Why the Greenwood Park Mall gets it right, Part I: the smokin’ location.

With all the gloom and doom written these days about dying malls, or long-lived national chains like Circuit City going out of business, it’s time to shift the attention to the occasional success story.

The fate of large regional shopping malls has never been more doubtful, since their first inception over 50 years ago. Centers that were thriving as recently as the mid-1990s are now saddled with high vacancies and folding anchor stores, while many buildings that broke ground in the late 1980s are already closed (often while the surrounding neighborhoods remain economically viable). I already wrote long ago about two of the most challenged malls on the east and west sides of Indianapolis. The long-delayed opening of Xanadu in East Rutherford, New Jersey outside New York City has attracted more media attention for the tremendous risk of the investment than for the magnitude of its attractions, which include a wave pool, indoor ski lift, and skydiving simulator. (Clearly it sounds like the sort of thing you’d see in a mall in Dubai, and we all know what sort of condition that great urban apotheosis of consumerism is in right now.) With regards to Xanadu, why open any mall, let alone one with a goal of becoming a major tourist destination in the suburbs, when consumer spending is so desperately slow and prominent malls are closing left and right? Xanadu has yet to open its doors and may need to go into state receivership. There are no malls slated to open in 2010, or any time in the future.

Websites like Deadmalls.com began as a collection of chronicles on the rise and fall of particular consumerist palaces across the country, but these “case studies” are not so much journalistic accounts of faded retail as they are deeply personal anecdotes, replete with nostalgia for a time when the centers were flourishing. Americans who grew up in the 1970s and 80s can’t help but become wistful as they watch a major part of their childhoods (and, no doubt, their adolescence) go tumbling with the wrecking ball. But not all malls are suffering this fate. In spite of the fact that the general consensus among retail developers is that the enclosed shopping mall is a dying retail typology, some malls continue to prosper against all odds.

It would be impossible for me to contribute a nostalgic account of my childhood mall going down the drain for Deadmalls.com, because the Greenwood Park Mall is not a dead mall in the least. It began as a mid-size shopping center in 1966, and only in 1977 did Indy’s own geniuses of mall management, the Simon Property Group (then called Melvin Simon and Associates), purchase the property and engage in an extensive renovation and expansion. What is known today as the Greenwood Park Mall opened in 1980. Despite the fact that it will soon be celebrating its 30th birthday—well beyond the life span of many malls—this mall in the most prominent southside suburb of Indianapolis is still going strong. It may even be stronger than ever, the current economy notwithstanding. Without delving into many further details on the financial management of the property, I offer the primary reasons I believe the mall has been a persistent success, starting today with its macro-level, regional location.

1) Sitting quite a distance from the other malls in the region, its trade area is much larger, and it has no clear competition. The map below provides as full of an account as I know of anything that could be considered a “mall” in metro Indianapolis, past and present.


Here’s a code to the colors:
Green – successful or at least generally operative mall
Red – mall with over 50% vacancy, a “dying” or struggling mall
Purple – former mall that has been redeveloped or “repurposed” to big box stores
Brown – vacant “dead” mall, no longer retail

As is clear from the map, Greenwood Park Mall—the big green dollar sign farthest to the south—is nearly all alone.* While the northern suburbs have always been more heavily populated, the area directly south of downtown Indianapolis still has a strong base. Johnson County, home to the suburb of Greenwood from which the mall is named, has well over 125,000 inhabitants. Compare this to the other parts of town. For example, a resident of the town of Lawrence (labeled on the map) could choose from either the upscale Fashion Mall, the more mainstream Castleton Square Mall on the northeast side of town, the Circle Centre Mall directly downtown, or go south to the struggling Washington Square Mall if all he or she needed was some basics (the mall still has a Target, a Dick’s and a Burlington Coat Factory). The reconstituted Glendale “Mall” in purple to the northeast of downtown also offers similar amenities in a big-box setting. All are more or less equidistant. Meanwhile, a resident of Fishers could choose from the Fashion Mall, Castleton Square, Glendale, or go further north to the newer malls of Hamilton Town Center in Noblesville or Clay Terrace in Carmel. The northsiders in general have multiple malls from which to choose, all relatively close by.

I’ve already said more than necessary. People in the southern suburbs have a fraction of the choices. Some residents may be relatively close to Metropolis in Plainfield or the Circle Center Mall, but the Greenwood Park Mall is pre-eminent. However, the mall also serves a much broader region than just the southern Indy suburbs; it’s the largest mall for a broad swath of southern Indiana. People from small towns across the region are likely to make the big trip to Greenwood Park Mall; the weekends in particular are crowded with vehicles featuring license plates from sparsely populated counties in the south. The two largest cities near the southside of Indy, Columbus and Bloomington, have mini-malls that pale in comparison to the offerings of the 1.1 million square-foot Greenwood Park. The trade area for the Greenwood Park Mall thus extends so far southward that the next major community with anything resembling its offerings is in metro Louisville. Its size and drawing power make it a super-regional center.

No doubt some of the other malls in Indianapolis metro have had similar aspirations—some of them are almost as big—but they are situated too close to one another to have the same magnetism. Certainly some southsiders will occasionally travel to the Fashion Mall for the designer names, or to the Castleton mall for the biggest Macy’s department store in the state. But Greenwood Park Mall covers a broad enough retail terrain to remain the favored choice. The significant, sprawling population on the north side may in itself justify multiple malls, but it isn’t enough to endow any single one with the same level of prominence that Greenwood Park Mall has for the south side. The retail mix between Castleton and Hamilton Town Center is far too similar for one to be discernibly different from the other. The only intrusion likely to unseat Greenwood Park from its gold-medal pedestal would be the construction of a new mall further to the south, but the suburban development patterns in Greenwood and the southside are not yet so widespread that any developer is likely to challenge this mall’s perpetual dominance.

[*This leads to my one big caveat, indicated by the asterisk above. Greenwood Park Mall is not quite alone among southside retail centers. The purple dollar sign just above the Greenwood Park Mall is the former County Line Mall, opened in 1976 and anchored by Target for many years, until it left and was redeveloped into a big box with accompanying inline retail strips. Its vacancy levels right now are pushing 50%--quite a contrast from the consistently fully occupied Greenwood Park Mall. Even at its most successful, it was always so small that it could only be seen as a supplement to the Greenwood Park Mall and not a competitor.]

2) The southern suburbs of Indianapolis have reasserted themselves as an attractive place for out-of-towners to resettle. This evolution has more to do with a shift in perception than any widespread changes in development or patterns. Anyone who has lived in the city of Indianapolis for more than a few years can identify the implicit cultural biases favoring certain sides of town over others. This is nothing unique; nearly every large city in the country has a fashionable and unfashionable side. But for decades, up to and including the time that the Greenwood Shopping Center underwent its first expansion to become the Greenwood Park Mall, the southern suburbs were the overwhelmingly the least favored side of town in which to live. Wind direction and a higher elevation, among other things, favored the north side of town as the residential destination for those with the financial means to choose. Most institutions, libraries, museums, followed this growth pattern and it remains clear to this day that the north side of town favored the wealthy. On the north side, the White Rivers’ banks predominantly host parks, golf courses, and leafy college campuses; on the south side the river hosts factories and power plants. Beyond wind and topography, much of this perceived preference for the north side of town comes derives from its own perpetual reinforcement; as this handy map of density by census tract demonstrates, settlement has overwhelmingly favored the land north of Washington Street, the city’s central east-west artery. The city’s top-heavy growth slightly resembles a mushroom, with the “cap” beginning at Washington Street, extending overwhelmingly to the north but also heavily to the east and west (and significantly to the northeast and northwest). In the other direction, the development has formed a straight trajectory southward from downtown towards Greenwood—the “stalk” of the mushroom—but even to this day the southeast and southwest of downtown are sparsely populated.

If anything, Washington Street—known elsewhere as US 40, the great National Road—is the true Mason-Dixon Line. By some standards, calling it Mason-and-Dixon is almost literal: Washington Street runs uncannily close to the same latitude as the Pennsylvania/Maryland border that comprised the original 1820 charter. But this invisible partition has cultural implications as well: like most of the Midwest, Indianapolis claims powerful German roots on the south side as well as the north, but the south side of the city also absorbed the vast majority of southern and Appalachian migration, drawn to the lower cost of living and proximity to the working class jobs that billow smoke nearby, far from the wealthy northsiders. It is far more common to hear a southern twang among people in the southern suburbs—north of downtown it is rare. Enough local historians have asserted that “the South begins south of Washington Street” that it has become part of common parlance. The east and west sides of Indianapolis are split between northern/Midwestern and southern influence; most of the more affluent older neighborhoods on these sides of town are also north of Washington Street. Meanwhile, the south side of Indy absorbs all of the “southern” reputation, as well as the implicit cultural condescension.

At the time of the late-1970s construction of Greenwood Park Mall, the south side was a parochially German/southern district and Greenwood a sleepy suburb of barely 10,000 people. Few realtors would ever recommend out-of-towners seeking to relocate to the Indianapolis area to consider the south side; it was too backwards, working class, uneducated, etc—the same appellations applied to the unfavored side of town in any metro area. The north side was booming, partly from economic growth and a great deal from white flight away from such storied neighborhoods as Mapleton, Butler Tarkington, and Meridian Kessler. The east and west sides also enjoyed steady growth, while the southside was a relative laggard. Fortunes have changed since then, to an extent. The north side remains overwhelmingly fashionable; Hamilton County north of Indianapolis is one of the wealthiest and fastest growing counties in the country. But Hendricks County, west of the city, is giving the affluent north a run for its money in population growth, if with a much more middle-class vibe: it has grown over 35% since 2000 and is among the top 100 fastest growing counties. Conversely, the east side of town has hit a snag. Though a very desirable place to live in the 1970s, it suffered some crushing industry closures in the 1980s, starting with Western Electric in 1984 and continuing with Navistar just this past year. Though some of the older, affluent neighborhoods remain attractive, the factory closures have decimated the lower-middle class base in the area, saddling the region with the reputation of increased crime and blight—manifested by the fact that its two malls are either dying or completely shuttered (see the above mall map). The future of the east side holds promise in continued reinvestment in its struggling inner-city neighborhoods, but suburban Hancock County to the east of Indianapolis remains lightly populated (about 65,000) and a more modest growth rate of less than 20% since 2000.

With the east side’s popularity on the wane, the south side of Indianapolis has emerged. Johnson County, south of the city center, has grown at almost the same pace as west-side Hendricks County and is neck-and-neck with it in population, at nearly 140,000 by 2008 census estimates. Among its biggest attractions are the significantly lower housing costs coupled with strong schools—the same drivers that give Hendricks County a competitive advantage over Hamilton County, whose excellent schools come with a heftier price tag. Sneering northsiders previously saw the south side of Indianapolis and its adjacent suburbs as “overwhelmingly white and trying hard to stay that way”, an unsubtle code that its southern, working-class roots automatically qualify it as racist. While it no doubt remains more homogenous than the north side, the south side no longer struggles with the profound negative perceptions (even if northsiders would tell you otherwise). Much of its population growth derives from out-of-state migrants entering the region, and an increasing number are foreign born: within the past decade Johnson County has experienced an explosive growth in Punjabi Indian population, much of it of the Sikh faith. Perry Township on the south side of Indianapolis has become a magnet for Latino immigrants in the region as well as Burmese refugees. All of this has become reflected in the significantly more multicultural (and multilingual) common space of Greenwood Park Mall. Southern accents remain commonplace, but they could just as easily derive from a newcomer Tennessee as an old-time local, and accents from other regions outside the Midwest are far more prevalent than twenty years ago. The increasingly cosmopolitan culture of the Greenwood Park Mall is a reflection of the surrounding area’s economic vitality and population growth, and it has only helped to reinforce the mall’s role as the hub of commerce for Indianapolis’ south side—a term that encompasses as broad of a geography as the mall’s numerous patrons can make it.

I will continue in part II of Greenwood Park Mall to explore other facets of its success, focusing primarily on the design. And I promise there will be more pictures.

The Battle of the Marts, Part II: When Wal-Mart is too high-falutin, there’s always…

In Part I of this post, I explored locational decision-making between two of the nation’s biggest discount retailers, Target and Wal-Mart. While both corporations nearly always prosper in middle class suburbs, only Wal-Mart has achieved such national ubiquity that it can be found along the six-lane highway leading into just about any community of 10,000 people or more. Conversely, Target is far more likely to stake a claim in the dense, prosperous urban centers of the largest cities; Wal-Mart has attempted this multiple times but has nearly often confronted such deep-seated opposition that it surrenders. Labor unions objecting to the corporation’s treatment of workers may have something to do with Wal-Mart’s surprising impotence in places like Manhattan or San Francisco, but much of it derives from the general revulsion the affluent urbanites in such cities feel toward the company. The ability to organize and stymie Wal-Mart has consistently succeeded in big cities, often through the opponents’ claims of induced traffic, lowered property values, and environmental degradation. Yet all too frequently this same constituency welcomes Target with open arms, even though a new Target could induce the same negative externalities in their community. And Target has been no more pro-union than Wal-Mart.

Why such divergent attitudes toward the two companies? I don’t really think I need to explain further—others have mined the subject in the past, and I hardly have added anything new to the discourse. But the relationship between these two competing retailers strangely resembles a yin and yang superimposed on the larger fields of cultural consumption: not quite as simple as Target/liberals and Wal-Mart/conservatives, but not a great deal more complicated either. The two companies have their own consumer niches. In some suburban areas they butt up against one another, but much of the metropolitan landscape belongs to one or the other.

And then some regions, though quite populous, belong to neither. Felbram Plaza in Indianapolis provided the backdrop for the core of this analysis: Target, which is just as guilty as Wal-Mart of contributing to suburban sprawl (the bane of the urban progressive), no longer saw the inner-ring suburban area here on the near south side of the city as a viable place for its smallish outlet. It shuttered this store at Felbram Plaza about a year ago, and soon an up-and-coming new tenant, Shoppers World, will occupy it.



This part of town no longer suited the Target Corporation, and its forthcoming replacement is an intensively discounted mart, appealing to a more blue-collar demographic than the well-educated yuppies most associated with the red bull’s eye. But Wal-Mart hasn’t located in this part of town either. In fact, as much as we often perceive Wal-Mart as having saturated the entire national retail landscape, the world’s biggest retailer eschews two major components of metropolitan America: the trendy, fashionably wealthy downtowns and the economically distressed inner city. The neighborhood around Felbram Plaza is hardly the ghetto, but its economic situation does not augur a likely boom in the future, and Wal-Mart avoids the area, despite the fact that it would probably find an abundant clientele of working class, elderly whites, or young Latino families who could benefit greatly from its low prices. In general, Wal-Mart does not do the inner city, or the declining inner ring suburban areas. But one other mega-discounter does seem attracted to this part of town, and its name is older than Target, Wal-Mart, or Shoppers World.


Just a mile north—a mile closer to the inner city—sits a hulking Super K, the biggest variant of hypermarket within the Kmart Corporation. The faded giant of a company, founded by five-and-dime philanthropist S. S. Kresge in 1962 at the age of ninety-five, quickly achieved repute for driving many of its competitors out of business through its low prices and its quirky Blue Light Specials. But by the late 1980s, as the company focused attention on ancillary companies it had either acquired or created, its brand had sunk. Meanwhile, Target and Wal-Mart emerged the victors among several battling discount retailers; no doubt at least a few still remember such casualties as Venture, Ames, Hills, and Zayre. Kmart survived, but not without shedding over a hundred stores in the early 1990s and renovating many of the others. However, it never was able to re-assert its foothold, despite an improved second half of the decade. It became the largest retailer in history to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in early 2002, partly due to the CEO’s scandalous misappropriation of funds. A year later, it emerged from bankruptcy under new leadership as Kmart Holdings Corporation, closed 300 more stores, and commenced a radical alteration of its image. By 2004, it engaged in its most high-profile acquisition through the merger with another long-ailing former powerhouse, Sears, Roebuck and Company. Both brands have continued operation under the name of Sears Holdings Corporation, while escalating the remodeling initiatives that had already been long underway.

But has it been enough? Business forecasters had long been predicting the demise of both companies. Just a few weeks ago I observed that the Sears wing is often the least successful portion of a mall, and Kmart continues to close underperforming stores now and then. Who still shops at either of these stores anyway? However, in spite of these grim predictions, the Sears Holding Company posted a narrower loss than expected at the end of 2009, particularly impressive given the sour economy, and it was mostly due to an increase in same-store sales at the Kmarts, for the first time in four years. Perhaps a flicker of life remains in this retail pair that seemed to have fallen from grace.

The best example of where Kmart has found its niche might be in this long-standing, high-profile location on Indianapolis’ south side, just 2.5 miles from downtown, across the street from an architectural oddity I also blogged about in the past. Thousands of commuters pass this branch of the chain every day, and it is close to some of the south side’s most intact working and lower-middle class neighborhoods, such as Garfield Park and South Village. With the departure of Target at Felbram Plaza last year, this Kmart also remains the only big box department store—with a full grocery—in a huge swath of land on the near south side. Until Shoppers World arrives, this Super Kmart Center has virtually no competitors. It’s not the only one in the region to survive, and even to thrive, where Target or Wal-Mart fear to tread. In the Part I of this essay, I also pointed yet another long-vacant Target, this time on the near west-side of town.




Thousands more people pass this branch than the one on the south side; it’s visible from I-465, the beltway interstate, yet the building hasn’t been occupied in a decade. But lo and behold, just a mile west on Washington Street, in a gritty area too close to the din of Indianapolis International Airport ever to be desirable real estate, is another long-running Super Kmart Center.

Demographic studies generally support the postulate that KMarts are more prevalent in lower income areas. Check out this map of 2000 poverty levels by Census tracts, provided by the local community information center SAVI:



A map showing all the Kmart outlets in metro Indianapolis reveals that the chain, amidst its relatively few remaining locations, is more likely to tackle inner-city or economically stagnant parts of town.

Five of the seven locations are adjacent to the I-465 Beltway, generally a harbinger of depressed values associated with inner-ring suburbia. Three of those five are within the beltway, and only two of the seven locations are in outlying suburbs, with none in the predominantly affluent north side of town. (Kmart used to have a branch in the increasingly posh Noblesville suburb, but it was retrofitted to a Sears Essentials.) Of the five beltway outlets, three are particularly noteworthy: the ones immediately south and west of downtown (featured in earlier photos) are in areas with higher than average levels of poverty, and the one to the northeast of downtown is in a particularly high poverty census tract.

Compare the distribution of Kmarts to the Target locations in the metro:


Only five of the twelve are close to the I-465 beltway, and only one is close enough to downtown that it might be in a potentially economically distressed area. But that one Target, part of the reconfigured Glendale Mall, is in a generally stable middle and upper-middle class part of town. In fact, not a single Target location is in a high poverty area. As for the major domo of all discount retailers, Wal-Mart’s pattern is a bit more idiosyncratic:

The yellow smileys represent the 15 Wal-Mart Supercenter locations. Of the four branches within the I-465 beltway, only one—to the northwest of downtown—is in a relatively high poverty area. The company is almost as sedulous as Target at avoiding economic distress. One complicating factor, however, are the presence of Wal-Mart Neighborhood Markets, indicated by the two green smileys. This relatively new introduction is a low-cost grocery store measuring about a quarter the size of the average Supercenter. They merit a completely different consideration because they are not a true discount department store; they are a mere grocery store and not real competitors to your typical Target or Kmart. However, they are under full ownership by Wal-Mart Corporation, and in metro Indianapolis, both of the two locations—the southside one and the northeastside branch—rest within census tracts with considerably above average poverty rates.

If the greater Indianapolis region is a fair indicator of what is normal (and, let’s face it, this popular test market is nearly always indicative of national norms), then it would appear that Target locations eschew poverty most routinely, while Kmarts are more likely to gravitate toward it. Wal-Mart ranks somewhere between the two. The near southside of Indianapolis, home of a Super Kmart Center close to downtown, may offer the most fertile ground for the long-struggling company, simply by virtue of Kmart’s willingness to cater to low and moderate income neighborhoods. Wal-Mart wins among all retailers in the country (and the world) for its omnipresence, and its brand image as a champion of working and lower-middle class values becomes manifest by the location of its branches. It avoids affluent areas such as the huge northern suburb of Carmel, which has only one, no doubt in large part because it is not highly welcomed there, but it makes little outreach to the impoverished inner city where its relentless cost-cutting may be welcomed among households with particularly low incomes. In short, the poorest citizens of Indianapolis generally have a long way to go to get to a Wal-Mart. Target, meanwhile, shrewdly markets itself as a stylish yet unpretentious alternative, with prices that may be low—if only by the standards of its often well-heeled clientele. The corporation overwhelmingly avoids high poverty areas.

The often discussed dichotomy between Target and Wal-Mart becomes particularly compelling in the few situations where the two literally sit cheek-by-jowl. Generally a good mile or two separates the two competitors, but the Carmel branches sit across the street from one another, and, as one local resident observed, “It’s like two completely different worlds.” While many Target-goers spurn Wal-Mart by claiming that Target offers equally good prices but a much more appealing atmosphere, such assertions don’t hold water when one considers that a completely different demographic frequents the Wal-Mart. Clearly the Wal-Mart shoppers don’t agree that Target has what they need at the right price, and they return to the store that offers what they perceive is a better deal—ambiance be damned.

This trinity of megamarts operates on a sociocultural pecking order that spatializes itself across any metropolitan region. Only Kmart’s story may appear inauspicious, though. Once a stalwart of the discount retail industry, it has in some ways conceded that it can no longer compete for the same constituency as Wal-Mart or Target, and through a sort of national attrition it has staked a broader claim in economically declining regions. It may be a wise survival tactic on the part of Kmart, since the other two competitors are chary to enter these markets, but in due time, if more exburban Kmarts close, these blue collar locations may be the last ones standing. And when a formerly powerful company’s identity becomes linked with areas that have declined economically (and may be losing population), such a brand is unlikely to inspire new shareholder confidence. The Hoover’s Overview of Kmart indicates that the company still identifies its chief competitors as Wal-Mart, Target, and Kohl’s. But Kmart’s only chance at long-term viability may be to accept its self-demotion, so that its peer retailers could be the extreme discounters that operate almost exclusively in economically declining areas—such as A. J. Wright, the aforementioned Shoppers World, opening a mile south of southside Indy’s Kmart at the Felbram Plaza.

The Battle of the Marts, Part I: In pocketbooks and (mostly) hearts.

The Indianapolis Business Journal recently announced that Felbram Plaza on the near south side had secured a new anchor tenant, in a space last occupied by Target. The tenant, Shoppers World, is a discount department store with one location in the region at the Lafayette Square Mall. These are the first two Shoppers Worlds in the Midwest; all other locations of this small chain are concentrated in the Mid-Atlantic.


This announcement is a boon to an inner-ring suburban area of town that has seen more than its share of businesses depart over the past few years. Frankly, I was surprised when I heard the news. After all, it was previously a Target—one of the supreme leaders of suburban big boxes—that last occupied this spot, and it probably survived far longer than anyone expected, in a neighborhood that had shed much of its middle class two decades prior. Even in these dusky photos, the painted-over labelscar is still largely visible.


Target’s inevitable closure of the branch raises some important questions about the much-loved chain. Unlike its chief competitor, Wal-Mart, Target has overwhelmingly escaped the ire of urban middle-class “progressives,” who routinely disparage the world’s single largest retailer for its low wages at long hours, meager benefits, stubborn resistance to employee attempts to unionize, and reliance on Asian sweatshop labor to keep its prices so low (it long ago reneged on its original “Made in America” pledge). Entire websites such as Wal-Mart Watch and Wake Up Wal-Mart or the 2005 documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price demonstrate the considerable energy, time, and money that labor unions and other advocacy groups have devoted to disseminating information on Wal-Mart’s exploitative workplace practices. The company, on average, receives multiple new lawsuits daily. According to a study by students at Columbia and Stanford Universities, in recent years, over 35% of Wal-Mart’s proposed openings have met with potent community resistance. Target, a chief competitor of Wal-Mart in every regard, avoids most if not all of this controversy. Perhaps because it abides by a more communitarian business model, because it offers better wages and benefits, because its growth strategy is less aggressive, because its product line clearly targets middle class consumers in metropolitan areas who are willing to pay a bit more for a stylish appearance, perhaps because the aisles and shelves in the stores just look better maintained—all of these factors, and many more, contribute to the fact that Target has become the widely respected (or at least minimally disliked) antithesis of the toxic Wal-Mart.

I find some of the Target-love a bit disingenuous. While I can concede that Target aims for and generally hits the bull’s-eye (target?) on the yuppie worldview, it continues to lack labor unions, and it somehow manages even to dodge one of the biggest cudgels frequently swung at Wal-Mart: that the mega-box effectively destroys communities by killing off the local retail. Even in small communities, the company has routinely abandoned its smaller, 1980s prototypes to build a larger Supercenter just a half-mile down the road. So after it has already shifted the center of retail activity away from the town center, it creates a second void through a new store. But is Target really that irreproachable in this regard? Felbram Plaza on the near south-side of Indianapolis would suggest otherwise. Target is just as happy to roll along with the decentralizing tide as Wal-Mart. Aside from Felbram Plaza, it has vacated store fronts in the inner-ring suburban regions of Indianapolis on the near east and near west sides as well. While the vacant Target on the near east side found a tenant in yet another discount furniture store, the near west side target still looks like this:


Hundreds of thousands of motorists along I-465 have seen this eyesore of a former Target, in its current condition for over a decade! The popular term for one of these long-vacant big boxes is a grayfield, a visual pollutant to complement the ecologically deleterious brownfields. Here on the west side, the Target Corporation sought greener pastures further out in the suburb of Plainfield. On the southside, it had already found two other flourishing locations before it put the kibosh on the one at Felbram Plaza. To a certain degree, Target is just behaving like any corporation in pursuit of its own best interest: if the net sales per square foot at the stores featured in the above photos was significantly lower than average (and, based on the income levels of the surrounding neighborhoods, the sales probably were quite low), it was only natural for the company to fold its underperforming branches. Besides, both locations were old, small, faded-looking, and poorly suited for an expansion or upgrade. Yet exurban coalitions often rally to attract a new Target location, sometimes even asserting it will boost property values, while simultaneously fighting new Wal-Marts, tooth and nail. Both companies effectively kill mom-and-pop stores through their ability to shove everything under one roof at bargain prices. Over the past few decades, both have followed inordinately successful business models, with rarely flagging quarterly increases in profits. But only Wal-Mart gets kicked around for doing so.

Part of it comes from a particularly nuanced interpretation of the old “location, location, location” maxim. When juxtaposed, the two Marts often compete fiercely as parallel discount superstores; Target usually wins the crowd with greater education and disposable incomes—after all, its prices are slightly higher. But Target also seems choosier with location: the corporation claims approximately 1700 stores, a pittance compared to Wal-Mart’s over 8000 retail units internationally and over 3600 in the US alone. From a drive across rural America one can surmise that if a community has over 10,000 people, Wal-Mart has probably scoped it for a location. If the nearest similarly sized settlement is more than 10 miles away, Wal-Mart has probably found a site in that town of 10,000 or more. They are omnipresent. Target is unlikely to break ground in communities under 40,000—in major metro areas, they pop up with about half the frequency of Wal-Marts. One person recently observed that a metro area will usually have as many Wal-Marts as it has public high schools. Yet Wal-Marts, for all their ubiquity, are rare in the nation’s largest, highest density big cities. Chicago has only one. San Francisco, Boston, and New York City have none. Conversely, Target has effectively assimilated into a number of urban settings, including a flagship store downtown in its home city of Minneapolis.

Why has Target successfully expanded into high density urban settings when Wal-Mart is scarcely visible? No doubt that some of Wal-Mart’s apprehension to enter urban centers comes from its clearly promoted business mission: “Saving people money so they can live better.” Land costs in big cities are often prohibitively expensive and incompatible with Wal-Mart’s relentless pursuit of rock-bottom prices. It is also harder for the company to assemble parcels large enough for its sprawling Supercenters in urban settings, and the lack of available surface pavement hinders the efficient, cheap unloading of merchandise from trucks. Conversely, Target’s slightly higher prices have enabled it to experiment routinely with more vertical configurations, with sites in Chicago’s South Loop (store stacked atop the parking lot), Washington DC’s Columbia Heights (two floors of a multi-tenant building filled with suburban big box stores), and a two-story Target in eminently suburban Metairie, Louisiana. Wal-Mart has ventured into vertical structures in a few select locations on the East and West Coast, but its identity remains wedded to the titanic suburban boxes with parking in front.

While land costs may contribute much to Wal-Mart’s avoidance of dense, urban settings, demographics also play a huge role in this sensitivity to location. The Columbia/Stanford report on opposition to Wal-Mart observed that only about one-third of all of the proposed Wal-Marts that face stringent community resistance end up successfully breaking ground—usually the execs at Wal-Mart surrender and look elsewhere to build. Powerful union organizers have successfully blocked the company’s entrance within city limits, but they alone cannot explain Wal-Mart’s struggles to expand into big cities, since the non-union Target Corporation has opened flourishing branches, even in places like Manhattan. The New York Times has cited the CEO of Wal-Mart, who observed that the urban, affluent New Yorkers/San Franciscans/Chicagoans serve as the greatest barrier to entry in these fashionable urban centers: “You have people who are just better than us and don’t want a Wal-Mart in their community.”

Perhaps the Wal-Mart leadership has shrewdly overplayed the cultural elitism of Manhattanites, turning the tables on the on a segment of the population who perceives itself to be champions of the working class, by reconfiguring the urban progressives within the socioeconomic context they have created; now they are the colossal snobs. Target undoubtedly provides a cleaner looking, more aesthetically pleasing environment than Wal-Mart in which to shop and work. But Target still sells cheaply made products from Asian sweatshops; the biggest difference is that its cheap products are designed by people like Michael Graves. As is often the case, hierarchies of collective taste affect corporate location decisions far more than mere infrastructure. All it takes is another scan of the responses to the Consumerist article mentioned earlier: it’s amazing how many rationalizing back flips people will perform in order to argue that Target is good and Wal-Mart bad, in an attempt to objectify their own personal preferences. But these taste hierarchies exert the powerful influence on land values that determine which parts of a metro exude fashionable urban chic (and are uniformly free of Wal-Marts), which are the blighted and depopulating inner city, and which are like Felbram Plaza on the near south side of Indy—a social and physical environment that is difficult to pin exactly, but clearly doesn’t work for either Target or Wal-Mart. Hopefully the new store, Shoppers World, will have better luck.

I’m sure to provoke with this posting; as always, comments are welcome. In Part II I will explore another high-profile discount mega-mart that may very well be carving its own niche by boldly venturing in to territory that Target and Wal-Mart shun. And I promise the photo series won't be so drab.

Discarded easels from the boardroom.

It should come as no surprise that a prolonged period of economic doldrums often fosters a collective hesitation. We’ve witnessed it for the past year with the sharp retreat of consumer spending coupled with job losses, in which the cause-effect nexus is just about as chicken-and-egg of a phenomenon as we’ll hopefully ever see. But it influences design as well: developers are far less willing to embark in bold, risky architecture when the economy is bad; in all likelihood, the banks won’t lend them the money. In short, any scarcity of cash flow is likely to slow the evolution of human landscapes: the churning energy of new construction may even stop dead in its tracks.

Detroit, no stranger to downturns, even when the rest of the national economy is often surging forward, offers a widespread cultural embalmment whose bifurcated consequences has made the city’s contemporary appearance seem that much more perverse. While the absence of job growth has frozen much of the downtown so that the architectural massing and "feel” of the city takes a visitor back to its 1950’s heyday, the lack of public stewardship over the years for these gilded-age relics has resulted in serious decrepitude. Neglect can only preserve for a limited time. Eventually, it will all implode, not unlike the way the great Hudson’s department store headquarters came down a decade ago—only much of it will happen without any further human intervention.

Until the city of Detroit is a permanent and consistent ruin—which hopefully will never be the case—one can try to look upon the most desolate parts of the city with a glass-half-full approach, seeing how subtle little blips in popular culture survive when no economic incentive exists to extirpate and replace it. Not too far from the central Grand Circus Park is the sign for what appears to be a recently closed Quiznos:



By now, everybody is at least aware of the nation’s second largest fast-food sandwich chain (behind the long-reigning champ Subway), but what, aside from the yellowed, faded sign, makes this particular franchise seem like such a time warp? The Wikipedia article features images of the original location of this Denver based chain—

—as well as the current design:

This oddity in downtown Detroit fits somewhere in the middle chronologically; I can find little other evidence on the Web of when or where the company ever used this style for the label—just one little remnant on Brands of the World. Clearly it didn’t catch on, and apparently the Quiznos’ leadership determined that a franchise in Detroit was not worth enforcing the update. But it still offers hints at the rationale behind the evolving logo, supplemented by some very modest research.

Contrary to popular belief, Quiznos was never a family establishment that made it big. It began as the creatively titled Sandwich World in an old Sinclair gas station. The new ownership who bought the operation in 1980 determined that Q and Z are the least used letters in naming, so a word that incorporated them both would strike the public as distinctive. No doubt the application of the possessive to the word endowed it with more of a feel of a last name—a sandwich shop run by Mr. and Ms. Quizno—helping instill the notion that the restaurant was a grassroots endeavor gone global due to its huge success in its original location.

The 3500-plus shops in over a dozen countries prove that the scheme paid off. But it is this vague middle-period logo, carefully preserved in an ailing city with more than its share of vintage signs, which offers a potential window into the mind of Rick Schaden, the original franchiser—or at least his marketing advisers. I’m hardly a marketing genius, but I can see where the original naming comes into play. Note that the two favored letters—the Q and the Z—feature most prominently: first the endpoint of the Q is stretched to form a race track around the majority of the title. And the Z‘s endpoint stretches to meet with the S—also an important letter because it signifies the possessive. Lastly, the large apostrophe cuts into the race track, making it stand out and drawing further attention to the possessive which helps suggest that this idiosyncratic nonsense word is a last name.

The contemporary logo suggests resignation. Fewer serifs make it sleeker and more modern, and it smartly avoids underlining the “no” in the name, which the ill-fated Detroit incarnation did…twice! The Quiznos company is ubiquitous, so it no longer needs to announce that it sells sub sandwiches on its signs, though of course it still proclaims the “TOASTY!” quality that originally distinguished the brand. The company also dropped the apostrophe, possibly out of a realization that the cryptic name reference is a no-longer-necessary red herring; one shrewd observer recognized that the apostrophe-s combination is rarely used in other languages to indicate possessive, so the company leadership may have hoped to internationalize the brand.

Much ado about nothing. But a further exploration of Detroit’s many forgotten nooks—those, of course, which haven’t been demolished—is likely to turn up other marketing relics of companies that have advanced more confidently into the Information Age than the Motor City.

Country Chic, Part II – Transforming Rural Character into a Hot Commodity.

In part one of this essay, I explored how the successful business, Trader’s Point Creamery, has become an archetype for the character of the community of Trader’s Point, a large spread of rolling wooded countryside still sitting squarely within Indianapolis city limits. This is a part of the city that, while affluent, has relinquished lot of its attractiveness to the suburbs, where the cost of living is lower but public services are often superior. Trader’s Point is certainly not an urban neighborhood, but it also isn’t really suburban or even exurban in character. What is it about the area makes a business like the Creamery so popular, even as homes here often remain on the market far longer than they would immediately outside of Marion County?

Trader’s Point Creamery, by emphasizing its 100% organic, grass-fed product line, has appealed to the well-heeled, educated, fundamentally urban populace nearby that defies the farm’s rural surroundings. The area’s idyllic setting is more distinctive than it otherwise might be, precisely because it sits in the boundaries of a large city. Though a dairy farm could easily occupy a plot of land anywhere in Indiana, the affluent clientele nearby has enhanced the likelihood of the Creamery’s success. In spite of the idyllic setting of country estates nestled on gentle slopes, Trader’s Point rests in a part of Indianapolis that continually loses out to neighboring suburbs such as Zionsville, where the school system has been ranked among the top ten in the nation.

Having scrutinized Trader’s Point carefully enough, I now can boldly make what may seem to be my flimsiest association yet: a comparison to the state of Vermont. Only a few stretches of Indiana—particularly those in the southwest part of the state—can claim the majestic topography that pervades in the Green Mountain State. Though a bit of an anomaly in central Indiana, an enterprise such as Trader’s Point Creamery would fit in perfectly in New England’s most landlocked corner. Vermont operates like a statewide rural heritage corridor, from its outlawing of billboards along interstates to its numerous microfarms tucked in the valleys amidst muscular hills. Think of all the food products that come from Vermont. Aside from the most high profile, such as Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, the state boasts national recognition in Woodchuck Cider, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, and Cabot Creamery (“America’s Best Cheddar”), let alone all the roadside maple syrup stands. The state’s prominence as an exporter of specialty agriculture products seems all the more impressive when one considers that: 1) the state of Vermont’s population is less than the city of Indianapolis; and 2) most of the land of this sixth smallest state is horrible for growing things. Part of the reason Vermont’s hills seem so pristine is that the tree canopy conceals the remnants of abandoned farms from centuries ago, when the first New England settlers gave up on the land after learning about the fecund soils in the Midwest. A number of Indiana farmers can claim New England ancestry.

So how did Vermont achieve such a firm footing in the specialty foods market? A trip to one of the many picture-perfect towns in the state, such as Brattleboro, offers more than a hint. I haven’t come across any evidence that would suggest that Vermont has a particularly stronger Main Street Association than other states, but you would certainly think it from a visit. A disproportionate number of these towns are tourist magnets, with well-preserved architecture along the Main Streets that host a variety of shops, nearly all of which could pass as “eclectic local retail”. Brattleboro, a town of 12,000 (and the seventh largest in the state!) featured, upon my last visit, numerous art galleries, an Indian restaurant, a vendor of hemp products, and a Marxist bookstore. No, it’s not a college town. It’s also not unique to Brattleboro.

The state capital, Montpelier, is an even smaller community of only about 8,000 people—the smallest state capital in the country. No doubt it attracts a well-educated work force through the demand for skilled government jobs, but plenty of other state capitals have the same requirements, yet they cannot boast such an impeccable and visibly posh downtown: The town—calling it a city would be inaccurate under any measurement, even if it legally is one—proudly claims itself as the only state capital in the nation without a McDonald’s. I cannot recall seeing any national chains along the main street, in fact. Downtown would probably embody the quaint New England archetype, except that most places one thinks of as quaint lack Montpelier’s undercurrent of political subversion:
I’ll confess that some of this was a bit too precious for me. Is it realistic for a town this small to have street musicians, a film festival, a transit authority, and a food cooperative? Clearly it is in Vermont. (I’ll concede that Montpelier is part of the larger Montpelier-Barre Micropolitan Area of about 50,000 people, and that Barre, a similarly sized town 5 miles away, is nowhere near as prosperous, but most of the people are spread far from these two nuclei. And population within Montpelier city limits is inconceivably urbane.)



With a town like Montpelier as its capital, it should come as no surprise that Vermont’s largest city is paradise for bourgeois bohemians.
Under 40,000 people, Burlington is very much a college town, hosting the flagship campus of the University of Vermont, among others. Lake Champlain in the background of the above photo provides a clear demarcation of the western edge of town, from a variety of vantage points. My impression during my brief visit was that the city’s vibrancy betrayed its size; one could hardly tell it was so small from how many people one might see out on a Saturday morning. It remains one of the few cities that can boast a successful, fully pedestrianized Main Street. And of course such a town wouldn’t be complete without its bustling weekend farmers’ market:


This survey of Vermont is about as superficial as they come, and it admittedly leaves out some of the grittier parts: St. Johnsbury has not enjoyed the prosperity of other communities its size in the state; nor has the aforementioned Barre; and Rutland, from what I hear, has seen better days. But for an overwhelmingly rural state, in which the largest city is the smallest large city out of all fifty, Vermont possesses a streak of worldiness normally associated with urban living—and its residents have shown an uncanny ability to expand the prominence of its limited agricultural output well beyond its modest borders.


An equally facile survey of the state’s recent history provides more than enough evidence to explain how it got this way. Always the most rural state in New England, it is also among the few states to have functioned as an independent sovereign government for some time prior to admission in the union. Its population remained basically unchanging, averaging around 350,000 inhabitants, from around 1900 until 1960. Only in the swinging sixties did the state blossom in growth, reaching 600,000 shortly before the new century. More recent population estimates suggests that the growth rate has leveled off considerably. While Vermont has always allied itself with independent parties to a greater degree than most states, its national identity overwhelmingly aligned with the Republicans throughout most of the 20th century—until the population boom. In 1992, the state supported Democrat Bill Clinton (for the first time since Lyndon Johnson’s sweeping national defeat of Barry Goldwater) and it has edged further toward Democrats ever since, giving President Obama one of his strongest winning margins in the country.


It hardly takes a rocket scientist to deduce that the steady stream of newcomers to Vermont from 1960 to 1990 have influenced the state’s political culture. Many affluent New Yorkers and Bostonians, seeking a rural alternative to crime and urban gridlock, found respite in Vemont’s inexpensive verdure and settled permanently in and around the state’s numerous depressed mill towns. They brought with them prestigious degrees, hefty disposable incomes, and urban communitarianism. No doubt other NYC expatriates settled in the remote corners of upstate New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Maine. But only Vermont was so sparsely populated that a gain of 250,000 could virtually double the state’s population and formidably alter its political leanings. The state has remained racially homogeneous but has swayed its legislature toward a culture that regulates urban growth strongly while emphasizing the aesthetic integrity of its towns and small cities. The result is a state with a higher cost of living than one might expect for so little industry, but a fairly consistent identity of mountainous countryside interspersed with manicured dairy farms and tidy fields amidst the few patches of arable land.

What, one may ask, does all of this have to do with Trader’s Point in Indianapolis? Loosely speaking, Trader’s Point is the Vermont of the Indianapolis metro. Its current character is largely fueled by an urban affluent diaspora that has instilled it with a blend of prosperous farmsteads and estates, where the wealth of the proprietors largely depends on their proximity to a larger urban market. This fusion of rural and urban elite undoubtedly has helped spawn a Rural Preservation District, and it affirms the identity of a smart boutique agribusiness such as Trader’s Point Creamery. One could even argue that the character of a pristine Vermont town finds a Midwest incarnation in the picturesque suburb of Zionsville, outside Indianapolis limits immediately to the north of Trader’s Point.

By most other metrics, an analogy between Trader’s Point and Vermont is a stretch, and others could justifiably refute my argument. Vermont is a state with political autonomy, made up of multiple jurisdictions that also enjoy relative independence. Conversely, Trader’s Point has no political identity outside of the Rural Historic District and an association of neighborhoods, which proffers only a small amount of authority to community’s residents. But perhaps the biggest difference between the two is the racial and ethnic composition: Vermont to this day remains overwhelmingly white, with the race comprising almost 96% of the population according to recent Census estimates. Conversely, Trader’s Point sits within Pike Township, the northwestern corner of Indianapolis. Once a bastion of white affluence, Pike’s minority presence is significant and growing. The census tract that comprises the majority of Trader’s Point is less than 80% white, while the more densely settled southern half of the township (south of Trader’s Point) is closer to 50% minority, with a growing presence of middle and upper-middle class African Americans, Latinos, and southeast Asians, as well as recent Burmese refugees from the Karen and Chin ethnic groups. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan School District of Pike Township has shown evidence in recent years of a strained response to the influx of minorities and foreign-born: though the township as a whole is still majority white, the school district is not. Pike High School, once as homogeneous as the district it served, now consists of over 80% racial minorities.

With that big of a discrepancy between the racial composition of Pike Township (over 50% white) and the student body of its flagship public school (only 18% white), something is clearly amiss. A little over a decade ago, I knew people who enrolled at the school at a time when it was about 50% white; clearly that number has plunged since then. Without investigating individual student samples, one can nonetheless easily speculate that two things are happening: the white families in Traders Point and throughout Pike Township are sending their kids to private schools, or they are finding ways to “cheat” the catchment areas by placing their children’s residential address with a grandparent or cousin, so that the kids can enroll in one of the neighboring districts with superlative academic records. (Most surrounding districts—Washington Township in Indianapolis, Zionsville, Brownsburg, or Carmel—are among the top ranked in the state, if not the nation.) While it is possible that sheer racial prejudice alone is diverting many of the white families away from Pike Township schools, it is equally likely that the school’s resources or under duress due to a growing non-English speaking population, or from less affluent families in the southern part of the township—which does have some visible poverty—who may have lower academic aspirations, thereby lowering the graduation rates and mean test scores for district. Meanwhile, families with the wherewithal to send their kids to superior schools nearby will not hesitate to do so.

Thus, Trader’s Point and Pike Township are faced with a predicament. Middle and upper-middle class white residents have lost faith in the school district, which, as I have blogged about before, exerts an inordinate impact on the desirability of a location . Pike Township could find its preeminence as a wealthy corner of Indianapolis eroding if the neighboring suburbs offer more or less a similar way of life with the primary difference being in the perceived quality of the schools. Chances are strong that the township’s racial shift, from approximately 90% white in the 1970s to barely 50% today, derives less from minorities moving into new housing developments than from whites leaving the area altogether. Diversity in and of itself should not be a problem—and most likely isn’t a problem to most of the residents of Trader’s Point—but declining schools don’t impel new families with high incomes to move there, and a sour reputation can lower property values, thereby resulting in an overall diminution of the tax base. The reputation of Pike Township public schools is the key concern here.


That’s where businesses like Trader’s Point Creamery can prove far more critical than their proprietors ever had intended. The dairy farm has galvanized the identity of Trader’s Point for its residents and the outside community, as well as organic yogurt aficionados across the nation. What the surrounding public could easily perceive as mundane semi-rural outskirts now has a discernible name, and, thanks to last year’s passage of the Traders Point Rural Historic District, identifiable boundaries. Its rolling hills and abundant tree canopy—about a tenth of Pike Township comprises the over 5000-acre Eagle Creek Park—could almost place it somewhere in southern Vermont (okay, so it’s not quite that hilly), but it rests in the limits of a large city. The posh rural character that some might criticize as sprawl may be one of Trader’s Point’s saving graces—with the presence of other specialty farms or trades that cater to an affluent, educated, eco-friendly clientele, the community may be able to overcome the stigma of a floundering school district by adapting to its growing diversity so that it remains a broadly attractive place to live, perhaps even because of its diversity. Clearly it’s not the same as every patch of rural Indiana; its far too multicultural for that. I find it a shame that the Creamery lists Zionsville as its mailing address on the website, even though it’s clearly in Indianapolis. Perhaps the Zionsville post office is closer, but I can’t help but think that even the folks at the Creamery might see Zionsville as a more “sellable” location than Indianapolis with its inner-city poverty, even though Trader’s Point is far removed from it all.

My recommendation here no doubt demonstrates the wobbliness of my Trader’s Point-Vermont analogy. Vermont as a state is hardly affiliated with any major city beyond the New Yorkers’ vacation or retirement homes, and even as it has become the nation’s most clearly identifiable bohemioracy, it has not in general needed to address racial and ethnic diversity. (The biggest ethnic tension in Vermont, from what I hear, is the political disharmony between the tenth-generation Vermonters of rural sensibilities, and the somewhat sneering cosmopolitanism of the urban newcomers. But both groups are white.) However, what Vermont has achieved through its cheeses, syrups, coffee roasters, and highest craft-brewery-per-capita ranking of any state in the nation is to transform its specialized agriculture into an engine for tourism and cultural consumerism. One friend of mine claimed that several other organic goods vendors have co-opted Vermont as a brand, dishonestly claiming to come from the state because it will better sell to the trendy white liberals than if it came from, say, Kansas.

And that’s where Vermont’s success translates to a creative dead-end for both Indiana and the Midwest at large. Our farm acreage is vaster than anything New England can hope for. Removing Maine, the remaining five states of New England (Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts) are smaller than Indiana as a whole, and Indiana is the smallest contiguous state west of the Appalachians! Clearly the Midwest is known for its superlative farmland, and some of the states have been able to forge an identity for an agricultural export or two: Wisconsin remains America’s Dairyland (with cheese shops around every corner); Nebraska’s meatpacking centered around Omaha Steaks has elevated it to a specialty good beyond the titanic presence of Con-Agra; and Indiana has quietly asserted itself as the epicenter of popcorn. But the general perspective both Midwesterns and the nation have of their landscape is endless fields of one or two crops. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa suffer a just stereotype of corn, corn, corn, soybeans, corn, soybeans, corn. Hardly the same level of eclectic output one sees coming from tiny little Vermont. I’m hesitant to assert that federal agriculture subsidies contribute to this, because I’m not well-versed enough in how they fully operate. However, this chart indicates that the Midwest receives the lion’s share. And these subsidies surely help explain why nearly a fifth of the country is devoted to cornfields, when a single state’s crop alone could likely feed most of the nation, if not the world. Could such subsidies stifle the creativity of Midwestern farmers, reducing them to churning out mind-numbering surpluses of corn at the expense of more innovative marketable goods? Perhaps one of the Midwest states will find a way to turn high-fructose corn syrup into a prestigious gourmet item, the way Ben and Jerry can now charge $5 for a cone. Or maybe that can just get Ben and Jerry to fill their Cherry Garcia with corn syrup. No thanks.

Vermont is replete with the likes of Trader’s Point Creamery. If the state’s relatively modest capacity for agribusiness translates to a smaller net recipient of federal farm subsidies, the low dependence on federal aid may help unleash the sort of creativity that makes it the epicenter of boutique organic farming. Clearly the nation cannot depend on Vermont alone for sustenance, but Vermont can certainly use its hyped-up pastoralism to bring in the tourists, even when at least 30 other states have greater agricultural capacity. The culture that supports places like Trader’s Point Creamery may be abundant in Vermont, and I wouldn’t begin to suggest that Indiana should try to mimic the state—I’m not trying to champion or condemn Vermont’s politics and demographics. But ingenuity that turned Vermont’s dying mills and struggling dairy farms into a stylish commodity is the same force that inspires the good folks at Trader’s Point Creamery. A little bit more of that élan could breathe new life into Midwest rural culture, or a deceptively unique place like Trader’s Point.

Country Chic, Part I – When Farming Becomes Fashionable.

I’ve discussed recently the challenges that certain suburban areas within Indianapolis city limits are facing at attracting newcomers. Essentially the city of Indianapolis consists of nine townships, with Center Township holding the lion’s share of historic neighborhoods and an infrastructure that one might generally perceive as “urban”, as well as much of the most pervasive inner-city poverty. The other eight townships, like the perimeter squares on a tic-tac-toe board, are the “collar townships” and are, by and large, suburban in character. However, they have increasingly lost their appeal to the newer, lower taxed, poverty-free suburban areas that fall outside of Indianapolis city limits, in neighboring counties such as Hamilton, Hendricks, and Johnson. These latter counties host the fast-growing suburbs of Fishers, Carmel, Plainfield, and Greenwood, among others. Meanwhile, the eight collar townships in Indianapolis suffer from higher taxes, school systems with measurably weaker statistics, costly insurance premiums, and increasing levels of crime, while failing to benefit from the historic character or urban appeal that some of the gentrifying neighborhoods in central Indianapolis can boast. Even the close proximity to downtown doesn’t always offer bragging rights: though downtown Indianapolis is more vibrant and densely populated than ever, it long ago lost its primacy as the focal point for office space. Many of the metro’s primary white-collar jobs are scattered throughout the north side and suburban areas of the city. In short, the collar townships are losing all of their competitive advantages. What can they do to remain viable places to live?


A humble little business on the northwest side of the city has inspired me to go out on a limb with this highly speculative post. I first featured Trader’s Point Creamery on an earlier blog post when I interviewed the business about why it chose not to operate as a vendor at the Indianapolis City Market. Its location among the rolling hills of the far northwest corner of Marion County would appear to the unacquainted visitor to seem bucolic and agrarian. But the Creamery rests within the Indianapolis city limits, and it has taken admirable advantage of the area’s topography, demographics, and settlement patterns to find a niche that is likely to support its success for years to come. And its success is unquestionable: since its establishment as a quiet organic dairy farm around 2002 and 2003, its products have expanded throughout Indiana and Chicagoland to 16 states across the Midwest, South, and Northeast. The cheese and yogurt have won recurring national awards, and now the farm offers regular tours as well as a full-scale restaurant called The Loft with rotating menus. No doubt the dedication and business acumen of its owners has played a pivotal role, but the location itself couldn’t have hurt.

The picturesque drive northward along Moore Road toward the Creamery rests in Pike Township, one of the aforementioned “collar townships” of Marion County. The business derives its name from the rural settlement Trader’s Point, which generally refers to the broad triangle of land, at least 5 square miles in area, framed by three major limited-access roads: Interstate 65, I-465, and I-865. The community has no discernible commercial hub; it remains dominated by farms, large-lot subdivisions, and country estates. With the exception of a commercial/corporate plaza at the interchange of I-465 and 71st Street in the far southeast corner of Trader’s Point (too far from the center to be called the heart of the community), the area is almost exclusively residential. Though long-known by many local residents for its history as a point of commerce between 19th century settlers and Miami Indians, only in recent years have advocates attempted to reveal the community to the eyes of the greater Indianapolis metro. The Creamery has helped elevate Trader’s Point to a national level, at least among dairy enthusiasts. A trip to the grounds provides ample evidence of how much the location matters:


From the gravel drive to the weathered wood façade of the structures, nothing about the sprawling 320 acres would suggest that it occupies a sparse corner of this city of 800,000 inhabitants. The topography of the grounds effectively put the pasture on display while concealing any neighbors, giving the picnic area below the semblance of pastoral serenity:
Inside the tiny storefront, a thumbtack-filled map shows visitors coming from nearly all 50 states; this place has a reputation.

On a gloomy afternoon in the late fall, The Loft restaurant upstairs is packed with a lunchtime crowd.


Lest I seem like a promotional mouthpiece for Trader’s Point Creamery, I will shift the focus away from the establishment back toward its surroundings. Travel just 500 feet up Moore Road to the north, and you are in the thick of the woods.

Trader’s Point Creamery is not an anomaly within this part of Indianapolis; it blends right in. For all the talk about densifying urban centers, a business such as this could not easily prosper if this part of the city were thickly covered with urban or suburban-style development. Trader’s Point is not a small-town enclave engulfed by the broader city, like the places referenced in my post from last week/last year. It’s not part of the commercialized suburbia one can find just a few miles away in almost any direction, nor is there enough nascent development to make it convincingly exurban. It’s rural. And apparently, its citizens have every intention to keep it that way: just a few months ago, a broad swath of 2,600 acres, straddling Indianapolis and Boone County to the north, was admitted to the National Register of Historic Places, as both the Traders Point Eagle Creek and Traders Point Hunt Rural Historic Districts (severed in two by I-865). Since it is not an official legislative act of farmland preservation, time well tell whether the designation effectively protects the area from encroaching development. Regardless of the future of Trader’s Point, it helps to affirm the character upon which the Creamery has capitalized.

However, not all that transpires in this community reflects pastoralism. A drive through Trader’s Point might initially seem like any other agrarian part of America, but the whiff of affluence should be a dead giveaway. Some might call them McMansions, but much of the housing in Trader’s Point has stood long before such a label existed. Income levels here are generally high, with median household earnings at $85,093 for the primary census tract in 2000; with 57.2% of people over 25 years possessing at least a bachelor’s degree, educational levels are commensurate with the high incomes. Trader’s Point Creamery has a built-in base of affluence for its 100%-organic, grass-fed dairy products, or the eclectic tapas it serves upstairs at The Loft: the incomes and education levels of its typical consumer base necessitates the proximity of a major employment center characteristic of a large city. A business such as Trader’s Point Creamery might succeed elsewhere in Indiana far removed from a city due to grocery outlets and online sales, but it wouldn’t pack its restaurant at lunchtime on a weekday. Without interviewing a single patron of the Creamery, I can’t help but suspect that the demographics that support this establishment largely fit the mold of “bourgeois bohemians” that David Brooks affectionately skewered in his Bobos in Paradise: environmentally minded folks with a hefty disposable income and a strong urban affiliation. Such is the defining character of the Trader’s Point community within the township of Pike in the much larger city of Indianapolis.

At the eleventh hour (literally!), and for fear of this getting too verbose, I have decided to include the second half of this essay at a later post. Stay tuned as I speculate how the rural character in this deceptively fragmented part of Indianapolis can work to the city’s widespread economic advantage.