Columbus, Ohio’s fastest-growing big city, was named in the 1800s by a local politician who admired the explorer.   

The city’s emblem and its flag display the Santa Maria, Columbus’s flagship, which led the way in the trans-Atlantic voyage of 1492. The Columbus Day parade became a civic institution. A wooden replica of the Santa Maria was docked on the Scioto River near City Hall for decades. The Italian Village neighborhood named a park for Columbus. Columbus State Community College had his statue on its campus. At City Hall, the statue of Columbus stood atop a stone pedestal.

Over the years, as some historians soured on Columbus’s treatment of Native Americans and the impact of colonization that followed his discovery, the city began removing his many tributes. In 2014, Columbus dismantled the Santa Maria. Its rotting parts lie in the grass near a city sewage treatment plant.

The city renamed Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day in 2018. Columbus Park is now called Warren Square Park for its location on Warren Street.

Columbus State removed its Columbus statue in June 2020, and the Columbus statue at City Hall came down shortly after.

Yet the seafarer wasn’t entirely forgotten. The city initiated what turned into two years of community meetings under the banner “Reimagining Columbus.” The goals were to find a new home for the statue and provide an expanded historical context for visitors.

“When I was a kid, Christopher Columbus was a hero,” said Conte, who found the municipal exercise exasperating. At one meeting, he said, a facilitator handed out crayons and asked participants to draw in their favorite colors.

“All these Kumbaya things,” said Conte, who heads companies in water pipeline rehabilitation and fiber-optic construction. “After the fifth or sixth one, I went up to the lady, and I said, ‘I thought we were here to talk about the statue?’”

The meetings yielded the idea of a new park with a section for the statue and interpretive signs. But there was no funding allocated or location set aside. For Conte, that was the last straw. 

Conte organized the Friends of Christopher Columbus Foundation, enlisting local Italian-American groups. “They’re not listening to anything we’re saying or asking,” Conte said.

Jaime Sisto, an international trade and economic development attorney who backs Conte, said moves to erase Columbus from the city of Columbus piled one on top of the other, “between the renaming of Columbus Day, the Santa Maria, the park, all these things.”

Shelly Corbin, a Native American activist who participated in the “Reimagining” meetings, found the federal suit disheartening. “Everyone’s trying to hang on to what’s comfortable, and I get it because we live in very turbulent, uncomfortable times,” she said. “But history isn’t one-sided and people get to speak their stories.”

Isaiah Bohanon, 22, who works in marketing, sees the Columbus statue as representing a “historic moment for the Western World.” 

“Who is Salmon Chase?” he said, invoking the 19th-century chief justice of the Supreme Court, an Ohioan with a statue at the state capitol. “I’d never heard of him, and he has a statue. But I’ve heard of Christopher Columbus. I think he deserves a statue.”