Reviving Downtowns: Just Add Water

COLUMBUS—Urban waterways in the US were once used primarily by heavy industry to help transport raw materials or as a place to dump wastewater. But most heavy industry has left the nation’s urban cores, and modern planners have started to recognize that a clean, natural waterway can bring a measure of beauty and grace to a cityscape. As a result, instead nurturing factories or other industrial operations, urban rivers and lakes are now used to attract multifamily developments, new retail, and upscale office spaces.

Columbus was never a center of heavy industry, but it has become the latest American city to reconstruct a waterway in order to foster a downtown renaissance. In the 1920′s, the city built the Main Street Dam across its Scioto River in the belief that as a major-league city, Columbus “should have a major-league river,” Guy Worley, president and chief executive officer of the Columbus Downtown Development Corp., tells GlobeSt.com. Although the river did indeed widen from 300 feet to 600 feet, the plan misfired as the waterway changed into a “sedimentation pond. It wasn’t flowing and it wasn’t clean.”