By Densil R. Porteous (he/they)
Executive Director – Stonewall Columbus
When I think about Stonewall Columbus, I return to the idea of place—the physicality of belonging, the way a building can hold memory, movement, and meaning long after its walls were first imagined. Our community has always known how to carve out space where none was offered, how to gather in rooms not built for us, how to turn corners of a city into corners of home.
And yet, there is something powerful—almost radical—about the fact that we have been rooted at 1160 N. High Street since 1995. For nearly thirty years, this patch of pavement in the Short North has carried the weight and wonder of LGBTQ+ life in Columbus: our celebrations, our grief, our growth, our becoming.
The building itself has lived many lives.
The front structure on High Street, constructed in 1957 as a State Savings Bank, once belonged to a world that did not imagine us. The rear building on 4th Avenue—built in 1922 by George Crane of the Crane Cigar Company—stood for decades before it was physically connected to our future. When Stonewall purchased the buildings in 2005, we did more than acquire property. We claimed permanence. We claimed visibility. We claimed a place in the landscape of this city that could no longer be ignored or treated as temporary.
By 2013, our community had outgrown what the space was originally designed to hold. So, we dreamed again. We envisioned a Center that reflected our people: expansive, accessible, intergenerational, intersectional. Renovation began in 2017, and in December 2018 the buildings reopened—not as a collection of renovated rooms, but as the Stonewall Columbus Community Center: a place with intention in every beam and window, a place built to hold the full spectrum of who we are.
A place where people come to seek connection.
A place where families are formed.
A place where trans and queer identities find affirmation.
A place where elders gather to remember, to laugh, to continue.
A place where people return—sometimes after years—because they know the door will still open for them.
When I walk through the Center today, I feel the unmistakable presence of those who shaped it before us. The activists, the volunteers, the donors, the neighbors, the elders who insisted that Columbus needed a home for LGBTQ+ people. And I feel the echo of all the people who have walked through the doors since 1995—carrying hopes, carrying burdens, carrying questions, carrying the desire to simply be.
Space becomes sacred not because of its architecture, but because of its accumulation of stories.
Place becomes powerful because people return to it—and re-shape it—again and again.
As Stonewall steps into its next chapter, I’m reminded that our address is more than a location. It is a declaration. A promise. A testament to resilience.
We have not always been welcomed everywhere.
But here, for nearly three decades, we have welcomed each other.
And as we look toward the future—toward new visions, new programming, new community needs—we do so grounded in the truth that place matters.
This corner of High and 4th has held us—and we, in turn, have turned it into a home.
