A ghost bike on Indy’s South Side: an outlier or a signifier of greater road safety needs?
Posted by Eric McAfee in Bicycling on Jan 18th, 2021 | 13 comments
It’s not typical of me to dive right back into a subject just two months after having written about it previously, but I can’t help myself: ghost bikes are an increasingly visible feature of the urbanized landscape. (I also guess the medium is a little different this time around, because I’m asking the question on Urban Indy, regarding an Indianapolis ghost bike.) And, as I depicted in my previous article at American Dirt, which featured featured a white-painted bike memorial in a completely uninhabited mega-park in Albuquerque, sometimes they’re in areas where one’s...
Branding the border crossing: when one side of the boundary builds a landmark…and absorbs all the monumentality.
Posted by Eric McAfee in Neighborhoods on Jan 6th, 2021 | 0 comments
The City of Indianapolis deploys the word “monument†far more than most American cities, and not without good reason. Most metrics indicate that it has the second highest concentration of memorials, landmarks, and civic plazas (behind only our nation’s capitol), and the landmark that gives the city its well-defined absolute center—the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument—comprises a geometrically precise plaza called “Monument Circle‖hence the nickname “Circle Cityâ€. Indy’s popular marathon takes the name...
