Living in History at the Corner of Gay and High
In 1917, at the corner of High and Gay Streets, Columbus built itself a temple to money. The Citizens Savings and Trust Company hired the architects Hopkins and Dentz, and they answered with a Neoclassical bank of masonry and stone, one of the tallest buildings in the young city's skyline. People walked up to those columns to open their first savings account, deposit a paycheck, take out a loan on a first house. For most of a century, this was where downtown Columbus kept what it valued.
The building watched the city change. Ownership passed from hand to hand through the market swings of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1960 the owners stacked three more stories on top, and six floors became nine. Ohio National Bank, then National City Bank, kept the lights on until the branch finally closed its doors in May 2000. Then the grand hall went quiet.
It could have ended there, the way a lot of old downtown buildings do. Instead, between 2017 and 2021, Edwards Companies restored it and gave it a second life. Sixty-three loft and penthouse homes now sit inside the old bank, mixed with the kind of places you actually want downstairs. The classic revival facade still stands on the street, its stone intact, its upper windows now quietly energy-efficient. What was built to impress still impresses. It just lets you live inside it now.
The best part is what they refused to erase. Walk into the two-story banking hall and you find the recast plaster columns and coffered ceilings that greeted depositors a hundred years ago. The original bank vaults are still here, doors and all, and the builders did something better than tear them out. One vault is now the resident mail room, so you collect your mail behind steel that once guarded the city's cash. Another has become a cocktail lounge, fittingly named The Citizens Trust, where you can order a drink inside the vault itself.
That is what living here really means. Your morning coffee comes from the flagship Brioso downstairs. Dinner is Veritas, a few steps from your door. A glass of wine, a cocktail in the vault, the rooftop at golden hour with the downtown skyline in front of you. You are not visiting the history of Columbus. You are living in it, at the exact corner where the city has done business for over a hundred years.
They do not build these anymore. In 1917 they built one, and it is still standing at Gay and High, waiting for the next person to call it home.
