Historic Miscellania

Posted in: Historic Miscellania Preservation Denied: Pythian Building

Formerly standing guard at the intersection of Pennsylvania, Ohio (thanks for the correction) and Massachusetts Avenue, The Pythian Building was constructed in 1905-1906 and was said to be the second largest flatiron building in United...

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Posted in: Historic Miscellania Public Transportation in 1940 Indianapolis

“Car and Bus Routings and Stops, Downtown” All aboard the time machine again…let’s head back to Indianapolis of 1940 to look at how we were maneuvering to and from home and downtown. This map is...

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Posted in: Historic Miscellania Connection: Court & Crown Hill

East entrance to Crown Hill designed by beloved Indianapolis architect, Adolph Scherrer Yes, that’s right, folks. Connections abound here, and what fun it is to figure them all out. Take a close look at the...

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Posted in: Historic Miscellania State Fair 1885 Poster

If you look on the bottom half of the image above, you will see the main Exposition Building (constructed in 1872) when the State Fair took place in what was to become Morton Place. Subsequently,...

Posted in: General, Historic Miscellania Preservation Denied: Bates/ When Building

In February 1874, newspapers announced that Hervey Bates, Jr. would soon commence building a new block where “Sharpe’s Cigar store now stands.” The first brick wasn’t placed until June, and yet Bates still expected the...

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Posted in: Historic Miscellania Happy Birthday Virginia Keep Clark!

Ever been hooked by an idea, person or place? Something that just infinitely fascinates or possibly even obsesses you? While that pretty well summarizes my love of Indianapolis history, there is an artist who has...

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Posted in: Historic Miscellania Claypool Hotel…Menu 110 Years Ago today…

Head north on Illinois to the northwest corner at Washington and back 110 years and this is approximately what you would see. This postcard, postmarked December 28, 1907 and reads: “All drunk & having a...

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Posted in: Historic Miscellania Downtown Prices, 1821

Northwest corner of Delaware and Washington Streets, circa 2012 You already knew that Indianapolis became the capital of Indiana back in 1821. Any guesses as to how much dinero downtown real estate fetched back then?...

Posted in: Historic Miscellania New Life at Central State Part III: The 1899 Building

The 1899 Building, formerly the Men’s Dining Hall for Central State Hospital. (Photo: 1899indy.com) When last RWAV headed west, we visited Central State Hospital’s Administration Building in the middle of its restoration and transformation into “Central...

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Posted in: Historic Miscellania State Fair, 1874

Think about what it was like to attend the Indiana State Fair and Exposition before electricity was invented. Enjoy a couple of highlights, excerpted from an 1874 Indianapolis newspaper. “The center figure in W.L. Woods...

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Posted in: Historic Miscellania Gunned Down Grocer

As a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, during the “golden age of fraternalism” (circa 1860-1920), for one “brother” to shoot another sounds unlikely. All the more when the organization was founded to...

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Posted in: Historic Miscellania Architect for Theaters

It would be fair to say many an architect or architectural firm gets known for designing a predominant genre of building, and that appears to have been the case since the earliest days the trade...

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Posted in: Historic Miscellania The World League for a Sane Christmas

Indianapolis News, July 18, 1911. Oh, tired Christmas shoppers! Burned out on commercial Christmases? So were people back in 1911, when a league that sought to call a halt to unfettered Christmas gift-giving established its national...

Posted in: Historic Miscellania Die Weihnachtseinkäufe

Die Weihnachtszeit ist nahe. Christmas time is near. That’s not an ad from overseas. At the turn of the 20th century, Indianapolis had a thriving German-speaking population. The major local German newspaper in 1900, the...

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Posted in: Historic Miscellania Grasshopper Jails & Other “Monkey Business”

If you peek into newspapers from any decade, it doesn’t take long to find some downright strange human activity going on. In spite of the often ego-stroking tales we tell ourselves, human behavior, of course,...

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Posted in: Historic Miscellania Bacteria, Blood & Bad Dreams: The Unsolved Murder of Helen Knabe

How did one of Indiana’s pioneer investigators into STDs and rabies come to a gory end? The mystery of Dr. Helen Knabe’s death remains one of the great cold cases in Indianapolis murder history. So,...

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Posted in: Historic Miscellania The Rise and Fall of the Billy Goat Beer

If you strolled down the streets of Indianapolis in 1900, you would have needed a bale of cotton stuffed in your ears not to hear a conversation or two auf Deutsch. Thanks to Germany’s turbulent...

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Posted in: Bicycles, Historic Miscellania Keep Your Sauerkraut Away From My Bicycles

In 1896, readers of the Christmas Eve edition of Cycling Life, a trade magazine for America’s exploding bicycle industry, might have noticed this clever ad. Probably drawn by an illustrator at an advertising house in Chicago,...

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Posted in: Historic Miscellania Rufus Cantrell, Intruder in the Dust

In 1935, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges weighed in on what mathematicians later called chaos theory: the results of some phenomena are simply impossible to predict, control, or even explain. Take the freak reasoning of...

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Posted in: Historic Miscellania “Escaped Nuns are Myths”: The Roots of a Forgotten Riot

Did you ever hear about the riot sparked by horror tales, a Holiness preacher, and a renegade nun? On October 12, 1924, a man named Lindley wrote this postcard home to his aunt and uncle. ...

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