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Meet Michael Wilkos—urban pioneer, Columbus Foundation executive and, above all, the most insanely enthusiastic booster of his adopted hometown.
At North Bank Park.
Jeffry Konczal
No doubt, there is more than one story to tell about Michael Wilkos. The Columbus Foundation senior staffer could very well have some unusual hobby, such as sand painting or bull riding, or perhaps a passion for medieval architecture or even tap dancing. All of these—if true—might make for a decent story, but, when it comes to the life of the affable and slightly geeky 44-year-old, there is a better story and it is absolutely, verifiably true (for the most part). Get this: Michael Wilkos may be the person who loves the city of Columbus more than anyone else.
No denying, it’s a bold assertion, but can it be proven? Yes, with a simple quiz. To play along, think back to those fun, playful years of childhood and ask yourself what book you most treasured. Did you answer The Ohio Almanac? Michael Wilkos does. And as a teenager, what did you do over the summer just for fun? Did you, like Wilkos, draw up a development plan for the city of Columbus and was it also high-density, walkable and connected by transit? Now for the bonus round, a four-parter: Can you recall not only the year, but month, date and time of the grand opening of the City Center mall? Guess who can, and in a heartbeat no less? (It was Aug. 18, 1989, at 10 am.) Finally, to dispel every last doubt: Did you run an ad in your high school newspaper declaring: Discover Columbus and Capture the Spirit ? Would you ever even think of doing such a thing? Of course not, but Wilkos did.
“It was so cheesy—so, so cheesy,” says Wilkos, slightly embarrassed by his ad and yet, all these years later, no less passionate about this city and, daresay, its spirit. Take, for example, his presentation before an audience of 400-plus at TEDxColumbus, a local incarnation of the popular lecture event known as TED, held late last year. At any TED event, speakers share short, succinct presentations on so-called “ideas worth spreading.” In his own TED talk, Wilkos, who has a knack for finding the fun in statistics, regaled the audience with an energetic and engaging story about the changing demographics of the city of Columbus—just the sort of subject, it quickly became clear, that makes the heart of Wilkos go pitter-patter. He is a man who really digs this city. His job steering the Columbus Foundation’s investments in area nonprofits is about this city. Even his choice of where to live is about helping this city. He not only advocates for its struggling neighborhoods, he also lives in one: Weinland Park.
“He is one of Columbus’s unsung heroes,” says Doug Kridler, CEO and president of the foundation, and also Wilkos’s boss.
Wilkos, originally from the Youngstown area, gets that his obsession over good ole Columbus, Ohio, is kind of funny. He will laugh at his earnest devotion and, at the same time, remain earnestly devoted. It is a combination both charming and convincing.
It’s also charming that he’s saved his pro-Columbus ad in an album that contains photos from his senior year spring break to, of course, Columbus. At 17, he organized a tour of the city and persuaded six fellow students to pile into his mom’s Grand Marquis and go along. “It’s so embarrassing,” says Denise Green, one of those six and a friend to Wilkos for the last 29 years. “But we did have a really good time,” she says. Green remembers staying at the newly opened Picket Suite hotel, dressing up for a dinner at One Nation, visiting the Continent, the Ohio Center Mall and Worthington Square, but also “the near east side, suburbs and office buildings—everywhere,” she says.
Dawn McCombs, who became friends with Wilkos at Youngstown State University (he spent three years at YSU before transferring to Ohio State), remembers many impromptu trips to Columbus. “It was a straight shot on I-71,” she says, “but Michael would insist on jumping over to 315 so we would come around the bend—he would crank this very ’80s song—and all at once we would get this dramatic music and the Columbus skyline in full.” On these trips, there’d be coffee shops, dancing and 2 am doughnut runs, but also “epic” car rides: “You just knew if Michael said, ‘Let’s go to the Dairy Queen’ you’d be in the car for four hours.” She adds: “I would ask why he couldn’t obsess about New York or San Francisco. But for Michael it was always, always Columbus.”
Long before he’d heard of Columbus, Wilkos was a little boy with an electrician father and a mom who worked at home raising him and his older sister (and later as a vet tech) in suburban Boardman. Like many kids, he played with Hot Wheels and Erector sets, but he also liked to connect his cars and buildings into a cityscape. As young as 5, he would sit on the slate floor in his parents’ foyer and create routes for his little school buses along the grout lines between the tiles; with Monopoly pieces he would arrange the red hotels and green houses into patterns of development; and though he had the ubiquitous boyhood train set, he was more interested in the town around it. “I would mow lawns and deliver the Youngstown Vindicator so I could buy models to build my city,” he says, and it is a model he still has today. Some highlights: a public square, an industrial section, an agricultural area, working street lights, trees that change with the season and, in the residential district, a house under construction.
A boy interested in cities and buildings is not unusual, especially when he is from steel country—the very place that makes the stuff that makes cities. But he says it was not the “bricks and sticks” that fascinated him so much as “the mortar between the bricks—what really holds the city together.”
But then, at age 11, the young Wilkos saw his own city collapse. “Remember Black Monday?” he asks. Everyone in Youngstown seems to know this as
Sept. 19, 1977, the day thousands of steel workers went to work only to find locked gates and a closed factory. “There was a domino effect,” explains Wilkos, who had to cross a picket line to go to school and would see people camped out for days in front of a new Kroger just to be the first to apply for a job. Green, too, remembers what it was like. “There was a feeling,” she says, “not even of sadness, but doom.”
Then, a gift set his future in motion. “From a very young age . . . all I knew was conflict, strife, people losing jobs,” he says, “then I get this Ohio Almanac from my parents and I’m flipping through these pages and thinking ‘Oh, why is this city in my state growing? Why am I seeing pictures of new buildings going up? How is this city that is not so far away so different from everything I know?’ So, Columbus to me was—it was like the Emerald City. It was like the land of opportunity.”
At age 13, Wilkos would bike to Boardman Smoke & News every Tuesday because that is when the Sunday Dispatch finally was delivered. At 15, when other kids might be getting their first issue of Rolling Stone, Wilkos subscribed to Columbus Monthly (a year later he wrote his first letter to the editor). While he didn’t give up on his hometown—he wrote articles in his high school and city paper imploring change and recovery—he knew that “something was happening in Columbus that was not happening in the rest of Ohio and it was clear to me I needed to go somewhere I could have an impact.”
High expectations, when they finally meet with reality, don’t always hold up. But after the 21-year-old Wilkos transferred to OSU in 1988, his Emerald City was even better than imagined. As an intern at a downtown planning agency, he took a crowbar every Tuesday and Friday to the manhole in front of what’s now Elevator Brewery & Draught Haus, climbed under High Street and slowly turned on a valve to water the newly planted city trees. “I was so proud of that,” he says, laughing. Later that same day, he could be in a meeting with developers on the 16th story of the Huntington Building. “I was just floored,” he says. “I thought, where else in America can you do that? And where else is someone going to ask you, at 21, what you have to say? And I still walk down High Street and think those trees are alive because I watered them.” He takes a breath and continues. “In a San Francisco or a Seattle, I don’t know if I would have the ability to influence the future of my community the way I think people can in Columbus.”
Kridler is one person who can attest to that influence. “He is a difference-maker,” he says. “Michael shows us that true leadership can be found on the street as much as it can in the skyscrapers.” Citing a perfect alignment of community knowledge, passion and advocacy, Kridler says the foundation and Wilkos “are made for each other.” In fact, Wilkos’s every job has related to the city, and more often than not his work put him in a disadvantaged community partnering with residents to improve long-neglected neighborhoods. His mission is revitalization, not gentrification. The difference: Revitalization is a slow, committed, thoughtful process that listens to the community, taps into its capacities and addresses all needs, not just housing—though housing, and specifically, “a variety of housing options by price, tenure and lifestyle,” as he puts it, is essential.
When Wilkos lists some of his former employers—United Way of Central Ohio, Transit Advocacy—he gets to one, a city job in Neighborhood Services working in South Linden, and his voice softens. “I learned a lot; over five years that community educated me, opened my eyes and taught me so much about forming relationships,” he says.
By way of explaining, he describes the time city workers inadvertently busted a water main and flooded Cleveland Avenue. A public meeting was called and city engineers were dispatched to explain to residents how to live with a closed thoroughfare, altered bus routes and contaminated water. This neighborhood “has already been discarded for decades,” Wilkos says, and the meeting had every reason to become fractious. But, he says, “This woman, I don’t know her but I will never forget her, rises from her seat and says: ‘We really appreciate all of the investment you are providing for our neighborhood, but if things go wrong again, what can we do to help better inform each other?’ Wow, I thought, that is a strong leader.”
Another woman that he will never forget had worked her way out of poverty, but purposely chose to stay in South Linden to, as he says, “fight for her neighborhood.” Wilkos hired her to write a community newspaper. “She had two kids,” he says. “One day she was out doing an article and there was a skirmish in front of her home and her son was shot and killed. He died right there on her front lawn.” With difficulty, he goes on. “I can still see her face at the funeral. She sacrificed so much to make a difference in this city, to try to make it better. . . . She has made more of an impact on me . . . helped shape me into doing what I continue to do.”
Even before his experiences in South Linden, Wilkos volunteered his time and, when they shared an apartment in college, Green would watch him truck ham sandwiches down to a homeless camp at the end of their street every Wednesday. “My parents taught me to care,” he explains. Today, there is a homeless camp behind his house, and on cold mornings he will sometimes take a warm breakfast to the people there. “It is what a person does as a neighbor,” he says.
To say there is continuity in his life is an understatement. Not only has his path and passion not wavered since childhood, work and life for him are the same. For fun, he collects postcards of Columbus buildings lost to demolition and he enjoys visiting other cities to get ideas for Columbus.
Friend Bruce Mann calls Wilkos’s cellphone “the Bat Line.” He describes how the two of them might be on their way to see a movie, but then Wilkos’s phone rings and, all of a sudden, says Mann, “You never know where you’ll end up”—helping out at Bicentennial Park or loading a truck at the Salvation Army. “When volunteer opportunities or good works call,” Mann jokes, “Michael’s there like a civic superhero.”
But there may be no better proof of his commitment to his life’s work than his choice of where to live. The man who in the early ’90s was paid to bring vibrancy and life back to a downtown also lived in that downtown, even when the options were, as Wilkos says, “the Waterford Tower or YMCA transitional housing and little in-between.” He managed to find a place above a Subway on Gay Street. He had only one neighbor, and his apartment, small and simple, was one of so few it was featured on the first ever (and the third) downtown tour of homes.
When Wilkos needed a new place in 2008, he already had lived in two of the five areas his then-employer, the United Way, focused on. So out of the remaining three, he chose Weinland Park, the long-struggling community that has been home to the infamous Short North Posse street gang. The neighborhood, east of High and roughly between the University District and Italian Village, is embarking on a revitalization project and the Columbus Foundation plays a role as a major partner. Though it joined the efforts before Wilkos became an employee, the foundation subsequently tapped him to lead its long-term initiatives in the area. “He is so attuned to the nuances of how to help a neighborhood help itself,” Kridler says. “Michael is just a remarkable asset when looking to make meaningful change.”
In front of Wilkos’s red brick house in Weinland Park is a big green lawn—behind it is that homeless camp. A block away are burned-out houses, but also nice lawns with flower gardens and cared-for homes occupied by families and neighbors who have been working “longer and harder than me,” he says, to improve the community. “When I am sitting in meetings, I don’t quickly forget any of this,” he says.
For decades, Wilkos has been a witness to struggle—he sees it in the statistics he reads and also up-close where he works and where he lives. Yet when he talks about solving the most difficult urban problems in Columbus, he is not merely hopeful, he is confident: “If Columbus, Ohio, can’t figure out some of these issues, I don’t think there is a place that can.” As he sees it, the region benefits not only because “our problems pale in comparison” to big cities, but also because “in Columbus people are open to new ideas and open to trying things.” Every Tuesday, he tutors at his local school and, at one point, he says, “If each person of means gave an hour or two of their time each week to one struggling child, that, in itself, would transform our city.”
Few would argue with this statement, but few also believe it will happen. There is an assortment of labels to wrap around Wilkos that would make it easy to set him aside on some high shelf: naïve, idealistic, do-gooder. These descriptions don’t seem to bother him. He shrugs them off and then goes and says something so simple, maybe even corny, yet seemingly sincere: “At the core,” he says, “I know that I have been able to make a difference in someone else’s life and I know what that has done for me. I want people to realize that they can make a difference; it’s really not that complicated.”
Lately, Wilkos has been on a mini-lecture circuit giving an entertaining and data-driven talk to show that Columbus, despite its lack of a national reputation, is anything but average. Often he opens with a trivia question: “In the last decade,” he asks, “which of the following cities did Columbus grow faster than: Minneapolis, Miami, Seattle or San Diego?” Most audiences voice surprise at the answer: “All of the above.”
He also cites this stat: Since 1980, three of every four newcomers to Ohio “arrived” (by birth or otherwise) within 25 miles of Broad and High streets. In other words, the Columbus metro area accounts for nearly 75 percent of the entire state’s population growth.
His other point: Columbus may not be what you think it is. For example, Northland. In the public mind, the area is still defined, he says, by “all the doom and gloom” of a dead mall. Take another look, suggests Wilkos, and you’ll find optimism and the kind of economic activity “our country was built on”—small, ethnic, family-owned businesses. He specifically points to the influx of Hispanic and Somali entrepreneurs along Morse Road.
Wilkos will always love a city skyline. He can get almost giddy when he talks about how High Street is coming together “as a vibrant corridor.” At the same time, he will say that the true measure of a city is not what it showcases, but the day-to-day life of residents, especially those who have the greatest struggles. “No matter who you are, you should be able to live in a city where you are treated with respect and where you feel welcome,” he says. “If people feel respected and welcomed in a place, they will want to be part of that place, and that,” Wilkos says, “is a city where people will want to stay.” n
Kendra Hovey is a freelance writer.
