North High Drive-In
Columbus, Ohio1952-1981
Shop North High Drive-In tees, long sleeve tees and hoodies. It opened on June 4, 1952, as the North Hi, with Belles on Their Toes and North of the Great Divide. Children came early for the playground at the base of the screen, and the Miles circuit ran it for years as the Miles North High. Pick a style below, then read the full North High history further down. We are an American small business bringing back the signs and logos of places and teams that are long gone but remembered fondly.
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North High Drive-In History
The North High Drive-In in Columbus, Ohio, opened on June 4, 1952, as the North Hi, with Belles on Their Toes and North of the Great Divide. The Columbus Dispatch ads could only give its address as High Street north of Worthington, and they called it the city's newest and most modern drive-in. It held 1,875 cars on U.S. 23, out where the road still had a grass median and little around it but corn. Later it took the address 8750 North High Street, and the name came to be spelled out.
The Miles circuit bought it in 1954, and the theater was known as the Miles North High for years. In August 1953, a commenter's research says, it became the first suburban Columbus theater to show a 3-D picture, opening House of Wax. Children came early for the playground at the base of the screen. A second screen came in the 1970s.
Its pale green tower carried the name in white, with a big N, the rest of North in capitals, and high in script beneath it, beside a burst of a star. In the last years it ran adult films, which a commenter who followed the theater recalls and a color photo of the marquee supports. One man remembers circling it at night in a small airplane in the late 1970s and seeing the screen from up there.
Newspaper ads ran until it closed in 1981. The land went for $1.15 million to Schottenstein for a planned shopping center, but the front of the lot was still empty decades later, with houses on the back.