Two Racetracks

by bam

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on the two racetracks of Indianapolis and the civic question that runs between them: who is admitted to a sport, and what gets built alongside when they are not? Five miles apart sit a 2.5-mile oval that opened in 1909, was paved with 3.2 million bricks, became a National Historic Landmark in 1987 and still runs the race it was built for, and a one-mile dirt oval that opened with the state fairgrounds in 1892, held the largest annually staged Black sporting event in America between 1924 and 1936, and was converted in 2019 to a crushed-limestone harness training surface and parking. Between 1924 and 1936 the Colored Speedway Association ran the Gold and Glory Sweepstakes on that dirt mile, because the premier race would not admit Black drivers; the first Black driver started the Indianapolis 500 in 1991, eighty years and seventy-five runnings after the first. This course does not repeat the story it inherited. It goes looking for the written rule that is supposed to sit under it, reports that it could not find one, and teaches the far more useful thing it found instead: how a license, an entry form, a club membership and a private gate can do the work of a rule while leaving almost no record. You will learn what an oval does to a farm and a town, why the Town of Speedway is one of the four places the 1970 Unigov consolidation left alone, who governs each of these two grounds today (one is private property, one is a state body corporate and politic, one is a town with its own redevelopment commission chartered to eliminate blight), test a claim against the record and watch part of it fail, look up a real parcel and a real public meeting, and write one piece of grounded nonfiction. Prerequisites: The Green Book: How to Read a Route (the method) and Indiana Avenue: A District and What Replaced It (course 1, the same metro and the same instruments). A 360 tour of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is planned and will be added to the Now section when its embed URL exists.