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An affiliate of Purdue University has acquired the former American College of Sports Medicine property along the Downtown Canal Walk.
Purdue Research Foundation bought the 29,500-square-foot building at 401 W. Michigan St. in mid-December for $6.5 million. It plans to hold the 1.63-acre site for future development opportunities tied to the emerging Purdue University in Indianapolis extension, a university official told IBJ on Monday.
“In an effort to enhance Purdue’s presence in the capital city, we are working to increase the footprint of our Indianapolis expansion for our students, faculty, staff and neighbors to utilize,” Evan Hawkins, senior director for administrative operations in Indianapolis, said in a written response to IBJ’s questions on the acquisition.
“Purdue is focused on immersing ourselves and marbling into the community, and we are having active discussions with Indiana Avenue neighborhood leaders and our many partners in Indianapolis to continue to inform those development plans to support Purdue’s growth throughout the city,” Hawkins said.
Purdue officials declined to share additional details about short- and long-term uses for the property.
In 2021, Schahet Hotels LLC said it planned to replace the ACSM building with an 11-story mixed-use development consisting of office space, a parking garage and an Element-flagged hotel. That project, which was later abandoned, would have continued to be occupied in part by the American College of Sports Medicine.
The college is considered an authority in the fields of sports medicine and exercise science, with 50,000 members and certified professionals worldwide. It now has temporary offices at 6510 Telecom Drive in Indianapolis after the board voted in 2023 to sell the property and staff formally moved out in 2024.
Purdue’s purchase of the site is one of several moves the university has made downtown stemming from the dissolution of IUPUI last summer.
IUPUI—otherwise known as Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis—broke into Indiana University Indianapolis, a standalone campus in the IU system, and Purdue University in Indianapolis, which is considered an extension of Purdue’s main campus in West Lafayette.
(IBJ previewed IU’s plans for its Indianapolis campus in a story you can see here. IBJ covered Purdue’s plans for its Indianapolis extension in a story you can find here.)
Purdue’s board of trustees in June approved plans for the first building on the school’s campus, a $187 million project at the northwest corner of Michigan and West streets that will include housing for up to 500 students as well as classrooms, lab space, a dining hall and street-level retail offerings.
Purdue secured a partnership with Dallara in May to house its motorsports engineering program at the company’s U.S. headquarters in downtown Speedway, along with a deal with Elanco for a new building at the former General Motors Stamping Plant site on the west bank of the White River. The school also has an agreement with High Alpha for the executive education program within the Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. School of Business.
As IBJ reported in August, representatives for the city of Indianapolis have asked Purdue to consider establishing a presence on Monument Circle, specifically encouraging the school to bring programs to either the former the former Anthem Inc. headquarters on the northwest portion of the Circle or the Emmis Corp. headquarters in the southwest quadrant, both of which are now for sale.
Each of the two buildings on the Circle are privately owned but have been difficult to find solutions for—in particular the nearly 214,000-square-foot Anthem building, which has been vacant since 2017. The building is owned by Boston-based Franklin Street Properties, which bought it in 2010 for $42 million. It was listed in October with an undisclosed asking price.
The 26-year-old Emmis building was put on the market by the company for $35 million in 2023 after Emmis sold most of its radio station holdings to Urban One.
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Vacancies on Monument Circle are a result of busses no longer using it as a pick up and boarding destination along with ample, inexpensive vehicular parking. While folks no longer congregate in the area for shopping or paying utility bills at IPL and Citizens Gas……..the city needs to look at reinstating public transportation in the vicinity in order to revitalize what has become ‘dead zone’.
Erecting little ‘fun zones’ with umbrellas, games and food stands along with artificial carpet is tacky as well as not the answer. Ask Windsor Jewelers.
You’re right, creating a big dead zone (closing a quadrant of the Circle for “Spark”) only makes the problem worse.
It is, in fact, the City’s habit of periodically closing parts of the Circle to traffic that prevents IndyGo from routing buses there.
Right. The problem with the circle is lack of bus traffic and Spark on the Circle. That makes total sense.
I have lived in Indianapolis since 1999 l, and I don’t think buses have ever been on the circle during that time.
Chris, that’s a wild one, I’ll give you that.
To bad Purdue could not pursue the mixed used development proposed earlier it was a great design for the canal.
The canal area has totally been mis-used since it was re-developed. So much potential wasted, this is yet another example.
Please recall that an objective of several [unnamed] businesses and people with influence [also unnamed] insisted that IndyGo remove all buses from the Circle in order to garner their support and money to spruce up the Circle. Although not expressly stated, the objective of businesses an others of influence was to remove what they considered an undesirable element, bus users, from the Circle.
Using the Circle was efficient for the buses and users but those with $$$/influence had zero interest in transit users. Thereafter, several modifications of IndyGo downtown service resulted in loops for local and the once-provided express buses. The loop networks cost more since buses spent more time in traffic and at signals. Ultimately, a transit center was planned and currently is in operation. Bear in mind that a key objective of the transit center was as much to facilitate easy transfers for transit users not destined to downtown but also to move bus patrons and bus stops from adjacent to certain downtown buildings.
If Indianapolis had restructured the network to provide crosstown routes in a true grid network in the 60s (as it should have), fewer individuals would have been forced to come downtown to transfer.