INDIANAPOLIS — Circle City Industrial Complex (CCIC), located at the corner of Massachusetts Ave. and East 10th St., was recently purchased by Indianapolis-based Teagen Development. The building, formerly known as the Schwitzer Building, encompasses more than 500,000 square feet of space, and is home to a wide range of businesses, artists, and industrial/warehouse users. The new owners intend to maintain the current tenants, who are concentrated on the north and central part of the massive building — and have exciting plans for the southern part. Current industrial tenants include RecycleForce, Indianapolis Fabrications, and New Day Meadery’s cider and mead production facility. Artists in the central part include Nancy Lee Designs, M10 Studio, sculptor Matt Davies, Lost and Found Art Studio, and many more. However, the building’s overall size — it is almost a third of a mile long —and its lack of public entrances (only two) will require creative space-making.
The existing southern facade of the CCIC.
The south part of the CCIC encompasses about 120,000 square feet and is currently vacant, and is plagued with infrastructure problems and poor accessibility. With project partners Riley Area Development Corporation and Pattern, Teagen is proposing creating a retail, office, and restaurant space at the very southern point of the building where there are loading docks at the moment. Behind it, they envision a “Maker Space” and work studios for artisans, inventors, and crafts people. The Maker Space will be open-concept to encourage collaboration and sharing of equipment and ideas.
In addition to the creation of new spaces, Teagen’s proposal includes removing about 60,000 square feet of the warehouse structure north of the Maker’s Space to create parking and an access drive between Brookside and Mass Ave. The interior parts of the building that would be exposed by the demolition would be refinished as new storefronts.
The plan’s ambitions also include re-visioning the internal drive aisle that runs the length of the building. Developers envision an opportunity to create a spur of the soon-to-be Pogue’s Run Trail that leads to the shops in the southern part of the complex, where bike riders and walkers can use the internal aisle as part of the trail. (The internal portion would be secured after business hours.) Riders and walkers would share the space with industrial and business users transporting goods from point to point within the building.
Developers envision the CCIC to be a new destination, drawing people into the Cottage Home/Windsor Park/Brookside neighborhood, as well as from the rapidly developing northern tip of Mass Ave., and spurring creative redevelopment of industrial spaces on the east side, with a nod to the area’s industrial past
Built in the 1920s, the building was the home of the Schwitzer Corporation, builders of cooling pumps, superchargers, and other automobile components. Founder Louis Schwitzer was an engineer who was the winner of the first Indianapolis Motor Speedway auto race in 1909. He was later inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame for his contributions to the field on and off the track. When he retired in the mid-Sixties, production at Schwitzer came to an end, and the building was repurposed for other office and industrial users.
For more information about the CCIC, visit their Web site at circlecityind.com
