Indianapolis 500 (words)
TL;DR? That’s okay.
And then some more words after that.
The idea of an I-65 renaissance was born in Indianapolis in August of 2015. It wasn’t a renaissance and I certainly had no notion of linking it to I-65. I came to the city to watch my nephew compete in the U.S. National Gymnastics Championships. Fortunately my brother, who by some strange coincidence is also my nephew’s dad, decided to stay at The Alexander, a stylish boutique hotel near the arena. It had great visual style, and a wonderful cocktail bar that gets its own paragraph in a moment.
Everywhere I went, I was pleasantly surprised by the people I met. I’ve been to 49 states along with some foreign countries, so I already knew that there smart, nice people everywhere. There was something about these smart, nice people that felt different. Two years later, I’m starting to understand what it was.
Meanwhile, time happened. I made my first visit to Louisville as an adult. I started to see similarities between those two cities and two others I had visited in recent years—Nashville and Birmingham. And then, with the swiftness of a greenhorn boy scout starting a fire by rubbing twigs together, it started to gel.
The rest of this story is about the why there was a Renaissance. And why there might now be another renaissance. You don’t need my permission to skip ahead.
It Takes an (Empty) Village
I’m not an historian or a sociologist. My only clear memory of high school history was being kicked out of Modern European History by Ms. Saunders for being a jerk. My memory of sociology is clearer. I never studied it.

Unqualifications being established, here is what I think I learned somewhere. The Black Death was a major catalyst for the Renaissance. The rapid population decline left behind changed the equation in several ways.
Bubonic plague spread most quickly and thoroughly in urban areas. As a result, the balance of agricultural production to other activities shifted. The economic and logistic systems which had evolved over centuries were disrupted.
At the same time, the power structures of cities was destabilized. The power elite had the means to flee, and they had done just that. Those who hadn’t fled were mostly dead, which is almost as disruptive as being gone.
I am sure you can find scholarly references that support those two shifts. I have no idea if anyone has ever studied or asserted this third factor, and I by disposition am not inclined to check. In the centuries leading up to the Black Death, the psychological ecosystem was stable. Your parents and grandparents had the same world view as you. There were local disruptions, but life returned to the status quo. The Death changed that. New generations were born into a world that was observably different, and that difference legitimized thinking differently as well.
It makes sense to me. Before the plague, life sucked, but it was predictable. Most days would wake up, do some shitty stuff, and go to bed. Sometimes people died, or had a limb ripped off in the field, or whatever, but mostly it was a routine. In plague times, you awoke, looked around to see how many of your loved ones were left, and started doing your shitty stuff, wondering all the time whether you would be sleeping that night in your bug-ridden sack of straw or settling for the long dirt-nap. In that context, why not innovate a little?
In short, massive depopulation from the plague moved having a renaissance from unsustainable to practical.
Was there a plague that depopulated Indianapolis?
With all the distractions of modern life, you could be forgiven for wondering if you missed the evening news the day a plague swept through Indianapolis. Fear not, though. It has not. Yet.
I contend that a series of industrial realignments starting in the 1970s have produced an equally relentless—but less gruesome—set of forces. The forces are most evident in large rust belt cities like Detroit and Pittsburgh, but they exist in Indianapolis too. That’s my story and I am sticking with it.
Next…I finally write something about my 2017 visit.
