Faces Around Downtown (570 wds, no weblinks, cd be eight)

Coming to Newark’s historic downtown area, you might drive east down Main Street, past the Historic Row on Sixth Street, and to the entranceway framing the 1876 Courthouse, formed by the new Licking County Library and the restored century old Avalon Apartments.

Or you might arrive off of Route 16 onto Fourth Street, where a gateway district is being transformed this very year. Some may drive west on Main Street having started into the city from the Longaberger Home Offices, the famous “basket building,” and enter through the old style girder-framed bridge that frames the courthouse on four sides, like a picture on display.

When you reach the encircling square with plentiful parking and tall shady trees, you can become a pedestrian and stroll around the compact area of shops, offices, restaurants, and residences. From Buckeye Winery and Dal Cielo restaurant, past a Louis Sullivan former bank and now architectural gem built in 1914, through one of America’s first covered malls, The Arcade, still open and operating for business over a century later. Cross the street and find The Natoma, a restaurant operated by the same family since the 1920’s.

The Midland Theatre is a classic movie house of that same era, now hosting live performance many nights each month, restored by the late Dave Longaberger and grandly re-opened by Bill Cosby in 2002. Garrison Keillor, Kathy Mattea, Ben Vereen, and local youth ballet doing “The Nutcracker” are all part of the living history that is on stage today.

As you head to the south side of the downtown area, knowing you need to check out The Works, a Smithsonian Affiliate museum of technology, industry, and history for Licking County, you realize that there are quite a few people around the square who don’t, well, move very much. Then the light catches the bronze and you realize that sculpture is everywhere!

Called “the Reese Bronzes” by some, after Lou and Gib Reese who have donated most of them, you will find many works by noted sculptors Gary Lee Price and Seward Johnson, dotted around the downtown area – two elderly women in mid-discussion on a bench, a man offering a candy bar to a little girl, children saluting the flag, a reading boy in The Works’ courtyard with his dreams unfurling above him.

Soon you start to look for them, and find that almost every corner shelters a bit more statuary; in front of the library you passed earlier with a “Learning Curve” of books greeting readers (and two more sculpted readers and a great blue heron can be found among the stacks), along the bike paths connecting neighborhoods overlooking major roads, and out at the Ohio State Newark campus.

Once you start to look, you find that faces peer back at you everywhere – a winged lion on the Sullivan building, a wreathed face over an imposing stone doorway, even a small gargoyle tucked into a side of the old county jail. Mural art faces blocks surrounding the square, showing pictures of the area when canal boats and daily street markets were the usual scene. Even more public art is planned in the very near future.

High above the courthouse square, on all four sides, are blindfolded figures holding the scales of justice. In some cities, that may be about all the sculpture you can find downtown on public display, but in Newark Lady Justice has plenty of company!