“. . . Put Up a Parking Lot”

Fifty years ago singer-song writer Joni Mitchell composed “Big Yellow Taxi.” The folk-rock song, while written in reaction to modern intrusions into the natural environment, later had Bob Dylan singing a “big yellow bulldozer took away the house and land,” lyrics that echoed all that was bad with urban renewal; the song’s chorus could serve as a refrain for historic preservationists:
Don’t it always seem to go,
That you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone,
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.
While sites targeted for urban renewal, or more euphemistically “economic revitalization areas,” might not have been paradise, they often were the cultural centers of minority communities. In Indianapolis, an area lying northwest of the central business district, beyond the Michigan St. canal crossing at the “Yellow Bridge,” was home to the city’s African-Americans. Bisecting the district was Indiana Ave., the commercial and entertainment soul of the community.
The area between White River and the canal, south of Fall Creek was subject to flooding and thought to be the source of pestilence and disease. Lots were cheap and this district of Indianapolis became the home to the poor, immigrants, and low-wage earners. The city hospital became established in the area during the Civil War, and later Indiana University Medical Center would come to dominate the area. Modest houses provided homes to a mixed community of Germans, Irish, and African-Americans. By 1900 20 percent of the population in the area of Indiana Ave. was black.
In the mid-thirties, 383 sub-standard houses were razed to build Lockfield Gardens, America’s first federally funded public housing project. Fronting on Indiana Ave., 748 apartments in 24 buildings provided affordable, modern housing to low-income African-Americans.
Three “colored” public schools, George A. Merritt School, IPS #4, 630 W. Michigan St.; Booker T. Washington School, IPS #17, 11102 West St.; and William D. McCoy School, IPS #24, 908 W. North St., named for noted African-Americans, provided an elementary education to the children of the Indiana Ave. community. Black Catholic children attended St. Ann’s School for Negro Children, 836 Fayette, and later St. Rita’s School from 1936-1946 at St. Bridget’s Academy, 813 West St. In 1927 Crispus Attucks High School, 1140 West St, opened as the “colored” public high school for all of the city’s black teenagers. The Madame Walker Beauty College provided an opportunity for African-American women to learn the art of cosmetology.
Businesses located on Indiana Ave. to provide basic needs to the adjacent residential neighborhood. Groceries and saloons were interspersed with barber shops and hair stylists, restaurants, tailors, and dry goods merchants. Professional services — doctors, lawyers, and undertakers — were also present along the Avenue. For many years, the business district was racially integrated with white and black owners working side-by-side serving a customer base that in time became predominately black. The Martin Brothers’ National Jacket Co., Henry L. Sanders’ Clothing Manufacturers, and Madam C. J. Walker’s hair care products company were major employers of the local residents.
Jazz came to Indiana Ave. in the ‘20s, and while it was the era of Prohibition, bootleg liquor flowed freely in the clubs. In addition to black patrons, whites came to the Cotton Club, Pearl’s Lounge, Paradise Club, Columbia Club, Sunset Terrace Ballroom and other venues to hear jazz greats Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Ella Fitzgerald and others. Indianapolis jazz icons Wes Montgomery, Mary Moss, J. J. Johnson, the Ink Spots, and Jimmy Coe got there start on “the Avenue.”
By the 1940s, the neighborhood west of the canal was poor and mostly black. Limited by segregation, the residents found most of their commercial and entertainment needs met by Indiana Avenue businesses. Nearly 50 area churches, from grand edifices to store fronts, provided for the community’s spiritual needs. While the nearby City Hospital and Indiana University Medical Center provided low wage housekeeping and orderly employment, one observer noted, “There is still a slum immediately south of the City Hospital, but it is constantly being whittled down as the campus expands.” By the end of the Sixties, the “whittling” was being done with a chainsaw.
To make room for the new Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI) campus, entire city blocks were bulldozed, leading Indianapolis News columnist Bill Roberts to write, “Seeing all of the parking areas crowded with cars, you realize there can never be such a thing as too much parking.” By the end of the Seventies 4,000 black residents had vanished who had once been Indiana Avenue patrons. With no customers, businesses closed, store fronts were boarded and life on “the Avenoo” became a thing of the past as crumbling facades began to be razed by the city of Indianapolis.
In 1975 the Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana recommended establishing the Lower Central Canal National Register Historic District that would include Indiana Ave. and “several good blocks of commercial buildings, a major landmark in black history.” But demolition continued and by the mid-Eighties, the only area with significant architecture was the 500 block of Indiana Ave. This block containing the city’s only evidence of the once-thriving commercial activity that primarily served the black community of Indianapolis was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Indiana Avenue Historic District. Unfortunately, the listing provided no protections from significant alteration or demolition of the buildings and most have been lost.
Today the hopes and failed promises of the past have left only a handful of landmarks on “the Avenue” and adjacent area. Like museum pieces, they stand with no context. As Rev. C. Nickerson Bolden wrote in Indiana Avenue: Black Entertainment Boulevard, “If planners and others had worked earlier to preserve the style of the Avenue, Indianapolis could have had its own form and style of a New Orleans’ Bourbon Street or a Memphis Beale Street.”