Lost Waters is a creative research project investigating the disappearance of Neil Run, a stream which vanished from campus maps in the 1890s when it was buried beneath the South Oval Lawn to make way for development– a common story for waterways in urban areas. This project brings together students, faculty, and staff from across Ohio State University to uncover the history of this stream by compiling archival maps, records, and surveys. See our methodology page for more information. We applied these resources to create an interactive storymap, as well as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) artworks that depict the landscape before Neil Run’s burial. These projects were shared as part of the Living Art and Ecology Lab’s 2025 Earth Day festivities, which also included a parade following the path of this old stream across the south oval and towards Iuka Ravine.
In sharing the story of this place with the campus community, we seek to use campus as a living laboratory to show how global patterns result in local conditions, and to bring our attention to the agency we have in shaping the world around us. Past Buckeyes made the decisions that created campus as we know it: what do we, as members of Ohio State University today, want our imprint on this place to be?
Inspiration
Images of markers from the Ghost Rivers project by artist Bruce Willen
This project was inspired by artist Bruce Willen’s Ghost Rivers project in Baltimore, a public art installation making visible the many buried waterways underlying the streets of this city. The accompanying website for this project includes a wealth of information on the historic infrastructure changes that have shaped the hydrology of Baltimore today, and also includes resources on buried stream systems across the globe.