It’s officially fall, a beautiful time of year in our community. As the leaves begin to change and the mornings grow cooler, I hope you can enjoy the season’s transformation with family and friends.
New Albany continues to thrive and we certainly have seen a lot of activity in 2024. I’m pleased to share these updates with you. Read the complete update…
(New Albany, Ohio) September 19, 2024 – At the September 18th annual New Albany Chamber of Commerce Community Update, New Albany Company President and CEO, Bill Ebbing, announced additional land donations from the company for civic uses. The donations include:
15 Acres adjacent to the recently announced Nationwide Hospital Facility: This additional parcel at the State Route 161 and Johnstown Road interchange will be for community use. When combined with the recent Wexner Family gift of 25 acres to Nationwide Children’s Hospital at this New Albany gateway, a total of 40 acres has been donated in this area.
13 acres in the commercial district along State Route 605: This contributed land is earmarked for future use by the New Albany Plain Local School District.
Additional acreage for the development of a new roundabout at the extension of Market Street and State Route 605: This acreage will support the extension of Market Street, the development of a beautiful water feature with wetland plantings and the addition of a new scenic overlook for public enjoyment that further extends Rose Run Park.
This additional contributed acreage, when combined with the recently announced two acres that was the former site of the Duke and Duchess gas station in the Village Center in support of Rose Run Phase Two, plus the Nationwide Children’s Hospital acreage, brings the total contributed land this year to approximately 60 acres.
Since inception, The New Albany Company has donated nearly 700 acres in support of community initiatives. This includes 210 acres for the school campus, 120 acres for the Metro Park and additional acreage that is now the location for iconic New Albany destinations such as the library, Heit Center, The McCoy, Hinson Amphitheater and more.
“Our city’s growth is a testament to the power of collaboration—between businesses, educators, healthcare providers, and community leaders,” said Mayor Sloan Spalding. “Together, we’re ensuring that New Albany remains a vibrant, welcoming, and prosperous place to live and work.”
“The spirit of collaboration in New Albany helps make extraordinary things happen,” said Bill Ebbing, President of the New Albany Company. “These land donations support our longstanding approach of working with civic leaders to build an enduring community that will stand the test of time. We are particularly proud that our land donations have now reached 700 acres, which is a significant and impactful milestone.”
Community-based facility expected to open in 2027 will offer Urgent Care and specialized care for children and teens.
Learn more at the Nationwide Children’s Hospital website…
Nationwide Children’s Hospital plans to build its first urgent care in New Albany on land donated by the Wexner family.
Read more at Columbus Business First…
Fall is upon us in New Albany and there’s a lot to celebrate as we head into the holiday season. I want to start by congratulating our school district on its recently released State of Ohio 2022-2023 School Report Card results. New Albany-Plain Local Schools was one of only eight school districts out of 607 public school districts in the entire state to receive an overall rating of “5 stars” and “5-star ratings” on all aspects measured by the Ohio Department of Education. These are exceptional results and we applaud our students, families, staff and school leadership, including Superintendent Michael Sawyers and the Board of Education, for this notable achievement. Strong schools are the heart of strong communities. Read the complete update…
“Twenty-five years ago this was a cornfield — today, we’re fighting cancer and disease in New Albany,” Jen Chrysler said. Read more at Columbus Business First
This suburb northeast of Columbus, Ohio, is known for its charm but is increasingly becoming a hotbed of business growth, thanks in large part to the New Albany International Business Park. But there’s much more to its success than the $20 billion Intel development. Learn more, and find out why the city is a great place to work and raise a family, in this Special Advertising Section from the Summer 2023 issue of Columbus CEO magazine.
Intel has long been committed to investing in local communities to help make them more vibrant for everyone. This includes a commitment to sustainability and minimizing its impact on the environment. Find out more by watching this video. See the Video
This is my first New Albany community update in a long while, and I wanted to begin by saying I sincerely hope you and your family are healthy and doing well.
It’s been truly inspiring to watch our community come together, and to see so many individuals, organizations and businesses reach out to connect with and help others during the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. The efforts of individuals, businesses and student organizations to produce and distribute personal protective equipment (PPE), and the scaling up of the New Albany Food Pantry to help families in need was a reminder of why this is such a special place to live and work. Read the complete update…
“Places of value stand out among all places in the world. They’re recognizable. They leave a mark and an imprint in the memory. And that difference makes all the difference.”
— Jaquelin T. Robertson
New Albany’s distinctive architectural identity is the result of a shared vision. One of the authors of that vision is Jaquelin T. Robertson (1933–2020), a world-renowned architect and planner who, during his half-century-long career, helped America rediscover its own architectural heritage.
Mr. Robertson, known as “Jaque” (pronounced “Jack”), first began consulting for the New Albany Company in 1989. Having recently completed an eight-year tenure as dean of the University of Virginia School of Architecture, he and his New York City-based firm, Cooper Robertson, left an indelible mark on the community. Mr. Robertson led the design of the clubhouse at New Albany Country Club as well as Bottomley Crescent, one of the first streets to open in the Country Club Community. Mr. Robertson also helped craft the community’s master plan, working closely with Les Wexner and Jack Kessler, along with other expert planners such as Gerald McCue and Laurie Olin.
To ensure a consistently high quality of design throughout the community, Mr. Robertson helped train local builders and architects in the art of traditional brick construction. He also wrote some of the design guidelines for the Country Club Community, emphasizing harmonious composition and authentic details in the Georgian style. Mr. Robertson’s knowledge and guidance subsequently informed other architects’ designs for the community learning campus, the New Albany Branch Library, and Village Hall. As the community’s business park began to develop in the late 1990s, Mr. Robertson helped the New Albany Company create appropriate architecture and planning standards so that the commercial buildings would respect the landscape and the scale of the community.
Jaque Robertson grew up in Windsor Farms, Virginia, a graceful residential community on the edge of Richmond. Recalling a typical English village surrounding a common green, it served as one of several key precedents for the planning of New Albany. Mr. Robertson’s love of architecture was fueled by his family’s Georgian-Palladian home, called Milburne, which was designed by master architect William Lawrence Bottomley—the namesake of New Albany’s Bottomley Crescent. Mr. Robertson also spent part of his childhood in Beijing, where is father, the diplomat Walter Robertson, was stationed. This cosmopolitan environment helped fuel Mr. Robertson’s lifelong interest in urban design as a complement of architecture. Each individual building, he believed, should feel connected to the larger community. The parts should form a whole.
Mr. Robertson earned two degrees from Yale and studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. In the early 1960s he worked for prestigious New York architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. He then became a senior urban planner in the administration of New York City Mayor John Lindsay, and took on international planning and design projects in the private sector. Returning to his native Virginia in 1980, Mr. Robertson led the architecture school at UVA, where he looked with fresh eyes upon the Classical tradition in architecture. He believed that Renaissance Italy and Georgian Britain and America still offered relevant lessons. His thinking was encapsulated in his treatise, In Search of an American Urban Order, in which he sought to apply Thomas Jefferson’s architectural principles to the challenges of modern life.
When Mr. Robertson came to New Albany, he was impressed with Wexner and Kessler’s vision to build a timeless American community. “To come upon this crowd in New Albany was just such a shock,” he recalled in 2015, during a Jefferson Series panel event at The McCoy. “Les was so committed to quality, and you don’t get that in our world anymore. No one in the country was doing things this way. It was so rare and so incredibly brave.”
Mr. Robertson showed Wexner and Kessler around some of his favorite buildings and communities, from Monticello to East Hampton, New York. When Wexner chartered a flight for roughly 45 Central Ohio builders and architects to go to Richmond for the day, Mr. Robertson led them on a tour of the city’s handsome Georgian homes. They returned with a clearer understanding of the subtle language of brick: specialized bonds or patterns, “grapevine” mortar joints, water tables, arched openings, glazed headers, decorative “rubbed” bricks, and many other techniques.
As Mr. Robertson once said in a Town & Country interview, “The symbolic hard currency of architecture is classical. It’s gold in the bank. The other stuff is leveraged buyouts and soybean futures.”
Apart from his work in New Albany, Mr. Robertson is remembered for his role in designing civic and university buildings, museums, corporate headquarters, club/resort environments, and community master plans. He also designed elegant country homes for prominent clients, typically evoking the spirit of older buildings without imitating them directly. He received the Thomas Jefferson Medal in Architecture in 1998 and the Driehaus Prize, an award for excellence in traditional architecture, in 2007.
New Albany honors the memory of Mr. Robertson, and we treasure his enduring contributions to our community.