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13. No Place Like Home: Preservation, the Past, and Personal Identity
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184 David Brent Johnson No Place Like Home: Preservation, the Past, and Personal Identity There is something mystical about the places you inhabited when you were young. Visit them decades later and you will find your mind redressing and regressing the houses and other buildings , cascading you into a reflective state of haze in the face of suddenly living memory. The past is a fading dream, and buildings are its symbols of meaning, its totems of silent significance, its runic monuments to a sense that what came before us mattered; therefore what we do now will matter as well. When I was twenty-three I returned to Indianapolis after spending several years at Indiana University in Bloomington and a summer working on a salmon processing boat off the coast of Alaska. I had grown up in the Midwestern metropolis in the 1970s and early 1980s, a time when the city’s vitality was at a low ebb. Although population rankings placed my hometown as the eleventh-largest urban concentration of residents in the country, it tended to have the vibe of a minor-league burg, bereft of significant sports franchises save the Pacers, with no skyline to speak of, and a downtown that seemed to be struck by a neutron bomb every day at 5 pm. The buildings were there, but where were the people? I sensed no spark, no soul in “India-no-place” or “Naptown,” as the city was derisively called. In my youthful ignorance I surely did not sense Indianapolis’s history either, though it was all around me had I cared to look for it. I spent much of my childhood at my grandparents’ enormous turn-of-the-century house in Woodruff Place, a neighborhood of old trees, esplanades, fountains, gazebos, and residences richly suggestive of the past in their thirteen No Place Like Home 185 elegant dimensions and facades, even if many of them had been poorly maintained and divided up into apartments. I had no idea that it had served as the inspiration for Hoosier novelist Booth Tarkington’s 1918 masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons. I took strolls with my grandfather along the Indiana Central Canal, left unfinished in the economic downturn of the late 1830s, which ran from Broad Ripple through Butler University’s Holcomb Gardens and then eventually vanished underground before resurfacing downtown, brown and stagnant as it dawdled its way to the White River. My grandmother took me to lunch at the L.S. Ayres Tea Room, though I failed to appreciate my brush with the last remaining vestiges of old-school retail glamour, and I sometimes accompanied her to the lunch counters and variety shops of Fountain Square, a much-declined area just south of the city’s center. My chess team occasionally traveled to play matches at our arch-rival School 4, located in the empty parking-lot flatland north of the Indiana University –Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) campus near downtown. I did not know that I was within easy sight of both Indiana Avenue, the city’s “black boulevard” that had produced some of the greatest jazz musicians in the world, and Lockefield Gardens, one of the nation’s earliest and most attractive federal housing projects. When I first moved to Bloomington as a freshman, I welcomed the university town as a newfound world of creativity and spirit, and my vacation stays back in Indianapolis inevitably left me feeling as if I had reenteredaculturalblackhole.BythetimeIresettledinIndianapolisfollowing my collegiate and Alaska sojourns, the city had emerged from its previous stupor and headed into the early stages of a renaissance. Many attribute the primary momentum of this renaissance to the acquisition of an NFL franchise, the Baltimore Colts, whose owner infamously spirited the team away in the middle of a March 1984 night to Indianapolis, wherethecitygovernmenthadmadehimanofferhecouldn’trefuse.But much came before the Colts, and much came after, as well, that mattered greatlyintherevitalizationofthecity–andmuchofwhatcamestemmed from the city’s past. In the 1970s Lockerbie Square, a historic neighborhoodofcobblestonestreets ,statelybrickhomes,andnineteenth-century cottages on the eastern edge of downtown, once home to famed Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley and (for a brief period) composer Hoagy [3.236.55.137] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:51 GMT) 186 David Brent Johnson Carmichael, became one of the first areas to gentrify. In 1982 Union Station , a massive brick-and-granite Romanesque train facility built in the late nineteenth century, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and several years later it reopened as a...