Indiana Avenue: A District and What Replaced It

by bam

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on Indiana Avenue in Indianapolis: the Black business and cultural corridor that held the Madam C.J. Walker Building, a jazz scene with national reach, and dozens of Green Book listed businesses, and the documented decisions that removed most of it. This is the PILOT of the route-course series, and it applies a method rather than telling a story. The prerequisite course, The Green Book: How to Read a Route, teaches you to read a listing, chain a route, and research an address forward; this course takes that method to one nine-block corridor and asks the harder question: who decided, under which instrument, on what record. You will learn the actual tools of the decision (the blight designation, eminent domain, the highway alignment, a university assembling land, and the redrawing of a city's boundary in the 1970 Unigov consolidation), test a proposed historical argument against a chronology and watch part of it fail, look up a real parcel in Marion County's own records, find the plan currently being written for this ground, and write a piece of grounded nonfiction about it. A 360 tour of the corridor is planned and will be added to the Now section when it is captured.