IF you are the sort of person who likes to look for a silver lining to every cloud, there is an upside to the decline of the domestic automotive industry.
Without the shrinking of the sector, the pillar of so many Ohio cities and towns, Kristy Yosick might never have left the Toledo area. She might still be employed as a tech recruiter on the supply side of the automotive industry, instead of down in Columbus, the state capital, making chocolate.
Yosick, a fabulously fierce and short-haired woman, has an easy explanation as to why she was in the car business one day and then making key lime truffles in her South Fifth Street shop, called Yosick’s, the next.
When she started her first career, she says, there were nearly 30 companies in her sector (transmission seals) doing business in the United States. Today, according to Yosick, there are just two: One German, one Japanese. Seeing the handwriting a few years ago, she paid her bills, put her kids through college, chucked her old life and went back to school to learn how to make chocolate.
“I wanted something that wouldn’t go to China,” she says.
Today, she’s one of many successful small business owners in Columbus’s historic German Village district. Yosick’s is known for its delectable chocolates, which, incidentally, are kosher. This makes the shop a favorite with the small but active Orthodox community in the Columbus area.
Like many residents and business owners in Columbus’s German Village, a narrow-streeted urban paradise of red-brick cottages and handsome Italianate and Queen Anne homes, Yosick is middle-aged; she’s here in part because of having reached this milestone.
For some people this means crisis; Yosick insists that it was merely an opportunity. A cause for celebration, not panic. Today, a hand painted exhortation on the pretty, wood-framed glass door at the entrance to her shop sets the tone, serving perhaps as much as a reminder to herself as to others: “Please enter joyfully.”
SO MANY GERMANS!
Immigration is hardly just an Ohio thing, yet the state, which stretches from the summer cottage islands of Lake Erie to the hills of the south that act almost as a cold shoulder to Kentucky and West Virginia, feels more tied to its European heritage than many. From Ireland to Ukraine, name the group; odds are there’s still at least a semi-distinct community somewhere in the state. Hungarians are here, so are the Czechs. Nearly 100,000 Austrians immigrated to Cleveland before 1920. Cincinnati, of course, is hopelessly Teutonic, right up to the present.
Columbus, just an hour or so to the north east of The Queen City, shares in Cincy’s German heritage, as does the state as a whole. According to the Ohio Historical Society, Germans were among the earliest European settlers in what is now the 17th state.
The South End of Columbus, part of which would years later become known as German Village, was laid out in 1813. Numbers in Ohio grew quickly enough that other ethnic groups and American-born settlers felt the expanding sphere of German influence in the state to be an extreme threat. By the 1850s, anti-German groups were on the attack, leading a German-American militia group to take up arms in defense of their homes, families and livelihoods.
As the 1800s progressed, friction between groups resulted in the Germans pulling back from the rest of society, forming a sort of New Germany within the state, a matter that had to have been of great concern to the state-led Americanization Society, which had a goal of total assimilation.
Either way, by 1865, the city of Columbus was more than one-third German. Their schools were the envy of parents of other backgrounds. Possibly feeling the threat of the expanding sphere of Teutonic influence, the 1875 Ake Bill sailed through the Ohio Legislature — no longer could immigrants teach their children the German language until the seventh grade, ensuring that their primary language would forever be English.
Things only got worse with the advent of the new century; with World War I arriving on the scene, Germans were, nationally, a target by those proving their patriotic status. German street names in cities across Ohio were changed; libraries banned “pro-German” books. By 1918, people were burning books in the South End’s Schiller Park. A year later, the state legislature banned breweries, a move seen as a thinly-veiled attempt to cripple the German business community. Since Columbus’s breweries, mostly on the banks of the Scioto River, were the engine of the South End economy, this, perhaps more than anything, signaled the end of an era. The brewery business in Columbus would never fully recover.
By World War II, there really wasn’t anything more the city could do to run the South End into the ground; it had already been rezoned for industrial use, a move that may have completely destroyed the neighborhood, had the Great Depression not quickly hit, effectively putting the kibosh on development.
In 1949, a city employee, Frank Fetch, bought his first piece of property in the area. Looking around at the zombie that the South End had become, he had an idea: Why not bring back the neighborhood? One by one, others followed. Fetch founded the German Village Society in 1960; the neighborhood became the city’s first National Historic District in 1963.
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Jerry Glick is one of the many volunteers that have spent decades working to build on the legacy that Fetch began. He bought property here in 1978.
“My friends told me I was throwing my money away,” Glick says.
Today, nobody moving into the German Village has to explain themselves — the Society has 1,000 members, it’s lead by a board of trustees. In an elegant example of what can happen once a community gets organized, the neighborhood today is largely spotless, its two parks tended to non-stop by local residents who prefer to take matters in their own hands, rather than wait for the city to clean up after them.
As Glick, a third-generation Ohio State University employee, tours me around the neighborhood, he introduces me to everyone we meet. He knows everybody; the German Village is one of those places. Glick tells me that he recently spoke to a recently-arrived couple who said they’d met more people in the Village in six weeks than they did in their old suburban town in four years.
Lenita Pepper has lived all over the world, in part due to her husband’s job as a chemical dependency specialist.
“We’ve lived here in Columbus longer than any place else, simply because I love the Village,” Pepper says, as she shows me around her curiosity of a home, built out of an abandoned garage and a vacant lot on a side street. An expansive outdoor area out back has been the scene of legendary parties, one at which, rumor has it, the Mayor of Columbus ended up in the pool.
We end up visiting and socializing everywhere Glick takes me, with everyone updating each other on their health. There’s a sense of community here that doesn’t just happen everywhere, not even in the Midwest. Not even in neighborhoods as beautiful and organized as this one.
At Schmidt’s Fudge Haus on Kossuth Street, we can’t really do anything until Glick has explained to the cashier there exactly what is going on with his bum knee, which is preventing him from indulging one of his favorite pastimes: skiing.
In the back at Schmidt’s, Tim Dick is busy pulling together a batch of fudge.
The former IT industry employee, who threw in the towel to try something more creative, has been a part of the Schmidt’s empire for 10 years now. The Schmidt family has a long history on Kossuth Street — their former slaughterhouse is now apartments.
The past few decades, the Schmidt’s have been running Columbus’s best-known German eatery, Schmidt’s Sausage Haus und Restaurant, across the street from the fudge shop. Dick, it turns out, convinced them to open up the store and let him make fudge.
Things have been going well, which isn’t surprising — the fudge is good, but Dick’s engaging personality and his love of experimentation are what give the operation its soul. He’s currently tinkering with a goat’s milk fudge; he likes putting on shows for the groups that stop by, many of them retirees. He finds ways to amuse himself as well as his guests, one time whipping up a batch of rum raisin fudge, simply so he could light the rum on fire for effect.
“Everyone sat up,” he says. “Even the ones with oxygen tanks.”
Dick slathers hot fudge atop freshly-made frozen custard and passes out samples. We get properly introduced to Geoff Schmidt, who sits atop the family-run empire. He couldn’t help but love Tim, he says — ten years on, and they’re getting along famously.
“I’d like to consider myself part of the family,” says Dick.
“We wouldn’t consider it,” Schmidt murmurs, jokingly.
We stop in across the street for sausages — their specialty is the spicy Bahama Mama, but the brats are pretty spectacular, reminiscent of the ones you’ll find on the currywurst stands of. Glick reminds me that we actually have a lunch date at a nearby tapas bar, but that can wait. Tapas we can get any time.
THE PERFECT NEIGHBORHOOD?
In many other cities that are not in Ohio, a neighborhood of this caliber would likely command exorbitant rents and feature multiple homes with sale prices in the millions. At the very least, the neighborhood might be the province solely of wealthy professionals and retirees who may need a lot of things, but certainly not another piece of property that they will rarely, if ever, use. Most Villagers estimate the renter-to-owner ratio at about 50 percent. Consequently, you have people here of all types and ages. Upstart entrepreneurs, accomplished retirees, young renters, second homers.
I meet Ryan Orewiler, a thoughtful thirtysomething, upstairs at Caterina, a Euro-centric home goods store on the Village’s South 3rd Street, near a spectacular old bookstore as well as the first-ever Max and Erma’s Restaurant, which was a German Village gathering spot before it was built along every off-ramp in this part of the country.
The proprietor of the home design shop, Catherine Adams, a worldly and appealing woman, has loaned her upstairs gallery space to Orewiler, founder and director of the German Village Art League, for its first juried show.
Orewiler was raised in the neighborhood; he shows off the diverse collection of work that includes some of his own pieces, then offers to show me the “small apartment” that he shares with his girlfriend over on one of the nicest streets in the Village.
The apartment turns out to be the entire first floor of a two-story building; it includes a well-tended side garden and a spacious back patio, plus a covered back deck for those rainy evenings when you still want to be outside. For this, he pays $600 a month.
This, just steps from the exclusive and Ohio-boosting Negy Gallery, where customers aren’t so much walk-ins as they are fly-ins, and by fly-ins we’re talking private jets from far away. They come to ogle the fascinating Elijah Pierce folk art collection as well as emerging work from various present-day Ohio artists, of which there are plenty.
As I drive past Schiller Park later that afternoon, I notice that it’s five o’clock; there’s no traffic in the Village to speak of, even though we’re just a few traffic lights out of Downtown and a mile or two away from Ohio State’s impossibly clogged campus.
Down here, life seems easy. Everyone is in the park at leisure — all ages, classes, colors. There’s fast-paced basketball, kids with too much energy, adults sitting on the grass, just enjoying the end of the warmer weather.
Ohio may be one of the most economically hard-hit states in a nation at risk, but right here, in the heart of its capital, everything seems quite alright.
For more information about German Village, visit the Society’s website at www.germanvillage.com. To learn more about the city of Columbus as a destination, check out www.experiencecolumbus.com.