Grandview Heights Moment in Time
Donald Monroe Casto was born in 1898.
His mother, Grace, died when he was a baby, and his father took over the responsibilities of raising Don and his sister, Thelma. His father was a regional sales manager for the Cyrus McCormick Harvester Company, later called International Harvester, and he took the children with him on his travels.
He died unexpectedly on a trip when Don was 12, leaving the kids as orphans. Thelma was sent to live with relatives and Don became a ward of the state, with a guardian who was a Columbus lawyer. Don later lived by himself in a room above a Columbus pool hall near OSU while he attended North High School. He enrolled at Ohio State, and in 1917 he enlisted with the Lafayette Battalion of the French Army, because the U.S. Army wasn’t taking enlistees at the time. When he returned from the war, he lived with the family of his girlfriend Ruth Strait on Neil Avenue.
He and Ruth married in 1921 and moved to the new development of Upper Arlington, residing in a new house at 1872 Stanford Road.
Upper Arlington was just being developed by the King Thompson Company, and Don had gone to work for them selling houses in the community. Even though he was quite successful at this, his entrepreneurial spirit told him that he could be more successful building the houses that he was selling.
He rented a mule team to dig the foundations and started building. At one point, he was responsible for the construction of just fewer than half of the houses in old Arlington, south of Lane Avenue. He also built multiple unit apartment buildings along Northwest Boulevard in Grandview, and his first project was a filling station at First Avenue and Oxley Road.
Casto observed that the new residents of Upper Arlington, as well as the residents of Grandview and Marble Cliff, needed to travel by streetcar or by car over difficult roads to shop in downtown Columbus, so he decided that a local shopping venue with pharmacies, grocery stores, general stores, jewelry stores and more could make things easier for them.
He purchased property along Grandview Avenue between First and Third avenues and built what he called the Grandview Avenue Shopping Center, or the Bank Block as it became known because of a bank anchoring the building at the south end. It was a unique design as many businesses shared storage facilities, and the parking lot was built in the rear of the center so that the stores could abut the sidewalk right off the street.
When the depression hit the markets, Casto had to close his development business, and he became a mortgage trader. He would buy mortgages in the Columbus area and sell them to banks in Cleveland. However, he never lost hope for the shopping center concepts that he had, and in 1947 he was able to return to the development world. He built the Town and Country Shopping Center on the east side, and Great Southern on the south side, as well as shopping centers throughout the Midwest.
His grandson, Don Casto III, (who is a partner in the Casto Co.) said in an interview for the Tri-Village segment of the WOSU-TV Columbus Neighborhoods documentary, that his grandfather “had a bit of P.T. Barnum in him” due to his PR stunts to publicize his developments.
For example, he featured the cast of Spanky and Our Gang (later called The Little Rascals) for the opening of the Bank Block. But his biggest stunt was related to aviation in Columbus.
Casto was on the Columbus Airport Commission and was a strong proponent of a new commercial airport for the region. A bond issue had failed in 1927, and Casto and others felt that they needed to publicize the value of aviation to Columbus‘ future. The German dirigible airship Graf Zeppelin had made the first leg of its maiden trans-Atlantic voyage in 1928, and Casto hatched a scheme to become one of the twenty passengers on its second leg back from the U.S. to Germany, writing about his experiences in the press. The flight and his accounting of the three-day trip generated a lot of attention, and Port Columbus, as he named it, became a reality with the passage of the bond issue the second time around.
Casto and his wife had two children, Nancy and Don Jr. They lived for 32 years in their home, which he had built for the family at 1852 Tremont Road in Upper Arlington. They sold it and moved to Bexley. Casto died in 1963 and is known across the country as “the man who changed the shopping habits of the free world.”
This article originally appeared on ThisWeek: Grandview Heights Moment in Time
