Architecture in Columbus, Indiana

I moved to Columbus, Indiana back in 1982 and lived there until 1985 and while it was a great city with lots of cool businesses and the city busses were Mercedes-Benz, that it was such a special place. After moving away and growing up and realizing all the cool stuff that I saw everyday around the city I felt priviliged to have lived in such a nice area.

Zaharako's is an old fashioned soda shop that has lots of marble throughout and stands the test of time and shines a light back to the grandness of architecture and design of days gone by. It is a family owned business and it has two Mexican onyx soda fountains that were purchased at the St. Louis World Expo in 1905 and a full concert German pipe organ that still plays songs of the 1890's on request.

Oh yeah and the people were wonderful as well. I plan to make a road trip either this summer or in the fall back to Columbus to see all the beauty and the changes since I was there last. Take the time to visit there someday and see what everyone is talking about.


HAVENS; A Farmland Showcase For Modern Architecture
By R. W. APPLE JR.
Published: December 5, 2003

IT must have been 1964 or 1968 when I first visited Columbus, Ind., which no less a personage than Lady Bird Johnson called ''the Athens of the prairie.''

I went there with Nelson A. Rockefeller while covering one of his two campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination, whose political futility was offset, for me at least, by their aesthetic benefits. There was an early-morning tour of the superb Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, for example, conducted by its benefactor, Seymour H. Knox Jr., and a weekend stroll through the unheralded Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha. One slow afternoon Rockefeller showed me some of the fine pictures and sculptures in his New York apartment.

Where there was art and architecture of quality to be seen, Rockefeller went to see it. Which is how we happened to find ourselves in Columbus, a city of 39,000 set in the cornfields an hour's drive south of Indianapolis. Columbus was and is the home of J. Irwin Miller, now 94, a remarkable businessman, political and social activist, amateur musician, philanthropist (and pal of Rockefeller). Besides building his family's company, Cummins Inc., into a multibillion-dollar manufacturer of diesel engines and generators, Mr. Miller made Columbus -- remote little Columbus -- into a Mecca of modern architecture, on a par with Chicago, Brasília or any other metropolis.


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