Indianapolis is a great town, as far as we are concerned, and among the many reasons (the strawberry festival on Monument Circle, the mass for the homeless at the downtown Episcopal Church every year, the Greek restaurant in freeway-wounded-but-now-rebounding area of Fountain Square, just for example) is that they are pioneers in what we like to call the Slow Road Movement. The Slow Road Movement has to do with American planners and citizens and even road engineers redesigning the streets and roads of cities and towns so that the car isn't the only interest served--streets, after all, are for humans too. Indianapolis is doing something that a lot of other cities would not even dare to do, and that is put a walking trail right down in the Middle of their streets. According to people we have talked to, Indianapolis residents can be a little concerned if they are told that a lane is being taken away from cars, but, on the other hand, everyone (from pedestrians to developers to hotel concierges) is pretty excited about the idea of giving a lane to the peolpe. Here is the Indianapolis section of a recent four-part report in Dwell. (The rest of the report is here: http://www.dwell.com/partners/saturn):.
Imagine if, in the near future, you could fly to Indianapolis, capital of car-racing America, and abandon your vehicle and tour the city just on foot, on purpose. Imagine if the city built a hiking trail not off into the woods or out to the city park, but right through downtown. It’s an idea that is so radical as far as civic transportation goes that it sounds a little crazy, but that’s what Indianapolis is building, an eight-mile bike and pedestrian trail that circles, in a zigzaggy way, in and through downtown Indianapolis—a trail that links neighborhoods and business districts, that would allow you to hike in the street. This is the plan, and this is the trail that is in the first stages of planning, a separate trail out in the street that is not quite a sidewalk, not quite a traffic lane, a $50 million redesign of how people might use a street. When Brian Payne, president of the Central Indiana Community Foundation, a nonprofit community group that is the lead partner on the trail, imagines the trail, he knows that the transportational stakes are high, since no city has tried this before, since they will be redesigning the downtown of the third-largest Midwestern city. “If you screw it up, you’re going to set everybody back by 30 years,” he says.
Touring the trail is an act of imagination at the moment: You have to imagine the markers, the pavement that is tiled or patterned somehow, the path as it is engineered through busy intersections—which is why Payne picks me up at the airport and drives me the ten minutes to downtown. The wide highway carries us onto equally wide downtown streets. “One of our problems is that we do too good a job of getting people out of town,” he says. “They’re going too fast to notice anything. I’m one of those people who does 50. No one does 25, because the capacity is there to do 50.”
But then, in one right turn, we are in a small neighborhood of Victorian houses and cobblestoned streets, a neighborhood that I have, on previous trips to Indianapolis, completely missed—the kind of neighborhood Payne hopes that the trail will help highlight. “Too often Midwestern cities look to the west and east and say, ‘What do we need to copy?’ Well, we don’t need to copy anything—we don’t want to copy. We want to be unique. I mean, we’ve got to concentrate on what’s unique. That’s what New York and Chicago do so well.”
As we park at his office, Payne describes his eureka moment, the day he was walking the Monan Trail, a hugely successful rails-to-trails project that runs on an old rail line out of Indianapolis to the north. “I was walking the Monan,” he says, “and I thought, We could build an urban version of this right downtown!” At his desk, we pore over a map of downtown, and he shows how the trail would link neighborhoods—it’s as if there would be a hiking path through SoHo, then onto the East Village and down to Chinatown.
With Gail Swanstrom, the director of marketing and communications for the Central Indiana Community Foundation, we start out near the American Legion headquarters, a vast mall in the center of the city, a beautiful war memorial that is like a miniature of the Mall in Washington, D.C. (The downtown of Indianapolis was designed by Alexander Ralston, who as an apprentice helped French-born architect Pierre L’Enfant design D.C.) When Payne takes people around, he is amazed at how many people have never seen this Beaux Arts view of their own place. “I grew up in San Diego, lived in Santa Cruz. I’ve studied cities most of my life. And we’ve got a great downtown. And yet the rest of the world doesn’t know anything about us.”
We head down Walnut Street, to see the old church about to change—to go co-op, to condoize. “People are selling condos,” he says, “on the basis of being on the trail.” I ask if the trail’s potential success kill people’s chances to afford to live near it. Payne points to Fall Creek Place, a downtown neighborhood with an affordable mix of historic and new housing, where residents agree to stay for five years and not turn the place over for sale. “Indianapolis is a community that watches over itself,” he says.
The centerpiece of the trail—and the town and my trip—is Monument Circle, the very center of the city, as designed by Ralston, and bustling with people and cars. The soldier on the 284-foot-high war monument faces south, to troops returning, and around him are buildings of all eras, from chain stores to the symphony’s headquarters, the Art Deco office building, the old Christ Church Cathedral.
In completing the loop, we move along a straightaway section of the proposed trail to Fountain Square, a neighborhood full of vintage stores and old sandwich places and artist’s studios and small galleries that have lately closed quickly upon opening. “Things start up and they get going but then they can’t keep it up and they close down,” says Payne. He sees the trail as helping gallery owners stay open—outside the main square, it feels beat up, cut off from the city center by an interstate. At lunch at a Greek restaurant, Payne talks about his hopes for the trail as an economic development tool and as a tourist destination. He talks about how he envisions it being used. “Eighty percent of all users will be walkers,” he says.
We end up downtown on Massachusetts Avenue. We pass by galleries and shops and pass through a little alley through which the trail will be built. We end up at the beginning of the Monan Trail, where the idea first hit Payne. I’m amazed at how determined he is and at how much he enjoys touring his own city, without any car at all. I’m amazed at how much I really like Indianapolis, after previously having only driven through it. I’m appreciative of him taking time off to tour what is not yet there.
“Are you kidding?” Payne says. “This is fun.” The trail might not be finished until 2009, but when you see Payne walking it, you can see him seeing it anyway, and you can see him seeing a whole new way of visiting and living in a downtown. “We want to create a journey that’s beautiful and inspiring and wonderful and as good as the destination,” he says.
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