The crowd is thick and dozens of new businesses line High Street between 5 thAve and downtown. Arched lights, reminiscent of those that were part of the neighborhood in the early1900s hover above, illuminating the scene. A smooth, warm breeze weaves among a gathering of artists and connoisseurs, vendors and pamphlet pushers.

I look around every now and then, just in case Keysha came. Does Sarah still live here? I think. There is only Mona; her expression is smug.

I remember racing my sister toward this street as a kid, just missing the bus that we would see approaching from the back porch. Not that we had bus money, or even a place to go, but it was fun to try. That big grey bus would spit smoke at us and ease away. Laura would usually continue to run after it. She was more dedicated. I would shrug and begin to walk back toward the house slowly, yelling for her to “Come on.”

High Street was filled with vacant buildings back then, and those that were inhabited were used furniture stores, pawn shops, and seedy bars.

Now, as nameless couples bump past and large groups of friends talk art on the corner in the latest DOC spectacles, I feel only a glimmer of familiarity. It is as though a veil has lifted, exposing something shiny underneath the neighborhood that was once here.

The Short North is now known as the artistic hub of Columbus. It caters to the rich and trendy. Condos in the “Mona Lisa building” now go for $300,000.00 a pop. People show up in droves each month for this festival, known as “Gallery Hop.” Here, a variety of art sells for ridiculous prices to people who can more than afford it.

The one constant is Mona Lisa. I stare at her, sitting (interpretively) sideways on the corner of North Pearl and High Street. She is painted to the expanse of a wall on a 20’s-era brick building. Once as an icon of Renaissance art, she represents re-birth once again in this small neighborhood just north of downtown in the capital city.

On this night I cannot help but to veer off the beaten path and toward the back porch of my old house. I am expecting to become overwhelmed with nostalgia. But, for some reason the house I grew up in seems ordinary. There is a fence around the backyard, so I stroll toward the front. Flowers have replaced the weeds that once welcomed visitors to our home. Pink paint on the trim detracts from its originality. The house seems to blend in with the scenery. All the beauty the current owners are giving 925 Mt. Pleasant only detract from the character it once had.

Our front door was fashioned into a stained glass panel of yellows and oranges with the numbers of our address delicately cut in clouded burgundy shards. This was the work of my father, an artist and craftsman who did some sort of nine to five that I knew little about. Our door attracted people from all over who, in turn, asked him to do art jobs for themselves, their friends, family. He always had something new to work on and rarely did the same type of job twice.

My mother had always been a very social person. She was a baker and whenever someone new would move in on our street, it was not be long before I would show up on their porch smiling with a plate of cookies, or brownies (minus the one or two that I would eat on the way over). As a result of my father’s odd jobs, their friends, and our cookie-loving neighbors, there was always a lot of traffic through our house which meant a lot of attention for me.

I enjoyed the parade of colorful neighbors that came through our glass door. Our house was a home base for the eclectic mix. There was Shannon, who had the rainbow flag on her porch and often sat on a swing porch with a cigarette dangling from her full bottom lip. She would glide across the street and call for my mother. Together they would create a cloud of pale blue smoke outside that would gain momentum as they spoke of politics or news, mom patting me on the head as I watched the smoke and smiled.

Next door to Shannon, Maria lived with her large dog Yolanda. I perpetually got their names confused. Maria was a yoga instructor and very Zen. She always tried to feed me carrots or celery that I would eyeball with an emotion bordering on contempt. She had a habit of bringing her own food to each neighborly event she attended at our house, and openly waving at my mother’s smoke. Even Yolanda would turn up her nose at a bone that wasn’t low-fat and vitamin fortified.

I liked her house because it was filled with candles and always smelled of cinnamon. Sometimes we would sit out on her porch, listening to the bass of rap music that trailed from cars on High Street intermingled with soft bells and drumming sounds of her meditation tapes as they would dance through the screen door. She rarely watched us however, because she worked two jobs and attended school.

Grandma Tina and Grandpa Pete were our regular babysitters. They would let us watch cartoons anytime we wanted, and that was exciting to us because their television was big and Channel 28 wasn’t all fuzzy there like it was in our house.

I remember running up to their porch, excited. Their house was the biggest on the block, or maybe I just remember it that way. Grandma Tina would open her wreathed door wearing her housecoat with the pale flowers and pink open-toed slippers. She would give us shortbread cookies and milk. On special days she would have chocolate chip cookies.

Grandpa Pete was always upstairs fixing something but would come down to say hi. He wore pale colors too. When I picture him now, I can only see him in one outfit: a soft blue baseball hat and pale plaid shirt, blue overalls, and a tool belt.

“You girls sure are getting big—growing like weeds!” He would say, “Catch any snakes today?” This question was directed toward both of us, but it didn’t apply to me. Laura, also known as “bug girl” would spend hours in neighbors’ backyards digging up worms and garden snakes, catching grasshoppers, crickets and katydids, scooping up slugs, and placing all of them gently in the same old jelly jars that we used for cups (mom didn’t know about this). She was always going around the neighborhood showing off a new creature.

What was unique about Laura was not that she was good at catching bugs and snakes, nor that she was a girl who was good at catching bugs and snakes, it was the attachment she felt for these creatures. Often times a slug, for instance, would get a name such as Henry. And when Henry would ooze his way up to the top of the jelly jar, Laura would rejoice in his ability to climb. Henry was amazing. Henry was hers, and when mom would say, “get rid of that nasty thing,” Laura would become indignant.

“Henry is my friend,” clutching him to her chest, she would demand, “he is not a ‘nasty thing’ and I am keeping him!” Her short blond hair curling around a furrowed brow; she was very convincing. Her passion would persuade my mother of Henry’s plight and win the heart of anyone present, especially my father who indulged this interest of hers with iguanas, geckos, anoles, and snakes of her own. Each birthday or holiday another would appear, straight from the pet store to our house, until her bedroom became a menagerie of cold blood.

The crickets, slugs, and grasshoppers that she once loved had become food for bigger and more important friends. We would buy them by the dozen and watch in awe as the lizards pounced, swallowing them whole. Each night, our house would fill with the soft sound of escapee crickets chirping.

The passion Laura felt for her lizards brought her many friends in the neighborhood, most of them boys. One of which was Josh. I didn’t like him. Josh was seven and he enjoyed listening to the sound of things break, or the sound of his mother apologize—I never figured out which it was. One time I watched him pick up a kitten by its tail and throw it. That was when I told my parents I didn’t want him around anymore.

Laura also loved to play while I just stayed at home most of the time. I enjoyed dancing in our living room to Madonna songs and sitting on the porch with my mom, people watching. I often visited our neighbors because they would often indulge me with sweets and listen to my detailed plans about how I wanted to travel around the world.

Sometimes my father would take me to a restaurant on High Street and we would have pancakes with melted chocolate chips or blueberries. The restaurant was special because it highlighted some of my father’s panels and the owner there always treated us as though we were special. He always commented on my curly red hair, asking to touch it for good luck. Sometimes I let him. He was always stroking his long, dark hair as he spoke about closing down because someone had robbed him again, or a rock had been thrown through the window. I enjoyed hearing such stories.

All in all, I simply enjoyed being in the company of these adults. Their were few children in our neighborhood, which I didn’t mind. Adults were calm and serious, and being a kid in a room full of adults was an easy way to be the center of attention. With other kids, one would have to compete. I didn’t see the appeal in this. I liked the fact that adults took me seriously. My parents, however, noticed this behavior and thought there was something wrong with me. Maybe she just needs a little help, they thought, and so they decided to assign me a friend.

Mom sent me over to Mike’s house under the guise of getting a new kitten. I was so excited. “I’m here to pick out a kitten,” I said proudly to Mike’s mom, who smiled widely.

“You must be Laura’s sister, Jenny right? Laura and Mike are playing in the backyard!” I preferred Jennifer, but decided to let her get away with the slip, besides my mind was focused on the task ahead: the kitten. “Come on in.”

“Thank you,” I said, and slipped in the door, standing there uneasily. Mike’s mom was big and her hair was wrapped around pink curlers. The smile that took up most of her face seemed welcoming enough. She waved me deeper into the house but I wasn’t sure which way to go. The house was full of stuff. There were big piles of clothes in the corner of the front room and open boxes all over the place. Mike’s family must eat a lot, I thought; there were open packages of cookies and Doritos on their counter and half eaten plates in front of the television. I got excited again when I noticed that their television was even bigger than Grandma Tina’s.

I asked if I could have some cookies and Mike’s mom said yes. I put my hand in the package only to find it empty and worse, stuck to the counter. She offered me Kool-Aid as a consolation and I accepted politely, thinking that they better hurry up and bring out the kitties, or else I was out of there.

Mike and his family had just moved into one of the houses at the end of the street and he had a sister who was nine, my age. “Jenny, just go right up the stairs and make a left. My daughter loves to meet new friends.” I don’t want to make a friend, I thought, but I did want to see kitties.

When I knocked on the door to Keysha’s room, it opened and I walked in. It was like walking into a toy store. Her room was crammed with games and clothes piles just like those downstairs. She was listening to music and playing with three little yellowish-orange fuzz balls. The Kitties!!! I ran over to them.

“I’m Keysha. Who are you?” She asked, rudely.

“Jennifer.”

“Oh that’s right, Jenny!” What was it with this family, thinking they could call me Jenny? I decided not to correct her. A moment of silence passed before she turned to me, hands on hips, “What do you want to be, Jenny?”

I thought her question was a strange icebreaker, “You mean when I grow up?”

“Yeah, I am going to be a doctor. I’ll get my PhD from Harvard and then I’ll be a female doctor!” The way she said it, I could tell it was rehearsed and I knew it would give her too much satisfaction to ask what a PhD was.

I thought about saying I wanted to be a biker then thought twice, “I want to be a gypsy,” I said with absoluteness that I could only hope mirrored her own.

She laughed at me. “You’re weird.”

I knew this. That I was weird, I mean. Being a gypsy just seemed so glamorous to me, moving from town to town wearing silk scarves and hoop earrings (all clichés provided by a painting that hung above Grandma’s couch), and most importantly never getting bored.

“I think I’ll name her Apricat,” I said, reaching for the smallest orange kitten I could find.

“No. That one’s mine!” Keysha said, and I folded my arms tightly against my chest.

“I thought the orange and white one was yours,”

“Well, I want both.”

“Fine,” I said, “I’m leaving.”

Keysha and her mother showed up at my house later that day. Keysha looked forcefully at me as Apricat meowed in her arms. She gave me a forced apology that was coaxed by her mother’s squeezing hand. Another squeeze and an awkward few seconds passed before she asked if I wanted to play with her Barbies.

“I want to play with Apricat. You can stay if you want,” I said, overjoyed with my new baby kitten. She began to purr loudly as soon as I pet her and I was completely in love.

Keysha told me later that her dad was better than my dad, “My dad’s a lawyer, what’s yours?” I said I didn’t know. She said she had better toys, “I just got the new Nintendo, what do you have to play with?” I thought about it and I wanted to cry. The next day we decided to become best friends, solely out of convenience. She was rarely allowed to play at my house, but I was always welcome at hers.

I walk around the double brick house and find an opening to the backyard of my childhood home. The yard is manicured and primed, full of blossoms and green plants. I remember what it used to look like and laugh out loud.

When it was our backyard a bathtub sat buried in the middle of it that acted as sandbox, flower pot, and finally trash can. The yard was often littered with brown bags and bottles, cigarette buds, and White Castle wrappers. These were residual items left carelessly by the three men who slept on our back porch occasionally. I remember dad talking to them on the weekends. While others cowered or called the police, dad would ask them to do work on the outside of our house and then pay them accordingly. “Vagabonds,” our neighbors would say, “are taking over the neighborhood.” My father would simply say they were down on their luck and he would make an extra sandwich for whoever was out there. I still believe this is the reason our house was never broken into. It was the only house on our block that could say that. A messy backyard was a small price to pay for that type of insurance.

Keysha and her family moved to a suburb on the north side of town after only a few years. Their house on Mt Pleasant had been broken into by three teenagers and had made the channel 6 news.

Reports spoke more and more of a gang known as the Short North Posse acting as a destructive force within the neighborhood that our street bordered. I remember thinking how cool it would be to be a part of a posse. The Columbus Police had waged war against them, saying that the Short North would soon be revitalized and crime-free. Meanwhile boys my age were the ones being initiated and trained to continue the reign, if only by some other name.

Keysha had a satellite dish and I only had three channels. I didn’t care what she thought, but knew that was part of the reason we never spent the night at my house. I enjoyed watching shows I would otherwise never see late at night in her basement.

We would sneak little tastes of her father’s Gin when her parents went to bed, and I would slip Benson & Hedges out my mom’s purse that we would pretend to smoke to try and impress each other (at least I was pretending).

Holding the smoke in my mouth, I counted to three, being careful not to puff out my cheeks. I nodded as Keysha explained that we would both need boyfriends by the time we were fourteen or else we would be known as freaks, according to some magazine that told teenage girls such things.

I put my mouth to Keysha’s window and blew out the smoke. “I don’t want a boyfriend,” I said, looking down her street at a row of identical houses in varying colors. It had been over a month since Keysha had set foot in my house. She even turned me down when some new galleries moved into the neighborhood and began throwing parties each month.

“Well you don’t really need one, but you should at least kiss a boy. Look, this quiz says that most girls have been kissed by the time they are thirteen. We’re already thirteen, we’re late!” She paused. “I don’t even think I know a boy who wants to kiss me. It’s probably because I’m fat.”

“Boys make fun of my glasses,” I offered, hoping to make her feel better. It didn’t seem to work, so I added, “besides, they like fat girls, fat girls have bigger boobs.” This made her cry.

We read those magazines feverishly. They told us to be tall, skinny, and acne free. Even the articles on self-esteem would feature some cartoon-perfect girl pouting in a chair at the opening paragraph followed by a few clichés, and then a quiz, and then her, again, smiling on the next page as though cured. It was as though you needed to be perfect in order for your suffering to matter.

As Keysha and I dwelled in our inadequacies, the world around us was getting bigger. My neighborhood was on the news a lot and I had heard stories at school about the men in black. They were the enemy to us kids, the men in black were known to break up families and put away people we knew as neighborhood celebrities.

Laura got accepted into an alternative school and was driven to her bus stop in the morning. I had to walk to Summit Street to catch the bus and at the time there were three known crack houses on Summit, right across the street from my bus stop.

Sometimes men would be sitting out on the porch at 7:20am smoking, drinking across the street from my bus stop. Sometimes one would ask if I “had a number.” I knew I was disgustingly young for them; they were disgusting, but it made me feel like one of the pretty girls. Lee and Sarah (my two new best friends) would yell back at them, saying they were gross.

I knew Keysha would have understood what it was like to want to feel like the pretty girls, but she had stopped calling me. She seemed to know what it was like to feel lonely. I remember that we didn’t talk much that first year of high school. I thought I knew why she didn’t. “I’ll keep in touch,” were her last words.

It was half way through my freshman year. Some of my friends had told me about them, but finally I saw the men in black in person. I was walking with Lee and Sarah to the recreation center after school when a white van across the street stopped suddenly, right there in the middle of the street. The doors opened and a dozen of the men, all in black, spilled from it and began to encircle a pale green house on the corner of 4 th Ave. It was a house I thought was abandoned. The three of us continued to walk in slow motion with our eyes cemented to it. Lee told me to “keep walking,” when I tried to stop (two years later Lee was incarcerated for a robbery that he said he didn’t do).

Over the course of my high school years, as I went through the pains of puberty, houses around my neighborhood were being boarded up left and right. Many people in the neighborhood were being arrested.

“Did you hear about my cousin? He’s in for three years!”

“They arrested the entire Short North Posse.”

“I heard they were going to raid every single house on the block until they got all of them.”

“I heard that Marcus got a warrant three days ago. He’s my brother’s best friend!” Sarah had said this. Her brother was supposedly a gang member himself, only he was seventeen and that was good for him. He wasn’t really known around the neighborhood yet.

To a young girl, stupid and in the midst of longing, this was really exciting. It was scary and sad, but it was also, in a weird way, appealing. I walked through a battleground each day on my way home from school.

The Columbus Police Department had a mission to clean up the neighborhood. They had infiltrated the Short North Posse. There were strategic arrests and SWAT was regularly seen within a little over a mile radius around a park in the area, a known hangout. The park was three streets down from my bus stop. I liked to watch it grow smaller from the backseat of the bus, and then we turned the corner, northbound toward school.

Around this same time, a phenomenon known as Saturday night “Gallery Hop” was introduced to the Short North. It began with a few galleries on High Street where local artists could display their work. My father included. A few coffee shops and restaurants had appeared as though out of nowhere, and many of the bars in the area were now serving food along with their drink.

The city was beginning to pay attention to my neighborhood, and in the blink of an eye I went from being “poor white trash” to middle class, without even moving. My mother had moved out by this time and Laura was ready to move in with friends. My dad was a get-rich (well, kind of)-quick-in-real estate success story, selling their house for eight times (no exaggeration there—eight times!) what my parents had paid for it in 1980.

Maria and Yolanda had already sold their house, Jan was gone, and Josh, his mother, and their cat were long gone too. Grandma Tina and Grandpa Pete were the only ones who stayed. The neighborhood filled with a new demographic: the chic, trendy, art-loving upper-class of the Midwest.

Two blocks north, however, many of the kids I used to go to school with were joining gangs of their own. Drug deals were still happening. Crack houses still existed, and still do. They just moved north a few blocks, moved east a bit. Where are the men in black in the new Short North?

Some economists say that there are definite patterns to the decline of once thriving downtown neighborhoods. So I wonder whether the Gallery Hop will last. What if they (the upper class) decide to move? Sociologists say that the construction of low–income housing developments in already over-populated neighborhoods combined with a lack of employment from central cities will lead to projects such as those I grew up in.

This means that the affluence I see around me will seep away and down into surrounding suburbs.

Then again maybe these galleries will thrive under Mona Lisa’s watchful eyes, the social changes I have witnessed will only be found in a few books and dusty police reports. I walk those few blocks north that have become more compressed with the city’s poor, and it is as though I have walked into a time warp. I pass the corner store that sold me beer at age fifteen, the grocery store parking lot filled with police cars, and rows of crumbling, grimy houses with men on the porch smoking and drinking, yelling at young girls. I do not believe that the Short North will become dilapidated as it once was; it still is.

When I moved out of the neighborhood I told Sarah I would keep in touch. She said, “Yeah right."