The Giant Eagle grocery store on Whittier Street in Schumacher Place in Columbus is gone, replaced by a, uh, giant lot surrounded by a chain link fence. My deepest condolences to the neighborhood folks who have beautiful memories of time spent trolling for fresh vegetables in the produce department or scoring the perfect can of Starkist Tuna. But for a local sports historian, the store’s demise has produced a wonderful opportunity.
While the developer (Pizzuti Companies) and local residents barter over the height and architecture of the apartment and retail complex that will likely be built there, the lot (bordered by East Whittier Street on the south, Jaeger Street on the west, Kossuth Street on the north and Ebner Street on the east) is mostly empty. That gives sports dreamers like me a chance to imagine what it looked like when it held Recreation Park.
OK, I sense that I may be losing some of you here, so let me trot out the part that might be called the grabber: This was the site of Ohio State’s first home football game on November 1, 1890, a 64-0 loss to Wooster.
The photos at the top and bottom of this piece may provide a little more insight into why this temporary arrangement is so special: the top photo is an action shot from an 1891 football game at Recreation Park between OSU and Denison; the bottom photo shows essentially the lot as it appears today, without a store, cars, trucks and shoppers to make this look like any other Giant Eagle location. Most of those houses, whose roofs and chimneys are visible above the board fence that surrounded the field in 1891, are probably still there.
But there’s more to this spot than Ohio State football. Recreation Park (the city’s second one) was built on the site in 1887 for the Columbus’ professional baseball team. The park was home to the city’s pro baseball teams until 1895, and during that time a local salesman named Harry M. Stevens made a deal with team owner Ralph Lazarus to print and sell scorecards at the games. He was soon selling peanuts, ice cream, soda pop and hot dogs at the park, the beginnings of a multimillion-dollar business (Aramark acquired it in 1994) that operates the concessions at many major league parks today.
Recreation Park was also the site of former Ohio State football great Chic Harley’s first high school game for East High School in 1912. East beat Mount Vernon 16-0 in an ugly game in which the Columbus Dispatch reported that the little sophomore threw a “splendid” touchdown pass to Ed Gochenbach.
I’m not sure exactly how long Recreation Park remained, but countless local baseball and football teams practiced and played there, and I vaguely recall reading that Jim Thorpe (who was often in Columbus) once participated in a kicking exhibition there.
Whether he did or didn’t, this was a place that meant a lot to thousands of local residents, long before a grocery store landed there.
Wouldn’t it be great if some former and/or current Ohio State and Wooster football stars could play a “game” there for charity before buildings litter the property again?
