What is 614 Day? How Columbus celebrates its unique culture

June 14 – or 6/14 – has become an unofficial holiday to celebrate Columbus and everything within the 614 area code.
We’ve made a name for ourselves by being kind of like everyone else, but we do have our quirks.
They’re not that quirky, really.

Columbus was founded not by explorers or adventurers, but by people looking for a place to put Ohio’s capital and thinking, “Over there looks nice.”

We were once a test market – you’re welcome, world, for the McRib – because our tastes were so legendarily middle-of-the-road. We were once a swing county in a swing state because so were our politics.

Part of the charm of our longest-serving mayor was that he kept imploring all of us in Columbus to set aside our longstanding cow-town self-image and act like the big city we had become.

“It’s time Columbus had some swagger,” then-Mayor Michael B. Coleman declared in 2007 after he was elected to the third of four terms. “This is the year of swagger!” he exclaimed five years later.

Are we swaggering yet?

Ehhh. We wear T-shirts that proclaim, “Columbus ‘Til I Die,” which is funny because that’s such an un-Columbus-like sentiment. Large numbers of us work for an insurance company and state bureaucracy. We’re not prone to such outbursts of emotion.

So it’s probably only fitting that 614 Day, the day we celebrate all things Columbus, falls on one of the middle days of one of the middle months of the year.

Even our quirks are kind of mild as quirks go. But what the heck, let’s celebrate ourselves, within reason of course. We can save the swagger for later.

Columbus is a big city! Honest!

As Columbus residents, it is incumbent upon us all to memorize this number: 938,396. That’s our latest population estimate, as of July 1, 2025, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

People who don’t live here are dumbfounded to learn that Columbus is as big a city as it is, and we are dumbfounded by their dumbfoundedness. Hence, anytime we go outside of our city, even if it’s just up to Cleveland or down to Cincinnati, we will feel it necessary to tell people the population of Columbus and its national ranking among population centers.

It’s currently No. 15, by the way, right after Charlotte, North Carolina, and ahead of Indianapolis.

Columbus surpassed Cleveland in 1982 to become the biggest city in Ohio, even though as late as 2000, the American Heritage Dictionary still sent that distinction northward. We’re now bigger than San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, DC, Boston, Detroit and Atlanta, according to U.S. Census Bureau rankings.

And we’ll keep reminding everyone of that until they believe us.

A taste of Columbus cuisine

Our contributions to the pantheon of American cuisine are not in the same league as Philadelphia’s cheesesteaks, Buffalo’s wings or Memphis’ barbecue. Truth be told, the pizza we so proudly hail as “Columbus style” is called “St. Louis style” in St. Louis and “Chicago tavern-style” in Chicago.

(Columbus is bigger than St. Louis, too, by the way.)

But our legendarily middle-of-the-menu tastebuds have elevated a few dishes and the places that serve them.

Asked for in an April profile of The Wendy’s Co. whether the Frosty was a shake or ice cream, the company’s chief corporate affairs and sustainability officer, Liliana Esposito, told The Dispatch emphatically that it’s neither.

“It’s a Frosty,” she said. The Frosty and just about everything else on Wendy’s menu, pre-Spicy Asiago Ranch Club Chicken Sandwich, was the creation of Dave Thomas, who started the chain a couple blocks east of Broad and High in downtown Columbus.

Johnny Marzetti, the church-potluck and school-cafeteria staple? That’s us, too (or maybe not).

And buckeyes, both the OG confection and all of its chocolate-and-peanut-butter spinoffs, couldn’t be from anywhere else but Columbus.

And the Fourth of July?

It’s like clockwork – if your clock was totally wrong.

The rest of the world celebrates certain holidays on certain days each year. Columbus, for various reasons, has no use for such conventions as calendars and traditions that go back centuries and millennia.

To celebrate the birth of our nation on July 4, 1776, our local Red, White & BOOM! party will take place July 3. Don’t assume it’s just a calendar quirk when the Fourth falls on a Sunday or a weekday or whatever day someone might want to avoid. The next three years’ BOOMs will be July 2, 2027; July 3, 2028; and July 3, 2029.

As longtime Dispatch columnist Joe Blundo once wrote: “It’s complicated.” Organizers boast that they put on the Midwest’s biggest fireworks show, but, apparently, they don’t want to disrupt all the other displays that aren’t.

Halloween is similarly yanked from its usual Oct. 31 box on the calendar. All but two central Ohio communities declared Oct. 30, 2025, the day of trick or treating within their borders.

It has been that way for years. Our digital editor, Eleanor Kennedy, explained last fall that Columbus used to host a raucous Halloween street party on Oct. 31 every year, so trick or treating was scheduled a day earlier. The party stopped in the 1950s – too un-Columbusly raucous, apparently – but trick or treating remained on the 30th.

These colors (you know the ones) don’t run

There are 1,216 styles of Ohio State University jerseys, sweatshirts, T-shirts, jackets, hats, headbands, hair clips, ties, tie clips, earrings, bracelets and collectibles for sale on the school’s official athletics website. And there’s still one Jim Tressel-style vest for the coach who left OSU in 2011 and now serves as Ohio’s lieutenant governor.

You know someone in this town has them all.

At Columbus’ Fourth of July fireworks show – which, as you already know, is the third of July here – you’ll see at least as many people wearing scarlet and gray as you see donning red, white and blue.

Did you know we could all be wearing orange and black? According to keepers of the OSU archives within the university’s libraries, those were the original colors of the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College. They were changed in 1878 because Princeton University already used them.

Scarlet and gray, the university’s official account goes, was considered “a nice combination” by the student committee making the choice.