City offers to buy Diamond Chain property from Keystone, says part of site has hundreds of remains

The Eleven Park soccer stadium would be located on the western edge of the former Diamond Chain site, along the White River. (Rendering courtesy of Keystone Group)

Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett’s administration is offering to buy the former Diamond Chain Manufacturing Co. site from Keystone Group—two months after negotiations broke down between the parties for the development of the proposed Eleven Park soccer stadium project at the site.

The city said just one acre of the 20-acre property—which was at one time part of the historic Greenlawn Cemetery—is believed to have as many as 650 remains, a finding that could have a major impact on future development. The estimate is based on research about the site; it is not based on excavations.

In a letter from Chief Deputy Mayor Dan Parker to Keystone Group and Indy Eleven owner Ersal Ozdemir, the city said it is interested in putting forth “an offer that we hope can fairly compensate Keystone for its efforts” on the property. Keystone had been planning to build a residential and entertainment district on the site, anchored by a stadium for the Indy Eleven soccer team.

The letter does not include a specific price for the 20-acre site, into which Keystone has told IBJ it has invested more than $26 million over the past two years. The city said it would pay an average of two appraisals for the site.

Hogsett’s administration ended negotiations with Keystone about the Indy Eleven stadium project on March 22, about a month before announcing it planned to pursue a Major League Soccer franchise with an unnamed group of potential owners. The city has since taken steps to establish a stadium site on the east side of downtown.

In a statement Wednesday evening, Keystone Group Senior Vice President Jennifer Pavlik called the city’s offer to buy the property a “last-ditch effort to salvage the bungled rollout of a half-baked idea, it is our hope Mayor Hogsett will once again retake the reins of his own administration and join us in a thoughtful, adult discussion on the future of soccer and downtown development in our state’s capital city.

Parker’s letter also highlights the city’s ownership of a one-acre parcel on the Diamond Chain site that is being used for the Henry Street Bridge project.

That acre alone is believed to contain as many as 650 remains, according to Parker, who said “proper treatment of the remains on that one acre” could cost as much as $12 million.

“As we have learned more about this site, the city has sought to take an active role in an effort to right the wrongs committed more than a century ago when the resting place of Indianapolis’ first residents were erased from the map and paved over,” he said. “Knowing what we know now, any proposed future development ought to follow a painstaking and inclusive community conversation on the different perspectives on how to respect the history of the site and the individuals still laid to rest there.”

Pavlik said Keystone has had “ongoing efforts to work with the community to offer peaceful reinterment for those buried in a site that for over a century has been disregarded and disrespected.”

She said Keystone has continued to try to engage the Mayor’s Office in discussions about Eleven Park and a possible MLS bid, but the city has refused.

The Hogsett administration has been focused on creating a new taxing district on a site that comprises the Indianapolis Downtown Heliport, a large parking lot and several other parcels bounded by the CSX railroad tracks and Alabama, Washington and East streets.

Keystone has been pushing back on the city’s plan to pursue MLS with the new, undisclosed ownership group, stating that it is “ready to build” the $1.5 billion Eleven Park project immediately, if the city returns to the table.

But the city has resisted those overtures—which recently have come to include an elaborate marketing campaign consisting of television and internet advertisements, as well as unsolicited texts asking people to send a form letter to the administration requesting it reconsider its position.

Parker said in his letter to Ozdemir that the administration believes “any future development plans entertained by the city on this site should follow these community conversations, a call we are hearing from community groups and councilors alike.”

He also acknowledged the amount of work Keystone has put into the site, and said he and Hogsett are “ready to discuss” how the city could purchase the property.

Keystone has said that it found “fragments of human remains” on the property, which was mostly occupied by the city’s first public cemetery in the 1800s.

The developer has begun early construction efforts on the proposed development, which is expected to include a 20,000-seat Indy Eleven soccer stadium, at least five 10- to 20-story apartment buildings, a hotel and office space, and a 4,000-seat entertainment venue.

The site was most recently home to the Diamond Chain Co., which operated at the property for more than a century. Its massive plant at 402 Kentucky Ave., built in 1918, has been demolished.

A portion of the property served as the city’s first public burial grounds, starting in 1821, with that land being named Greenlawn Cemetery in 1860, according to records from the Indiana Historical Society and research by DeeDee Davis, a digital scholarship services specialist at IUPUI’s Herron Art Library. The remains of thousands of Black residents were buried at part of Greenlawn, also known as the City Cemetery and Union Cemetery.

The cemetery, which eventually encompassed most of the nearly 18-acre site, included an area set aside for Confederate soldiers who died at the Indianapolis prisoner of war camp, with a monument erected in 1909 to honor those soldiers. (It was later moved to Garfield Park.)

While most of the  graves were moved to the Crown Hill and Holy Cross cemeteries by the early 1900s, not all of them made it out before the site was sold for redevelopment in 1914—first as a baseball stadium for the short-lived Indianapolis Hoosiers of the Federal League and three years later as the manufacturing facility.

The Confederate soldiers’ remains were moved in 1931, when a Crown Hill plot was dedicated for that purpose.

But records of other remaining graves had slipped through the cracks. In fact, multiple graves were uncovered at the site over the years, often during expansion or remodeling by Diamond Chain. The most recent discovery was in 1999, when two graves were unearthed as part of an effort to accommodate new machinery by lowering part of the facility’s floor.

Some historians have called for a full archaeological dig of the site, while parties representing both the Keystone Group development and the city’s planned adjacent Henry Street Bridge project decided on a plan that includes halting construction when remains are identified rather than searching for remains first. Any remains would be examined by researchers at IUPUI.

Members of the Indiana Remembrance Coalition called on the city to follow a 1923 state law that would have required the city to excavate and remove all human remains before the site could be used for any other purpose. But corporation counsel for the city told IBJ in November that the law no longer holds any weight. It was not codified into the Indiana Code in the 1970s, and any statutes not incorporated into the code were repealed at that time.

The group’s members first raised concerns in May about disturbing the site and restated them Nov. 20 before a City-County Council committee unanimously advanced a tax district proposal that would fund the Indy Eleven soccer stadium. The city also plans to build a bridge in the area by extending Henry Street over the White River.