Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe city of Indianapolis on Wednesday announced the launch of a website to provide information and collect research for a bridge project that uses land that was once occupied by the city’s earliest cemetery.
Work from the Indianapolis Department of Public Works to connect the future site of Elanco Animal Health’s headquarters to downtown Indianapolis includes the Henry Street Bridge connection to Kentucky Avenue, as well as the Cultural Trail. That project runs over a portion of the former Greenlawn Cemetery, where thousands of the city’s earliest residents were buried in the 1800s.
Officials in Mayor Joe Hogsett’s administration have been hearing calls for more transparency on the historical and archaeological work at the site for more than a year. Deputy Mayor Judith Thomas, who oversees neighborhood engagement, has convened since last September a group of historians and activists interested in seeing high standards of care taken on the city’s one-acre plot within the former burial ground.
In a release Wednesday from the Department of Public Works, city officials presented the website and a future public meeting as the next step for residents to become involved in the research and memorialization of early Indianapolis settlers.
“This site has a long, complicated and unfortunate history,” Brandon Herget, director of Indianapolis Public Works, said in the release. “The former Greenlawn Cemetery has been negatively compromised by industrial development for well over a century. We have made commitments to the community to go above and beyond state law when it comes to this project, and this extensive research into who remains buried at the site is part of that. We now hope to incorporate the greater Indianapolis community into this effort.”
City leaders will hold a public meeting on the project Monday, June 24, at Edison School of the Arts at 777 S. White River Parkway Dr. W. at 5 p.m.
Private developer Keystone Group owns most of the former cemetery land. Ersal Ozdemir, owner of Keystone and the Indy Eleven soccer team, had planned a multi-use development anchored by a 20,000-seat soccer stadium on the property. The future of that project is in question after a recent breakdown in negotiations with the Hogsett administration, which is pursuing a Major League Soccer expansion club at a different location instead.
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.
Seems more like damage control than transparency!
For me, seems more like they are using this “new” concern as cover to leave the Keystone deal behind and find a new site “without the cemetery issues” and a different ownership group to build a stadium and lure an MLS team. How long has the City been working on their 1 acre site, over a year. How long has Keystone been working on their many acres, close to the same. But this all comes to a head and things are changing now? Seems convenient.
The last paragraph talks around the issue, the City bailed on the Keystone deal because they realized that Keystone couldn’t raise their part of the financing and the lure of possibly getting an MLS team.
Exactly. The city had no issue when the chain factory was there and had no issue with Keystone clearing the whole area for them. This is Hogsett doing what he has always done. Deals in backrooms and being nontransparent to the entire city.
This meeting is all about the Henry Street Bridge project and has nothing to do with Eleven Park. Proximity is the only connection.
Regardless of the site’s development, a monument on site recognizing the known and unknown should be enough.
Other than that is a selfish play on politics.
So you’re good if the city finds the cemetery where your family is buried, erects an apartment complex or shopping center or office park, but puts up a monument recognizing those who used to buried here until we scooped up their bones and dumped them in a pit somewhere…