The state house makes the laws; the state takes it for granted.

I’ve observed in the past how, almost instinctively, we come to expect a certain degree of monumentality in major seats of government, usually the prominent display of a central building that hosts those administrative offices.  In the typical Midwestern county seat, the courthouse provides that landmark—an elaborate masonry building resting in the center of a park-like square, often with a clock tower at its highest point.  Opposite the square on all four sides rest commercial and office buildings that date from the town’s original founding.  My earlier essay noted that Muncie, Indiana has essentially undercut its monumentality because it demolished the historic courthouse, replacing it with a brutalist-influenced concrete structure that offers no embedded landmarks or ornamental features to attract the eye.  As a result, Muncie has lost much of its “centered-ness” in its downtown, because no single remaining building offers a compensatory visual prominence.

But Muncie is a simply the political center for Delaware County, a mere one out of 91 other counties in the State of Indiana.  What if the visitor is looking for the most prominent landmark in a state capital—a higher tier of governance for a much larger, more populous body politic?  If a sightseer searches for a clear visual center in Trenton, New Jersey, this capital of the Garden State (with a 2010 population 8.8 million) is not likely to impress.

Despite several decades of population loss, Trenton is hardly a small city: it has stabilized in recent decades, down from its 1950 peak of 128,000 but generally locked at around 85,000 since 1990.  It is the state’s 10^th largest municipality and the hub of the Trenton-Ewing Metropolitan Statistical area, which includes all of Mercer County (with a 2010 population of over 360,000).  Trenton sits in an unusual position nearly mid-way between the teeming metropolises of New York and Philadelphia.  Up to the 2000 Census, Trenton belonged to the Philadelphia Consolidated MSA.  However, after determining that a preponderance of commuters linked Trenton and Mercer County more heavily to the New York City CMSA, the US Census Bureau shifted its alignment.  Now Trenton identifies as the southwestern arm of the nation’s largest metropolitan area, even though it is still geographically closer to Philly and belongs to the Philadelphia media market.  Perhaps most importantly, it is the seat of government of the nation’s 11^th most populous state and one that, by most measurements, ranks among the three wealthiest.

Nonetheless, Trenton assumes a low profile among national capitols.  Even most New Jerseyans will claim they have connection to the city unless the State employs them.  Perhaps it is no surprise that the New Jersey Statehouse does not immediately catch the eye.  But did it have to be quite so unobtrusive?

It sits quietly on West State Street, along the middle of the block, as evidenced by the Google Map below.

Unlike most statehouses in the country, it does not boast an expansive lawn or a bold processional; the setback from the street might be slightly more than usual, but it is still so modest that a motorist could drive right past the building without even noticing it.  (That’s what I did the first time I visited Trenton.)  The central cupola, a feature most capitol buildings in the US share, glitters on a sunny day, thanks to its gold finish.  But it’s not particularly tall and is situated far enough in the center of the massive building that it isn’t easy to see it from the State Street address.  It certainly doesn’t assert itself as a visual landmark.

At the very least, the opposite side of the street could offer some visual cues: a long boulevard or another state building of elevated visual prominence.  But it really doesn’t.

The handsome 18^th and 19^th century buildings (about two-thirds of which are in good condition) hardly suggest that the seat of the state’s government sits squarely across the street.  In fact, they conspicuously recall a conventional post-revolutionary residential neighborhood.

In Trenton’s defense, the space directly across the street from the cupola does host a modest plaza with a war memorial.

This opening ostensibly provides some decent views of the statehouse, but as this Panaramio photo indicates, the viewshed still isn’t great enough to see more than a portion of the sprawling edifice—one that grew in subsequent years after multiple expansions.  And this little plaza appears to be contemporary installation, evidenced by the blank walls on the buildings that sandwich it.

The impressions of the structures that previously abutted the centuries-old residences on either side of the plaza recall what used to stand there: similar residential structures that subsequent generations of Trentonians allowed to fall into neglect.  In time, demolition seemed like the best option.  Thus, this war memorial plaza is an afterthought—an insertion to fill a gap in the old building stock.  And it offers a modest view, but hardly an expansive one.  Even the winter’s denuding influence does little to enhance the views of the New Jersey State Capitol; this recent photo of State Street a bit to the east only reinforces how unobtrusive the building is.

A pedestrian can barely see that gold cupola.  Meanwhile, a back-seat view of the state house, from Lafayette Street to the southeast, is hardly better.

Sure, the cupola pokes out a little bit from behind the Revolution-era Hessian encampment in the foreground to the right, but the view is still widely obscured.  In fact, the only unobstructed view of the entire New Jersey State House is from the south looking northward, across the Delaware River, from the town of Morrisville, Pennsylvania.

I admit that I cheated in my first photograph in this essay, which also shows the Trenton skyline, but panned at a different angle that deliberately blocked the statehouse.  But even in the rare perspective when the structure features prominently, the photographer’s vantage point obviously requires quite a distance.  This photo took some effort on my part: it sits on a quiet residential street in Morristown, and I had to climb up a levee to get the photo.

And pivoting to see the levee, as well as the houses on the Pennsylvania side, which enjoy little real view of Trenton or the river from their front doors:

As capital cities go—both in the United States and throughout the world—Trenton is the antithesis of self-referential ostentation.  Founded in the first two decades of the 18^th century, this New Jersey city predates the nation’s capital by nearly one hundred years.  In his book Representing the State: Capital City Planning in the Early Twentieth Century, Wolfgang Sonne recognizes that George Washington famously commissioned the military engineer Charles Pierre l’Enfant to plan a centrally located capital for the young nation, along the banks of the Potomac River.  The French-born ally of American Revolutionists believed that the scale of such a city should parallel the political greatness of the state, so he modeled it after the Baroque details of Versailles.  After designing a hilltop government center, l’Enfant organized the remainder of Washington DC along a comprehensive grid system, punctuated with radial streets that emanate from the two principal centers: the U.S. Capitol and the White House.

Despite his devotion to a clearly articulated vision, L’Enfant died in relative obscurity, though his legacy enjoyed a resurrection a century later, when James McMillan, chair of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia, proposed the comprehensive revitalization of Washington DC using European capitals as inspiration.  Jon A. Peterson, in The Birth of City Planning in the US – 1840-1917, identifies the overriding political purpose of the McMillan Plan: it transformed the city into a place of national identification, and he convinced President Theodore Roosevelt to adopt it.  This time around, the reinforcement of a political center inspired a number of other American cities to introduce a similar degree of monumentality to their downtowns, even though many of them weren’t even state capitals.  In the years following the McMillan Plan, the contagion of the “City Beautiful” manifested itself through smaller civic center proposals in Cleveland, St. Louis, Buffalo and (most famously) Chicago, as well as state capitals such as Hartford, St. Paul, Indianapolis and Providence.  The prevailing view at the time seemed to be that sweeping diagonals rebelled against the monotony of the gridiron, which was the street configuration to which the majority of American cities already adhered.  In addition, the insertion of a processional or a mall-like passageway offered lengthy vistas that would typically terminate at a site of manifest importance.

But Trenton has none of these.  When it became the state capital in 1790, it was already a mature hub of industry—not a preconceived political center, as is characteristic of Washington DC and a fair number of capitals to the west.  It is also the second oldest state house in continuous legislative use, a fact no doubt abetted by the fact that New Jersey is one of the thirteen original colonies (Annapolis, Maryland hosts the oldest house).  So is this humility characteristic of the colonial states, most of which already hosted a number of industrial centers at the time of US independence?  To an extent, it is.  Look at the New Hampshire state house in Concord:

The lawn over which it presides lends a certain majesty that elevates it in comparison to the New Jersey equivalent, but the structure itself is modest in size, and it mimics the town green commonplace in just about every New England city.

Attractive but conventional commercial buildings frame the other corners of the state house plaza:

But nothing about Concord as a state government center would strike the average visitor as sublime.

Concord and Trenton surely owe part of their restraint—their workaday industrial character—to a deliberate capitalist gesture borne out of anti-imperialist sentiment in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War.  Virtually every major European capital, though presumably organically conceived (rather than overtly planned like Washington DC), remains saturated with references to its monarchic heritage.  Particularly in western Europe, the majesty that totalitarian leaders imbued in their capitals contributes generously to their aesthetic appeal in this day and age—just as it obviously did for James McMillan a century ago, or Pierre L’Enfant another century prior.  The malls and plazas and palaces may evoke centuries of virtual despotism, but it was all done in such good taste that we overlook the subjugation upon which these magnificent vistas depend.  Scrolling across the US in search of its variegated state capitols, one can discern our collective conflicted relationship toward political power and urban design.

We probably never will sort this relationship out, as both political monumentality and references to the City Beautiful movement poke their heads up at random locations from time to time, through sundry downtown revitalization initiatives.  And while little Trenton may not ever hold its statehouse aloft, at least another landmark has more than helped the city retain some notoriety.  Just a hundred yards from the Delaware River levee is the US Route 1 bridge, and from that bridge is an uninhibited view of the neighboring “Trenton Takes” bridge, with the city skyline in the background.

The nighttime view, in which these letters (dating originally from 1935) glow a fierce orange, provides one of the most signature entrances to any city in the country and has won Trenton a ticket to immortality through features in numerous TV shows and movies.  Trenton itself may not seem to embrace the spirit of its parent Garden State—it is, after all, one of only two capitals that physically borders another state—but it cynically tips its hat to its industrial past and post-industrial grit with aplomb and (dare I say it) Jersey attitude.

Barricading a downtown...forever.

About two years ago on this blog, I glossed over the unusual skyline of Frankfort, Kentucky’s pretty, parochial capital city.   

As capitals go, it’s an oddity: one of the least populated out of all 50 (only Vermont, South Dakota, and Maine are smaller); it’s also located less than 60 miles from either of the two largest cities, Louisville and Lexington.  Though its role as the seat of the commonwealth’s government would require Frankfort to host a number of important public sector jobs, it has never attracted any other industries, which has kept its population firmly lodged at around 25,000 for the last forty years or so.  Prior civic leaders could have encouraged these commuters to move to the town permanently, but to its credit, Frankford has no need to be bigger: the population base to fill those government jobs is close enough either to the east or west at the two large “L” cities.  Lexington is only 25 miles away.  As Kentucky state employees have described to me, “Frankfort doubles or even triples in population during the work week, empties out promptly at 5 pm every weekday, and tumbleweeds blow across the downtown on the weekends.” It is the perfect embodiment of the US Office of Management and Budget’s neologism of a micropolitan area, referring to an urban cluster with a population between 10,000 and 49,000 that shares many of the characteristics of a larger metropolitan area, particularly in its enviable ability to attract commuters from a particularly broad radius.

Considering its role as the engine of the Commonwealth of Kentucky’s government, it should come as no surprise that Frankfort’s downtown shows evidence of a considerable amount of investment.  The remarkably intact commercial center has scarcely any old buildings that are vacant or in disrepair; a careful inspection suggests that very few have even faced the wrecking ball.

The old center of Frankfort comprises little more than 10 blocks, but the overwhelming majority of these blocks seem well-preserved.  Lacking any major private industry, Frankfort doesn’t have so much to worry about during a severe recession.  While the number of government employees may expand and recede in relation to the Commonwealth’s budget (or the dominant political party) the chances of it leaving the city altogether are virtually nil—thus, the city’s reason for being has kept it relatively stable and prosperous, unlike many similarly sized cities in the Rust Belt, whose fortunes collapsed in the last 50 years with the departure of a principal manufacturing employer.  And Frankfort offers a stark contrast to the rural landscape just 50 miles to the east (just beyond Lexington), in which the lumpy Appalachians hug economically devastated, ramshackle old mining villages or the impoverished clusters of trailer parks in the unincorporated wilderness that surrounds them.  Frankfort looks fantastic by comparison, and the emblem of Frankfort’s continued prosperity presides on a hillside several blocks southward, on the opposite side of the Kentucky River from Main Street:

The cupola of the Statehouse asserts itself confidently from a lookout point along a western drive down into the valley that hosts the oldest part of the city.

With an excellent stock of 19^th century buildings in a compact little downtown bisected by the lazy Kentucky River and surrounded on all sides by bluffs or cliffs of limestone, Frankfort could muster up as much cachet as Santa Fe, another modestly populated capital.  But Santa Fe punches above its weight class, attracting hordes of tourists not just from in state but from across the nation and globe.  Despite its beauty, Frankfort is almost completely unknown among even the neighboring states, and the average Kentuckian’s most likely first (and only) encounter with the city is on an elementary school field trip to the Center for Kentucky History—if they even get that.  Even the surrounding Franklin County has only grown in single digit percentages in the intervals between the last three decennial censuses.  In short, Frankfort has the aesthetic potential to be a bucolic artist colony or a premier weekend getaway, but it resigns itself to an epicenter of drab bureaucracy.  Downtown isn’t completely dead—it has a few attractive bistros, some bars, a chocolate shop, and more law/accounting offices than you can shake a stick at.  Obviously the thousands of government workers need some places to eat and run the most routine of errands.  But aside from those conventional 40 hours in a week, the heart of Frankfort is dead on the weekends.  The pictures below provide evidence:

Not a lot of people out for the closing hours of a weekday.

Most of the old buildings look cared for, but curtains are often drawn to hide service-oriented jobs that don’t depend on window displays the way retail does.

St. Clair Street, the most impeccably maintained block in the entire downtown, boasts a smartly improved and manicured streetscape, as well as an active old motion picture palace.  But elsewhere on the block, the whitewashing can only conceal the high vacancy levels up to a point.

And even a city that never saw its major industries close—it never had any—still shows evidence of a commercial center that is struggling to remain viable.

Somehow, in the life cycle of this town, a rupture has emerged.  A modest, well-maintained, economically stable community nestled in a verdant Appalachian valley has achieved to the unthinkable: near perfect banality.  This small city, though idiosyncratic in so many ways, is likely to strike most visitors as completely average—as unremarkable as a dinner at Bob Evans Restaurant. Frankfort’s shortcomings show no indication of a failure to invest, or even a failure to think big: the problem has nothing to do with the historic commercial center depicted in the photos above. It’s just fine.  The problem, implied in my previous Frankfort blog but expounded upon this time, becomes far more evident in some of the views of the city from a farther distance.

Approaching Frankfort from the north, a lone skyscraper obtrudes from the Kentucky River Valley more confidently than the limestone bluffs that flank it.  It is the Capital Plaza Office Tower—at 28 stories, it is the tallest public building in Kentucky and was the tallest structure outside of Louisville from 1963 until a building in Lexington surpassed it in 1987.

Even from a distance, a structure this tall seems anomalous in a city this modest, and it is no less jarring when up close.  At the time of its construction, the utopic “towers in the park” paradigm espoused by influential architect Le Corbusier had taken hold of urban America; many city governments supported the construction of towering structures surrounded by a landscaped plaza, most notoriously as the large-scale public housing aftermath of urban renewal.  But here in Frankfort, the Capital Plaza Office Tower houses employees of the commonwealth’s government, ultimately dwarfing the classically inspired Statehouse with this austere verticality.  And, though the Tower manages to eschew the criticism of “concentrating the poor” that has dogged most high-rise housing projects, it certainly is no better than Chicago’s now demolished Robert Taylor Homes at connecting with the surrounding landscape.  Both have been lifeless.  Walking the Tower’s grounds confirms any further suspicions, and I took these photos during the noon lunch hour on a working weekday.

If you think it’s busy in these photos, you ought to see it in the early afternoon on a Saturday.

From an organizational behavior standpoint, the Capital Plaza Office Tower is probably efficient: it concentrates a variety of loosely related government agencies and fosters easy interaction among them.  Commuters coming from homes in Louisville and Lexington can wend their way past the historic center of Frankfort into the underground parking of this tower and then hop right from the car to the elevator, in order to reach the floor they need.  At lunch they can partake in the building’s cafeteria—since it hosts so many people, dining options should be considerable.  It offers a fair amount of service-oriented shopping as well.  No need to leave the building.  The average commonwealth employee can thus navigate through a full week in Frankfort—or two, or three—without ever directly experiencing it.  From the perspective of civic leaders, that might be a good thing.  But it certainly doesn’t help to foster connectivity between government workers and the proprietors of downtown businesses.  Skyscrapers may help concentrate people, but if the urban design doesn’t allow for an occasional “discharge” of economic activity in the world outside their four elongated walls, they might as well be standing in the middle of the Gobi Desert.

A much more recently constructed government building next door suggests that the architects and developers have learned a bit from those earlier mistakes…at least slightly.

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet may hulk over everything else except the neighboring tower, but at least the structure feels a bit more inviting.  Glass walls convey openness and hospitality, and building nearly hugs the lot line—no moribund parks and plazas surrounding it.  The few pockets of open space seem to encourage a certain level of association with the rest of Frankford, even if it amounts to watching traffic pass by while sitting at a shaded table during lunch.

Nonetheless, the building dwarfs and presides over everything else, leaving little room for integration between the old and new.  It might not be as uninviting as the Capital Plaza Office Tower, but it sure seems out of scale for a community of this size.  The safe “corporatecture” and the absence of any real mixture of uses makes the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet building appear (at least to me) like a prototype for a convention center.  But no, Frankfort already has one of those, just across Mero Street from the other structures.

It’s as discouraging as just about every other windowless convention center from this time period, and it seems to be keeping with the notion I blogged about earlier ,that convention centers seem speciously designed under the fallacious assumption that just bringing lots of people into a shared space is good enough to energize a downtown.  Wrong again.

Thus, poor Frankfort has three massive publicly funded structures within a stone’s throw from one another, placed on the other side of the tracks from downtown, thereby ensuring the relationship between the two as almost adversarial.  (Even the Statehouse is quite removed from everything else.)  Though my earlier Frankfort blog post acknowledgedthat architect consultants have recommended demolishing the Capital Tower, but it doesn’t appear that the idea has gained much traction.  Aside from the taxpayer cost of demolishing a building that remains in good condition, the relocation possibilities raise a number of questions.  Where would these workers go?  Do the second floors of all those pretty downtown buildings have enough vacant space to hold everybody in the Tower?  Is it even a good idea to decentralize from an efficiency standpoint?

Thanks to the violent dichotomy between old central Frankfort’s handsome array of commercial buildings and the massive institutional structures nearby, Frankfort’s skyline is nothing if not weird.

(The Kentucky State Capitol building would be just to the right of the photo, but the panorama function on my cheap camera doesn’t work so well.)  Unfortunately, none of the planners, architects and civic leaders have been able to elevate the city’s weirdness to something bigger than the individual parts; they have failed to mythologize it.  Perhaps these successive urban design misjudgments will forever relegate Frankfort to its humdrum status as a provincial capital that meets but never exceeds its potential.  But such an assertion makes implicit use of words like “always” and “never”; I’m not so fond of those.  Frankfort may someday ally with an ambitious leader who sees a creative and translatable opportunity amid the city’s disjointed parts.  However, with a track record for building itself out of the doldrums as poor as this one, it may be wise to keep architects, engineers, and designers in general as far as possible from an economic development team.

Gateway to navigational confusion.

In recent years, the various public and private agencies in Indianapolis have collaborated on the commissioning of public art projects in what would appear to many to be unlikely places: off the side of some the region’s busiest interstate highways.  The most prominent location for these installations is along the I-70 corridor connecting the Indianapolis International Airport to downtown, with the goal of providing a colorful, idiosyncratic greeting to people arriving by plane to the city and traveling to the most likely destination: the city center.  But why build a sculpture in an area in which people will most likely be zipping by, and newcomers will probably be more concerned about finding their way than a cluster of many have called (somewhat pejoratively) giant gumdrops?  In some cases, the installations no doubt attempt to divert attention from economically distressed neighborhoods that the interstates transect, just as the many murals disguise the otherwise blank walls induced from a demolition in previous years of the adjacent building--a blog topic of mine from the past.  City leadership amplified the public art initiative in the months preceding Super Bowl XLVI, in which the nation’s eyes would hone in on the host city.  Ostensibly the mentality behind the public art was to engage in as multifaceted of a campaign as possible.

I can hardly criticize the welcome mat that the city rolled during the Super Bowl: not only was I not living in the US at the time, but virtually every international media source I scanned (and I surveyed many) formed a conclusion of the city’s hosting ability that was overwhelmingly positive.  But I have noticed that, after approaching the city center by car from a number of directions, one of the most prominent gateways—the city’s welcome mat to wheeled vehicles—is also among the least satisfactory.  When approaching downtown after getting off the I-70 interchange at Meridian Street, this is what a motorist will encounter at the first stop light intersection with McCarty Street:

I have little complaints with the sign; it’s utilitarian, inoffensive, and widely reproduced at various entrances throughout the city, both at egress points from the downtown interstate system and when entering the city from a municipal boundary.  But isn’t an essential aspect of downtowns—of urbanism in general—missing?

I confess, I’m caviling about a sidewalk, yet again.  During a block-long stretch of Madison Avenue, it is missing completely, on both sides of the street.  It picks up again at the next intersection (the stoplight in the distance of the above photo), where it intersects with a small stub of Merrill Street.  By any metric, it’s a strange oversight I’m hoping the City corrects in the near future, since, once a car travels north of McCarty Street, it has left the exit ramp and is fully integrated in the urban environment.  (The City and various nonprofits have thoroughly mapped sidewalk deficiencies in central Indianapolis  in the recent past.)  But this stretch of the street still functions as a through-way for vehicles only; not only is it impractical for pedestrians to walk here safely, it is virtually impossible.

Landscaping and street trees hug the curb, leaving little room for pedestrians even to walk through the grass.  Granted, this 1.5-block stretch of Madison Avenue offers little attraction for pedestrians: virtually all buildings have backs turned away from to the road, giving little incentive for a person to access by foot.  Meanwhile, the parallel streets to Madison to either the east (Pennsylvania Street) or west (Meridian Street) offer perfectly acceptable sidewalks and better access to any buildings.  So why does this stretch of the Madison Avenue entrance to downtown Indy exist under these conditions?

The streetscape across approximately a one-quarter square mile stretch on the immediate south side of downtown Indianapolis has changed dramatically over the past twenty years.  While the high-profile construction of Lucas Oil Stadium involved some changes in the right-of-way—including the elimination of two blocks of Merrill Street, indicated by the blue line—the source of the most significant alterations is the Fortune 500 to the stadium’s southeast: Eli Lilly and Company’s corporate headquarters.  The pharmaceutical giant has played such a pivotal role in the growth and prosperity of Indianapolis that it is understandable that it should leverage changes to the road network as the needs for its campus grows.  (Lilly also helped to fund a considerable amount of the city’s public art along the I-70 corridor coming from the airport.) The markings I made on the Google Map below shows the current street configuration:

The first major transformation during my lifetime involved the removal of a segment of McCarty Street in the late 1980s.  The street used to extend from Delaware Street to East Street, linking the Babe Denny/Pogue’s Run neighborhoods with Holy Rosary and Fletcher Place, but Lilly purchased that three-block right-of-way and developed it, indicated by the red line I’ve drawn on.

The modifications most relevant to the above photos (the gateway without a sidewalk) took place in the late 1990s, commensurate with Lilly’s development of the Faris Campus.  This complex stretches across multiple city blocks, engulfing several streets in the process.  Among the largest segments to undergo the axe were two more segments of the aforementioned Merrill Street, which, these days, is literally mere fragments of what it was 25 years ago.  Back then, Merrill ran perfectly parallel to McCarty Street and stretched about the same length, from Kentucky Avenue to Virginia Avenue, so well over a mile long.  However, while McCarty earns its prominence by being the first general-access roadway parallel to the I-70 interstate—the presumptive east-west gateway to the broader downtown area—Merrill Street was never more than a modestly trafficked local road with just a couple stop lights.  Very few addresses fronted Merrill Street; it was little more than an ancillary entrance.  Even a portion of Merrill between Delaware and New Jersey streets is now a private road, owned and fenced in by Lilly.  Although the elimination of a segment of McCarty Street in the mid-1980s precipitated a significant change in traffic patterns for the area, the complete fragmentation of Merrill into a few stubs and two-block fragments barely raised an eyebrow.  Lately, the City has commenced a fully pedestrianized segment on the block of Merrill between Pennslvania and Delaware streets, under the train viaduct:

Beyond the near-complete elimination of this reasonably lengthy street, Lilly’s Faris Campus instigated other modifications to the southside of downtown that have irrevocably changed the transportation network.  The welcome sign in the first photo from this blog posting comprises the culminating point of this reconstructive surgery.  In the past, Meridian Street’s diversion north of McCarty was much more straightforward.  Traveling northward from the intersection, a fork in the road gave motorists and pedestrians two options: a northwesterly bound Russell Avenue provided quick access to the north-bound arterial Illinois Street, while Meridian Street diverged to a northeast bound two-way collector stub (also named Meridian Street) that again became prominent when it merged with Madison Avenue at the approximate intersection with South Street.  The block long green line in the Google Map shows the previous configuration to Meridian Street.

I did not live in Indianapolis at the time of the Faris Campus construction, so I don’t know if it aroused controversy, but the changes have proven significant.  Meridian Street between McCarty and South streets no longer provides direct access…to itself.    At the McCarty Street divergence, where Meridian starts moving northeastward, it devolves to a quiet, little-used segment.

After just three blocks on this segment of Meridian, motorists/pedestrians must turn onto the local road called Henry Street, where Meridian terminates.  The termination is below, but notice that it's still easy to see the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in the distance.

This T in the road at Meridian and Henry is apparently obscure and sparsely traveled enough to merit nothing more than a stop sign.  By comparison to the “Welcome to Indianapolis” sign gateway, it’s also quite pedestrian friendly.  But it's a strange treatment for a street that, just a few blocks further south, promised a direct connection to the absolute center of the city; it is the city's meridian, after all.  And here it ends at dinky two-lane Henry Street.  Then, after just one hundred or so feet on Henry Street, the motorist/pedestrian must turn left (at a stop light) on that same gateway section of Madison Avenue in order to continue downtown.

Here’s another view of that intersection, looking toward downtown, where Madison Avenue meets with the unremarkable Henry Street, which, I reiterate, has become a quiet temporary terminating point for what is otherwise the city’s most prominent north-south road.

At this point, after traveling a block further northward toward South Street, Madison Avenue changes names as it once again becomes the arterial, north-bound portion of Meridian that continues toward the Soldiers and Sailors Monument.  Here’s looking south from the Meridian-Madison-South intersection:

Just beyond that conical sculpture, the interrupted path of Meridian Street is visible in the distance. Meridian Street therefore now falls under a permanent detour.

Meanwhile, the naming scheme of Madison Avenue embodies what the US military would politely label a “Charlie Foxtrot” (for those not aware of this term, look it up).  Technically, the Madison Avenue arterial that stretches all the way toward the southern suburbs of Indianapolis comes to an end when the street forks into northbound Delaware Street and Southbound Pennsylvania Street.  However, a small five block stub of Madison Avenue between I-70 and South Street has existed for as long as I can remember, even though it is completely non-contiguous with the 12-mile remainder of Madison Avenue.  I have shaded this Madison Avenue extension with a pinkish transparency in the map.

How does this stub fit in to the big picture?  Without digging into old Public Works records or archival maps from the 1960s and 70s (okay, I confess, I dug a little bit), my interpretation is it is a leftover fragment that was made discontiguous when the City converted Pennsylvania and Delaware Streets to complementary one-way arterials that forked outward from Madison Avenue.  The turquoise diagonal dashed line just north of McCarty indicates the original path of Madison Avenue.  But the pinkish highlighted area—the sidewalkless gateway from the interstate exit ramp--has essentially evolved into an orphan street segment, and while it is obvious from a map how it might have met with the primary arterial of the Madison Avenue that sprawls southward, it is not necessarily so easy to understand for those unfamiliar with the city—namely, the visitors the city is trying to attract with public art, signage, and a walkable downtown area.  Essentially, two contiguous intersections have the same street name, visible from the photos below.  The first shows the intersection labeled with a big purple 1 on the map, on McCarty Street looking westward:

The second intersection, labeled with a purple 2 on the map, is on that stretch of Madison right as it has stopped being called Pennsylvania, looking southeastward:

So essentially, two parallel streets at two adjacent intersections on McCarty both have the name “Madison Avenue”.  It proves even more of a problem for motorists leaving the interstate from the I-65/I-70 arterials and entering through the southside of downtown, the region I have highlighted with a green transparency. Look at how the signage first tells drivers they are disembarking at Meridian Street:

And then, as the exit 79B meets the southside gateway to downtown, McCarty Street, look at the various options:

And the conventional street signs tell motorists that they are on this street—

--even though the interstate exit told them they were disembarking onto Meridian Street.

Continuing northward on this Madison Avenue orphan stub, it remains a prime arterial for reaching the city’s absolute center at Monument Circle, but a visitor would have no way of knowing this until the intersection with South Street into the Wholesale District (marked on the map by a purple number 3), when…

…Madison Avenue Orphan Stub changes name again back to Meridian Street.

The radical improvements of navigational technology over the last decade have palliated this problem significantly; most people these days can just check their GPS to figure out how the roads here function.  But GPS will save them in spite of the signage, not because of it.  Other cities which I know well (New Orleans comes to mind) have equally confusing entrances from the exit ramps, in which navigation falters from a morass of modified streets, name changes, stubs that go nowhere, and unexpected interruptions to the conventional grid.  The near-southside of Indianapolis is probably no worse than a number of cities, but the initiative for a solution at this point seems elusive.  The confusion induced from this street-grid palimpsest does not affect the locals, who know the area like the back of their hand.  Visitors eventually figure it out, and probably without much of a headache if they have GPS.

But a stretch of Madison Avenue Orphan Stub/Meridian Street Access/whatever-you-want-to-call-it remains without sidewalks, and the only affirming, conclusive sign when exiting the interstate is that “Welcome to Indianapolis”.  Is this tangle of street segments severe enough to warrant another round of surgery from the DPW?  Absolutely not.  But Lilly may grow again in a better economy, another major employer may expand, or the moderately deflated real estate of the area may encourage the construction of a similar mega-attraction like Lucas Oil.  The existing confusion isn’t going to heal into scar tissue any time soon.

A much cheaper solution than further alteration of the right-of-ways could involve two primary steps: 1) eliminate the orphan street status; 2) place pedestrian and motorist navigability on equal footing.  Merrill Street and McCarty Street are reasonably straightforward—they terminate and reintegrate at fixed latitudes.  Madison Street is a mess, but a simple renaming of the stub could easily forge a separate identity that makes it less confusing on the signs as well as a birds-eye view from maps.    Perhaps this stub could be renamed after a major civic leader from the past?  While it would necessitate the cost for replacing road signs on both the interstate and the conventional streets, the shortness of Madison Avenue Orphan Stub means the cost shouldn’t be as great as renaming the orphaned stub of Meridian Street (of course), and it will allow for a more clear-cut terminus to Madison Avenue where it forks into Delaware and Pennsylvania Street.  The cost incurred to businesses will also be minimal, since very few businesses front this stretch of Madison Avenue—it is essentially an extension of the exit ramp that eventually provides access to Meridian Street at South Street.  The most plausible means of assuaging businesses frustrated by a name change would be to remind them how the renaming will relieve much of the confusion when trying to explain the street network to visitors—no more double Madison Avenues. 

Signage improvements would fall under the category of streetscape enhancements, which effectively transitions the discussion to the second corrective measure: equalizing navigability for pedestrians and motorists.  Both could benefit from signage that helps clarify this network, and the pedestrians will earn the accommodation they need with installation of 4-foot wide sidewalks on the margins.  While this may require the sacrifice of streetscape improvements (trees, shrubs) currently at the curbs, it will involve little to no sacrifice to any privately owned parcels, since no buildings front the Madison Avenue Stub, nor will parking lots shrink as a result.  If this Madison Avenue Orphan Stub receives a renaming after a famous Indianapolis figurehead, the streetscape improvements could include plaques or memorials addressing the dedicatee.  Eventually, I would hope the City might improve the clarity of the Henry/Madison/Meridian intersection, so that the north-south artery regains the importance it deserves instead of tapering off into virtually nothing.  But that would probably involve some heavy surgery toward existing traffic patterns.

Obviously this remedy is not terribly high on the City of Indianapolis’ to-do list; it probably isn’t even up there at all.  I’m even willing to concede that I just identified a solution in search of a problem, mostly out of my frustration of seeing a block-long gateway to the city without any sidewalks.  But we could also analogize the south side’s thirty-year incremental changes to a frog slowly getting boiled without realizing the temperature is rising.  Clearly the signage and pedestrian infrastructure here is imperfect.  How much worse does it have to get before it results in an civic contretemps?  More than anything, it could integrate into a balletic political maneuver—a means of bringing a solution to the forefront the next time the city does want to dedicate a road to a great former leader.  “Hey—there’s that confusing stretch of Madison Avenue right when you get off the interstate.  Lots of people travel it but it doesn’t make sense because the rest of Madison Avenue continues a half block away.  What about renaming it and improving it with some real sidewalks?”  Legitimate problem is solved—so long as the City finds a more reputable dedicatee than Mr. Charlie Foxtrot.