Last Monday, I traveled a couple of blocks west from Irvington to the old Indiana Women’s Prison at Randolph and New York for a meeting with Joey Newsom and a tour of the old prison complex. Newsom serves as board president of the Willard Park Neighborhood Association on the eastside of the city. Newsom and the WPNA are seeking input from eastside residents for ideas and suggestions of what to do with the old prison, which has been closed since 2017. In 2024, the City of Indianapolis took control of the 15-acre property and formed a partnership with the Willard Park Neighborhood Association and the Near East Side Community Organization. Newsom asks that eastsiders scan the QR code near this article or visit the WPNA facebook/Meta page or navigate to the NESCO website at nescocommunity.org/neighborhoods/willard-park/. Newsom stated, “We’re doing the survey to show the city that a lot of our eastside neighbors really care about what happens to the site. We’d like to get 1,500 responses and we also want to be civil, that’s important too.” This is a time-sensitive survey though. They need to have all of the responses in by November 12th.
Newsom, who lives in a home no more than twenty paces from the old prison, is spearheading an event called “Beyond the Fence: Vision for the Prison” and needs your input before the advisory campaign concludes on November 12th. Newsom, who originally hails from Bloomington, stated, “I’ve lived in the Willard Park Neighborhood since 2004. When I first came here, it was still a women’s prison, then it became the Indianapolis reentry facility for a few years. When we first started the remediation process, they told us that we could not be here because there is mold and asbestos, but we asked why is that an issue now when it was not an issue when there were people actually living on site.” Newsom continued, “I feel that the real issue was failing infrastructure, sewer problems, electrical issues, and so forth. And these days, a prison within a neighborhood is not ideal. Somebody could take a drone and easily drop something in from the outside so that’s a problem.” Newsom stated that the insides of the buildings, particularly the remaining three cellhouses (which the prison called “cottages” containing cells called “dorms”), contain individual barred cells that are “very, very, very small” and are pretty rough, “When the state owned it, they were not keeping good security. People scrapped in there before the city took over, and the vandalism, illegal dumping, structure burning, and tagging was getting out of control. During the demolition, when they cut the lights out, it got really bad. It really affected the neighborhood in a negative way. That’s when it became a free-for-all in here. But that has changed in the last couple of years, and IMPD patrols the property regularly now. The city is doing a great job with it now.”
“We had our ‘Vision for the Prison’ event on October 4th, and nearly 300 people came out. It was amazing. That Saturday was the first time that the community, the neighborhood, was able to come inside to tour the facility, ever. It created a framework for the question of how do you engage contentious sites.” The city of Indianapolis placed waymarks on all seven of the remaining buildings with QR codes and descriptive text identifying what it was used for during the prison years. The codes lead the listener to different stories about the site. “The city went above and beyond to make the event really special. They cleaned up the site. They cleaned out the pond. The engagement level from the city has just been phenomenal,” says Newsom, “There’s a lot of options for reuse on the table. And that is what the survey is for. We would like input from the eastside for ideas of what it might be used for.” Since he lives a stone’s throw from the property, I asked Newsom what he would like to see placed there. “I’d like to see a Bodega grocery store, maybe a coffee shop, and, wait ‘til you see the courtyard. Small businesses and affordable housing would do well here, I think. It would make a great community park. I envision children’s engagement programs and activities. The Chapel near Woodruff Place could be an event space or an innovation hub. The administration building could be used as a sort of museum to tell the history of the site. I hope to keep it walkable and more accessible so it becomes part of the fabric of the neighborhood. Everybody has a vision, mine’s not THE vision, it’s just a vision.”
Since the prison closed, some demolition took place in 2018, resulting in the loss of several buildings, including the health & fitness building, industries buildings, and the cafeteria. Luckily, the oldest buildings were left intact. Newsom said, “The public began to get involved and started to question what was happening to the historic prison. There were two buildings that the neighborhood wanted to see kept, that was the chapel and the administration building. All the other buildings, there wasn’t a strong feeling towards them one way or the other. They didn’t have a plan or an idea of what they were going to do with the site. So we said, before you demolish the rest of the buildings, let’s figure out what the plan is. The neighbors want to be part of the process. We want to have an engagement process. The prison lies within the boundaries of the Willard Park Neighborhood Association, and on the north side is Woodruff Place, a couple of blocks away is Holy Cross Neighborhood, and diagonal from the site is the St. Clair Neighborhood.” The historic prison opened in 1873 and was in use until 2017. It was relocated to 2596 Girls School Road, the former location of the Indianapolis Juvenile Correctional Facility, on Indy’s west side.
The centerpiece of the courtyard is a beautiful old-growth oak tree that would make a perfect focal point. Newsom describes the pond, complete with it’s own school of goldfish, as once having been part of a creek in the 1870s that has since gone underground. There is a Labyrinth next to the pond created by former inmates. It is marked “Humanity In Unity” on a descriptive metal plaque at the foot of the large basketball-court-sized concentric circular pattern designed for endless walking, facilitating deep thought, which could easily be incorporated into any landscape design. Newsom notes that the Labryinth was used as an “ancient way to pray and meditate as you walked along the lines.” There is an old DNR/IDOC metal sign from the re-entry program years that identifies a nearby tree as having been planted and dedicated to the crime victims of Indiana. “This site is very integral to the community, and I expect a full reuse of it at some point. I envision a site that honors the history of the people who worked and resided here and kind of respects some of the stories that were told about it,” says Newsom.
The site, known officially as the “Randolph Street Campus,” has an interesting history and can stand alone as worth saving for the historical significance alone. Opened in 1873, the Indiana Women’s Prison was not only the first adult female correctional facility in the country, but also the first maximum-security female correctional facility in the nation. Until that time, Hoosier female felons were incarcerated at the Indiana State Prison in Jeffersonville (1821 to 1847) and in Clarksville (1847 to 1873). Quaker prison reformers exposed the abuses suffered by women prisoners at the hands of male guards; they lobbied for an end to sexual abuse of women in state prisons, facilitating the opening of the Indianapolis prison. The first inmate to be admitted was Sarah “Aunt Sallie” Hubbard, who was convicted of helping her husband murder a family of 7 before burying them all under the floorboards of her cabin. By October 1873, 17 women had moved in, including Mary Ann Longnecker, who was convicted (some said wrongfully) of poisoning her husband with white antimony, and “Blue-eyed” Mary Lewis, who bludgeoned another woman to death with a shovel during a drunken bar brawl. The number of inmates increased quickly. By September 1928, 197 women were incarcerated there.
Another notable inmate was “Bloody Mary” Brown, a convicted murderer (again some said wrongfully) who, along with her lover Joseph Wade, was accused of killing her husband, John Brown on February 6, 1880. Bloody Mary’s story was featured (for the first time) on my Irvington Ghost Walks this year. Perhaps the most infamous inmate at the prison was Gertrude Baniszewski, who, with the aid of her own children and some neighborhood kids, caused the prolonged torture, mutilation, and eventual murder of 16-year-old Sylvia Likens. By the time of “Gertie’s” incarceration, the population of female offenders had dropped to around 88, and there were no treatment programs available to the women. Indianapolis journalist, author, and longtime friend of Irvington, Nelson Price, related one of the few surviving encounters with Gertie during her time there. Price visited the prison on an unrelated story, gathering interviews from inmates when he encountered her. After a few minutes of questioning, an older woman sporting a carefully-coiffed prison hairdo above her grotesquely-arched eyebrows, asked the young reporter, “You don’t know who I am, do you?” To which Nelson answered politely, “No ma’am, I don’t.” Nelson recalls that Gertie seemed surprised and astonished that he hadn’t recognized her before ending the interview.
In less than two decades, the prison was packed to the gills. In 2005, the Indiana Women’s Prison had an average daily population of 420 inmates. By the end of 2015, the population had increased to 599 inmates. Then, as now, most of the inmates were classified as “special-needs”: geriatric, mentally ill, pregnant, and juveniles sentenced as adults with security levels ranging from medium to maximum. Female incarceration in Indiana has come a long way in the 150 years since the eastside prison opened. During that century-and-a-half, the ethos of the Indiana Women’s Prison changed from punishment to rehabilitation. So it seems only fitting that the old prison get a chance at a new life too. And if Joey Newsom gets his wish, the historic Indiana Women’s Prison will rise from the ashes to transform into a viable community asset.
Al Hunter is the author of “Haunted Indianapolis” and “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide.” and the co-author of the “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Osborn H. Oldroyd: Keeper of the Lincoln Flame”, “Thursdays with Doc. Recollections on Springfield & Lincoln” and “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
