Columbus Neighborhoods – Flytown “now lives only in memory”
Personally I think of Flytown as the Columbus’s Irish neighborhood… Not so according to local musician and amatuer Flytown historian, Arnett Howard. Howard say in the WOSU piece about documentary, The Short North: A History that the area was diverse, integrated and poor. No mention of the Irish, Howard says:
“Polish families would live next to German families. Black families were integrated into that. It was an area of poverty.”
Howard makes no mention of the Irish. They would not have been my family anyway… I am not related to any local McCabes, I believe my family hit the US about the time of the Civil War… but settled in Illinois and Wisconsin.
Reading a history book about Columbus I was intrigued by a woman named Ida Rose McCabe but I have never seen mention of her name except that one book, a college textbook a co-worker loaned me.
I thought the Flytown historical marker on the south end of Goodale Park referred to Flytown as an Irish neighborhood, but I don’t know much about the waves of immigrants that settled in Columbus in the 1800s.
Flytown was where 670 is now? Flytown got the name because the cheap wooden houses flew up when nearby manufacturing brought workers to the area?
In a piece by Sam Hendren, WOSU reporter about the documentary Short North : A History says of Flytown “vivid impressions of Flytown which now lives only in memory.”
McMemory or not. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
Columbus Neighborhoods
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There was also a very large number of Italian immigrants in Flytown. There were also Irish immigrants.