Fountain Square Arrives

I’ve been writing pieces for Indy Forward about the transformations and upgrades of many suburban communities in our region. I plan to continue writing them because there are so many good stories to tell.

But the same is true of many city neighborhoods as well. My family moved back to Indianapolis from New York City in December. In NYC we lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, one of the world’s great neighborhoods, only steps from Central Park and so much more. Here in Indy we live in Fletcher Place. This is a homecoming of sorts since I had an apartment in next-door Fountain Square back in 2008, and the two sides of the expressway really function as one larger neighborhood.

I’ve been coming to Fountain Square regularly since the early 1990s and have always loved the neighborhood. It was talked about for years and years as the next hot place but reality long lagged the hype. I was ambivalent about that as I always liked the quirky, downscale character of the place that I knew would be lost once development eventually hit it.

But today, Fountain Square has fully arrived as a neighborhood that could compare to those in some of the hottest cities in the country.

Since I recently moved back to Indy from NYC, I can easily and directly compare where I lived before on the Upper West Side to where I live now in Fletcher Place-Fountain Square. Yes, I have more space. Yes, I’m spending less money.

But guess what — a lot of things are just plain better here than they were in NYC.

Start with breakfast at Milktooth, which is better than any place I ever had breakfast in New York (and I tried a lot of places there over the course of five years). Or even Peppy’s Grill, which is better than the diners in Manhattan (which are incredibly overrated). Then there’s the bread from Amelia’s, which is better than any I found in my NYC neighborhood. And ditto for Circle’s Ice Cream, which will deliver to my house here. There was no neighborhood grocery store like Wildwood Market near me in New York, nor did I ever find a whole animal butcher like Turchetti’s.

There are definitely some things we miss from New York, like fresh seafood, but the quality of the local food we get here in our Indy neighborhood is absolutely better than what we had in New York.

Of course, food isn’t the only thing in Fletcher Place and Fountain Square. There are coffee shops, microbreweries, a variety of drinking establishments, multiple concert venues, etc. Plus a number of office type businesses and non-profits are located there, such as Heartland Film.

The transportation landscape of Fountain Square has also changed for the better since 2008. I used to walk to my office in what’s now the Salesforce Tower, and Virginia Ave. was pretty bleak. Today, Virginia Ave is a branch of the superb, totally unique Indy Cultural Trail. It also has handsomely designed stations for the new Red Line Bus Rapid Transit line.

It’s no wonder that Fountain Square has seen a building boom. There are several apartment buildings providing levels of density that I thought would never see in the area. There are also a large number of new and renovated single family homes in the area. With all this influx of people, the streets are now bustling in a way that they had not in many years.

The only real downside of all this transformation has been that housing prices in the area have gone up a lot, though certainly nowhere near NYC levels! It’s no longer the deal it used to be. But then again, the product is now worthy of paying more. Too often we acclimate ourselves to urban neighborhoods struggling to recover from undesirability. The fact that we’ve seen a place like Fletcher Place-Fountain Square become a high-desirability neighborhood that people are happy to pay a premium to live in is an incredible change for our city.