Columbia was the most active city to date of any Civilisation-style Minecraft server. Out of necessity, too. The server was lawless, so people banded together under the roof of a few power players that were capable of protecting them.

That particular thumbnail holds a lot of history in it, and I would wager a bet that it was chosen precisely for that reason. It's a juxtaposition of Columbia-proper (right-side), a capitalist minarchist (later AnCap) nation, and Goldmayne (left), the LSIF enclave commune within Columbia.

Columbia's skyscraper fetish was weird, but a natural evolution of the city. Most of the original founders had rather small areas of land, and outward expansion was infeasible. So they built down, and then up. Foofed's particular skyscraper consisted of a 30-something layer vault, bunkers and minivaults, and farms to the ground floor. Higher floors were used as storage, though he only used around half of the upper structure.

A lot of copycat skyscrapers appeared since the style was in vogue. You're looking at those.

Some more trivia: the red flag with the iron tools was posted to /r/vexillology, and was how I found the server. Five years ago. Huh.

^{Occasionally I write replies that may be worthy of their own thread, or are otherwise of historical interest. I'll be posting them to my reddit profile.}

^Original