Micro-museum aims to preserve Martindale’s cultural heritage

The new Polklore Micro-Museum near the intersection of East 16th Street and the Monon Trail is testing a theory about gentrification, says Joanna Taft, executive director of the Harrison Center.

By showcasing artifacts and stories shared by longtime residents of the Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood, Polklore Micro-Museum is an experiment in what can be gained by preserving cultural heritage.

Taft said she doesn’t know how the Polklore—named for the bygone Polk Sanitary Milk Co. that once occupied the property—will affect Martindale-Brightwood. The area’s current era as a hot spot for development follows decades of hard times after an initial heyday fueled by the railroad industry.

But seeking an alternative to gentrification, the process in which people can no longer afford to live in neighborhoods that become popular and pricey, is worth the effort, Taft said.

“In gentrification, you’re throwing away what you don’t value,” she said.

The Polklore, an initiative of the Harrison Center, the arts-focused not-for-profit a few blocks west at the intersection of East 16th and Delaware streets, is designed to show love to neighbors and their stories.

If newcomers to Martindale-Brightwood learn and appreciate the area’s history, Taft said, they will want to be part of a continuing story that includes longtime residents.

In the words of Gina Fears, a neighborhood engagement coordinator in Martindale-Brightwood, it’s a matter of stakeholders saying, “Do this with us,” as opposed to gentrification being imposed on a community.

“We talk about the difference between economic gentrification and cultural gentrification,” Taft said. “Economic gentrification is when somebody gets physically pushed out or financially pushed out. Cultural gentrification is when you feel like a stranger in your own neighborhood.”

Martindale and Brightwood emerged in the 1870s as two suburbs of Indianapolis. Today, the combined neighborhood is bordered to the north by East 30th Street, to the east by Sherman Drive, to the south by East 21st Street and Massachusetts Avenue and to the west by the Monon Trail.

The western side of the neighborhood was Martindale, a community historically made up of Black residents. To the east, Brightwood was settled by immigrants from Germany and Ireland.

According to niche.com, a resource for neighborhood demographics, Black residents now make up 78% of Martindale-Brightwood’s population of 12,000, with white residents making up 12% and Hispanic residents making up 5%.

Rosemarie Gore Bigbee, 75, grew up near the intersection of East 29th Street and Ralston Avenue, at the eastern border of Frederick Douglass Park. She remembers Martindale as a self-sufficient, full-service community that was home to a grocery store, movie theater, pharmacy, hardware store and ice cream shop.

“We lived our life in the Martindale area,” she said. “We could do almost everything there and not go outside of that area.”

Bigbee attended kindergarten and first grade at School No. 26, 1301 E. 16th St., which opened at the beginning of the 20th century to educate Black students from kindergarten through ninth grade. She graduated from Crispus Attucks High School, the then-segregated high school near Indiana Avenue known for its prowess in academics, sports and the arts.

As an adult, Bigbee toured internationally as a professional opera singer, and she also worked as a medical chemist.

Bigbee still plays golf at Douglass Park, and she admits to being somewhat leery of the influx of white players on the course.

“You think, ‘Hmmm … what are they getting ready to do?’” Bigbee said.

During the past decade, new construction and building renovations have transformed the southwestern corner of Martindale-Brightwood—beginning with the East 16th Street corridor near the Monon Trail.

In 2016, popular Mexican restaurant Festiva succeeded a soul food restaurant at 1217 E. 16th St.

Monon Lofts, a $20 million, 142-unit apartment community, arrived in 2018 at 1122 E. E. 16th St., the same year Provider Coffee opened in the renovated Tinker House building across the street.

Dozens of new houses were built along the Monon Trail from East 17th Street to East 21st Street as part of the Monon16 development.

Douglass Park is part of Martindale-Brightwood’s northern border just east of the Monon Trail. In May, the $23 million Frederick Douglass Family Center and playground opened in the park.

“It’s almost like they did this place for them, not for us,” Bigbee said. “That’s what it feels like.”

Bigbee’s perspective on upgrades in the neighborhood reflects the controversial push and pull that arrives when neglected communities become trendy.

“There are good times, really bad times and good times again,” said Fears, the neighborhood engagement coordinator who’s affiliated with the Martindale-Brightwood 7 initiative to strengthen the area. “This is a resilient neighborhood, and a neighborhood of families and long-term people. Yes, there is a piece that is more transient. But there are people who are in family homes purchased by their parents.”

Bridging the divide

Polklore Micro-Museum opened in June inside COhatch Polk Stables, a coworking space in the southwestern corner of Martindale-Brightwood at 1533 Lewis St.

From 1910 to 1963, Polk Sanitary Milk Co. workers prepared milk, butter, sour cream, cottage cheese and other dairy products in the neighborhood. Iconic jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery worked a day job at Polk—a company known for hiring Black employees when other dairies in the city did not.

COhatch Polk Stables opened in a renovated building that once housed mules used to pull the milk company’s wagons.

Despite its name, Polklore Micro-Museum isn’t small. An exhibition room, visual art studio and podcast studio occupy more than 2,500 square feet on the first floor of COhatch Polk Stables.

“A micro-museum is an artist-led museum,” Taft said. “We’re not museum professionals.”

She added that no rigorous fact-checking is applied to stories or artifacts collected from neighborhood residents. “Whatever story you have is your story,” Taft said.

The Harrison Center first engaged with Martindale-Brightwood residents by attending neighborhood association meetings. A deeper connection was formed by convening porch parties, and Texas-based artist Abi Ogle helped the Harrison Center honor “greatriarchs” in the neighborhood by painting portrait murals of six distinguished residents in 2018.

Polklore Micro-Museum features paintings of more than 40 greatriarchs.

In 2017, Harrison Center presented the first PreEnact Indy event, which envisioned a future on East 16th Street in which development doesn’t erase the past.

Taft mentioned the Chop Chop barbershop at 1236 E. 16th St., established in 2020, and this year’s reopening of the Paul Laurence Dunbar Library inside The Oaks Academy Middle School (which succeeded School No. 26 in 2015) as examples of amenities foreseen by PreEnact.

One neighborhood fixture displaced by development, the Rough Riders Motorcycle Club, is commemorated in a corner of the Polklore with a wall of trophies and a leather jacket.

It was evident that the days of the Rough Riders’ clubhouse were numbered in 2017, when the Monon16 project broke ground on Alvord Street. The block was empty aside from the clubhouse where the motorcycle enthusiasts had gathered since 1994.

Fears credits the Harrison Center for giving the Rough Riders, led by greatriarch Earl “Dirty Red” Cantrell, a proper send-off.

“The members of that motorcycle club were constantly pouring into the community with food giveaways, Christmas stuff and just taking care of the community,” Fears said. “The Harrison Center bridged that divide between the motorcycle club and the new neighbors who were moving in to help them understand the history and the wealth of personalities and churches and service providers in the area.”

Before the clubhouse was razed, the Rough Riders were guests of honor during an Alvord Street parade and dinner.

“The meal was held at the motorcycle club,” Fears said. “The neighbors who have just built these amazing, wonderful homes are now inside the motorcycle club—their neighbor—and they’re having a meal together.”

Fears said groups such as the Hillside Neighborhood Association, Oakhill Civic Association and Brightwood Concerned Citizens are in tune and participating when development is planned in the area. The Martindale-Brightwood Code Compliance & Land Use Committee meets monthly.

“It is no longer, ‘We just come in, take the land and do what we do,’” Fears said.

Sense of community

Eunice Trotter, director of the Black Heritage Preservation Program of Indiana Landmarks, is a greatriarch who grew up near the intersection of East 20th Street and Columbia Avenue.

She’s presently attempting to land Martindale on the National Register of Historic Places. Because so many original structures along East 25th Street and Dr. Andrew J. Brown Avenue (Martindale Avenue until 1986) no longer exist, Trotter said the best chance for historic designation might be a thematic selection based on churches.

Brown was a civil rights activist and the longtime pastor of St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church.

Trotter is a descendent of Henry and Keziah Martin, who founded Scott United Methodist Church in 1908.

Other historic congregations in the area include St. John A.M.E. Church (founded in 1898), St. Rita Catholic Church (the first Black parish in Indianapolis) and New Bethel Missionary Baptist Church (which has roots dating to 1875).

In 1950, the combined population of Martindale and Brightwood was 25,000, or more than twice the number of today’s residents. The midcentury exit of the railroad industry from the area signaled a decline, and the construction of interstates 65 and 70 from 1963 to 1976 gutted and isolated the southern border of the community.

School No. 26, where Trotter was a student, and prominent Black-owned funeral home King & King became up-close neighbors of the interstate.

Trotter, 71, said the streets of her youth resembled an orchard.

“There were fruit trees up and down that whole neighborhood,” she said. “If you wanted food, you could always get it. There were apples and pears and grapevines and berry bushes. There was a significant sense of community, because those people knew each other and many of them were related.”

Her father, Charles Brewer, was an independent electrician who grew up on Yandes Street.

Contrasting now and then, Trotter said longtime residents pronounce Yandes as “Yan-deese” while newcomers in the neighborhood often say “Yan-dis.”

Historian Sampson Levingston, who launched his Through2Eyes Walk and Talk tours in 2021, has a similar observation about Bellefontaine Street west of the Monon Trail in the Kennedy-King neighborhood.

Longtime residents say “Bell-fountain.” Levingston said he’s heard newcomers say “Bell-a-fon-tain.”

“You don’t go around trying to change the street name,” he said. “I think you just have to understand who’s there and how they’ve been living. More than anything, let’s not try to wipe it out.”

During the pandemic, the Harrison Center commissioned Levingston to make a 10-part video series about the Polk milk company and Martindale.

On Oct. 17, Levingston will lead an 11:30 a.m. workshop at the Polklore to instruct attendees on how they can become effective researchers of the past.

Levingston said he appreciates the Polklore for its preservation of everyday items that could have been lost to time.

“The human experience is a shared thing,” he said. “We’ve all done the same things one way or another. You may walk in and say, ‘Why is a frying pan in a museum?’ But we all have cooked. We all know what that looks like and what that feels like. We know the smell of our grandmother’s favorite dish. It’s cool to have these items that tell the story of the neighborhood.”

Persevering in style

Cierra Johnson, the Polklore’s host artist, works at the micro-museum about 20 hours per week. The Polklore also offers residencies for musicians, entrepreneurs and visual artists to work on improving the quality of life in Martindale-Brightwood.

For now, public tours are by appointment only. For more information, visit harrisoncenter.org.

In the large room where artifacts are displayed, visitors are encouraged to use augmented reality app Wintor. Pointing the camera of a phone or tablet toward an item prompts a video of a neighborhood resident telling the history of their artifact.

One poignant story accompanies a pair of red platform shoes.

“I bought these shoes with my first paycheck from my first job,” Elizabeth Mitchell says in her video.

Mitchell worked as a typist for the city’s police department. She was told by a supervisor to stop wearing the fashionable shoes and to straighten her hair to conform to the predominantly white workplace. Mitchell was told she could be perceived as being “militant.”

“That was something we had to do,” Mitchell says in the video. “We could not be ourselves.”

Fears said the concession went along with the accomplishment of a Black woman holding a coveted job in the early 1970s.

Today, Mitchell works to revive West Baden First Baptist Church, a 104-year-old Black history landmark of southern Indiana.

“She’s a powerful lady,” Johnson said of Mitchell. “She came through it all and, apparently, did it in style.”

Johnson said the cultural preservation on display at the Polklore can be replicated elsewhere.

“I would love for every neighborhood to have a micro-museum of some kind,” she said. “This one is Martindale-focused, so it’s all about perspectives that are closer to this end of the neighborhood. Martindale-Brightwood is a huge area. I would love to see Brightwood have its own. Riverside is down the street. If they want to have one, I’m happy to help.”•