miketoronto
Apr 7, 2007, 1:48 AM
The following article is from
http://indyinsights.typepad.com/indy_insights/2006/12/enquirering_min.html
It is a great article about the revival of downtown Indianapolis. Indianapolis is not talked alot here. But it really is a success when it comes to bringing life back to the centre.
And for information on Indianapolis' reviving downtown and inner city cultural areas, check out the following link. It is done very well.
http://www.discoverculturaldistricts.com/
For videos on the great things downtown check out
http://web.bsu.edu/capic/culturalindy/video/wholesale.html
http://www.indydt.com/images/circlephoto.gif
---------------
Enquirer-ing Minds Pick Indy Over Cincy
In a prelude to tonight’s Monday Night Football matchup between the Colts and Cincinnati Bengals, the Cincinnati Enquirer dispatched business writer Jon Newberry to Indy to detail comparisons.
Not of the two football teams. Of the two downtowns.
It appears Indy is the big winner. If only the Colts fare as well.
Here's the story:
INDIANAPOLIS - Hundreds of specialty retailers, restaurants and clubs. Dozens of theaters, museums, parks and sports venues. More than 5,000 hotel rooms. A huge convention center that's being expanded - again. Nearly 10,000 single-family homes, condos and apartments. A supermarket.
That's not just a wish list for downtown Cincinnati; it's what downtown Indianapolis already has.
Ten years after its $319 million Circle Centre shopping mall opened, downtown Indianapolis has a multitude of downtown workers, shoppers, residents and out-of-town visitors who bring these places to life and keep them in business.
That success comes from years of planning combined with billions in public and private money invested in a range of projects that feed on each other and the city's natural assets.
Like Cincinnati, those assets include a Midwest location attractive to national conventions. In Indy, a large convention center accommodates more than one major event at a time. Conventioneers patronize hotels, restaurants and stores.
"It's amazing. You get the big-city feel, but it's not like Chicago or New York. It's more homey," said Heather Sperry, a student at nearby Butler University.
Sperry and three friends were taking time off from studying to see Monument Circle in its holiday splendor last week. The women said they felt safe downtown, at least on well-lit Monument Circle, although at 10 o'clock on a cool Monday night there wasn't much activity.
Across the street, the Parisian department store at Circle Centre had just closed for the night. The four-story enclosed mall spans two downtown blocks and contains more than 100 shops, with Nordstrom at the other end.
The mall is connected by an extensive skywalk system to the 1.9 million-square-foot Indianapolis Convention Center and RCA Dome complex, where the hometown Colts will play the Bengals tonight.
Bengals fans flowing into town for tonight's game will find a city from which their hometown could learn a bit about downtown development, though growth here has come in fits and starts.
As Cincinnati winds up its $42 million renovation of its downtown centerpiece, Fountain Square, and moves slowly forward with a new developer on the riverfront Banks project, Indianapolis provides one nearby model for creating vitality in the urban core.
Compared with downtown Cincinnati's retail scene, Circle Centre is thriving, although according to annual reports filed with the city, vacancies rose and operating profits fell in 2005, both to their worst levels in five years.
But all around the mall, restaurants and nightclubs are open late into the night, with neon signs lighting Meridian Street from the circle to the Slippery Noodle blues club - which bills itself as Indiana's oldest bar - five blocks away on South Street.
National chains including Hard Rock Café, Buca di Beppo and Palomino join locally owned eateries such as St. Elmo Steak House and the renowned Shapiro's Delicatessen among more than 200 restaurants and bars downtown.
PLACES TO WORK AND LIVE
There's much more to downtown Indianapolis than the mall and the convention center. It also has Indiana's state capital, a big-city zoo, the 30,000-student campus of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, a world-class medical research-and-hospital complex and several major corporate headquarters.
The latter include pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co. and mall developer Simon Property Group Inc., which operates Circle Centre Mall and just moved into its new $55 million headquarters tower just south of the State Capitol.
But what makes this downtown so different from Cincinnati and most other similar-size U.S. cities, besides all the places to eat, drink and shop, is that there also are thousands of places to live.
Downtown - encompassing 6.5 square miles by the official definition that includes the IUPUI campus - has about 20,000 residents in several distinct neighborhoods or districts. Newly built and under-construction condominium and apartment projects - mostly townhouses and three- to four-story buildings - are scattered all over the northern half of downtown within a mile of Monument Circle.
Terry Sweeney, vice president for real estate development at Indianapolis Downtown Inc., said the growth and prosperity of the city's core has been a result of a civic-corporate partnership that goes back to the 1970s. That includes the development of Circle Centre, which opened in 1995 at a cost of $320 million, including $187 million in government-issued bonds and $75 million invested by 19 local corporations.
Those same corporations later funded much of the $183 million cost of Conseco Fieldhouse, the downtown home of the NBA's Indiana Pacers that opened in 1999, where the University of Cincinnati Bearcats played the Ohio State Buckeyes on Saturday."That is a microcosm of what goes on," Sweeney said.
Another catalyst for all the changes here was a tax ruling decades ago that ordered the Lilly Endowment, a foundation annually funded by Eli Lilly and Co., to start spending more of its money, said Ralph Gray, a retired IUPUI history professor. Downtown Indianapolis has been a major beneficiary of that largesse.
"They talk about the public-private collaboration," he said. "That's been the key."
Indianapolis, with a metro government that encompasses all of Marion County, has been an aggressive pump-primer to build convention business and establish itself as the amateur sports capital of the world. Most recently, it took an 8 percent equity stake in a super-luxury Conrad Hilton hotel that opened this year.
The city has found that its convention center, already at more than 400,000 square feet of exhibit space, isn't big enough: It awaits yet another expansion that will nearly double its size.
The $500 million Lucas Oil Stadium, the future home of the Colts, is being built a block south of the RCA Dome, which will be torn down to expand the convention center.
DEMAND FOR HOUSING
The recent upsurge in downtown residential development has been market driven, with no blanket public incentives to subsidize developers or buyers. Any public incentives are granted on a case-by-case basis, Sweeney said.
"Everything's right on your doorstep. That's what's driving demand," he said of the housing boom that added 2,400 units downtown between 1995 and 2005. Forty-five active projects should add another 1,750 units by 2010, he said.
Not every project has been a slam dunk. One Market Square, a proposed $100 million, 31-story condo tower that was supposed to be built on the former site of Market Square Arena, stalled when financing dried up after slow upfront sales. Three blocks east of Monument Circle, the site is now being used as a parking lot while the city mulls its options and talks to developers.
'I LIKE IT NOW'
At the Rathskellar Restaurant in the historic Athenaeum building, Talha Uzun had come downtown for a meeting of the Nationalities Council of Indiana Inc., a group that celebrates the area's ethnic diversity. The Athenaeum is a 19th century theater, now home to the American Cabaret Theatre, in the Massachusetts Avenue (known locally as "Mass Ave") arts and theater district.
Uzun, 29, works and lives in the northern suburbs but comes downtown often on business and to shop. He likens downtown Indianapolis, with its wide avenues, museums and monuments, to Washington, D.C., which is where he relocated from about two years ago.
"When I first came here I was seriously bored," said Uzun. "I like it now."
http://indyinsights.typepad.com/indy_insights/2006/12/enquirering_min.html
It is a great article about the revival of downtown Indianapolis. Indianapolis is not talked alot here. But it really is a success when it comes to bringing life back to the centre.
And for information on Indianapolis' reviving downtown and inner city cultural areas, check out the following link. It is done very well.
http://www.discoverculturaldistricts.com/
For videos on the great things downtown check out
http://web.bsu.edu/capic/culturalindy/video/wholesale.html
http://www.indydt.com/images/circlephoto.gif
---------------
Enquirer-ing Minds Pick Indy Over Cincy
In a prelude to tonight’s Monday Night Football matchup between the Colts and Cincinnati Bengals, the Cincinnati Enquirer dispatched business writer Jon Newberry to Indy to detail comparisons.
Not of the two football teams. Of the two downtowns.
It appears Indy is the big winner. If only the Colts fare as well.
Here's the story:
INDIANAPOLIS - Hundreds of specialty retailers, restaurants and clubs. Dozens of theaters, museums, parks and sports venues. More than 5,000 hotel rooms. A huge convention center that's being expanded - again. Nearly 10,000 single-family homes, condos and apartments. A supermarket.
That's not just a wish list for downtown Cincinnati; it's what downtown Indianapolis already has.
Ten years after its $319 million Circle Centre shopping mall opened, downtown Indianapolis has a multitude of downtown workers, shoppers, residents and out-of-town visitors who bring these places to life and keep them in business.
That success comes from years of planning combined with billions in public and private money invested in a range of projects that feed on each other and the city's natural assets.
Like Cincinnati, those assets include a Midwest location attractive to national conventions. In Indy, a large convention center accommodates more than one major event at a time. Conventioneers patronize hotels, restaurants and stores.
"It's amazing. You get the big-city feel, but it's not like Chicago or New York. It's more homey," said Heather Sperry, a student at nearby Butler University.
Sperry and three friends were taking time off from studying to see Monument Circle in its holiday splendor last week. The women said they felt safe downtown, at least on well-lit Monument Circle, although at 10 o'clock on a cool Monday night there wasn't much activity.
Across the street, the Parisian department store at Circle Centre had just closed for the night. The four-story enclosed mall spans two downtown blocks and contains more than 100 shops, with Nordstrom at the other end.
The mall is connected by an extensive skywalk system to the 1.9 million-square-foot Indianapolis Convention Center and RCA Dome complex, where the hometown Colts will play the Bengals tonight.
Bengals fans flowing into town for tonight's game will find a city from which their hometown could learn a bit about downtown development, though growth here has come in fits and starts.
As Cincinnati winds up its $42 million renovation of its downtown centerpiece, Fountain Square, and moves slowly forward with a new developer on the riverfront Banks project, Indianapolis provides one nearby model for creating vitality in the urban core.
Compared with downtown Cincinnati's retail scene, Circle Centre is thriving, although according to annual reports filed with the city, vacancies rose and operating profits fell in 2005, both to their worst levels in five years.
But all around the mall, restaurants and nightclubs are open late into the night, with neon signs lighting Meridian Street from the circle to the Slippery Noodle blues club - which bills itself as Indiana's oldest bar - five blocks away on South Street.
National chains including Hard Rock Café, Buca di Beppo and Palomino join locally owned eateries such as St. Elmo Steak House and the renowned Shapiro's Delicatessen among more than 200 restaurants and bars downtown.
PLACES TO WORK AND LIVE
There's much more to downtown Indianapolis than the mall and the convention center. It also has Indiana's state capital, a big-city zoo, the 30,000-student campus of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, a world-class medical research-and-hospital complex and several major corporate headquarters.
The latter include pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co. and mall developer Simon Property Group Inc., which operates Circle Centre Mall and just moved into its new $55 million headquarters tower just south of the State Capitol.
But what makes this downtown so different from Cincinnati and most other similar-size U.S. cities, besides all the places to eat, drink and shop, is that there also are thousands of places to live.
Downtown - encompassing 6.5 square miles by the official definition that includes the IUPUI campus - has about 20,000 residents in several distinct neighborhoods or districts. Newly built and under-construction condominium and apartment projects - mostly townhouses and three- to four-story buildings - are scattered all over the northern half of downtown within a mile of Monument Circle.
Terry Sweeney, vice president for real estate development at Indianapolis Downtown Inc., said the growth and prosperity of the city's core has been a result of a civic-corporate partnership that goes back to the 1970s. That includes the development of Circle Centre, which opened in 1995 at a cost of $320 million, including $187 million in government-issued bonds and $75 million invested by 19 local corporations.
Those same corporations later funded much of the $183 million cost of Conseco Fieldhouse, the downtown home of the NBA's Indiana Pacers that opened in 1999, where the University of Cincinnati Bearcats played the Ohio State Buckeyes on Saturday."That is a microcosm of what goes on," Sweeney said.
Another catalyst for all the changes here was a tax ruling decades ago that ordered the Lilly Endowment, a foundation annually funded by Eli Lilly and Co., to start spending more of its money, said Ralph Gray, a retired IUPUI history professor. Downtown Indianapolis has been a major beneficiary of that largesse.
"They talk about the public-private collaboration," he said. "That's been the key."
Indianapolis, with a metro government that encompasses all of Marion County, has been an aggressive pump-primer to build convention business and establish itself as the amateur sports capital of the world. Most recently, it took an 8 percent equity stake in a super-luxury Conrad Hilton hotel that opened this year.
The city has found that its convention center, already at more than 400,000 square feet of exhibit space, isn't big enough: It awaits yet another expansion that will nearly double its size.
The $500 million Lucas Oil Stadium, the future home of the Colts, is being built a block south of the RCA Dome, which will be torn down to expand the convention center.
DEMAND FOR HOUSING
The recent upsurge in downtown residential development has been market driven, with no blanket public incentives to subsidize developers or buyers. Any public incentives are granted on a case-by-case basis, Sweeney said.
"Everything's right on your doorstep. That's what's driving demand," he said of the housing boom that added 2,400 units downtown between 1995 and 2005. Forty-five active projects should add another 1,750 units by 2010, he said.
Not every project has been a slam dunk. One Market Square, a proposed $100 million, 31-story condo tower that was supposed to be built on the former site of Market Square Arena, stalled when financing dried up after slow upfront sales. Three blocks east of Monument Circle, the site is now being used as a parking lot while the city mulls its options and talks to developers.
'I LIKE IT NOW'
At the Rathskellar Restaurant in the historic Athenaeum building, Talha Uzun had come downtown for a meeting of the Nationalities Council of Indiana Inc., a group that celebrates the area's ethnic diversity. The Athenaeum is a 19th century theater, now home to the American Cabaret Theatre, in the Massachusetts Avenue (known locally as "Mass Ave") arts and theater district.
Uzun, 29, works and lives in the northern suburbs but comes downtown often on business and to shop. He likens downtown Indianapolis, with its wide avenues, museums and monuments, to Washington, D.C., which is where he relocated from about two years ago.
"When I first came here I was seriously bored," said Uzun. "I like it now."