Fishers On the Rise
I previously wrote a piece about developments in Westfield, and want to continue with my coverage of suburban success today with a bit about Fishers.
Fishers has been the single greatest growth suburb in the state. In 1980, Fishers only had 2,008 people. After nearly tripling its population during that decade, it still only had 7,508 by1990. Today, Fishers has over 95,000 people, making it one of the largest suburban cities in the entire Midwest.
One of the most impressive but seldom discussed things about Fishers is simply how it managed to keep up with all that growth. It had to build fire stations, hire police, acquire parks, expand roads and utilities, etc. Imagine having to build a city about the size of Bloomington in only three decades. That’s what Fishers managed to do — successfully.
Oh, and get themselves ranked the best city in the country to live in by Money magazine in 2017.
What this ranking shows is that in the 2010s, Fishers not only was able to keep up with growth — a pretty hard challenge in its own right — but was also able to mature as a city with a focus on quality as well as growth.
Mayor Scott Fadness discussed this maturation of the city when describing his plans for the showplace park Fishers is building on Geist Reservoir.
“If you take a longer view of where our parks system has evolved over the years, the first decade of the 2000s, we were still catching up with the tremendous population growth and the insatiable appetite for youth athletics. So, most of the parks we built were very much…Now, our investments are in creating a more well-rounded and dynamic park offering.”
Of course, the mere fact that Fadness is mayor and not city manager is itself an example of change during the 2010s, when Fishers officially moved from being a town under Indiana law to a city.
But perhaps the biggest indication of change in Fishers is the slew of new developments in the city’s downtown. Unlike many of Indiana’s more established county seat communities, Fishers never had a major downtown. It was just a few buildings near 116th St. and the old Nickel Plate railroad plus the municipal center. I remember it well.
Today, things are completely different. Several large apartment buildings with ground floor retail have gone up in the area. Multiple new buildings are under construction as we speak. There are plenty of restaurants — including plenty of local and independent ones. And companies like Formstack, ClearObject, and soon First Internet Bank have set up headquarters there. There’s also a boutique Hilton Tapestry brand hotel called the Hotel Nickel Plate under development. This is in addition to the municipal complex, and amphitheater, and more. This will all be connected to the north and south by a new rail-trail being built along the former Nickel Plate line that will extend from Noblesville well into Indianapolis. And while not a traditional downtown in form, downtown Fishers has in effect spilled across I-69, with developments containing unique local and regional attractions like the state’s only Ikea, a Sun King, and the Fishers Test Kitchen (which allows local chefs to incubate new concepts).
On a recent visit to Fishers I was really struck at the scale of what has been built there in just a short period of time. It’s almost unrecognizable. Fishers has really been transforming, not just getting bigger. The city is already winning national awards for quality of life, and even more good projects are on the way. As Fishers moves forward to soon cracking the 100,000 level in population, I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next there.
