Why neighborhoods grow bad.
My first urban neighborhood was a gem. Until it wasn’t.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes a neighborhood feel like you belong to it, and it belongs to you, and what happens when cities make decisions that change, improve, or break that relationship. What aspects of the places that surround us are in the control of thoughtful city leadership, and what things can’t be helped. When the culture molds the neighborhood, and when the neighborhood molds its culture.
Today, I live in a lovely, leafy corner of Los Angeles that by just about any measure is on the upswing. But for decades I lived in a number of houses and apartments in, or very near, Indianapolis’ Broad Ripple Village.
Last time I was there, around 2017, Broad Ripple Village was less a neighborhood than an, “entertainment hub,” It’s a hodgepodge of iffy bars, often-terrible restaurants (one large now-defunct brewpub served dishes that were criminally inedible) e-cig shops and intermittent gunfire.
But in the 1980s it was a neighborhood, one where people lived, dined, shopped and did bits of business. Like selling guitars, or stereos, home decor, or coffee, maybe a cigar, or natural foods and tie-dyed leisurewear. Only a few years before that, trolley cars ran through the avenue and by 1982 you could still make out the tracks in the street. I’ve been away for well over a decade and all that recognizably remains is the 1922-era fire station (being retired as I write this) and the Guilford Avenue bridge, which is just about the only place you could put a camera if you wanted to shoot a period piece from John Mellencamp’s Cougar era.
As I was lazing out the end of high school, my dad was dating a smart, Indianapolis-based attorney named Heather McPhearson for a brief time — she was an owner, or investor, or somehow connected to the now beloved Chatterbox jazz dive bar (Still in operation, largely unchanged, and recently in the news for telling a local MAGA fuckwit where to step off). I was about to move to Indy to start college at nearby Herron School of Art, which in those days, was in an increasingly sketchy part of Indy’s near north side.
One weekend in the summer of 1982, Heather gave me a tour of what she considered a better part of town. I suspect my dad wanted to buy a duplex in Broad Ripple make me defacto building manager and collect some rental income to offset the cost of Herron, one of the cheapest tuition rates in the entire United States.
It was so different up in Broad Ripple, and to me, fresh from a very small town in a very small county on the Ohio border – nearly JD Vance country – it was more welcoming than the blighted and white-flighted area near 16th and Penn that surrounded the school. So I was immediately charmed.
And for decades after graduation I’d live within a short drive of Broad Ripple. Getting drunk there, playing gigs there, getting drunk and playing gigs there, and so on, until my wife and I moved away in 2013.
(If you somehow found your way to this article on this massive internet, you could be part of this cultural alumni — and nearing retirement age. So let’s remember what made for a great neighborhood together while we still can, shall we?)
It’s the mid 1980s and we’re strolling:
Here’s the quaint Lobraico’s Rexall Drugs, next door to the fire station, in which polite ladies who knew nearly every customer by name sold toothbrushes that had been on display since at least the 1960s. With black bristles. On purpose. Most problems could be solved with a trip to Lobraico’s, at least those that could not be solved by the bar across Westfield Boulevard. It’s honestly the last place I ever saw men’s hair dressing in a tube. The building remains standing and has housed a parade of endeavors since, including dance club, a card shop and a running shoe store. I remain haunted by black bristles.
And here is a glistening postwar storefront called Fox Deli on Guilford. Plate glass windows and the requisite terrazzo floors, and a counter, and a sign-painted menu with dozens of sandwich choices with words I did not know you could even put between slices bread. What’s a blintz? Oh, that’s a blintz! I considered converting to Judaism after eating at this deli. But wait, I had no ethnicity. Would I be welcome? Would I be served something I would not know how to eat, like the first time one is confronted with edamame? But Fox’s was welcoming, suggested what i had to try, and I embarked on my let’s-get-brave-about-food-now-that-I’m-on-my-own period. And thus began the romance of a Roast Beef on a Kaiser roll, properly executed and ostensibly kosher.
If not Fox, there was Renee’s French Delicatessen. I felt so cosmopolitan. Wine! With lunch! Plus, the servers were universally young and pretty Broad Ripple High School graduates, or maybe pre-graduates. The sign said it was French, but in reality, it was what a couple of midwestern housewives would imagine a French restaurant to be who had never set foot in one or ever hoped to. But it had very serviceable ham, mushroom and asparagus crepes in a sort of light pink sauce, decent white wine (nobody in the midwest would order rosé in those days for fear they’d be plagued by a glass of white zin). It was painted a dusty but pleasant lemon yellow inside and the soundtrack was the noisiest air conditioner in the village. I recently looked at what used to be the place on Google Earth and it looks like that AC unit still noisily chugging away as part of a place unconvincingly called “Dad’s.”
Just up the road is Ambrosia and Blue Point Oyster Bar. Beloved immigrants Joe and Anna Pizzi’s better restaurant — its bar once was playing one of my 8-year-old college mix tapes I’d given to a girl while at Herron who had worked there 4 years earlier. And long before I knew her, my wife was a server there. Checking the overlap of her tenure and the sheer volume of times I’ve eaten there, there was almost certainly at least an evening or two when I would have overtipped her. Because I probably ate at this place more than any other place in my decades in Indy with, in fact, with every girl I dated from college onward. One of them broke up with me at the Blue Point Bar, after which I almost certainly ordered Ravioli Della Mama, covered in pesto cream, and a martini. (I’ve heard they still sell the dish in a new location.)
Stillwater. It wasn’t around too long after I arrived there but it seemed like The Nice Place. Pretended to be laid back Northern Californian, later other restaurants including various Broad Ripple Steak House incarnations, which I freqented on nights I wasn’t at Ambrosia; It’s now an empty lot. Probably because I moved away.
The Patio. A rock club when it wasn’t a punk club when it wasn’t a grumpy folk alternative club. I eventually played that room as the latter a dozen or more times with a band called Mikes House, a live at the Patio recording of which is rescued here. Dark. Messy. The beautiful stench of a thousand spilled Rolling Rocks, and the bathroom of a thousand held-hair assists. Later I’d see friends’ bands there, including one called Wonderdrug who would fist fight in the parking lot, make up by 2am, and members of which I still hang out with today.
There’s Red Wing Shoes on the Avenue. I mention it only because it still had its cool old red winged sign. And over there is Ed Schock’s Toy and Hobby Shop on Carrolton. I was 22 and too old for model kits by now… ooh but look at this P-51 mustang!
Okay. Holland Bakery. A stupid-cute bakery of shortbreads, cookies, chocolate things and little cakes; my college girlfriend’s favorite thing ever. This, along with Fox’s, made this slice of Guilford Avenue an absolute treat. The storefront wouldn’t look out of place on Disneyland’s Main Street USA. It was seriously that adorable.
Add to that Reisweig’s Meat Market across the street. At least that’s how I think it was spelled. I can find no trace of it anywhere on the internet. White tile everywhere, with an extremely clean, yet vaguely bloody vibe. I’d never seen a butcher in a stand-alone shop before that. I’d never seen sausages chain-linked together that wasn’t in a 30s cartoon before that. And shortly after I met it, it closed.
Down on the avenue was Cafe Espresso, (college girlfriend’s sister called it Cafe Depresso, as I think she had been fired from the place and there were grudges) a narrow venue decked out in that increasingly ubiquitous 1970s “environmental look” and already worn to a burnish on every surface a human or rodent could come in contact with. It was pretty much just coffee and pastries and probably my first ever cappuccino, again provided by attractive and unfailingly young and blonde women.
Across from that was Union Jacks, another loveworn pizza and burger joint, ostensibly pub food, but not particularly English aside from its entry’s presentation of the Football League Table, updated in chalk. But it had decent imported beers, some even on draught and sat across the avenue from where a building with the same name is today. Kevin Cahill, a design instructor, once took me and my design partner (and future business partner) to Jacks to conspire with us to take his senior class as juniors because he hadn’t yet told Herron that he wouldn’t be teaching at Herron during our senior year. It was an excellent tip.
And here is The Good Earth and Birkenstock store. Yet another worn-wood environmental-look creaky maze of a shop. If the term Earthy-Crunchy was invented anywhere, it was probably here. Still, some of the first imported foods and snacks I could ever find were from this 1971 vintage purveyor of supplements and wheat germ. Dan Quayle-Brett Kimberlin related drug money is allegedly buried in corked hoses, stashed under its paved parking lot. But you didn’t hear that from me. The building is still there today in a similarly crunchy condition.
Bazbeaux Pizza. Bazbeaux is, I believe, still a thing in Indy, but back then it was in something of a rough-hewn falling-over-shack, with the falling over while burning directly into the White River being a distinct possibility at any given visit. Perhaps it was the oven or the east-leaning architecture, but in my memory the Quatro Formaggio was superior to what came out of the renovated spaces a few years later.
I could go on. There was a trophy shop where Brothers is today. The Jazz Cooker, which was a rickety house with a gumbo on the menu on Westfield. Sometimes there was jazz. The Alley Cat existed, where strangely, our friends the Hogans met and fell in love on a July 4th in the absolute squalor of it.
Then there was The Corner Wine Bar, one of the 1980s village’s very worst restaurants in the 1980s village’s very best location. But to be fair, even if the food was bad, the experience almost made up for it. It was among the first places that would pour wine by the glass in urban outdoor seating like a real actual city. It also housed The Wellington, a beloved shithole bar with darts that shared its terrible kitchen with Corner Wine Bar and was a go-to for St. Paddy’s day. Not that I remember any.
Nowadays the kids have tried to make the term “SoBro” happen, but in the 80s, what was considered Broad Ripple kind of oozed down College Avenue for a few blocks. There was the backwardly named ACR Appliance. I think I bought a vacuum there once. Next to it was The Barn Antiques in The Clark Building on College (now a brokerage), where I once found an old nazi army helmet with leather pads in the liner that, through cracks in the pads, revealed they were stuffed with human hair. I left immediately.
Next to that was Habig’s garden shop, whose sign was a giant green trowel. The trowel, as of 2024, remains.
But probably the most missed business of the era is Atlas Super Market where David Letterman was once famously a bag boy. Anything good from all over the world seemed to be easy to find at Atlas. Imported candy. Decent wines. Crème fraîche even. If you heard Julia Child talk about it, they would likely have it. When you bought a whole beef tenderloin, the butcher would pack up the trimmings as ground beef and include it. (“You bought the whole thing, you should get the whole thing!”) And each year they would offer, with great fanfare, Indiana State Fair Lamb. And it always lived up to the hype. If somehow you couldn’t find an ingredient, just ask and they’d nearly always have it the next week. This is pre-internet. They’d have to use a telephone, but you’d get it. The whole enterprise was run like steamship by Sid Maurer, who was straight out of central casting. When my wife was in her twenties, she applied for an Atlas check cashing card. Sid said he needed her to get him some employment information paperwork. “Well, I work at the Cheese Shop up at Keystone–”
“You work for Dink!? Don’t worry about it. Here’s your check card.”
Invariably in a white shirt and skinny tie from the Kennedy administration, Sid knew, to the millimeter, where everything in the store could be found, and would tell you, if asked, if one brand would be better than another for whatever you wanted to do with it. He was a constant at the location for half a century. Then he died. And the word on the street was, without Sid at the captain’s chair, the family began to come into conflict with operations, particularly the meat cutter’s union. Maybe over the trimmings, I’ll never know. Today the building is gone, the site is now a chain grocery. Like a lot of the places I’ve mentioned that are now chain Buffalo wing places, chain sub shops, bank branches, Starbucks, FedEx Office or empty storefronts.
For me the throughline here is, can the place that surrounds you be relied upon to set the stage for the story of your life? And does what happens there make for a good story? A funny story? Where you meet and get to know a memorable cast of characters that inspire you? A story with a fine ending?
Or are you left with the story of going to FedEx Office again?
I admit. Everyone falls for their own nostalgia, and I’m certainly not immune to yelling, “in my day…” at a cloud.
But inarguably, we make our cities differently than we did back in the 20th century, in some ways for the better, or at least more convenient, and some for the worse. As an entertainment hub, I’m sure the Broad Ripple tax base is massive compared to the 1980s. Huge apartment buildings have risen in the surrounding blocks in every direction, which will need quite a few years of tree growth to soften their architectural mediocrity. Their residents will never be but a block or two away from a Buffalo wing or a Bud Light and a big screen with the Butler game on it. And that will also create stories of a kind.
What seems to be lost, at least in that little place where I began my adulthood, is a setting that provides really diverse ways of discovering something that delights you – that’s unique to where you find yourself.
If you ever get a chance to help navigate where your city is headed, either by showing up at town council, or by running for office, or even just by voting thoughtfully, I hope you’ll think about the stories the place will help write, and if those stories will forever be a delight to tell.
(This story proudly created free of AI)
