At the last minute, I decided to drive down to Indy to see my family for the long holiday weekend.
I used it as an opportunity to check out some of the areas of Indianapolis that I haven’t seen in a long time. My parents took me downtown to show me the relatively new Peace Walk as well as the Canal Walk.
Indianapolis Canal Walk
I hadn’t been to the canal in at least 5 years, and it was amazing to see how much it had changed. We walked past the Eiteljorg Museum, devoted to Native American art… “Weird, when I was a kid, I felt like the Eiteljorg was in the middle of nowhere practically,” I commented. “That’s because it kind of was,” my mom explained. Now it feels like an integral part of downtown, surrounded by parks, cafes, condos, and other museums. It just needed to be connected.
It reminded me of all the efforts to connect various parts of Detroit, like the extension of the Riverfront from the Ambassador bridge to just past the Belle Isle bridge, the new Dequindre Cut from the Riverfront to Eastern Market, and all of the Greenways being built.
When discussing the intentional “right-sizing” of Detroit, many people point out the inherent challenges with shrinking a city dotted with islands of relative prosperity–there will have to be sacrifices if the city is to be condensed. When exploring, you quickly realize how quickly the landscape swings from blighted to well-off and how often the most popular museums, boutiques and restaurants are located next to vacant lots.
These bike and walking paths are some of the things that give me hope for Detroit’s revitalization. It’s not a quick solution though. It took Indianapolis nearly 25 years…
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Rebuild your city core in just 25 years.
“I started this program, and just a few decades later I’d lost almost 10 percentage points of crime!”