Running a collaborative blog has been rewarding. Â We have recently added 2 new bloggers, who I hope you will enjoy. Jim Walker is the head of Big Car Gallery and Made for Each Other. Â Basically, if there’s something cool going on around town, there’s a good chance Jim has his hands in it. Scott Russell …
This article originally appeared on urbanOut in May 2010 and gained  a lot of attention in the Columbus blogosphere so I figured it should be shared on Indy’s prominent urban blog as well. People love to compare cities and pit them against each other in an attempt to understand strengths and weaknesses of places, analyze …
What does it mean to have a visual connection between inside and out? What is the impact of having street presence? In commerce, it could mean the difference between success and failure.
A little known or seen part of our every day built envrionment will be the focus of one of the city’s largest infrastructure projects ever in coming years. What is commonly called a “CSO” or “Combined Sewer Overflow” is a structure that was implimented in the late 19th and early 20th century. A single system of buried …
Double 8 Foods provides a vital link to fresh foods for residents of the Near Northside of Indianapolis. Some might be surprised to find out that it is a locally owned family business, and is operated by the relatives of Zoltan Weisz, who was the first grocery store owner in the state to hire an …
Sacred Heart Neighborhood on the near South Side has seen a renewed interest, due in large part to the promotions of a concert venue at the Vollrath Tavern. Can a bar revitalize a neighborhood? I’m not sure, but attracting people from around the city to a little-known street with a boatload of potential is a …
As part its annual A Monumental Affair program, Keep Indianapolis Beautiful hosted a charette on Nov. 5 with the goal of cooking up innovative ideas for improving the Lafayette Square area. In advance of the charette and the awards event, I wrote a column for Metromix about the area, KIB and its president, David Forsell. The full interview is here as a way to keep the conversation about this important area of the city going.
The people who run our cities … think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit, which makes their opinion worthless. The people who truly deface our neighborhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff. -Banksy, Wall …
Last week, I was asked to speak at an Envision Broad Ripple (EBR)Â meeting. EBR, is a community effort being put forth to change the future of Broad Ripple’s built environment. They are looking at an entirely new zoning structure, and it will be based upon a vision now being developed by community leaders, as well …
In light of my recent posts about Indyconnect gutting the light rail portion of the plan for Marion County, I thought it would be a good time to put some of this financial talk in context by displaying what some recent, and ongoing, roads projects in the Indianapolis area are costing us. This is a partial …