4:20 Downtown Stroll

The streets downtown are so peaceful at night. It’s like having an entire city to yourself.

This is Mike George coming at you live from Downtown Columbus on this beautiful, slightly nippy 4:20 in the morning. It has become a nightly routine of mine to walk through downtown about an hour before the COTA buses start. This is one of my favorite times of the day — a sort of "lull" between the folks coming home from the bars (around 2:00 or 3:00 AM) and the early risers heading to work at 5:00. In this hour or two of tranquility, it feels like I have the whole city to myself.

I am currently walking down Gay Street toward High Street, passing one of my favorite Italian restaurants, Due Amici. I’m looking at my old “Open Mike LIVE” videos and realizing how much content I fill with pointless rants, rather than just enjoying the silence of the stroll. I think I often filibuster my viewers out of the conversation, which might be why I get so few comments.

The architecture downtown is marvelous; it is nice to see they have kept the old architecture intact, even through the city's current renaissance. As I approach High Street, I notice an interesting "webbing" structure that was erected around the time I moved back last summer. Even though it’s the busiest street in the city, it is remarkably devoid of traffic right now, though I did see a couple of cars. I also see city vehicles doing the "unsexy tasks" of keeping the city clean and taking out the trash.

I want to mention a project I’ve been developing for about a year called "Street Smart". It is a tool I created to track amenities needed for survival, such as public restrooms, free Wi-Fi, and—most importantly—free meals offered by churches and community organizations. My experience has shown me that resources are out there, but the key is organizing that information into a shareable format.

My headphones are probably dead, so I hope the phone microphone is picking up my voice. Doing these live streams uses a lot of data and battery, so I have to keep an eye on that. When I walk the city, I often use WANDA rather than headphones. I enjoy being the "DJ for the theme song" of the streets, setting the vibe for anyone who passes by.

As you walk up High Street, you notice an elevation change where the street traverses the train tracks. This "hump" is where the historic Union Station (the passenger rail hub) used to be. It’s funny that Columbus is the largest city in the nation with no passenger rail service, yet we have homages to it everywhere, like the "Easton Station" concourse or the Union Station gay bar.

Currently, only a single track remains of the dozens that used to pass through here. You can see it peering through the gap near the Hilton Tower and the Hyatt. However, with funding from the infrastructure legislation (the Inflation Reduction Act), this area is the intended site for a third generation of train stations. I hope to see the day passenger rail returns to Columbus.

I can hear the birds chirping as we get closer to dawn. A freight train is passing through the corridor right now — unfortunately, it's carrying goods, not people. My electronics are dying, so I am going to give my phone and my brain a rest.

Happy Thursday to the early birds; we’ve almost made it to the end of the week. Take care of yourselves, and take care of somebody else.