Recently via twitter, some residents alerted me about a new sidewalk closure that had to be seen to be believed. Sidewalk closures for construction are common around Indy, and I have yet to see accommodations made for pedestrians via temporary barriers placed on the street. Even the City County Building was guilty of this during …
An important note: Urban Indy is planning on providing weekly construction updates for the Red Line. If you have any construction photos to share, please let me know at kevin dot kastner at gmail dot com. Construction has started in my neck of the woods for the Red Line Bus Rapid Transit project. With all …
Now that Public Greens is open on the corner of NJ and Market, I figured it would be a good time to see the evolution of this corner, which less than a decade ago was an urban disaster. How bad was it in, say, 2007? This bad: The opposite corner was not any better. It …
Back in 2012, Curt Ailes posted an article containing a few maps of the surface parking lots downtown. After these maps came up on twitter, I figured that now would be a good time to compare the lots to what currently exists. First , I took the old lots and contrasted them with the new …
Recent History For most of the past 2 decades, Old City Hall was a jack-of-all trades. It was the site of the Indiana State Museum when I arrived here in 1999. Later, it became the temporary home of the Central Library, while the original one undertook an extensive renovation. After the library moved back to …
In the summer of 2018 I found myself sitting in a room with a small number of other people, making decisions about how land in Marion County should be used. I’m a computer person by trade with no background in land use planning. How did I end up here? The Impetus The Long-Range Planning …
I work on map layers for Indianapolis, and recently I’ve been updating the sidewalk layer. Something that really jumps out is a donut that’s about 6-8 miles out from the center of the city which has very few sidewalks. Aaron Renn of the Urbanophile might call this the new donut. There are some noted exceptions …
Recently, I was traveling with the family on I-70 just south of downtown. We hit a bad traffic snarl just to the west of the south split. The traffic jam allowed my wife to notice something amusing in the large “attractions” sign: I didn’t notice this quirk at all. But, sure enough, Indiana Govt Cntr …
There was a recent petition to demolish the old gymnasium building at 625 S Meridian to be replaced with…a surface parking lot, which was modified to be a “plaza”. This building is within the Regional Center, but not within an IHPC district, so it will likely be approved. Somewhat ironically, a new petition …
Recently, a spate of reasonable proposals have been shot down by the Metropolitan Development Commission due to fears of over-densification. The MDC has been using previous neighborhood land use plans to defend their repeated denials. While it may be true that the most recent land use plan called for a different type of development, that …