Ave. made business sense but cost its neighbors. The grocer said the store had lost $3.6 million over the past five years.

Groceries open and close all the time. But in Linden, such a closing is more than an inconvenience. For many, traveling to the Kroger on Morse Road 3 miles away is difficult if they can't afford a car, or if the buses aren't running on their schedule. A Save-A-Lot grocery is nearby, but it has a smaller selection of food items.

On May 1, Abdul Turay, a 36-year-old refugee from Sierra Leone and one of the thousands of immigrants now repopulating Linden, leaned against the brick wall of the closed Kroger at Northern Lights. He lives in a house on nearby Oakland Park Avenue and used to shop at Kroger.

Turay, an unemployed delivery driver, was unaware of Kroger's problems. He's well aware of neighborhood issues, though: "Too much crime, drugs, too many drugs. People shooting, killing each other."

About three months ago, Turay was jumped by five people who took his phone, his hat, his jacket, his wallet containing $200 and his green card, which he has been trying to replace.

He has three daughters, ages 11, 9 and 7.

"I'm scared," he said.

 

Historical neighborhood

More than a century ago, Linden was its own town.

Residents established Linden Heights Village in 1901, when it was on the outskirts of Columbus. It was incorporated in 1908. Columbus annexed the village in 1921.

Walt Reiner was born in South Linden, but his parents came from Germany in the 1920s. Their first house was in South Linden. His father worked at Reiner's bakery, now Pistachia Vera in German Village. His mother was a cook in Bexley.

Reiner, 74, long a local real-estate broker and consultant and a North Linden area commissioner, said his father started a nursery at Oakland Park Avenue and Atwood Terrace. The area kids played in the nearby woods and fields, when Linden was at the edge of what was rural, Reiner said.

Linden grew into a middle-class neighborhood, with residents working nearby at the Timken Co.'s sprawling roller-bearing plant at 5th and Cleveland avenues, or Columbus Coated Fabrics on 5th Avenue. Cleveland Avenue was a commercial strip, with restaurants, a movie theater, a library and a new auto dealership.

Linden Elementary School photographed in 1979. The building in the forefround was built in 1905, and the building behind it was added in 1921. Photo from Dispatch archive.

 

By the 1950s and '60s, Linden was split along Hudson Street, with South Linden a primarily low-income, African-American community, and North Linden a white, middle-class area.

Jessica Roach is CEO of the nonprofit group Restoring Our Own Through Transformation, which has studied historical redlining, in which banks and other lenders denied home loans to people living in minority neighborhoods. The effects persist even today, because the practice helped create economically unstable communities.

Roach said leaders have to go beyond the surface politically. It's not just about putting in new bus stops and Wi-Fi on utility poles, she said, it's about addressing chronic unemployment and underemployment. The median annual household income in North Linden was $36,393 in 2017. In South Linden it was $20,622. For the state of Ohio, that annual median household income was $52,334.

"All the jobs coming into the city — not many people in that ZIP code are getting them," she said.

 


Linden over the years

1770s: Revolutionary War soldiers receive land grants instead of salaries for military service and settle in the area.

1799: Frederick Agler is among the first settlers. Agler Road, to the east of Linden, is named for him.

Early 1800s: Linden's first street, made of planks, is Harbor Road. After being paved in 1932, it is renamed Cleveland Avenue.

1893: The first streetcar line runs through South Linden, connecting Columbus to Westerville and sparking residential development in Linden.

1895: Linden Heights Village is created by a real-estate developer. It officially becomes a village in 1901.

1908: Linden Heights is incorporated.

1920: Sewers, water and streetlights are added.

1921: Linden residents vote to be annexed by Columbus.

1928: The Linden Heights Kiwanis Club is founded.

1954: The Northern Lights Shopping Center is built.

1964: Northland Mall on Morse Road is built.

1998: Columbus Mayor Michael B. Coleman announces development of the "Four Corners" at Cleveland and 11th avenues. The $2.2 million center features a transit facility, child care, a job-training center, a medical office and retail space.

2010: The U.S. Post Office at 1979 Cleveland Ave. is named to honor longtime Linden-area activist Clarence D. Lumpkin.


Change and no change

In 1998, then-City Council President Michael B. Coleman announced the development of the $2.2 million Four Corners projects at Cleveland and East 11th avenues in South Linden, a project that included medical offices, transit and job-training centers, a restaurant, and new headquarters for the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority.

"It was an eyesore for a generation," Coleman said. There was a vacant and crumbling old school building, and a carryout that "sold milk and drugs," he said.

Four Corners was to spur more development in South Linden, but success has been limited. There is a Family Dollar and some new housing. But 20 years later, little has changed beyond Four Corners.

Coleman in part blames the housing foreclosure mess a decade ago that changed the city's focus in Linden.

"The strategy changed from offense to defense," Coleman said. That meant demolishing dozens of vacant and abandoned houses.

By 2013, North and South Linden had 1,388 vacant and abandoned homes, more than any other area of the city at that time. That number dropped to 884 by December 2017, after a combination of demolitions and home rehabs.

The populations of North and South Linden, 54,745 in 1960, had plummeted by more than a third to 35,376 in 2010. But the population apparently stabilized, and bounced back to an estimated 35,889 by 2016.

Now, the city's going back on the offensive, Coleman said, with efforts such as COTA's CMAX bus rapid-transit line running along Cleveland Avenue through Linden's heart.

Members of Ginther's administration said they realize that any efforts need to be comprehensive and long-lasting.

Perceptions and misperceptions

Two years ago, a North Linden resident in the Maize Road area and others began an unsuccessful campaign to change the name of their area to East Clintonville because they thought North Linden carried a negative connotation.

Some from outside Linden have had their views shaped by what they see on the news.

Hayden Shelby was a master's-degree student in city and regional planning and geography at Ohio State University when she decided to study Linden, including the social connections in the neighborhood and whether residents preferred to stay or leave.

"The vast majority of people I talked to didn't want to leave Linden," Shelby said. "They want to see more investment in the community. People want to be there."

The fact that people in Linden feel that outsiders denigrate their community helps galvanize residents more than anything, she said. "People have a strong sense of identity attached to Linden."

Shelby grew up in Sunbury in well-to-do Delaware County. She acknowledged that she had many preconceptions about Linden before immersing herself in the community.

"I had that assumption that this was a place where people were trapped," she said. "And that it was a place that was a high-crime area. It never felt like a place where I felt unsafe when I was there.

"Linden on the news is not the reality of most people's day-to-day lives."