The Most Impossible Rise of a City Ever: Indianapolis, Indiana

In 1821, Alexander Ralston drew a one-mile grid on blank Indiana farmland and put an empty circle at the center. There was no harbor, no navigable river, no road. The White River was too shallow for steamboats. The state canal went bankrupt after eight miles. Indianapolis had no natural reason to become a major American city — and spent the next two hundred years becoming one anyway. From Railroad City to the automobile age, when Indianapolis had more auto plants than any city in Michigan and names like Duesenberg, Marmon, and Stutz rivaled anything Detroit could build. From Carl Fisher's bicycle shop to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the first Indy 500 in 1911. From Eli Lilly's three-employee pharmaceutical lab on Pearl Street to a trillion-dollar company. From the jazz clubs of Indiana Avenue to the Ku Klux Klan in City Hall. From "Naptown" and "India-No-Place" to the night fifteen Mayflower trucks carried the Baltimore Colts through the snow to a domed stadium that had been built with no team to play in it. This is the story of Monument Circle, the Hoosier Dome, Unigov, and every impossible bet a city made to stay alive. Sources: Encyclopedia of Indianapolis (indyencyclopedia.org) — entries on the automobile industry, railroads, Soldiers and Sailors Monument, downtown development, Unigov, and Eli Lilly and Company Sigur E. Whitaker, The Indianapolis Automobile Industry: A History, 1893–1939 (McFarland, 2014) Indianapolis Motor Speedway historical archives (indianapolismotorspeedway.com) Indiana Historical Bureau state marker files — Carl Fisher, Unigov (in.gov/history) Glory-June Greiff, "Union Station," SAH Archipedia (sah-archipedia.org) Jeffrey T. Darbee, Indianapolis Union and Belt Railroads (Indiana University Press, 2015)