The Public Square. Doesn't that just get you all misty, picturing a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover, perhaps an earnest man delivering a speech on a real soap box to a crowd of adoring fellow Midwesterners, perhaps from a gazebo, hat in hand, church spire in the background?
Yeah, it's not like that. At all. (Except perhaps the Old Stone Church spire part.)
What it is like is a grittier version of that. Just yesterday I passed by the north-west quadrant (the "square" is actually four, distinct city blocks) and saw, and I'm not fabricating any of this, a bunch of executives playing bean-bag toss. Okay, around these parts people, with absolutely no irony, call this game "cornhole." When I was growing up, if someone asked, "Hey, feel like some cornhole, downtown, after lunch?" that feller would end up with a bloody nose. Or a dozen roses, depending.
Now, the curiouser part of this whole tableaux was that, while the executives and executrix were cornholing the afternoon away on the raised, center greensward of the park under the adoring gaze of the Tom L. Johnson statue, the regular denizens of that park were still holding their positions on the outer edges, perhaps engaged in amateur pharmaceutical sales, perhaps just waiting for their luck to change. I pointed this out to a few of my colleagues, and was met with shrugs, as if to say, "Forget it Jake... it's Public Square."
The block on the south-east corner is home to the marvelous and wonderful Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument. (I'll try to post a separate review. I love it. Honestly.)
Now that there's a casino just south of the Square both security and cleanliness have become a priority, and you can't walk a half block without seeing some type of cop, constable, gendarme, janitor, welcoming committee, cuspidor attendant, all of them smiling. Get that? Smiling. I'm not sure I'd really want to hang around after hours; it ain't THAT great, yet, but it sure is improved, cleaner, safer and cornholier than thou.
"The Greek agora, however, was different in one crucial respect, a difference that highlights a momentous development in modern life. It was surrounded by civic buildings and temples; it served as the daily centre not only of commerce, but also of religious, political, judicial, and indeed general social life. To be in public in ancient Athens meant to be a citizen, and likely enough to be tossing a bean-laden bag."
-- John Carroll