"It's just a really welcoming community, and it's full of readers." That's how Gib Bickel, the late co-founder of the Laughing Ogre, described why his comic shop lasted three decades on North High Street.
Bickel died in April after a 20-month fight with cancer, and the store he helped start in 1994 just changed hands for only the second time in its history. A half-mile away, a trail project that started as a sketch in 2018 finally opened its last bridge last November. And in between, five different storefronts on North High have swapped tenants in the past year, some already serving customers, some still just a sign on the glass.
None of these things happened on the same calendar, but they're all happening in the same neighborhood, in the same year, and that overlap says something real about how Clintonville actually changes. Some of it moves at the pace of a bureaucracy. Some of it moves at the pace of a lease. Almost none of it happens the way people assume, with a single ribbon-cutting or a headline that resolves everything at once.
The Slow Clock: Seven Years to Close a Half-Mile Gap
If you've walked or biked the Olentangy Trail through Clintonville any time before last fall, you know the old routine. The path would just stop, dump you onto neighborhood streets, and make you cross West North Broadway at Milton Avenue before you could pick the trail back up. It was the one place in fourteen miles of riverside path where you had to think like a driver instead of a cyclist.
That gap is gone now. The city finished a $9.6 million stretch of new trail in November 2025, built around two new bridges that carry the path across the Olentangy River near Clinton-Como Park and Northmoor Park, according to WOSU's coverage of the opening. The project traces back to 2018, when plans for a new OhioHealth campus along the river first put a river crossing on the table. It took until 2021 for the city to settle on a design, until 2024 to start construction, and until last fall to actually finish it. Seven years for a half-mile fix.
The new route still crosses West North Broadway, just not at Milton Avenue anymore. The crossing now happens near the State Route 315 ramps, at a new signal built specifically for trail traffic. Reaction has been mixed in the way that only real infrastructure change produces mixed reaction. One Clintonville resident told WOSU the new alignment "probably makes more sense than routing it through a neighborhood." A couple of Ohio State students using the trail called the new crossing a longer wait than the old one, sitting that close to a highway ramp.
Neither take is wrong. What matters is that this summer is the first full season anyone has had to actually live with the change, not just read about it. Columbus Recreation and Parks estimates more than a million people use the full 14-mile trail every year, and for the first time, all fourteen of those miles run without a single required detour onto city streets, connecting Clintonville straight through to Worthington to the north and Downtown to the south.
The Fast Clock: Five Storefronts, One Year
While the trail took the better part of a decade, the restaurant scene along the same street has moved at almost the opposite pace. Since last fall, at least five spots on North High have changed hands or announced plans to.
- TK's Hangout Pub and Patio opened this spring at 5295 N. High St., the address that belonged to Iron Grill BBQ & Diner until it closed abruptly in March with a handwritten sign on the door.
- Playa Bowls, the national acai and smoothie chain, has already hung its sign at 4422 N. High St., in the space that used to house Diamonds, Pearls and Jade, next door to Habanero's.
- Nusantara Indo Kitchen, an Indonesian restaurant, told followers it was targeting a spring or summer 2026 opening at 3250 N. High St., where the Down Memory Lane antique shop operated for years, according to reporting from the Clintonville Spotlight.
- Fox in the Snow Café, the Central Ohio bakery and coffee chain, has filed paperwork with the city to move into 4201 N. High St., the former Hot Chicken Takeover location, though the company hasn't confirmed a timeline.
- Local Cantina closed its 3126 N. High St. location this past fall after eleven years. The building is becoming Cove Veterinary Specialty and Emergency Hospital, and the company said in a statement covered by NBC4 that it isn't ruling out a return to the neighborhood down the road.
Compare that turnover speed to the trail. The bridges took seven years from first sketch to ribbon. These five spaces have changed in less time than it took the city to pick a bridge design. That's not a knock on either process. It's just a useful reminder that "change" in Clintonville doesn't move at one speed. Public works and small business leases run on entirely different clocks, and this year both happen to be ticking loudly at once.
Where the Two Clocks Meet
The Laughing Ogre sits closer to the trail's pace than the restaurant scene's, and that's the part worth sitting with.
Bickel co-founded the shop in 1994 with two friends, Daryn Guarino and Rodney Phillips, after they bonded over a tabletop game where a tavern called the Laughing Ogre gave the store its name. Bickel sold his ownership stake back in 2006, two decades before his death, but stayed on as the store's manager and its public face the entire time. The shop celebrated its 30th anniversary on Oct. 30, 2024. Eighteen months later, Bickel was gone, and management passed not to a buyer or a chain but to Lauren McCallister, who started working at the store thirteen years ago as a college student.
That's a succession twenty years in the making, arguably closer to the trail's timeline than to Playa Bowls hanging a sign. It also lands differently than the restaurant turnover next door. Local Cantina's building is becoming a veterinary hospital. Iron Grill's space now belongs to a pub with a different name and a different owner. The Laughing Ogre, by contrast, stayed inside the family it built, passed from a founder to someone who had already spent thirteen years behind the same counter.
If you're trying to read what kind of neighborhood this is from the outside, that's the tell. Clintonville isn't a place where everything either stays exactly the same or gets replaced overnight. It's a place where infrastructure crawls, franchises move fast, and the businesses people actually love tend to find a way to pass the keys to someone who already knows the shop rather than to whoever's next in line with capital.
What This Actually Changes for Anyone Walking Around Here
None of this requires you to do anything differently tomorrow. But it does mean a few concrete things if you're out on foot or on a bike this season. The Milton Avenue crossing you might still be avoiding out of habit isn't part of the trail route anymore, so if you've been sticking to city streets near Clinton-Como Park out of old muscle memory, that detour is gone. If you're heading north on High Street looking for dinner, check before you assume a spot is still there. Iron Grill, Local Cantina, and Down Memory Lane are all different businesses now, or about to be. And if you haven't been into the Laughing Ogre in a while, it's worth a stop, not because anything about the shop has changed, but because it's rare to watch a neighborhood institution pass hands the way this one just did.
We spend most of our time at The Laumann Group talking with people about buying and selling homes in neighborhoods like this one, but the parts of Clintonville that matter day to day rarely show up in a listing description. The trail, the restaurant turnover, the shop on North High that's been there longer than most of its customers have been alive. That's the texture that makes a Clintonville address mean something beyond square footage. If you're curious how any of this fits into a longer view of the neighborhood, or you just want to talk through what's changing on your own stretch of High Street, Let's Connect.
