house two blocks to the east, built a mansion at the northwest corner of Third and Broad Streets that stood until 1922, after most of its contemporaries had been replaced by parking lots and office towers.
The vision of transforming Broad from plank road to grand tree-lined avenue came to Deshler after he saw similar streets in a visit to Havana, Cuba, in 1857. He ofered to buy trees for the street if the city provided the land for median strips on each side, and the city complied. By 1870, a double row of elms and sugar maples lined the street, and more wealthy citizens began building homes there.
Several mansions had already paved the way. Peletiah Webster Huntington, founder of the bank that still bears his name, had a fine old home at 141 East Broad that stood on the site of the current PNC Bank building. Ohio canal builder and state legislator Alfred Kelley built a sandstone Greek Revival mansion at 282 East Broad between 1836 and 1838 on 18 acres that later became the site of the Christopher Inn.
In 1855, Columbus Gas Company president William Platt built a mansion for himself and his wife, Fanny, sister of future president Rutherford B. Hayes, on a 3-acre plot at the northeast corner of Cleveland Avenue and Broad, and Columbus Art School founder Francis Sessions had a square brick mansion on the site of what is now the Columbus Museum of Art.
In 1860, Baldwyn Gwynne erected a mansion at the southwest corner of Broad and Fourth Streets that became Miss Phelps English and Classical School, a school for girls of wealth and social position, in 1885. In 1864, financier and railroad contractor Benjamin E. Smith built the house that would become the Columbus Club with individually wrapped bricks from Philadelphia.
The mansions gradually crept east all the way to Franklin Park, as many of the largest, most luxurious homes went up in the 1880s and 1890s. Clinton D. Firestone, president of the Columbus Buggy Company, built a handsome home trimmed in red terra-cotta, at 580 East Broad. The towered Frederick Schumacher house, made of attractive green stone, became a landmark at 750 East Broad. Several Ohio governors made their homes in various mansions along Broad Street while in office; included in their august company was 1920 Democratic presidential nominee James M. Cox, who lived at 840 East Broad six years before he lost the presidential election to Warren G. Harding. Eventually, most of the city’s prominent families—Hanna, Wolfe, Pace, Jones, McCune, Bentley, Warner, Lindenberg, Bricker, Johnson, Merkle, Powell, Hoster, Orr, Pirrung, Monypeny, Campbell, and many more—had elegant, impressive homes on the street and a lifestyle to match.
The spacious dining rooms in these mansions were built for formal dinner parties for twelve or more visitors, and engraved invitations were often extended ten days beforehand. Lavish lunches prepared by the households’ private chefs were common, and many of the homes contained second- or third-ffloor ballrooms for grand parties. Carriage houses stood on the grounds of most of the mansions, many with servants’ quarters on the upper ffloor.
The wives and daughters of some of the early business titans became community leaders in their own right, founding and playing prominent roles in local charitable organizations including the Columbus Female Benevolent Society, the Capital Area Humane Society, the Columbus Home for the Aged, the Friends Rescue Mission, and the Columbus Tuberculosis Society. Others were deeply involved in cultural activities such as the art gallery or the symphony orchestra.
In the April 1888, issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Deshler Welch called Broad “one of the most beautiful thoroughfares to be found in an American city. It extends for a distance of several miles, and in the summer time the four rows of shade trees form a bower of foliage.” He contrasted Broad Street’s “rural beauty” with “the cold uninteresting style of a Fifth Avenue residence.”
Alas, it was a diferent time. The median strips were removed in the 1920s. The stately elms that gave the street a certain pastoral elegance eventually fell victim to Dutch elm disease, and the families who once made their homes there gradually removed to the ever-growing suburbs, first to Marble Clif and nearby Bexley and then to newer suburbs in places such as Upper Arlington, Dublin, and most recently, New Albany.
There are still business titans and rich, successful entrepreneurs these days, but many of the stately old mansions that once created a showplace for the city are gone and the high society that once lived on East Broad Street isn’t quite so high. Wealth was only part of what made East Broad Street what is was. It was a special time in the nation’s history, a place where a growing city took us and a particular state of mind.
It’s still a nice place to visit, even if we have to do it with photographs, postcards, imagination, and memories.
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1. 136 East Broad Street—The Esther Institute, a girls’ boarding school, opened here in a rectangular three-story building on September 29, 1853. Agnes W. Beecher, a relative of author Harriet Beecher Stowe, was the principal. The school had originated the year before in a private home on Rich Street under the name of the Columbus Female Seminary. Governor Salmon P. Chase’s daughters, Kate and Nettie, attended this school. The school closed in 1862, and the building became a military hospital that housed hundreds of wounded veterans during the Civil War. It was remodeled and opened as the Irving House family hotel after the war. It had stood empty for years when Trinity Episcopal Church bought it for use as a parish house in 1890, and Samuel B. Hartman bought it when the church’s parish house was completed. He sold it to the newly organized Athletic Club in 1913, but it was razed two years later for the construction of the new Athletic Club building, which still occupies this site. The Athletic Club’s address is listed as 140 East Broad. President Warren G. Harding was once a member, and presidents Richard M. Nixon and George H. W. Bush both visited there, as did 2008 Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain and his running mate, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, musicians Harry Connick Jr. and Randy Travis, actor Anthony Quinn, and Chelsea Clinton, daughter of President Bill Clinton.
2. 137 East Broad Street—The Maramor Restaurant, one of the city’s most famous eateries, was in this location from the 1920s until it closed in 1969. The restaurant achieved a national reputation, in part because of testimonials from theatrical personalities who ate there while appearing in town. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were so impressed with the “Lamb Luntanne” that they wrote in the guest book that the Maramor was “the best restaurant in America.” Helen Hayes, who starred as a queen in Victoria Regina, called the Maramor’s vichyssoise “a soup to a queen’s taste.” Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas likely dined here during their 1934 visit to Columbus, based on the glowing description they gave the place. Duncan Hines named the restaurant as one of his favorite eating places in a 1947 interview and singled out its stewed chicken: “The chicken is so delicate in fflavor, tender, the dumplings light as thistledown, cooked in the rich, creamy gravy.” The restaurant was started by a single woman named Mary Love in 1920 in a house across Broad Street —112 East Broad—in 1920, and she ran it until it was sold to Maurice Sher in 1945. By then, Mary’s husband, Malcolm McGuckin, was president of the company, which included a candy shop; the restaurant was also known for its chocolates. The Maramor was listed in Gourmet’s Guide to Good Eating in 1948. Sher operated the restaurant until it closed. The building was torn down in 1972. The candy business survives as Maramor Chocolates at a diferent location.
3. 141 East Broad Street—Peletiah Webster Huntington, founder of the bank that still bears his name, had a home on this site that was demolished in 1926 to make room for the construction of the Maramor Restaurant. The PNC Bank building occupies this site today.
4. Southwest corner of Broad and Fourth Streets—The mansion of Baldwyn Gwynne stood on this spot, built around 1860 with an address of 151 East Broad. Lucretia Phelps and
B. H. Hall moved their Miss Phelps English and Classical School here in 1885; the school’s enrollment grew so large that a plain brick building was added in the side yard along Capitol Alley in 1890. At its height, this school for girls of wealth and social position had about one hundred students; twenty-five or so were boarding students, many from other states. Three times a year, the school held a ball on the spacious third ffloor of the mansion. Many of the boys came from Columbus Latin School, across Broad Street. Miss Phelps English and Classical School was known as a “finishing school”; the best manners were required. Graduation was held in nearby Trinity Church. The school closed in 1906 after