Currently Browsing: Neighborhoods
Looking at Safety from a Pedestrian’s Eye
Posted by Kevin Kastner in Neighborhoods, Pedestrian, Transit on Mar 11th, 2019 | 22 comments
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 construction projects, there will be adjustments to be made. However, some who are opposed are putting up an effort on opposing the line, arguing that the dedicated bus line will hurt response times of emergency vehicles.
Actually, safety must be an option right now. If you’ve ever tried to...
Market and New Jersey: The Evolution of an Urban Corner
Posted by Kevin Kastner in Neighborhoods, New Development, Pedestrian on Feb 8th, 2019 | 9 comments
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 was a surface parking lot for over a decade after the demolition of Market Square Arena:
I also looked at the corner in 2011:
The construction that is visible in the last photo is merely a gravel parking lot turning into a paved parking lot, to match the other paved lot on the north side of the street.
Flash...
Downtown Indianapolis Parking Lot Comparison: 2011 to 2018
Posted by Kevin Kastner in Neighborhoods on Feb 7th, 2019 | 4 comments
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 ones. The new configurations are shown in red below, whereas the 2011 parking lots are shown in blue:
Next, the more interesting map for our purposes. The parking lots shown in red are the ones from 2011 , while the blue ones are the existing lots:
There are fewer large blocks of...
Indy Needs an Open, Public City Hall
Posted by Kevin Kastner in Neighborhoods, New Development on Dec 19th, 2018 | 9 comments
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 its original location, the City Hall saw several other temporary uses. During the 2012 Super Bowl, it housed a large public art exhibit called “Turf“. It was even home to Yelp’s Christmas Bazaar.
Its most recent incarnation was as “The Hall”. The Department of...
The Indianapolis’ Sidewalk Donut
Posted by Kevin Kastner in Neighborhoods, Pedestrian, Transit on Dec 3rd, 2018 | 32 comments
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 here, especially within the excluded cities of Beech Grove and Lawrence. But, the city went through a ~2 decade period of purposely not building new sidewalks. Much of that development lies within this donut:
This area of the city was largely developed between the 1950’s and the...
